Comparative Literature

Cordingley, A.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2376606

This article elucidates the dialectic between Pythagorean-Platonic and Democritean ideas latent in Beckett's final work of long prose, Comment c'est/How It Is (1961/1964), and measures the importance of Beckett's perception of philosophy gained through his study of Wilhelm Windelband's primer, A History of Philosophy . Unearthing Beckett's reaction to the nineteenth-century Kantian's grand narrative of the progress of reason, this article maps the poetics of appropriation that marks Beckett's quintessentially late modernist aesthetics. In no way can Beckett's poetics edify the Tradition (à la Pound or Eliot), but neither can it simply deny, subvert, or pastiche it. To ask whether or not Beckett escapes into nihilism, to wonder if he finds a philosophically satisfactory solution to his rejection of a faith in reason, or to look for his synthesis of the Ancient dialectic he entertains is in each case to miss the point. Beckett's use of allusive discourse is demonstrated to be a vector through which he explores the mechanisms of listening, memory, and creativity. This article therefore offers the precise example of Beckett's use of Ancient philosophy to illustrate how his aesthetics defines a limit point of modernism.

Salton-Cox, G.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2376615

This essay examines the English Communist novelist, Edward Upward (1903–2009) in a hitherto unexplored comparative frame. Until recently, Upward's authorship was largely dismissed as formally uninspired and dogmatically “Stalinist,” the work, as Samuel Hynes put it, of “a gifted man who traded his gift for the security of a cause.” Recuperative readings of the last few years have instead stressed Upward as an eccentric modernist rather than a doctrinaire adherent of socialist realism. Drawing extensively on unpublished archival sources, I argue that these recent recuperative accounts, while correct in debunking the myth of Upward's slavishness to Moscow, erase the crucial comparative frame through which his work must be understood. Reading Upward's writing of the 1930s alongside Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and socialist realists such as Fyodor Gladkov and Alexander Fadeev, I show how Upward's work was centrally shaped by Soviet aesthetics, a reception which led him to an innovative conception of literary commitment, surprisingly resistant to the powerful critiques later offered by Theodor Adorno and Raymond Williams. This conception of commitment emerges through a process of literary praxis in which aesthetic-ideological formations are rigorously critiqued and tested against three mutually constitutive concerns: Upward's personal transformation as a Marxist, the specific demands of the revolutionary movement in England, and the work of narrative itself. Rather than exhibiting the mechanistic understanding of cultural production for which English thirties leftists are typically condemned, Upward develops a mode of commitment that sees praxis as inherent to the cultural field. Reading Upward's work in terms of cultural praxis thus adumbrates new lines of inquiry in the cultural and intellectual history of English Marxism, as his leftist self-fashioning involves sophisticated modes of theoretical engagement more usually associated with later formations such as the second-generation New Left.

Szeghi, T. M.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2376624

This article argues that conceptions of indigeneity and mestizaje conveyed in Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead are influenced (differentially) by the very colonialist assumptions the novels otherwise aim to dismantle. I compare how indigeneity and mestizaje are defined in Letters and Almanac (with particular attention to their oppositional features), addressing relationships between these definitions, popular colonialist discourse, and anti-colonial articulations of identity that have developed in American Indian and Chicana/o communities. Significantly (and tragically), Letters ' Chicana protagonist, Teresa, envisions her recovery of a cohesive cultural identity as a return to a distant indigenous past (via traveling from the U.S. to Mexico) — which, I demonstrate, places Letters in conversation with Mexican indigenismo , the myth of the Vanishing Indian, and the myth of Mexico as an Infernal Paradise. Almanac 's Menardo, by contrast, grows up with a strong sense of Mexican indigenous ideologies but cuts his family ties and conceals his cultural identity after discovering that identification as Indian will disqualify him for entrance into Mexican high society. Through Menardo, introduced as “the mestizo,” Almanac critiques Mexican mestizaje as a cultural construct, and I consider whether this critique functions as the sort of exclusionary gesture Castillo has ascribed to some North American Indians when it comes to Chicana/o claims to indigeneity. At the same time, I consider how Teresa's inherited presuppositions about indigeneity perpetuate discourses that have functioned to bar indigenous peoples from the full rights of citizenship and self-determination. That Menardo eschews what Teresa strives to recover can best be understood, I argue, in the context of the different national circumstances in which they grow up, the consequences of Chicana/o diaspora, and traditional versus colonially influenced American Indian standards for tribal identification.

Lensen, J.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2376633

This essay examines contemporary rewritings of World War II memory narratives. Drawing on the examples of Flughunde (1995) by German author Marcel Beyer and Marcel (1999) by Flemish author Erwin Mortier, I analyze the ways in which both authors address the complex processes of the transfer of guilt and perpetratorship from one generation to the next, processes that have marked public discourses in both national collectives in the aftermath of the war. I show how both authors challenge such habitual transfer, instead insisting on critical distance, empathic witnessing, and narrative integration. In this manner, they enable a fresh and productive approach to the past that moves beyond guilty silence, assignation of blame, or even calls for amnesty — a stance that notably sets them apart from previous writings on the war. Both Beyer and Mortier participate in what has come to be known as “third generation” literature, which, as I argue, opens up remarkable transnational perspectives for the discussion of Europe's war past.

Abel, J. E.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2376642

Tropes that connect human corpses and literary corpora are as old, perhaps, as writing itself, yet in recent years the personification of texts has come under scrutiny. Despite such critical tendencies either to disregard connections between people and texts as manifestations of pathetic fallacies or to overvalue the biological and historical identity of writers over the linguistic content of their texts, written arguments against real oppression and suppression remain powerful precisely when writers use tropes to bestow language, writing, or texts with basic characteristics of living organisms. Drawing on Nakano Shigeharu's passing use of the trope “the language of slaves” to describe the practice of using blank type and deletion marks under imperial Japanese censorship, this article argues that recent assessments of the ethics of personifying texts and language are far from universal.

Naiman, E.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2376651

Faber, S.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2376660

Hart, J.;

2013 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2376669