What Was Tragedy? The World We Have Lost, 1550–1795Hoxby, Blair
2012 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-1539190
We owe our idea of tragedy and our tragic repertoire to a generation of romantic critics who, writing in the shadow of Kant, demanded that tragedies display organic form, express the spirit of a nation, and stage a collision between freedom and necessity. Their formula obscures aspects of Attic tragedy and hinders our ability to interpret most tragedies written from 1550 to 1795. These works were supported by a poetics of tragedy that identifies pathos as the essence of tragedy. In order to read this repertoire anew, we must entertain five propositions: (1) that great drama need not be the drama of a nation; (2) that organic form is not superior to mechanic beauty; (3) that tragedy is a theatrical rather than a poetic art; (4) that not only the naïve but the sophisticated aspects of ancient theater have value; and (5) that the passions are dramatic units of crucial significance to early modern tragedy, a theatrical form that cannot be read only for plot, character, and imagery. CiteULike Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? « Previous | Next Article » Table of Contents This Article doi: 10.1215/00104124-1539190 Comparative Literature 2012 Volume 64, Number 1: 1-32 » 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 Hoxby, B. Related Content Load related web page information Social Bookmarking CiteULike Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? Current Issue Winter 2012, 64 (1) 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 © 2012 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")); try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-5666725-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}
The French DiseaseNewman, Karen
2012 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-1539199
This essay considers cultural translation and exchange between England and France from the publication of Randle Cotgrave's important Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611) to Madeleine de Scudéry's Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus (1649–1653) to the Soame/Dryden translation of Boileau's L'art poétique (1683). It considers translations of various genres, including the poetic epistle, verse drama, and the newly fashionable romance in the context of complex shifts in Anglo-French relations. It argues that French and French cultural forms represented powerful cultural capital that was “translated” or “borne across” the channel during an important chapter in the history of cultural translation, a term taken from social anthropology. While useful for literary and cultural studies, its deployment in anthropology and its recent appropriation by postcolonial studies too often eschews linguistic translation — the word for word — in favor of cultural expression and thus risks emptying cultural translation of its linguistic specificity. Much recent criticism of early modern English literature and culture has been so engaged by arguments about the making of the English nation and of the English vernacular that it may have obscured the ongoing pouvoir/savoir of French. The cultural competition between England and France in the seventeenth century is too often read backwards, in the hindsight provided by the later imperial successes of Britain, or through the culturally triumphalist lens of Shakespeare's ensuing reputation, or via the Anglocentrism of today's translation markets in which the global economic power and language skill of the Anglo-American majority — English — have such powerful effects. CiteULike Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? « Previous | Next Article » Table of Contents This Article doi: 10.1215/00104124-1539199 Comparative Literature 2012 Volume 64, Number 1: 33-48 » 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 Newman, K. Related Content Load related web page information Social Bookmarking CiteULike Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? Current Issue Winter 2012, 64 (1) 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 © 2012 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")); try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-5666725-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}
The “Alpha and Omega” of Haitian Literature: Baron de Vastey and the U.S. Audience of Haitian Political WritingDaut, Marlene L.
2012 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-1539208
Given the increasingly fractured interactions between Haiti and the United States in the twentieth century that recently culminated in what one critic has called the “alleged kidnapping of Aristide,” it would be more than tempting to conclude that Haitians have always been the victims of an unequivocally “bad press” which they were powerless to influence. However, an examination of the complicated interactions between early Haitian political writers and the northern U.S. newspaper press in the first two decades of Haitian independence suggests that the idea of Haiti as a powerless “apparent state” with an unimportant literary tradition is a concept of more recent date. Based on literary reviews and advertisements in nineteenth-century U.S. newspapers, as well as the holdings of U.S. libraries during that time, U.S. readers living in the northern states were well acquainted with Haitian authors generally and with the works of the Baron de Vastey (1781–1820) in particular. Vastey composed at least ten prose works, all of which circulated either in the original or in English translation in the Atlantic World. U.S. newspapers in the north that printed or reviewed Vastey's works tended to view Haiti favorably and argued for formal recognition of Haitian independence, as well as continued trade with the country. Vastey's ideas were thus crucial to the development of northern U.S. American attitudes towards Haitian independence in the early nineteenth century, and one reviewer of his works called him “the ‘Alpha and Omega’ of Haitian intellect and literature.” I argue therefore that, contrary to popular belief, Haiti was not isolated by non-recognition in the first two decades of independence, if by isolation we mean cut off from the rest of the world either economically or culturally. CiteULike Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? « Previous | Next Article » Table of Contents This Article doi: 10.1215/00104124-1539208 Comparative Literature 2012 Volume 64, Number 1: 49-72 » 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 Daut, M. L. Related Content Load related web page information Social Bookmarking CiteULike Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? Current Issue Winter 2012, 64 (1) 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 © 2012 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")); try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-5666725-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}
