Noble Passions: Aristocracy and the NovelQuint, David
2010 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-2010-001
In its retrospect on the history of the European novel, Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo identifies the figure of the aristocratic male libertine as a particular novelistic object of erotic attraction and repulsion. The nobleman's sexual dominance and whip-wielding brutality is a measure of the social dominance of his class, but the turning of his own power against himself in self-flagellation likewise indicates how the aristocracy, in the historical long run, may destroy itself from within. Taking its cue from Lampedusa and beginning with Don Quixote , this essay looks at social fantasies that the novel, a genre associated with the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie and its values, weaves around the eroticized figure of the aristocrat. It documents, in Madame Bovary , the gradual replacement of the nobleman-rake in Emma Bovary's fantasies and love-affairs with substitutes produced by a money-ridden bourgeois society. It shows, in À la recherche du temps perdu , how the Baron du Charlus's masochistic desires are thwarted by working classes too sentimental about their social superiors to imitate the model of the Russian revolution: aristocracy will endure in France. In the visions of both Flaubert and Proust, the sexual allure of the declining aristocracy is tied to a sense of the aesthetic itself and to the question of what of aesthetic value can survive in modern mass culture and in the novel, which is that culture's dominant literary form.
On Portraits, Painters, and Women: Balzac's La Maison du chat-qui-pelote and James's "Glasses"Ginsburg, Michal Peled
2010 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-2010-002
This essay explores the function of the portrait in two texts, Balzac's La Maison du chat-qui-pelote and James's "Glasses." I argue that in both texts the portrait plays a crucial role and that taking the portrait into account allows us to see differently the social dramas these works depict. In both texts the portrait raises the issue of the relation between identity and representation. Since in both stories the portrait is that of a woman and the painter is a man, they also deal with the way the power to represent (and thus determine or construct identity) relates to gender difference. As portrait stories that demonstrate the social function and power of the portrait as representation and show the painters' artistic production to be inseparable from their interests and desires, these texts also show the ways in which, and the conditions under which, the power to represent is gained and kept (or not).
National Betrayal: Language, Location, and Lesbianism in August Strindberg's Le Plaidoyer d'un fouStenport, Anna Westerstahl
2010 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-2010-003
Written in Denmark in French in 1887–88, Swedish author August Strindberg's novel A Madman's Defense ( Le Plaidoyer d'un fou ) was first published in an 1893 German translation and subsequently released in a manicured French version in 1895. The German version was taken to court on indecency charges in Vilhelmine Berlin, the French version became a scandal, and Strindberg never authorized the novel for publication in Sweden. Although A Madman's Defense helped cement Strindberg's reputation at home and abroad as a paranoid misogynist, it also provides a complementary trajectory for understanding the emergence of European transnational prose modernism. In its conception, publication, and reception, A Madman's Defense straddles both national and linguistic borders; its plot involves travel trajectories that link Sweden with the continent, and Stockholm with Paris. This novel tells a story of adultery, divorce, and lesbian desire, while tracing, through a first-person voice, the narrator's professed descent into madness. One thematic emphasis links transgressions of public and private with specific architectural manifestations. This article traces these architectural manifestations and argues that, as the narrator appears increasingly irrational, boundaries of nation, of public and private, and of gendered conventions disintegrate in ways that illustrate how literary setting becomes a vehicle of modernist literary experimentation. The article discusses specific locations through which this transformation is effected, including a bourgeois apartment, a railway station, a library, and a tourist boarding house. It also links Strindberg's writing about divorce and lesbian desire with nineteenth-century French literary texts, including those of the 1880s, and with Henrik Ibsen's plays and legacy in Paris during the 1880s and 1890s.
"Noseological" Parody, Gender Discourse, and Yugoslav Feminisms: Following Gogol''s "Nose" to Ugresic's "Hot Dog on a Warm Bun"Lydic, Lauren
2010 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-2010-004
Dubravka Ugre i 's 1983 short story "Hrenovka u vru em pecivu" ("Hot Dog on a Warm Bun") self-consciously parodies N.V. Gogol''s 1836 "Nos" ("The Nose"). Building on the tradition of "noseology," a literary sub-genre in 1820s and 1830s Russia, Ugre i parodies the highly symbolic interpretations of "The Nose" that dominated both Formalist and psychoanalytic literary criticism in early-twentieth-century Russia. Copying and revising Freudian interpretations of "The Nose," wherein the nose symbolizes the phallus, Ugre i substitutes Nada Mati —the female plastic surgeon who finds Mato Kovali 's penis on her hot dog bun—for Gogol''s Ivan Iakovlevich—the barber who discovers Kovalev's nose in his bread. Through the postmodern misadventures of Mati 's "hot dog," Ugre i humorously reproduces and undermines the Lacanian assertion that the penis is merely the image of the phallus. As Ugre i dismantles the phallus's imaginary "veils," she also unmasks persistant gender inequality and a virulent socio-political backlash during the immediate post-Tito years. Ugre i embeds in her psychoanalytic parody an incisive reading of gender discourse and local feminisms in 1980s Yugoslavia.
The Novel, the State, and the Professions: On Reading Bruce RobbinsBove, Paul A.
2010 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-2010-005
Since Bruce Robbins's Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State deals with the novel, readers will rightly place it next to Lukacs and more recent historians and theoreticians of the genre. Critically, however, I believe it is also important to place Robbins in the tradition of Northrop Frye's efforts to establish a separate science of literature and so to legitimate such knowledge and practice as essential to how society understands its own practices and self-creations. Like Frye, Robbins embraces the critical task of establishing once more the fact that literature, especially the novel, does work within a society that both exposes social processes and psychological drives and creates the institutions they need and desire. Frye organized his anatomy around a set of interlocking hermeneutical and structural levels and modes that attempted to embrace all imaginative literary forms. Robbins has a more precise focus: the inter-relations among erotic and displaced erotic desires and drives; the class formations and reformations of capitalist, especially bourgeois, liberal societies; and the emergent formation of the welfare state as the mechanism that meets the often implied and expressed aspirations and obligations of such formations. Central to Robbins's work is an embrace of professional work and social place. He finds the stories of upward mobility essential both to organizing his own tale of developing modern forms of relation and state power, and to defending the idea that the professions are perhaps the key mode of rising in the stories and worlds he discusses. Robbins does not work comparatively, even though he treats the literatures of several nations and periods. Rather, the materials he gathers and analyzes illustrate a very complicated set of points about modernity, the chances of the market, the needs—sexual, economic, and social—it produces. Throughout he emphasizes the efforts of individuals, by means of their writings, to bring into being the conditions for and actual existence of the ideals and institutions the welfare state offers to meet the often painful conditions of aspiration within liberal capitalism. Robbins has a substantial political agenda in this book, as he has had through most of his career—to oppose the anarchism that anti-statist politics and critical theory have often advocated. While he makes clear that the welfare state is far from his ideal of political organization, he also makes a good case that its diminishment has had disastrous human consequences, consequences that have provoked him to write this book. Unlike various forms of utopianism, which seems to find its modern roots either in Messianism or a misprision of Frye, Robbins's book eschews the satirical and often cynical or skeptical elements of utopianism's critical functions in order to apprehend and point out the transformative possibilities inherent in text, experience, knowledge, and institutions. In his hands, critical practices thus become part of the necessary imaginative actions of struggling peoples whose desires at their best appear in visions of a transformed collective world. A defense of literature becomes, then, a defense of criticism and an illustration of its value as a necessary profession.