Dorothy M. Figueira (Email:figueira@uga.edu) is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia. She has published extensively in the field of comparative literature, whose books include Translating the Orient (1991), The Exotic: A Decadent Quest (1994), and Otherwise Occupied: Theories and Pedagogies of Alterity (2008) and The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Cross Cultural Encounters with India (2015). She has served as the Editor of The Comparatist (2008–11) and is currently editor of Recherche litteraire/Literary Research. Prof. Figueira is an Honorary President of the International Comparative Literature Association, and has served in the past on the boards of the American Comparative Literature Association and the Southern Comparative Literature Association. She has held fellowships from the American Institute for Indian Studies, Fulbright Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has been a Visiting Professor at the University Lille (France), Jadavpur University (Kolkata), and the Indira Gandhi National Open University (New Delhi).

In literature, the fictional worlds of William Faulkner, Margaret Laurence and others are about local places but seem universal to readers of different places, cultures and later times. The poetry of Homer and the Greek tragedians like Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides are rooted in their time and place, but have had a “universal” appeal in the West despite all its changes in culture, beliefs and language. Homer wrote about heroic Greece, and Socrates and Plato questioned his universal appeal, his knowledge, his wisdom, partly because of mimesis or representation or imitation. Though he agreed with Plato that philosophy is more universal than poetry, Aristotle analyzes the work of Greek tragedy and epic poetry and also discusses history; he finds poetry inferior to philosophy precisely because poetry is more particular. Not only William Blake, but also many literary critics from the 1960s onward in the West, have rebelled against universals and, in an age of globalization, have often sought particulars or a rhetoricization or historicization of philosophy and poetry to try to act against grand narratives, universals and idealism. Jean François Lyotard is a case in point. By analyzing the relations among poetry, philosophy and history, this article will examine the ground of this dispute between the local and the global, the particular and the universal, and will show the importance of both.

In the present, the concepts of local and global are being used in sundry circumstances, which is why they have acquired many meanings. They may mean much and, precisely because of that, very little at the same time. The question appears even more evidently when applied to culture, which can be neither limited to nor contained within national or state borders. In this article the author attempts, on the basis of the literary and essayistic work of the late Slovenian public intellectual Aleš Debeljak, to delineate a novel approach to this question, namely to reintroduce a concept of cosmopolitanism, for which Debeljak and others opted. Debeljak, a child of the former Yugoslavia, developed as a poet in its last plentiful and relatively happy decade, the 1980s, and in addition to Slovenia, adopted the broader country as his own. When he moved to the USA to earn a doctorate in social thought, the USA became his third home base. With his opening towards the world, Debeljak also connected his idea of belonging, that is, the concept of identity. This article discusses the juxtaposition of the concept of identity with the positions of local, global and in-between.

David Porter argues for the inclusion of neo-Latin, as a transnational language, in the corpus of world literature. He discusses two poems by the sixteenth-century Northern humanist Jacobus Susius, Francis Paget’s nineteenth century Lucretian poem, Sol Pictor, in comparison with Pope Leo’s epigram on the art of photography and finally an elegiac satire Adolf Eichmann by Harry C. Schnur in order to show how Latin literature was adapted to divergent contexts and milieus and functions both as part of a specific local and historical context and as part of an established literary tradition. Emphasis is placed on these works of well-known but technically accomplished poets in order to highlight the large corpus of neo-Latin works available and their critical neglect in non-specialist literary studies.

The duality of the local and the universal and its application to literary works in our age of globalization are likely to be deemed irrelevant because a global or multinational world is, per se, often identified to the universal. Consequently, it should be wise to avoid binary approaches to the duality of the local and the global, and to conflate the latter with the universal that is to be contrasted with the singular. Moreover, the local has no direct logic or semantic opposite — global is not the strict antonym of local. By substituting partial connections between historical, cultural, symbolic and anthropological facts to the prevailing designations of both dualities (local/universal, singular global), contemporary novels respond to any universalism that these dualities invite to imagine. Rushdie, Mitchell, and Murakami exemplify this use of partial connections.