Ephemeral Asia: Position without Identity in the Modernist Urdu Poetry of N.M. RashedPue, A. Sean
2012 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-1539217
Modernist Urdu poet N.M. Rashed's Iran men ajnabi ( A Stranger in Iran , 1957), published ten years after the partition of British India, describes the experiences of an Indian Muslim soldier in the British Indian Army occupying Iran during World War II. Rashed's narrator searches in Iran — the motherland of the Persian language and culture that pervades Urdu — for his cultural past, but what he finds instead is an extension of his colonial present. The Urdu literary establishment at this time was dominated by progressive ( taraqqi pasand ) critics, who promoted a Hindustani language that bridged the gap between (Muslim/Pakistani) Urdu and (Hindu/Indian) Hindi and deemphasized Persian. These critics opposed modernism ( jadidiyat ), a movement associated with Rashed and with Indo-Muslim identitarianism, as socially regressive. By setting the poem in Iran and using modern Persian, Rashed confronted a readership for whom those gestures could only be signs of Indo-Persian nostalgia, and the poem was largely misread as a paean to the cultural identity of the East. Yet for Rashed, Asia is not a marker of cultural heritage but closer to what Gayatri Spivak has called a “position without identity” — a geographical category that Iran and India may claim but not fully possess. In Rashed's poem the narrator's ephemeral and contingent experiences of Iran serve as a critique of the two modes of belonging then prevalent in the Urdu literary community, progressivism and Indo-Muslim identitarianism, which he reveals to be ideologies mired in imperial projects. In anecdotes that gleefully lampoon socialist ideology, Rashed's poem represents Soviet internationalism as Russo-centric imperialism. In equally scathing satires of Indo-Persian tradition, the poem exposes the connections between India and Iran made by Western imperialism. Further, it employs rich citations of modern Persian poetry in order to critique an Iranian nationalism based on continuity with a lost imperial past. In place of these ideological structures, Rashed finds in Asia a category too vast and heterogeneous to serve as a collectivity, and he imagines, in vague detail, the emergence of a new man not bound by identity at all. This article seeks to restore this more radically anti-ideological aspect of Rashed's poem while illustrating the potential of Spivak's category for the study of literature. CiteULike Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? « Previous | Next Article » Table of Contents This Article doi: 10.1215/00104124-1539217 Comparative Literature 2012 Volume 64, Number 1: 73-92 » 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 Pue, A. S. Related Content Load related web page information Social Bookmarking CiteULike Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? Current Issue Winter 2012, 64 (1) 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 © 2012 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")); try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-5666725-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}
Calvino, Llull, Lucretius: Two Models of Literary CombinatoricsDuncan, Dennis
2012 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-1539226
A recurring problem in much critical writing about the Oulipo is a tendency to homogenize the output of the group's writers in order to present a universal poetics of constrained writing. Oulipians rightly bristle at these attempts to oversimplify the group's history, and a useful distinction has been made by Jacques Roubaud, who notes the widening of the group's membership beginning in 1966, when he joined, and postulates that a second era — the “Perecquian era” — of the Oulipo began in 1969, when Georges Perec published La Disparition , his infamous novel without the letter e . This essay looks at the theoretical writing of Italo Calvino over the six-year period from 1967 to 1973 —the years between his translation of Raymond Queneau's novel Les Fleurs bleues and his full election to the Oulipo — arguing that during this time Calvino's own poetics underwent a significant change with regard to the perceived relationship between creativity and constraint. The essay makes its case by analogy with two authors often cited by the Oulipo — the medieval theologian Ramón Llull and the Atomist philosopher Lucretius — between whom Calvino draws a parallel in one of his final works, the undelivered lectures Six Memos for the Next Millennium . It argues, however, that Llull and Lucretius represent two opposing models of combinatorics and that the former encapsulates Calvino's views at the start of the period in question, while the latter neatly exemplifies his later position. The essay also suggests that the trend in Calvino's thought is germane to the distinction Roubaud makes — that Calvino's earlier position is characteristic of the “pre-Perecquian Oulipo,” while his later views are closer to those of his peers among the group's second wave. CiteULike Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? « Previous | Next Article » Table of Contents This Article doi: 10.1215/00104124-1539226 Comparative Literature 2012 Volume 64, Number 1: 93-109 » 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 Duncan, D. Related Content Load related web page information Social Bookmarking CiteULike Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? Current Issue Winter 2012, 64 (1) 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 © 2012 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")); try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-5666725-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}