Comparative Literature

Bush, C.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2019239

Hassan, W. S.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2019248

If reading literature in its original languages has always been the sine qua non of comparative literature, the discipline began to change when the answer to the above question was no longer restricted to European languages. In parallel motion, many efforts, several of which are comparative in nature, have been made since the early 1990s to reconfigure American studies beyond its established national-linguistic boundaries, either in relation to the American hemisphere or to various constructs of world literature. This essay reflects on those two mutually reinforcing processes by way of implicating Arabic studies, a field in which the question of which languages are relevant may seem as counterintuitive as in American studies. Given its (post)colonial contexts, comparative approaches to Arabic literature have tended to emphasize its relations with British and French literatures. These conventional answers to the question of which languages are relevant in the study of American and Arabic literatures have echoed geopolitical hierarchies and obscured important networks that do not always center on Europe and the United States, such as the South-South dimension of world literature, of which Arab-Latin American relations is but one example. The essay proposes a tertiary model that connects U.S. to Latin American and Arabic studies.

Vadde, A.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2019257

This article contributes to the forum on original languages by examining debates about reading in translation in comparative literature studies. Traditionally comparative literature has eschewed the study of works in translation, but new interventions in world literature challenge this long held piety. I argue that reading in translation can be a valuable practice for scholars of English and comparative literature alike because it demands that we reconsider the link between the commitment to original languages and the promotion of theories of culture that prize alterity and difference over encounter and intersection. I further suggest that the preference for foreignness and defamiliarization as critical strategies of translation and reading limits the kinds of literary works that constitute postcolonial and world literature canons, particularly in the English language. To illustrate these claims, this essay turns to the career of Rabindranath Tagore, whose auto-translations of many works, including Gitanjali and The Home and the World, render him a bilingual writer of Bengali and English literature. By close reading Tagore's translations and their receptions among early Orientalist and late-twentieth-century critics, I show that his under-appreciated translations are key to understanding the development of his style across both languages. Even more importantly, the reception of his translations as awkward and old-fashioned, or what I call “Babu English,” reveals continuities between Orientalist and postcolonial approaches to the elevation of cultural difference. Tagore's Babu English refers to his uncanny English translations, which are neither fully assimilated to the target language nor assertively foreignized. Their partial domestication shows up the exoticism desired by Orientalist readers and equally challenges the notion of complicity assigned to domesticated translations by contemporary critics. Tagore's English-language works are thus best approached not as timeless works of art, but as untimely translations whose history of circulation, reception, and stylistic change across languages and nations must be made visible in order for Anglophone and Bengali literary history to become more comparative and more entwined.

Bachner, A.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2019266

Whenever scholars of Comparative Literature invoke the importance of working with the original, there are clear political implications. Claiming the surplus value of work in the original language(s) versus work in translation emphasizes cultural specificity and celebrates the multiplicity of linguistic and cultural expressions that are the corpus of Comparative Literature as a discipline. However, the term “original” also has less benign innuendos that conceptually void hybridity and polyvalence: the original (versus the copy), the origin (versus derivation and decadence), as well as the origin or arché of the archive (versus cultural repertoires and marginal expressions). This essay uses Leibniz's search for a linguistic original and origin of Chinese as a test case as well as a caveat against some implications of the claim for linguistic “originality” (with its different meanings). Leibniz's project of a Characteristica universalis , a universal philosophical language, drew inspiration from the Chinese script—or rather, from what was known or fantasized about it by European scholars. In a time in which the quest for the monogenetic origin of languages gave way to the possibility to conceive of a perfect man-made language, Chinese seemed a likely model. However, Leibniz's dream of a Universal Character relied on a combination of competing semiotic and systemic requirements that only the misguided view of sinographs and hexagrams as an integral part of one Chinese script system could achieve. Consequently, instead of finding a perfect philosophical language in the Chinese script, Leibniz framed Chinese as an impossible system of multiple scripts and signifying principles.

Kaufman, E.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2019275

This essay argues that twentieth- and twenty-first-century French philosophy (“French theory”) is aligned around a theory of difference that would contest many of the “comparative” frameworks of the discipline of Comparative Literature, including the question of original languages. Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Alain Badiou, each in their fashion, challenge the purportedly representational model on which questions of “original,” “translation,” and “maternal language” are based (what Deleuze refers to pejoratively as the principium comparationis with its four axes of identity, analogy, opposition, and similitude, on which “difference is crucified”). Thus, Richard Rorty's claim that philosophy / “theory” and literature have very little to do with each other is refined to suggest that one of the few unifying threads of contemporary French philosophy is precisely its foundational antagonism to the types of questions posed under the rubric of comparative literary analysis.

Basu, M.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2019284

This article examines a selection of Rabindranath Tagore's essays with a view to demonstrating that the Indian Nobel Laureate was distressed about the fact that in the early twentieth century the modern historical sense was eclipsing the place of poetics in the colonial world. In place of the transcendental vision implied by a developmental process of world-history, Tagore proposed that literary language generates a notion of time that is radically finite because it is aligned with the human failure to achieve divine transcendence. More specifically, his essays stage truly secular, historical time as the effect of a notion of rhythm that is bound neither to the imperial authority of history nor to mathematical measures, but rather emerges in the variety and contradictoriness of traces that language impresses upon itself, through the play of shifting economies of meaning, changing image patterns, and the mobility and textile strangeness of syntactic and accentual imports. In order to elaborate the radically finite temporality of such a literary language, this essay draws on Tagore's formulation of jivalila , or the play of living creation, which he opposes to the Western conceptualization of life as a primal struggle against death. Tied to the notion of a joyful union with the Supreme Being as it unfolds in the scriptural Upanishads, jivalila may at first seem like the kernel of yet another transcendental vision of Totality. But in Tagore's hands it becomes instead a recognition of the enduring gap between man and his god, just as death for the radical secularist is the epistemological confrontation of the nothingness between mortality and redemption. It is this enduring gap — rather than a specific mechanics of meter and verse — that Tagore imagines as rhythm, and it is in this gap that the play of literary language as also the play of living creation comes to be, together creating a dense relationship between the human form and its poetic scripting. The essay argues that Tagore offers a different imagining of the modern human condition — one that employs literary thinking to give us a radically secular human unchained from the transcendental process of world-history and from redemption as the conceptual telos of that sovereign process.

