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Abstract
Literary studies has taken a global turn through such institutional frameworks as global romanticism, global modernism, global anglophone, global postcolonial, global settler studies, world literature, and comparative literature. Though promising an escape from parochialism, nationalism, and Eurocentrism, this turn often looks suspiciously like another version of Anglo-European imperialism. This essay argues that, rather than continue the expansionary line of recent decades, global literary studies must allow other perspectives to draw into question its concepts, practices, and theories, including those associated with the terms literature, discipline, and comparison. As a settler colonial (Pākehā) scholar in Aotearoa New Zealand, I attend particularly to Māori literary scholars from Apirana Ngata, Te Kapunga Matemoana (Koro) Dewes, and Hirini Melbourne to Alice Te Punga Somerville, Tina Makereti, and Arini Loader. Their work highlights the limitedness of global literary studies in its current disciplinary guise. Disciplines remain important when they bring recognition to something previously marginalized, as in the battle to have Māori literature recognized within Pākehā institutions. What institutionalized modes of global literary studies need, however, is not discipline but indiscipline: a recognition of the limits of dominant disciplinary objects, frameworks, and practices, and an openness to other ways of seeing the world.

AbstractThis essay examines Sergei Tret'iakov's and Dmitrii Prigov's turn to the newspaper in their search for a symbolic form adequate to the geopolitical flux at the beginning and endpoints of Soviet history. Fusing the epic and the sublime with the modernist montage principle, both present the newspaper as embodying simultaneously totalizing and disintegrative imaginings of space. Reflecting his avant-gardist and statist commitments, Tret'iakov's newspaper-epic andocherkjournalism figure the tension between socialist internationalism and socialism in one country and between federal and centralist models of the state. Prigov's newspaper art embodies the contrary pressures of resurgent nationalisms and globalization in perestroika-era and post-Soviet Russia. Having linked the decline of print culture to the Soviet Union's demise, Prigov addresses the return of an imperial Russian spatial imaginary by highlighting how the tension between spatial boundlessness and totality in the print newspaper anticipates and complicates the information sublime of the digital age.

Lyn Hejinian's Oxota: A Short Russian Novel (1991) and Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate (1986) are works from two very different poetic camps- Language poetry and New Formalism—that both draw on Russia's national poet Alexander Pushkin's novel in verse Eugene Onegin (1833) for inspiration and so offer a unique opportunity for reconsidering poetic and Cold War divides in U.S. poetry. These two poems can be read as attempts to transcend the Cold War binaries of the 1980s at both formal and thematic levels. Each poem employs its connection with Eugene Onegin, including the genre-crossing elements of that work, to create a symbolic space in which divides are bridged between East and West. The poetics of boundary crossing in both works thus belies the apparently radical formal difference between the two and demonstrates the multiple ways in which the crises and euphoria of the late Cold War period have promoted artistic expression and experimentation as part of an attempt to interpret the conflict and flux that marked the last decades of the previous century. At the same time, my comparison of Oxota and The Golden Gate demonstrates the need for criticism to bridge the conflicts in contemporary U.S. poetry and so to parallel the formal, thematic, political, and geographic boundary crossing of these two novels in verse.

The career of the poet Yang Lian provides a case study of the tension between dissidence and accommodation in PRC literary publishing over the past quarter of a century. In the 1980s, Yang published unofficially and officially, attempting to maintain his dissident independence while also taking advantage of the accommodations available within official culture. In 1989, the accommodation that Yang had reached with official culture collapsed. Since 1989, Yang has been promoted outside China as a dissident. Inside China, Yang's work has been adapted to the demands of censorship. This study shows that accommodations with China's official publishing system have been important to the careers of writers like Yang throughout the 1980s and 1990s. It also suggests that dissidence has played an important role in the achievement of such accommodations. The findings of this case study are pertinent to the situation of many artists and writers in the PRC today.

"These essays argue that recentring Asia necessitates a revision not only of notions of Asia but also of the centre itself. On the one hand, recentring Asia asserts the centrality of Asia, especially overlooked Asian histories, encounters and identities, to world history, culture and geopolitics. On the other hand, the concept of recentring provides a way to address and rethink the concept of the centre, a term critical to Asian Studies, area studies and, more broadly, to the study of globalization, postcolonialism, diaspora, modernism and modernity. Drawing on new approaches in these fields, Recentring Asia forces the reader to rethink the centre not as a single site towards which all is oriented, but as a zone of encounter, exchange and contestation."--Publisher's description

"These essays argue that recentring Asia necessitates a revision not only of notions of Asia but also of the centre itself. On the one hand, recentring Asia asserts the centrality of Asia, especially overlooked Asian histories, encounters and identities, to world history, culture and geopolitics. On the other hand, the concept of recentring provides a way to address and rethink the concept of the centre, a term critical to Asian Studies, area studies and, more broadly, to the study of globalization, postcolonialism, diaspora, modernism and modernity. Drawing on new approaches in these fields, Recentring Asia forces the reader to rethink the centre not as a single site towards which all is oriented, but as a zone of encounter, exchange and contestation."--Publisher's description