Modalities of Tragic Doubt in Homer's Iliad, Sophocles' Philoctetes, and Shakespeare's OthelloZERBA, MICHELLE L.
2009 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-2008-001
Doubt is intrinsic to our situation as beings immersed in a world that connects us to people at the same time that it renders impossible the certainty of knowing their minds. It has both an affective side that is linked with such kindred emotions as fear, anxiety, and suspicion, and a cognitive side that is engaged with questions about whether the things we perceive can lay claim to being knowledge. As such, it is central to some of the most persistent concerns of Western philosophy. The epistemic and emotional registers of doubt have a long history, but it is also a history that has not yet been plotted. The purpose of this essay is to stake out some parameters for such a study by establishing Homer's Iliad as an exemplary text. I then extend my inquiry into the relationship between doubt and portrayals of subjectivity and to two plays, Sophocles' Philoctetes and Shakespeare's Othello , which share with the Iliad an interest in the unraveling of heroism in a world torn by friendship, love, and the obsession with masculine honor. The bond between the Iliad and Philoctetes is close, since Sophocles is exploring the limitations of the Achillean paradigm in this play. In doing so, he helps shape the Greco-Roman heroic ideal that is later embodied in medieval romance, a tradition on which Shakespeare draws in Othello .
Exile as the Inaudible Accent in Germaine de Stael's Corinne, ou l'ItalieBATSAKI, YOTA
2009 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-2008-002
The question of the accent is usually muted in theories of linguistic and cultural translation, yet perhaps no other mark speaks more eloquently of exile. Exile may thus be conceived as the permanent burden of an accent in the midst of someone else's mother tongue, while cosmopolitanism may require a provisional deafness vis-à-vis the accent. This essay seeks to apply recent poststructuralist thinking on language, translation, and exile to a figure who straddles the Enlightenment and Romanticism and whose life and work starkly embody the inaudible accent of exile and cosmopolitanism: the cultural critic and novelist Germaine de Staël (1766-1817). It argues that de Staël conceived of exile in terms of translation—as the necessity, even the opportunity, of crossing borders that are not only national but also linguistic and cultural. I begin by situating de Staël in relation to recent work at the intersection of language, translation, and gender: Derrida's The Monolingualism of the Other (1996) and "Shibboleth: For Paul Celan" (2005), and Barbara Johnson's Mother Tongues (2003). I then consider the extent to which many of her key figures—drawn from the work of Novalis, Schleiermarcher, and Goethe—enable her to explore both the productive and the perverse dimensions of translation. Finally, I argue that her views on translation in "De l'esprit des traductions" (1816) and De la littérature (1800) are radically tested by her novel Corinne, ou l'Italie (1807), which can be read as an extended personification of the promise and failure of translation.
Sebald, Wittgenstein, and the Ethics of MemorySTRAUS, NINA PELIKAN
2009 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-2008-003
What does W.G. Sebald mean by the doubling of his character Jacques Austerlitz with Ludwig Wittgenstein, a "poetic" philosopher who, although of Jewish ancestry, had little to say about the fate of the Jews during the Nazi period? Sebald's initiation of the reader into Austerlitz's life story through visual and verbal references to the philosopher suggests certain Wittgensteinian themes and problems. These include the relation of ethics to aesthetics and of both to memory, of propositions to truth-making, and of the verbal to the visual arts as exemplified by the eighty-one photographs included in Austerlitz . Indeed, Austerlitz and Wittgenstein mirror each other in so many ways that a reader familiar with Ray Monk's biography of the philosopher and Wittgenstein's own work might suspect that Sebald lifted specific elements from these texts into his own. But Sebald's work also conveys an unvoiced critique of Wittgenstein's neglect of Nazi politics. If Sebald's representations of the way that both propositions and images can dissimulate, that logic and science can fail and even destroy us, would have interested Wittgenstein, Austerlitz also reminds us that the ethics of memory requires the necessity not of the silence Wittgenstein invokes at the end of the Tractatus in a statement that Sebald himself quotes at the end of Vertigo , but of an ongoing journeying into new literary genres. In Sebald's work each of these relations bears upon the difficulties of representing the Holocaust and Austerlitz mediates the search for his history through photographs of landscapes and buildings. This mediation also occurs through Sebald's dialogue with Wittgenstein's skepticism and, indeed, Through its focus on architectural "monumentality," Austerlitz brings into full articulation Sebald's "inhabitations" (Mikhail Bakhtin's word) by Wittgenstein's family resemblance, as well as his notion that ethics is a kind of metaphysics.
Viennese Waltz: Freud in Nabokov's DespairTRZECIAK, JOANNA
2009 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-2008-008
Although Nabokov dismissed Freud as a trivial and vulgar thinker and derided him at every turn, the presence of Freud and Freudianism is quite conspicuous in his works. With great vigilance, Nabokov anticipates and short-circuits potential Freudian interpretations of his work through parody, travesty, and psychoanalytic pastiche. Taking as points of departure Jenefer Shute's framing of Nabokov's conflict with Freud as an attempt to ensure hermeneutic control over his own texts and the cultural fields within which Nabokov's works were written and read, I analyze a literary mechanism within the 1966 text of Despair that both relies on and undermines a Freudian reading. I identify a set of objects whose Freudian valence could easily mislead the unwary reader into taking them symbolically, thus overlooking their function as important clues to events in the novel. I also posit that prevailing discourses, coupled with what might be called the "cultural competence" of the reader or scholar, are co-determinants of literary devices, semantic structures, and textual patterning in Nabokov's texts. In the case of the 1966 version of Despair , the resulting text is a palimpsest, as Nabokov adds, deletes, and reconfigures passages in translation, and the text itself is overwritten by discourses in the target culture. Moreover, by attending to cultural debates extant in mid-1930s émigré Berlin, where the Russian original was composed, it is possible to see within the canonical 1966 version vestiges of this originary text. While I do not tackle the larger question of the nature of Nabokov's reliance on Freud head on, my analysis provides some purchase on this fraught relationship, its literary manifestations, and what may be learned by pursuing a line of questioning that Nabokov himself sought to stymie.
The Rhetoric of AnachronismLUZZI, JOSEPH
2009 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-2008-009
This essay organizes its readings around a figure of speech, anachronism, that embodies a defining tension in much new formalist thought, one best expressed as a chiasmus: the historicity of form and the formal quality of history. I aim to trouble the lingering binary distinctions between text and context by analyzing the capacity of anachronistic discourse to collapse the boundaries between a literary work's internal means of reference and its external referential compass. Because the aesthetically productive temporal fissures that anachronism produces are not limited to any single literary genre, I examine the rhetoric of anachronism in two historical novels—Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi ( The Betrothed ) and Giorgio Bassani's Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini ( The Garden of the Finzi-Continis )—two texts dealing with the Holocaust—Primo Levi's "Il tramonto di Fòssoli" ("Sunset at Fossoli") and Robert Antelme's L'espèce humaine ( The Human Race )—and poems by Francis Ponge. My argument centers on the ability of certain modes of temporal disjunction to subvert any a priori and potentially reductive belief in the objective historicity of an aesthetic form, especially when this same creative representation emerges as a challenge to a visceral historical crisis. Throughout the essay, I make claims on behalf of the "necessity" and "ethics" of the rhetoric of anachronism, primarily because it provides a corrective against any attempt to reduce the formal matter of literary discourse to the status of mere reflector or mirror of its contextual referents and, correspondingly, resists the isolation or separation of this same formal component from the historical discourses in which it not only participates but also, in some cases, actively shapes.