Comparative Literature

Emery, J.;

2012 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-1891387

This essay examines situations where a single trope is implicated in two traditionally opposed rhetorical structures: mise en abyme , in which an internal text provides a miniature model of the framing text, and allegory, a figure in which the text at hand is only the key to some single and essentially external reading. Where mise en abyme is typically associated with the self-enclosed autonomy of the artwork, allegory tends in the opposite direction by treating the text as a disposable means to a proper meaning. Through readings of the chess motifs in Vladimir Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and statuary tropes in an Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnet, the essay argues that the two tropes are better thought of as versions of each other, not least because allegories signal their presence precisely through interpolated texts that resist paraphrase. Our difficulty in reconciling them relates to our inevitable temptation to reduce undecidable figures to mechanically decodable signs and involves a complex of related binaries: figure and sign, symbol and allegory, inside and outside. The essay traces these binaries from the German Romantics into more contemporary theory in an effort to make their dynamic a productive one — first by treating the interaction of mise en abyme and allegory as analogous to the relation of part to whole in the hermeneutic circle, and then by relating texts as metaphors of production processes to texts as metonymically resulting from those same production processes. Approached in this way, mise en abyme generates a model by which we can conceptualize the artwork in relation to the larger work of economic production in which it participates and of which it is a miniature model.

Maslov, B.;

2012 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-1891396

This article puts forward a genealogy of one of the principal temporalities associated with German (pre-)Romantic lyric, the time of a privileged moment (“ewiger/prägnanter Augenblick”). The same temporality is shown to dominate the lyric oeuvre of Fyodor Tiutchev, a Russian Romantic, the proximity of whose poetics to German models is otherwise well documented. As the article maintains, this distinct presentist temporality, along with a concomitant metaphysical stance on the relation between the human and the divine realms, ultimately derives from Pindar's victory odes, which are argued to represent a key resource both for the ideal of lyric propagated in Germany in the Geniezeit and (more unexpectedly) for Tiutchev's lyric practice. The first two sections of the article contain an overview of the chief temporal categories that occur in Pindar's corpus (and, more generally, in Ancient Greek literature of the archaic period) and a discussion of the ways in which his temporal imagination relates to the ideological concerns of the victory ode. Beyond these specific objectives, which lie in the fields of literary and conceptual history, the article discusses the theoretical implications of a close association between distinct temporal patterns and poetic genres, as well as the issue of the priority of literary vs. philosophical influences on cultural perceptions of time.

Braider, C.;

2012 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-1891405

Walter Benjamin confides to his friend Hugo von Hofmannsthal that “I sometimes think about writing a book on French tragedy as a counterpart to my Trauerspiel book,” noting that his “plan for the latter had originally been to elucidate both the German Trauerspiel and the French tragic drama in terms of their contrastive nature.” However, to do so “something must be added” that the book he wrote failed to supply. The aim of this essay is twofold: to reconstruct what Benjamin might have said about French classical tragedy and to identify the mysterious addition. Why does the effort to “elucidate” the two forms “in terms of their contrastive nature” demand a supplement? What would the supplement have been, and how might it illumine Benjamin's own project as well as tragedy and Trauerspiel ? My hypothesis is that Benjamin remains silent on these points because he was temperamentally and philosophically unable to think them through. Benjamin's focus on tragedy is itself an indicator of this psychic resistance. Benjamin clearly assumed that, whatever deeper features of German tragic drama a contrast with the French version might bring to light, Trauerspiel constitutes a sovereign law unto itself, whose wider metaphysical as well as historical authority needs no argument. As a result, his interpretation of the nature of French tragedy inevitably would have confirmed his core theses about the German baroque, a fact that in turn draws attention to what Benjamin truly needed to add to both accounts: the perspective of comedy . I propose, then, to counter Benjamin's argument by exploring the ways in which comedy challenges the underlying metaphysics to which tragedy appeals. To this end, I argue that the greatest tragedy of the French classical age is its greatest comedy, Molière's Dom Juan, ou le festin de pierre . Reading Molière's play alongside French and German tragedy reveals not only how deeply both versions of the “mourning play” are implicated in the political ideology of royal absolutism but also the availability of a quite different model of social and political association grounded in the historical ontology of modernity against which absolutism sets its face. In addition to opening new sightlines on seventeenth-century tragedy and comedy alike, the result raises questions about the metaphysics underlying both Benjamin's thought and the tradition of critical theory from Burckhardt, Nietzsche, and Weber down to Benjamin's rivals and epigones, Adorno, Schmitt, and Agamben.

