Comparative Literature

Allan, M.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2325086

Mahmood, S.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2325095

Based on fourth-century Christological debates and the travels of an Egyptian monk, the Arabic novel Azazeel (2008) was accused by the Coptic Orthodox Church of defaming Christianity and fomenting Christian-Muslim sectarian strife in Egypt. The conflict over the novel was quickly characterized as a standoff between religious proscription and the right to freedom of expression. This way of casting the debate failed to comprehend the complex stakes Azazeel mobilized, eliding substantive disagreements about religion, history, and literature. Through a careful reading of the novel, the response it elicited from the church, as well as the Christological controversy at the heart of the novel, this essay forces us to reconsider what it means to claim the autonomy of literature from history, to cast religion as a human invention, and to ponder the humanity of Christ.

Kimmel, S.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2325104

This essay argues that the effort to define and police the shifting boundaries of Christianity in early modern Spain produced a counter-intuitive peninsular logic of secularization. Hoping to stem the extension of ecclesiastical power over everyday cultural life, New Christians and religious reformers defended the authority of civic tribunals to regulate the social conditions of faith. This attempt to secularize the crime of heresy was not simply a call for the Crown to execute a coercive religious agenda. On the contrary, by turning late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century inquisitorial regimes of discipline and dissimulation to critical pastoral and political ends, New Christians such as the negotiator Francisco Núñez Muley and reformers such as the court historian Pedro de Valencia sought to transform both Christian orthodoxy and civic identity. This social and intellectual history troubles conventional scholarship on secularization, which tends to focus on the legacy of the Protestant Reformation and Northern European Enlightenment while either lamenting an apparent theological backwardness south of the Pyrenees or ignoring the peninsula altogether. It is not my goal to trace an alternative genealogy of late modern secularism to the various coercive discourses and practices associated with early modern inquisition. I argue rather that the candidness with which Spanish intellectuals justified the pastoral and disciplinary features of civic law can serve as a guide for untangling the complex relationship between secularism and religion in other times and places.

Masuzawa, T.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2325113

The Bible has been considered one of the Great Books of Western Literature, and “the Bible as Literature” is regularly found in the curriculum of English departments in American colleges and universities. An underlying assumption is that the Bible possesses great literary value and cultural assets, and therefore its general educational employment within public institutions, as opposed to its religious or liturgical use, causes no offense to anyone's freedom of conscience guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Confidence in this idea, however, set in only after a long series of litigation and legislation. This essay recounts a lawsuit that came before the Supreme Court of Maine in the mid-nineteenth century ( Donahoe v. Richards ) wherein the traditional practice of reading from the Bible in common schools was challenged and, perhaps for the first time, the idea of the Bible as literature was publicly articulated. At that time, the Bible — specifically, the King James Version (1611) favored by the majority Protestants, styled the “Common English Bible” — had been regularly used in the quotidian practice of piety, including in schools, as this practice was considered essential for the welfare of both the individual and the commonwealth. At the backdrop of the lawsuit was the emergence of the public school system and also a surge in the Catholic immigrant population, which began to challenge the de facto Protestant establishment of many American communities. The essay suggests that the hyperbolic estimation of the literary excellence of the King James Version, often voiced to this day, may be a reaction-formation, a symptom of the deeply troubling legacy of bitter quarrels yet unresolved.

Stein, J. A.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2325122

Borrowing a turn of phrase from Talal Asad, this essay asks: What might an aesthetic study of secularism look like? Examining four case studies between roughly 1880 and 1930 (with attention to the critical writings of Walt Whitman, T.W. Higginson, Matthew Arnold, Barrett Wendell, W.D. Howells, Charles Chesnutt, and Norman Foerster), this essay demonstrates how a methodological or theoretical focus on aesthetic formalism is a symptom of the secularization of knowledge in the nineteenth century. The variations in the use of “form” among this essay's case studies are ultimately less significant than the methodological persistence of formal (and later thematic) analysis across the cases, which will be shown to tie the study of American literature to an unexamined secularism that, consequently, it lacks the methods to investigate. The rise of American literary studies offers comparative literature a position from which to view some roads not taken and perhaps to pursue its commitments to internationalism apart from the claims to a “secularism” that has, we shall see, proved irremediably problematic for the study of American literature.

Schachter, A.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2325131

This article examines how Leah Goldberg's modernist novel Avedot , written between 1936 and 1939, but unpublished in her lifetime, theorizes the intersections of gender, Hebrew secularism, and Orientalism. Goldberg's novel dramatizes the crisis of secular European Hebrew through the perspective of a modern Hebrew poet and Orientalist scholar, Elhanan Yehuda Kron, who travels from Palestine to Berlin to pursue his research on the Islamic origins of Jewish mysticism. Through Kron 1 s experiences in Berlin in the 1930s, the novel calls attention to how the origin of modern secular Hebrew shares roots with an Orientalist Christian world view that is allied with Nazism. Goldberg's protagonist attempts to resolve this crisis by addressing a community of women readers whose exclusion from the world of traditional Jewish texts might enable them to envision and create a secular Hebrew culture.

Raz-Krakotzkin, A.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2325140

The main intention of this essay is to use Walter Benjamin's insights in his “On the Concept of History” as a critical tool for examining Zionist discourse. Specifically, the theses provide a vector for reading the perception of Zionism as reflected in the writings of Benjamin's close friend Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism and messianism. Scholem may be seen both as the object of the critical reading offered in this essay and its inspiration. On the one hand, Scholem was among those who participated in the construction of the Zionist metahistorical narrative, even if his contribution took a uniquely complex and sophisticated form. I read Benjamin's theses against Scholem's perspective, particularly his attempt to distinguish Zionism as a manifestation of “redemption,” the “utopian return,” and messianism. On the other hand, Scholem himself signals towards this critical stance. His writings from the 1920s, in which he advanced the idea of bi-nationalism in Palestine, suggest an alternative discourse that gives a concrete meaning to Benjamin's reflections written more than a decade later. An exilic perception of Benjamin can be actualized according to Scholem's early principles, for a process of remembrance oriented towards the Palestinian victims of redemption. In this context, the way to reveal the Jewish exilic consciousness is through the words of the victim of the “utopian return,” through the words of Mahmoud Darwish, the great Palestinian poet.