Comparative Literature

Counter, Andrew J.

2011 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-1444419

Abstract This article considers the figures of the anarchist and the homosexual in Oscar Wilde's play Vera, or the Nihilists (1880) and Émile Zola's novel Paris (1898) and argues that the two are ideologically associated and structurally analogous. In Zola's novel and French and English responses to the Wilde trials, the article identifies a peculiarly fin-de-siècle form of homophobia that denigrates an abstract notion of male homosexuality while denying the authenticity of homosexual tastes as they are professed by real individuals. Both this understanding of homosexuality and the politics of Paris are complicated by the structural and lexical associations the novel sets up between the homosexual and the anarchist, the latter of whom Zola treats sympathetically, if critically. The article goes on to consider how both Vera and Paris situate anarchism and, implicitly or explicitly, homosexuality in opposition to the idea of the family, which represents for Zola the only conceivable foundation of human happiness and social progress, and for Wilde's Nihilists an oppressive structure to be resisted or destroyed. Wilde's play is shown to offer an exploration of the tension between family and politics, sexual or otherwise, and of the possibilities and risks involved in “coming out” as anything other than normal; it thus provides a critique of the heteronormativity and familialism of Zola's ideological project. CiteULike Complore Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? « Previous | Next Article » Table of Contents This Article doi: 10.1215/00104124-1444419 Comparative Literature 2011 Volume 63, Number 4: 345-365 » Abstract Full Text (PDF) References Classifications Article Services Email this article to a colleague Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in Web of Science Download to citation manager Citing Articles Load citing article information Citing articles via Web of Science Google Scholar Articles by Counter, A. J. Related Content Load related web page information Social Bookmarking CiteULike Complore Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? Current Issue Fall 2011, 63 (4) Alert me to new issues of Comparative Literature Duke University Press Journals ONLINE About the Journal Editorial Board Submission Guidelines Permissions Advertising Indexing / Abstracting Privacy Policy Subscriptions Library Resource Center Activation / Acct. Mgr. E-mail Alerts Help Feedback © 2011 by University of Oregon Print ISSN: 0010-4124 Online ISSN: 1945-8517 var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-5666725-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview();

Rowland, Antony

2011 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-1444428

Abstract This article examines the categories of victim and perpetrator testimony in relation to the writing contained in the Salamander Oasis Trust archive in the Imperial War Museum at Duxford. In Dimensions of the Holocaust , Elie Wiesel famously commented that the Holocaust produced the new literary genre of testimony. Although critics — such as James Young in Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust — have pointed out that testamentary accounts abound in relation to many other wars and atrocities, studies of testimony have — following Wiesel — mainly focused on the Holocaust. In this article, I explore British soldiers' poetic accounts of the Second World War in the Oasis archive, which contains around 20,000 items by over 200 authors. The concepts of victim and perpetrator testimony are both relevant and problematized in relation to soldier testimony. Clearly, the origin of the terms “victim” and “perpetrator” lies in a judicial context, but with the development of critical discussions about testimony outside the courtroom — as in the notion of literary testimony — the efficacy of these terms has been questioned. For Primo Levi, the trace of legal discourse is important, since it allows us to distinguish his tormentors from his fellow prisoners. However, Levi himself introduced the notion of the “grey zone” in which the “guilt” of, for example, the Sonderkommando does not sit easily with legal notions of criminality. In relation to soldier testimony, these categories are similarly vexed, since — as the variety of writing in the Oasis archive attests — an Allied recruit, as a reluctant conscript, or subsequently traumatized individual, or even a violator of the Geneva Convention, could be considered a victim. Sometimes the categories blur within an individual poem, as when Oasis writers celebrate the killing of German soldiers, but then also engage with troubling memories that surface in relation to such events after the war. Who (or what) is a perpetrator in the context of soldier testimony (as opposed to a perpetrator of genocide)? Should the term only be used in a legal sense, or should critical discussions of literary testimony draw on the dictionary definition of a perpetrator as an instigator of (potentially heinous) acts, which may include — whatever the pertinent definition of criminality — the killing of others in combat ( OED , 2nd ed.)? Is a soldier only ever a victim (a common descriptor of soldiers after Vietnam and the advent of PTSD in 1980) or something between these two testamentary categories? And — most pertinent for this article — is there such a thing as a perpetrator voice, perspective, or aesthetic when the poet dispassionately records enemy deaths, or — as in Keith Douglas's “Elegy for an 88 Gunner” — voyeuristically mulls over the corpse of an enemy soldier? This article addresses such questions in relation to both the canonical poet Keith Douglas and other, relatively unknown, writers in the Oasis archive. CiteULike Complore Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? « Previous | Next Article » Table of Contents This Article doi: 10.1215/00104124-1444428 Comparative Literature 2011 Volume 63, Number 4: 366-382 » Abstract Full Text (PDF) References Classifications Article Services Email this article to a colleague Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in Web of Science Download to citation manager Citing Articles Load citing article information Citing articles via Web of Science Google Scholar Articles by Rowland, A. Related Content Load related web page information Social Bookmarking CiteULike Complore Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? Current Issue Fall 2011, 63 (4) Alert me to new issues of Comparative Literature Duke University Press Journals ONLINE About the Journal Editorial Board Submission Guidelines Permissions Advertising Indexing / Abstracting Privacy Policy Subscriptions Library Resource Center Activation / Acct. Mgr. E-mail Alerts Help Feedback © 2011 by University of Oregon Print ISSN: 0010-4124 Online ISSN: 1945-8517 var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-5666725-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview();

