Comparative Literature

Dwyer, A.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2143143

This essay investigates the linguistic play and geopolitical scenarios in the work of Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (author of Venus in Furs and the man who gave his name to “masochism”) and his younger contemporary, the German-Jewish writer Karl Emil Franzos. Both men grew up in the Eastern borderlands of the Habsburg Empire, in the Crownland of Galicia, which was inhabited by Ukrainians, Jews, and Poles. A third figure with a distinctly Habsburg imperial biography, Sigmund Freud, provides both techniques for reading and serves as a subject of analysis in his own right. Drawing on a psychoanalytic toolbox, this essay develops a provincial reading of psychosexual and geopolitical fantasies in these writers' work within the context of Austrian culture after Austria's defeat to Prussia (1866) and subsequent German unification (1871). The analysis devotes special attention to the linguistic origins of Sacher-Masoch's favored fetish object, the fur-lined kazabaika . Sacher-Masoch's particular brand of fetishism, this essay argues, is a form of resistance to the procrustean bed of national identity in favor of an aestheticized and idealized vision of imperial multiplicity. This article aspires to remind twenty-first-century critics that Freudian psychoanalysis was born at the border and emerged from the interstices of multiple languages, religions, and nationalities. In the Habsburg imperial setting where psychoanalytic thinking first took hold, the psychoanalytic subject and the syntax of the fantasy were always emphatically multilingual and cross-cultural.

Thomson, S.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2143152

When we first encounter the narrator of Austerlitz , he is wandering around the unfamiliar town of Antwerp with, he tells us, “unsicheren Schritten” (1; 9). As well as reflecting the unfamiliarity of the locale, these “uncertain steps” evince a proud modesty characteristic of the classic Sebaldian narrator, a wanderer who discreetly relays the stories of the people and places he is privileged to encounter. Although Sebald does not use the phrase, steps of this sort, unpurposed yet unerring, are made with what is commonly known in German as somnambule Sicherheit : the legendary surefootedness of the sleepwalker. The convergence of sleepwalking and certainty in a single phrase poses an interesting challenge to one of the central tenets of the English-language canonization of Sebald, for his writing has been most highly valued for its ability to move the reader through apparent certainties towards a salutary uncertainty. But somnambule Sicherheit also presents the possibility that the current may be reversed, that narrative may move under cover of uncertainty towards certainty. That Sebald criticism has not been more troubled by this possibility is in no small part due to the fact that it tends to deploy the notion of sleepwalking with a minimum of reflection on its theoretical ramifications. To evoke some of the complexities of this matter, I first offer a brief cultural history of sleepwalking, as well as a brief account of the topic of uncertainty in Sebald criticism. Most of my argument, however, involves an extended comparative analysis of sleepwalking in Sebald's Austerlitz and Hermann Broch's 1933 trilogy The Sleepwalkers . Although these writers have not previously been the object of any sustained comparison, sleepwalking in Broch's novels illuminates much that is left implicit on the topic in Sebald's fiction and points toward some difficult questions regarding the role of aesthetics and agency in Sebald's work.

O'Meara, L.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2143163

This article is a comparative study of Theodor Adorno and Roland Barthes. These rarely compared thinkers share a profound affinity: their lifelong work on ideology critique proceeds from similar bases, and they each accord preeminence to aesthetic reflection. Their shared insistence on the importance of openly subjective critical response is founded on a post-Nietzschean understanding of Kant and is concerned with the condition of the individual in modernity. Adorno's and Barthes's respective investments in the aesthetic realm have often been viewed unfavorably. Challenging such views, this article shows that aesthetic reflection, which stages the difficult balance between the particular and the general, is at the heart of Barthes's and Adorno's conceptions of the role of criticism in doing justice to the individual. Beginning by comparing Adorno's and Barthes's divergent views on Brecht as exemplar of committed literature, the article then examines the convergence between the two writers' attitudes to the aesthetic. Essayism is a central preoccupation, as a discussion of both writers' preferred forms shows: Adorno's “The Essay as Form” and Barthes's “Inaugural Lecture” reveal strikingly similar conceptions of the role of subjective aesthetic response in criticism. Finally, the article examines Barthes's Camera Lucida , arguing that this text on photography confirms Adorno's insistence that in individual literary works we can find embodied the hope of “attaining universality through unrestrained individuation.”

Barzilai, M.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2143172

Following the 1988 translation of Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida into Hebrew, Ronit Matalon, an Israeli writer of Egyptian extraction, began interpolating Barthes into her writing, in part through unacknowledged quotations. This essay explores how Camera Lucida “traveled,” as a piece of both visual theory and personal reflection, to the Israel of the first Intifada and its aftermath. Drawing on Matalon's use of Barthes, the essay seeks to highlight Camera Lucida 's theoretical tensions and to show how these tensions were productive for an experimental mode of critical writing. In her short fiction, Matalon uses the elevated Hebrew of Barthes in translation as a surreal device of linguistic and narrative estrangement from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and from the predictable script of an Israeli journalist's visit to a mourning family in Gaza. Parodying Barthes's discovery of the famous “Winter Garden” image of his deceased mother, Matalon questions Camera Lucida 's relevance and significance for situations of mourning in which inequality prevails and the deceased subject does not function as the Barthesian unique and irreplaceable other. Reading Matalon's novel The One Facing Us (1995), I contend that here, in the fictionalized framework of neocolonial Cameroon, the author addresses the racial implications of Barthes's idea of photographic “contingency,” anticipating American criticism of his work by more than a decade. Matalon treats the light captured in the photograph itself as a means of disrupting photography's contingency and introducing indeterminacy into the black/white order of Africa, as well as the racial orders of Israel and Palestine.

Barnaby, A.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2143181

This essay explores the mutual implication of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Freudian psychoanalysis as works of mourning. More particularly, it takes up how both the play and a series of Freud's writings — from early letters to Fliess to the Interpretation of Dreams to “Mourning and Melancholia” to Beyond the Pleasure Principle — themselves explore mourning as the almost impossible burden of a son trying to shed the authority of the dead but still potent father. In that sense, mourning has less to do with grief as traditionally conceived than with ambivalence, even hostility, toward the dead. It is an emotive experience that, in repressed form, manifests first as identification with the dead. The essay thus documents the complex “working-through” by which, in response to their fathers' deaths, two “tardy sons” finally arrive at a place of self-identification, a site from which they refuse the burden of living out — of repeating — the existence of the one who came before. Seen from this vantage, Shakespeare (through his tragic hero) and Freud both offer existential meditations on the need to originate our own lives even as they concede that, at the place of the origin, our lives are at once our own and not our own.

Gillespie, G.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2143192

Evangelista, S.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2143201

Minden, M.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2143210

Yamaguchi, L.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2143219

Segall, K. W.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2143228