Singh, S.;

2012 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-1891414

Walter Benjamin's two essays on Charles Baudelaire — “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” (1938) and “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939) — are regularly taken as profound readings of that poet's work. This essay argues that, whatever claims may be made for Benjamin as a philosopher, mystic, correspondent, revolutionary, martyr, memoirist, or stylist, his readings of Baudelaire are inadequate. The essay, proceeding in three parts, first offers an account of the surprisingly uncritical reception of Benjamin as a reader of Baudelaire. Second, it examines Benjamin's crude methodology and peremptory interpretations in his two essays on Baudelaire. Finally, it offers a close comparative reading of Baudelaire's lyric “The Swan” and Benjamin's ninth aphorism in “On the Concept of History,” staging an unexpected and revealing correspondence between the two works to argue that “The Swan” is no less a thesis on the concept of history and affords rather more stunning illuminations of the modern condition. Both the poem and the aphorism feature incapacitated winged creatures, debris, bad weather, and, most strikingly, a speaker who stands in the present, considers the past, and ponders the endurance of human disaster. However, the ethics and aesthetics that emerge in Baudelaire's lyric could not be more inhospitable to Benjamin's messianism. And ultimately, this essay claims, to endorse Benjamin's vision of modernity is to refuse an alternative genealogy of modernity that could well take, once free and clear of Benjamin's shadow, Baudelairean “contingency” as its watchword and Baudelaire's complex staging of irresolvable psychic and social antagonisms as its praxis.

Zumhagen-Yekple, K.;

2012 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-1891423

This essay takes up the significance of Wittgenstein's philosophy for our understanding of literature (and vice versa) through a comparative reading of the stakes and aims of Kafka's and Wittgenstein's respective circa 1922 puzzle texts “Von den Gleichnissen” (“On Parables”) and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . The essay builds upon the so-called resolute program of Wittgenstein interpretation developed by Cora Diamond, James Conant, and others, bringing its insights to bear on Kafka's perplexing work. The essay explores the ethical weight of these two writers' investment in the philosophical depth of riddles, irony, and parabolic and nonsensical expression as unorthodox modes of indirect instruction about ordinary language and world, the yearning for transcendence, and the failure to achieve it. Both demanding works deal with the ethical difference between “getting” the philosophical import of a story or joke and not getting it in the context of an examination of the relationship (or lack thereof) between the activities and difficulties of everyday life, on the one hand, and those of literary expression and/or spiritual or philosophical teaching, on the other. Both strive to open readers to experience — as revealed through everyday language — by leading us beyond the dichotomy of facticity and transcendence, away from the urge to transcend the limits of language, and toward a recognition of the possibility of seeing our ordinary dealing with things as presenting a face of significance that is at once linguistically meaningful and ethically valuable. The central aim of this discussion of Wittgenstein's Tractatus and “Lecture on Ethics” alongside Kafka's parable is to examine the ways in which Wittgenstein's philosophical outlook, writing, and method (shaped by his general attraction to the Book and book writing as well as by his reading of certain works of literature) are deeply relevant to literary studies, and particularly to our understanding of literary modernism.

Lionnet, F.;

2012 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-1891469

Plotz, J.;

2012 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-1891432

Gravendyk, H.;

2012 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-1891441

Dawes, J.;

2012 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-1891450

Love, J.;

2012 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-1891460