![]() ![]() ![]() Yet, in some cases, this conceptual reengineering leads to the reaffirmation of the Euro-Anglo-American perspective it is meant to provincialize. As a measure to decenter the canon, valorize marginal literary production, and bear witness to global power dynamics, World Literature scholars (e.g., Pascale Casanova and Stefan Helgesson) and Global Modernists (e.g., Eric Hayot, Susan Stanford Friedman, Aarthi Vadde, and Jeanne-Marie Jackson) have advocated for or carried out a reengineering of the conceptual tools of literary history. I am interested in Damrosch’s arguments to the extent that they exemplify a trend in the transnational turn in literary studies. I do so by assessing Damrosch’s arguments on magical realism as a basis for comparison and by teasing out the implications of these arguments for the book’s larger aims. In line with the commitment to difference that Jay posits as a defining feature of the transnational, I contrast in this article two types of transnationalism - regionalism and cosmopolitanism - as they feature in David Damrosch’s Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age. In his account, the transnational is also an epistemic orientation, a shift in attention from the universal to the particular, a sensitivity to difference, and the conviction that any identity - individual or collective - develops dialectically. For Jay, the transnational names the de facto heterogeneity of any national collective, as well as external forces such as migration, travel, and exchange that continually reshape the nation’s boundaries and composition. In the first chapter, “The Nation and Beyond,” he describes the transnational as an internal and external challenge to the purity and integrity of the nation. In Transnational Literature: The Basics (2021), Paul Jay offers an introduction to the transnational turn in literary studies.
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