Canadian Metis author Joan Crate explores the fraught existence of those with Indigenous ancestry within the Canadian nation in her volume of poems, Foreign Homes. The definition and understanding of multiply constituted identities, the tenuous position — socially and politically — of Indigenous Canadians, and the uncertain narrative of indigeneity in contemporary Canada are examined in her volume as is consideration for how Indigenous identities are formed globally, shaped through colonial contact and the imperialistic ambitions of European powers. The volume’s title reflects this tension of identity and place in its invocation of a home that is signalled by its otherness as foreign space. This tension is particularly liminal, suggesting that an individual’s status as an Indigenous person within the Canadian nation is bounded by global — and thus foreign — forces that disrupt a sense of rootedness in place, a disruption that spans centuries.

Shakespeare’s plays stand as powerful examples of the simultaneous appeal to the local and the global: though he most immediately wrote for his local audiences in sixteenth-century London, his choice of subject matter often takes on an international and even global scope, and his representations of what to his immediate audience/readership would be considered exotic and unfamiliar have inspired numerous responses from a global and/or postcolonial perspective, by authors such as Wole Soyinka and many others. This paper takes Wole Soyinka’s 1983 essay “Shakespeare and the Living Dramatist,” a reading of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and a discussion of responses to that play from the Arab world, as inspiration for an examination of Antony and Cleopatra as a literary work/world comprising many examples of opposing forces in balance with one another, and Soyinka’s essay as an effort to bring a similar balance to postcolonial literary criticism. As Soyinka demonstrates in his essay, Shakespeare’s portrayals in Antony and Cleopatra of the delicate balances between East and West, women and men, passion and reason, history and legend, and life, death, and immortality continue to make the play attractive to readers throughout the world.

There is a gap in the current research on historiographic metafictional novels; previous efforts have mainly focused on the postmodern treatment of language and narration in these novels: the use of parody, language plays, slippage of meaning, etc. The focus has been mostly upon the formal features of these writings. This article however offers a fresh line of research, because the writer believes that historiographic metafictional novels necessarily reveal a connection to the discourse of nationhood since they evoke shared memories of the past. The present article examines the relationship between history and national identity in A. S. Byatt’s neo-Victorian novel Possession (1990). In this novel, the past is retrieved through a collage of pseudo-historical documents and intertexts. Possession is written at a time Britain was involved in negotiating and redefining its post-imperial identity. Here Englishness is mainly reflected in the interaction between history and myth.

From late 20th century, a large number of Iranians have migrated to Western countries. Some of Iranian immigrants especially women in diaspora began writing memoirs which represent the questions of ethnics, identity, language and other problems they have grappled. Living in Western countries with different cultures positions emigrants in a state of ambivalence. This ambivalence creates a metaphorical lesion in their identities. In such conditions, Iranian diaspora searches for new identities through different ways. This searching is represented in Dumas’s Funny in Farsi (2003), narrating the life of Firoozeh and her life-style in America. With its humorous tone, her memoir deals with social aspects of living in Western culture and dilutes political features of most memoirs written by Iranian women in diaspora. This article aims to analyze Firoozeh Dumas’s Funny in Farsi through Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial theories of hybridity, mimicry and stereotype in order to represent how the characters of Funny in Farsi in specific and the Iranian immigrants in general can obtain new identities in the Western communities. It is concluded that the sense of superiority in Firoozeh is gained through celebrating her new, hybrid identity in the third space while her parents’ reluctance is depicted as inferior and humorous.

George Herbert’s The Temple is generally acknowledged and praised for its religious admiration of God and the spiritual journey the poet undertakes to reach closer to his Creator. The countless studies dedicated to Herbert’s opus magnum have aimed at unraveling the various religious aspects while discarding or undermining the political influence behind his work. The accumulated scholarship has depicted a dedicated man of God who had turned his back on any political involvement in life. This paper peruses a different path projecting The Temple’s political participation in aiding the Anglican court and church by attempting to bring about docile bodies susceptible to control and domination. Within a Foucauldian perspective, the researcher exposes the dominant power’s influence in the priest’s poetry with the use of primary sources such as Discipline and Punish, The Elizabethan World Picture and The Book of Homilies. The study looks at the role of disciplinary power and its mechanisms in order to map out the anatomical structure of discipline through “the art of distribution” and “the control of activities,” before tracing the functions of hierarchical order and observation, normalizing judgment and finally the examination.