A Cultural And Political Criticism Through Literature

This dissertation is aimed to explore Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Political Idea of Literature i.e.,the political awareness manifested in her thought of new comparative literature or "world literature".This new comparative literature or "world literature" proposed by Spivak is no longer concerned about skills of narration or stylistics of literary works which are studied in the traditional literary discipline,but focuses on a kind of "reading of social text" through the reading of literature via interpretation so as to embody the political concern through literature,or intervene and criticize the social reality through literature.In such a way, comparative literature extricates itself from the traditional disciplinary yoke and crosses the border.It has turned to the social-cultural comparative study by manifesting itself a strong political ideology.The exploration to Spivak's Political Idea of Literature is unfolded in the following six aspects:(1) How does she announce the death of the old comparative literature and predict the birth of a new comparative literature?(2) How does she talk about world literature from the perspective of "planetarity" which makes comparative literature jump out of the limit of Eurocentrism and therefore,expand its domain with the change of time(especially in the era of globalization) and the evolution of its content or research object?(3) How does she practice postcolonial criticism in the global context?(4) How does she engage in feminist criticism?(5) How is she concerned with the "subaltern" study?(6) How does she make the study of translation by emphasizing the politics of translation and the social and political responsibility literature bears?Based on close reading of Spivak's texts,the dissertation employs the approach of hermeneutics to explore Spivak's literary idea and make a global study of it and concludes that the literary idea Spivak holds is a brand new idea of literary politics,i.e.to concern literature with politics and the fate of human beings.