Toal, C.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2019293

This essay proposes an alternative account of the significance, for the development and interpretation of his work, of Henry James's engagement with French literature. Beginning with James's critique of the “cruelty” of the Goncourt brothers' novel Sœur Philomème , it argues, through a reading of The Turn of the Screw , that James's narrative technique and typical configuration of characters create a mechanism very different from the ethically sensitive portrayal of distinctive “perspectives” enshrined as the Jamesian contribution to a liberal Anglo-American aesthetics of the novel. The essay reviews the various critical efforts to reconcile James with his French near-contemporaries and suggests an outline of the evolution of his method and plots in the 1890s. An important figure in the dismantling and re-forging of Jamesian narrative “point of view” in this “middle period” — and especially in The Turn of the Screw — is the kind of female protagonist scrutinized by the Goncourts' novel. I argue that the structure of The Turn of the Screw — and the critical controversies that have beset its reception history — can be explained by linking it to the two failed texts that constituted James's bid for popularity ( Guy Domville and The Other House ) and to the nature of psychoanalytic allegory, as epitomized by E.T.A. Hoffmann's “Der Sandmann.” The essay offers a psychoanalytic interpretation rooted in the biographical and stylistic progression of the oeuvre to which the story belongs, one that accounts for its force and impact, and modifies key cultural and formal assumptions in the theory of fiction.

Schildgen, B. D.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2019302

The essay examines a specific case of “wood-stripping” that occurs in three related texts: one ancient, Statius's Thebaid , and two medieval romance versions of Statius's poem, Giovanni Boccaccio's La Teseida and Geoffrey Chaucer's The Knight's Tale . It argues that all three writers are gazers at nature (in the sense that they situate action in a natural environment that they make visible), by adopting an “affective fallacy” (traditionally called the “pathetic fallacy”) they also convey the “feelings” of the natural world (in this case, its sorrow, suffering, and mourning). In doing so, they become co-partners, even “co-sufferers” or mourners, in the feelings of natural phenomena. The elegy for the trees in Statius, Boccaccio, and Chaucer provides a pointed example of how the intertwining of thinking and feeling that poetry makes possible allows the authors to enter into an eco-critical space that reveals an affective environmental understanding even without the discursive tradition for writing about nature that modern environmentalism has made possible. In contrast to Ernst Robert Curtius's assumption that medieval literary notions of nature follow standard tropes, medieval literary texts in fact reveal a keen awareness and dedicated study of natural phenomenon. Comparing how the three authors discussed here describe the trees, forest, and defoliation in their elegies highlights their knowledge of the natural environment and their affective response to deforestation. Recognizing this eco-consciousness in medieval texts can enhance our understanding of the period while at the same time contributing to a working history of environmentalism.

Shvabrin, S.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2019311

Overlooked by students of John Keats's reception in Russia and misattributed by scholars researching the earliest stages of the writer's evolution, Vladimir Nabokov's Russian domestication of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (1921) poses before its interpreter a set of problems ranging from the mystery of its origin to issues in the ontology and ethics of literary translation as adaptation. The present study of one such work establishes that Nabokov's experiments in literary adaptation, their questionable proprietorship notwithstanding, afford a unique perspective not only on the subsequent development of his theory and practice of literary translation, but also on his original writing. The essay's analysis of “Akh, chto muchit tebia, goremyka” shows it to have been a seminal instance of Nabokov's fruitful and enduring engagement with a principle poetic text in the Anglo-American canon, as well as with the artistic imagination abiding therein. As a result of his encounter with Keats's ballad in the medium of literary adaptation, Nabokov was able to acquire, absorb, and creatively promulgate a productive stratagem that would become a hallmark of his own creative output, that of the unreliable narrator.

Dubow, J.;Steadman-Jones, R.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2019320

This essay takes a particular image in W.G. Sebald's novel Austerlitz and traces the hidden web of literary, theoretical, scientific, and philosophical allusion that informs it. At a crucial point in the narrative, when the protagonist is on the verge of entering the state archive in Prague and discovering his own origins, he has a dream which implicitly recalls the figure of Humboldt's parrot, a talking animal and the only creature to preserve the sounds of a now extinct language. If this is an image sourced in the literature of eighteenth-century science, it is also one that demands to be read against other key intertexts of the modern moment, including Darwin's Descent of Man , Flaubert's Un Coeur Simple , and the more recent voices of Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and Maurice Blanchot. Weaving these diverse materials together in a manner that echoes Sebald's own textual and aesthetic practice, we argue that Sebald's parrot crystalizes a central problematic of the novel: What is the relationship between the archive and testimony in the experience of the desubjectified subject? What is the status of linguistic signification in the aftermath of loss? In this the image of the parrot becomes both a highly condensed figure of Freudian dream-work and the quintessential monad, caught in that vacant space between the real and the relic, primary event and present trace, representation and that which cannot be spoken. While all of this coheres with Sebald's historical preoccupations as a post-Holocaust writer, it points specifically to those literary resources of modernity that Sebald implicitly brings to bear on the very question of history. Indeed, the aim of this article is to mine the unrevealed archive of Sebald's own literary imagination in order to capture the problem of the archive itself.