Ben Hutchinson

Comparative Literature is both the past and the future of literary studies. Its history is intimately linked to the political upheavals of modernity: from colonial empire-building in the nineteenth century, via the Jewish diaspora of the twentieth century, to the postcolonial culture wars ofthe twenty-first century, attempts at "comparison" have defined the international agenda of literature. But what is comparative literature? Ambitious readers looking to stretch themselves are usually intrigued by the concept, but uncertain of its implications. And rightly so, in many ways: even theprofessionals cannot agree on a single term, calling it comparative in English, compared in French, and comparing in German. The very term itself, when approached comparatively, opens up a Pandora's box of cultural differences. Yet this, in a nutshell, is the whole point of comparative literature. To look at literature comparatively is to realize just how much can be learned by looking over the horizon of one's own culture; it is to discover not only more about other literatures, but also about one's own; and it is toparticipate in the great utopian dream of understanding the way nations and languages interact. In an age that is paradoxically defined by migration and border crossing on the one hand, and by a retreat into monolingualism and monoculturalism on the other, the cross-cultural agenda of comparativeliterature has become increasingly central to the future of the Humanities. We are all, in fact, comparatists, constantly making connections across languages, cultures, and genres as we read. The question is whether we realise it.This Very Short Introduction tells the story of Comparative Literature as an agent of international relations, from the point of view both of scholarship and of cultural history more generally. Outlining the complex history and competing theories of comparative literature, Ben Hutchinson offers anaccessible means of entry into a notoriously slippery subject, and shows how comparative literature can be like a Rorschach test, where people see in it what they want to see. Ultimately, Hutchinson places comparative literature at the very heart of literary criticism, for as George Steiner oncenoted, 'to read is to compare'.ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, andenthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Comparative Literature: a Very Short Introduction

The meaning of life is a common concern, but what is the meaning of midlife? With the help of illustrious writers such as Dante, Montaigne, Beauvoir, Goethe, and Beckett, The Midlife Mind sets out to answer this question. Erudite but engaging, it takes a personal approach to that most impersonal of processes, aging. From the ancients to the moderns, from poets to playwrights, writers have long meditated on how we can remain creative as we move through our middle years. There are no better guides, then, to how we have regarded middle age in the past, how we understand it in the present, and how we might make it as rewarding as possible in the future.

Literature and the Art of Aging

The Midlife Mind

Qiang Yang

Graham Cormode

Yang Liu

David Evans

Han Yu

Ramesh Raskar

Mehryar Mohri

Zheng Xu

Rachel Cummings

Dawn Song

Mehdi Bennis

Peter Kairouz

H. Brendan McMahan

Brendan Avent

Aurélien Bellet

Arjun Nitin Bhagoji

Kallista Bonawit

Zachary Charles

Rafael G. L. D'Oliveira

Hubert Eichner

Salim El Rouayheb

Josh Gardner

Zachary Garrett

Adrià Gascón

Badih Ghazi

Phillip B. Gibbons

Marco Gruteser

Zaid Harchaoui

Chaoyang He

Lie He

Zhouyuan Huo

Justin Hsu

Martin Jaggi

Tara Javidi

Gauri Joshi

Mikhail Khodak

Jakub Konecný

Aleksandra Korolova

Farinaz Koushanfar

Sanmi Koyejo

Tancrède Lepoint

Prateek Mittal

Richard Nock

Ayfer Özgür

Rasmus Pagh

Daniel Ramage

Mariana Raykova

Weikang Song

Sebastian U. Stich

Ziteng Sun

Ananda Theertha Suresh

Florian Tramèr

Praneeth Vepakomma

Jianyu Wang

Li Xiong

Felix X. Yu

Sen Zhao

The term Federated Learning was coined as recently as 2016 to describe a machine learning setting where multiple entities collaborate in solving a machine learning problem, under the coordination of a central server or service provider. Each client's raw data is stored locally and not exchanged or transferred; instead, focused updates intended for immediate aggregation are used to achieve the learning objective.Since then, the topic has gathered much interest across many different disciplines and the realization that solving many of these interdisciplinary problems likely requires not just machine learning but techniques from distributed optimization, cryptography, security, differential privacy, fairness, compressed sensing, systems, information theory, statistics, and more.This monograph has contributions from leading experts across the disciplines, who describe the latest state-of-the art from their perspective. These contributions have been carefully curated into a comprehensive treatment that enables the reader to understand the work that has been done and get pointers to where effort is required to solve many of the problems before Federated Learning can become a reality in practical systems.Researchers working in the area of distributed systems will find this monograph an enlightening read that may inspire them to work on the many challenging issues that are outlined. This monograph will get the reader up to speed quickly and easily on what is likely to become an increasingly important topic: Federated Learning.

Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning

Modern European literature has traditionally been seen as a series of attempts to assert successive styles of writing as 'new'. In this groundbreaking study, Ben Hutchinson argues that literary modernity can in fact be understood not as that which is new, but as that which is 'late'. Exploring the ways in which European literature repeatedly defines itself through a sense of senescence or epigonality, Hutchinson shows that the shifting manifestations of lateness since romanticism express modernity's continuing quest for legitimacy. With reference to a wide range of authors--from Mary Shelley, Chateaubriand, and Immermann, via Baudelaire, Henry James, and Nietzsche, to Valery, Djuna Barnes, and Adorno--he combines close readings of canonical texts with historical and theoretical comparisons of numerous national contexts. Out of this broad comparative sweep emerges a taxonomy of lateness, of the diverse ways in which modern writers can be understood, in the words of Nietzsche, as 'creatures facing backwards'. Ambitious and original, Lateness and Modern European Literature offers a significant new model for understanding literary modernity. "

Lateness and Modern European Literature

Jeannette Baxter

Valerie Henitiuk

This book investigates the crucial question of ‘restitution’ in the work of W. G. Sebald. Written by leading scholars from a range of disciplines, with a foreword by his English translator Anthea Bell, the essays collected in this volume place Sebald’s oeuvre within the broader context of European culture in order to better understand his engagement with the ethics of aesthetics. Whilst opening up his work to a range of under-explored areas including dissident surrealism, Anglo-Irish relations, contemporary performance practices and the writings of H. G. Adler, the volume notably returns to the original German texts. The recurring themes identified in the essays – from Sebald’s carefully calibrated syntax to his self-consciousness about ‘genre’, from his interest in liminal spaces to his literal and metaphorical preoccupation with blindness and vision – all suggest that the ‘attempt at restitution’ constitutes the very essence of Sebald’s understanding of literature.

Critical essays on W. G. Sebald

A literature of restitution

Rainer Maria Rilke's early verse is often seen as having little relevance to the great achievement of the middle years, the Neue Gedichte. Yet the very different styles of the juvenilia and this new maturity are united by a preoccupation with processes of motion and growth which governs both his life and work. In this meticulous philological study, Ben Hutchinson reassesses every level of Rilke's early poetry, from its motives and metaphors to its very grammar and syntax, in order to trace what he terms a "poetics of becoming". With careful attention to rhythm, resonance and linguistic detail, he illuminates both the hidden patterns of the poetry and the artistic context of the fin-de-siècle. From its roots in the intellectual climate of the 1890s to the poems inspired by Rodin in 1908, Rilke's stylistic development is set against the surprising consistency with which he pursues this poetics of becoming.

Rilke's Poetics of Becoming

"Rainer Maria Rilkes' early verse is often seen as having little relevance to the great achievement of the middle years, the Neue Gedichte. Yet the very different styles of the juvenilia and this new maturity are united by a preoccupation with processes of motion and growth which governs both his life and work. In this meticulous philological study, Ben Hutchinson reassesses every level of Rilkes early poetry, from its motives and metaphors to its very grammar and syntax, in order to trace what he terms a poetics of becoming. With careful attention to rhythm, resonance and linguistic detail, he illuminates both the hidden patterns of the poetry and the artistic context of the fin-de-siecle. From its roots in the intellectual climate of the 1890s to the poems inspired by Rodin in 1908, Rilkes stylistic development is set against the surprising consistency with which he pursues this poetics of becoming."

Rainer Maria Rike, 1893-1908: Poetry as Process - A Poetics of Becoming

First published by Manchester University Press in hardback in 2013.

Critical Essays on W. G. Sebald

A Literature of Restitution

This book uses the annotations in W.G. Sebald s private library (held in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach) to construct an interpretation of his prose style as fundamentally dialectical. Alongside his readings of writers such as Benjamin, Bernhard, Bassani, and Levi-Strauss, it uses in particular Adorno s and Horkheimer s Dialektik der Aufklarung to help develop a close reading of Sebald s syntax and narrative structures. The key concern of Sebald s prose emerges not as the Holocaust, but rather the dialectical processes of progress and regression inherent in history. "

Die Dialektische Imagination

W.G. Sebald

Ben Hutchinson

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