Rizzuto, Nicole

2011 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-1444437

Abstract This essay argues that the Caribbean migration narratives of Jean Rhys and George Lamming employ formal tactics associated with modernism to question values subtending literary realism and provide alternative models for thinking about relations between the novel form and community. The systematic orchestration of two key devices in Rhys's Voyage in the Dark and Lamming's The Emigrants challenges modes of perception, temporality, and history shaping the realist discourses each novel directly or indirectly invokes. Voyage in the Dark responds to Zola's naturalist novel Nana through the use of parataxis; The Emigrants responds to the generic conventions of postwar British neo-realism through parataxis as well as paralipses. These experimental strategies interrupt the plotting of migration as Bildung . The resistance to character development and narrative closure enacted in Voyage in the Dark and The Emigrants through parataxis and paralipses leaves the colonial migrants in the grip of an unresolved past. Yet these same devices also operate on a wider textual register to shift readers' focalization from realism's gaze, which disjoins observing subject from observed object, suturing readers and colonial migrants into what Jean-Luc Nancy calls a communité desouvré , a precarious collectivity that is never completely enclosed or stabilized, always safeguarding a discrepancy among members. By doing so, these novels work to transform what Lamming calls “ways of seeing.” CiteULike Complore Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? « Previous | Next Article » Table of Contents This Article doi: 10.1215/00104124-1444437 Comparative Literature 2011 Volume 63, Number 4: 383-401 » Abstract Full Text (PDF) References Classifications Article Services Email this article to a colleague Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in Web of Science Download to citation manager Citing Articles Load citing article information Citing articles via Web of Science Google Scholar Articles by Rizzuto, N. Related Content Load related web page information Social Bookmarking CiteULike Complore Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? Current Issue Fall 2011, 63 (4) Alert me to new issues of Comparative Literature Duke University Press Journals ONLINE About the Journal Editorial Board Submission Guidelines Permissions Advertising Indexing / Abstracting Privacy Policy Subscriptions Library Resource Center Activation / Acct. Mgr. E-mail Alerts Help Feedback © 2011 by University of Oregon Print ISSN: 0010-4124 Online ISSN: 1945-8517 var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-5666725-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview();

López, Alfred J.

