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

加亚特里•查克拉沃蒂•斯皮瓦克(Gayatri C. Spivak，1942- )，美国著名学者。生于印度，现任美国哥伦比亚大学教授、比较文学与社会中心主任。在当今的美国乃至整个西方学术理论界和文化研究界，她是继萨义德之后当代最有影响、最有争议的一位后殖民地(或第三世界)知识分子和后殖民理论批评家，其批评的独特性和冲击力受到人们的高度重视。