Cultural Resonance and the Echo Chamber of Reading: Introduction

Abstract

"reading comparatively and crossculturally can dramatically change our perception of each compared text, sometimes in utterly unexpected ways, giving us an enhanced understanding of the resistance, interference, manipulation, and transformation that intrinsically characterize world literary relations. Doing Comparative Literature is, therefore, much more than gathering a set of literary texts delimited by particular nationhood or languages; rather, it signals many ways of dealing with textual relations transnationally and across communities, histories, and languages, and, increasingly, of putting word in relation with other artistic or media forms....  attention to the physical qualities of sound, its mechanics of transmission, sound-inspired metaphors, and the processes of listening
and hearing, can help us rethink and revitalize what we mean by reading and reading literature comparatively."