2011 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-1444446

Abstract The central proposition of this essay is that a reading of the plantation as an archive, rather than as a single unified, stable signifier, offers possibilities for understanding the plantation image's continued efficacy as a signifier for today's postcolonial, postglobal South. The essay begins with Benitez-Rojo's description of the indeterminable center or “origen” (“origin”) of the island archipelago to call attention to this proposition: namely, that there is no single “plantation” or plantation image that we can privilege above all others. Like Benitez-Rojo's repeating island, the plantation is known by its recurrent image — the white pillars projecting power and grace and explicitly linking the plantation with classical empires, the front porch with its rocking chairs that balance or undercut, with their implicit invitation and warmth, the imposing phallic pillars. Such plantation images reach their apogee in 1930s films such as Gone with the Wind (1939), Mississippi (1935), and Showboat (1936), all of which portray a Mythic South that is less a specific geographic location than an ideal — or an idyll — less an actual object than a procession of images that proliferate into the future even as they revise the past. The visual archive of the plantation, then, as unvarying and stable as it may appear (Tara, say, or the Lyceum), is really a composite consisting of all the photographs and portraits of plantations produced and circulated for the past two centuries or so. The “original” can be no more than a fleeting glimpse and a hypothetical construction. Far from being an island, the plantation thus emerges as a veritable archipelago or even meta-archipelago in Benitez-Rojo's sense: a polyglot entity overflowing its own boundaries and exceeding all attempts to anchor it to a given center, and at the very least not bound by its own time and space. By way of illustration, this article offers a limited genealogy of the plantation: Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, García Márquez's Macondo, and Coppola's Appocalypse Now Redux (2001). CiteULike Complore Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? « Previous | Next Article » Table of Contents This Article doi: 10.1215/00104124-1444446 Comparative Literature 2011 Volume 63, Number 4: 402-422 » Abstract Full Text (PDF) References Classifications Article Services Email this article to a colleague Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in Web of Science Download to citation manager Citing Articles Load citing article information Citing articles via Web of Science Google Scholar Articles by López, A. J. Related Content Load related web page information Social Bookmarking CiteULike Complore Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? Current Issue Fall 2011, 63 (4) Alert me to new issues of Comparative Literature Duke University Press Journals ONLINE About the Journal Editorial Board Submission Guidelines Permissions Advertising Indexing / Abstracting Privacy Policy Subscriptions Library Resource Center Activation / Acct. Mgr. E-mail Alerts Help Feedback © 2011 by University of Oregon Print ISSN: 0010-4124 Online ISSN: 1945-8517 var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-5666725-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview();

Chang, Chih-Wei

2011 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-1444455

Abstract This essay attempts to “bring out” Roland Barthes as an unnamable textual figure in the Taiwanese writer Chu T'ien-wen's Huangren shouji ( Notes of a Desolate Man ). Chu's “gay novel” is notorious for its narrator's seemingly inexhaustible references to a legion of writers, film directors, thinkers, and artists from across the globe. Among these encyclopedic references are allusions to Barthes's writings, most notably A Lover's Discourse: Fragments and The Pleasure of the Text . However, when the narrator of Chu's novel quotes from The Pleasure of the Text , he apparently forgets who he is quoting. In fact, the name “Roland Barthes” is elided throughout the novel. As a result, Barthes seems to become an unnamable figure in the novel, occupying the textual non-place usually reserved for homosexuality itself. To bring out “Roland Barthes,” this essay explores the intertextual space between Chu and Barthes. It uses Barthes's theorization of “text” and “intertextuality” to demonstrate that the seemingly endless — and controversial — quotations and references in Chu's novel are connected to its concern with promiscuous homosexuality. It thus serves as an alternative reading to Ng Kim Chew's influential essay on Chu, which “heterosexualizes” Chu's novel through an author-centered biographical approach. Barthes's textual theory, by contrast, dismisses the relevance of the author's intention and problematizes the use of the author's biography in reading a text. This essay follows his encouragement to play with the signifiers of a text (including the author's “biographemes”) so as to generate meanings unforeseen by the author. Ultimately, the unforeseen textual echoes between Chu's novel and Barthes's text almost (but not quite) produce the perverse and impossible enunciation “I am Roland Barthes.” CiteULike Complore Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? « Previous | Next Article » Table of Contents This Article doi: 10.1215/00104124-1444455 Comparative Literature 2011 Volume 63, Number 4: 423-437 » Abstract Full Text (PDF) References Classifications Article Services Email this article to a colleague Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in Web of Science Download to citation manager Citing Articles Load citing article information Citing articles via Web of Science Google Scholar Articles by Chang, C. Related Content Load related web page information Social Bookmarking CiteULike Complore Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? Current Issue Fall 2011, 63 (4) Alert me to new issues of Comparative Literature Duke University Press Journals ONLINE About the Journal Editorial Board Submission Guidelines Permissions Advertising Indexing / Abstracting Privacy Policy Subscriptions Library Resource Center Activation / Acct. Mgr. E-mail Alerts Help Feedback © 2011 by University of Oregon Print ISSN: 0010-4124 Online ISSN: 1945-8517 var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-5666725-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview();

Saussy, Haun

2011 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-1444495

Yao, Steven

2011 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-1444468

Krier, Theresa

2011 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-1444477

Holt, Elizabeth M.

2011 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-1444486