For almost three decades, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has been ignoring
the standardized "rules" of the academy and trespassing across
disciplinary boundaries. Today she remains one of the foremost figures
in the study of world literature and its cultural consequences. In this
new book she declares the death of comparative literature as we know it
and sounds an urgent call for a "new comparative literature," in which
the discipline is given new life--one that is not appropriated and
determined by the market.
In the era of globalization, when mammoth projects of world literature
in translation are being undertaken in the United States, how can we
protect the multiplicity of languages and literatures at the university?
Spivak demonstrates how critics interested in social justice should pay
close attention to literary form and offers new interpretations of
classics such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Virginia
Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Through close readings of texts not only
in English, French, and German but also in Arabic and Bengali, Spivak
practices what she preaches.
Acclaim for Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and her work:
"[Spivak] pioneered the study in literary theory of non-Western
women."--Edward W. Said
"She has probably done more long-term political good, in pioneering
feminist and post-colonial studies within global academia, than almost
any of her theoretical colleagues." --Terry Eagleton
"A celebrity in academia... create[s] a stir wherever she goes."
--The New York Times
