Comparative Literature

Braga-Pinto, C.;

2014 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2682173

Given the growing concern with urban crime and the fate of the black man in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888, it is not surprising that the figure of Othello in its various versions, appropriations, and adaptations would become emblematic. In this essay I read the Brazilian novel Bom-Crioulo , written by Adolfo Caminha in 1895, in light of Cesare Lombroso's criminal anthropology. I argue that to read this novel — which deals with crime, race, sexual perversion, and jealousy — in the context of fin-de-siècle criminology and what I call “Othello's pathologies,” rather than to celebrate its explicit and supposedly benevolent (or ambivalent) approach to homosexuality, is not just to be faithful to the literary work and its historical context. More importantly, I contend that the novel may help us examine how stereotypes are reproduced, as well as the assumptions regarding the immutability of race and sexuality.

de Looze, L.;

2014 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2682182

Medieval people knew as well as we do that no two people could look exactly alike. But the question of look-alikes was nevertheless a fascinating one because it opened up a potential gap between external manifestation and deeper identity. What did it mean for the ontology of the self if one person could be substituted for another with nobody being the wiser? This article examines two medieval reflections on the possibility of an absolute resemblance that enables one character to be substituted for another. The first is the case of the “False Guenevere” in the Lancelot section of the enormous thirteenth-century Vulgate Cycle of the Arthurian romances, and the second is from Spain: El Conde Lucanor by the great fourteenth-century writer Don Juan Manuel. The two instances contrast nicely. In the first, Queen Guenevere's look-alike half-sister arrives at Arthur's court with the false claim that she is the true Guenevere and that the sitting queen has usurped her place. Indeed, she triumphs temporarily until Lancelot restores the proper order through trial by combat. In the second, an angel counterfeits a king's physiognomy (after the king commits blasphemy) and dresses in his clothes, leaving him only a pauper's vestments. In the Arthurian tale, the problem posed is how to know the true inner self when two identical-looking women both claim to be the “true” queen — a question that is complicated by the fact that the “true” Guenevere has been “false” for many years due to her adulterous affair with Lancelot. Conversely, Juan Manuel poses the question of identity as one of context: when the king is deprived of the trappings of his kingship, no one recognizes him. Both texts point up the problems of signification and identity that haunted medieval thinking. What is the relationship between one's outer appearance and inner nature? What is the relationship between a sign and what it signifies?

Spektor, A.;

2014 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2682191

The essay offers a comparative study of “narrative ethics” in the prose of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Witold Gombrowicz. Analyzing the relationship between the texts' poetics and moral philosophy, the essay investigates how narrative dynamics of fiction shape the ethical parameters for the reader's engagement with the text. The argument aligns the differences in each author's narrative ethics with the differences between modernist and postmodernist modes of addressing the loss of ontological certainty as outlined by Brian McHale in Postmodernist Fiction . Thus, this comparison strives to trace the evolution of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature — from the ontologic instability of modernist prose to the ontologic plurality of postmodernist prose — with the focus on how this shift affects the formation of the subjectivity of the reader. The author proposes that Freud's conceptualization of melancholy and mourning as two processes describing the subject's dealing with loss can be a productive theoretical framework for understanding how modernist and postmodernist fiction in general (and that of Dostoevsky and Gombrowicz in particular) deals with the loss of ontological certainty. The essay argues that this psychoanalytic conceptual framework — elaborated further by an analysis of political and philosophical takes on it by Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva —allows us to see the shift between modernist and postmodernist fiction in intersubjective terms, thus situating it within the ethical discursive sphere.

Alvergue, J. F.;

2014 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2682200

This article explores the art and poetics of Chilean born Cecilia Vicuña in the contemporary context of indigenismo, while simultaneously questioning the capacity of ethnopoetics to fully engage the political, cultural, and social reaches of transnational aesthetics in the twentieth century. Using César Paternosto's study of Incan stone work and architecture, I locate Vicuña's use of the spiral in her 1966 landart installation and poetic performance, Con-cón , in relation to indigenismo's stance within and against the global politics that redefine the late twentieth century during the rise of neoliberalism and the culture clash between an already unstable Latin American middle class and North American consumerism. I locate Vicuña's critique of consumerism, complacency, and the subordination of environmental concerns by comparing her use of the spiral to that of Robert Smithson in Spiral Jetty (1972), to D'Arcy Thompson's writing on the mathematics of biological and zoological examples of spirals and sea shells (1917), and to Vicuña's more recent poetic experiments in text, form, and philology in Instan (2002). The construction of alternative modes of “knowing” and expressing knowledge via the spiral explores ways of reading experimental poetry like Vicuña's and opens experimental poetry as a site for popular readings of democratic language. The experimental politics of Vicuña's Chile, expressed by the spiral at Con-cón, refers to a poetic practice of democratic individualism that begins at the locale, and extends in a non-linear curvature. Vicuña's poetry and art constitute an epistemology that recurs during the performance of locality and redefines the collective expression of historical time from the events of language that realize the present.

Kernan, R. J.;

2014 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2682209

Literary critics in the U.S. have generally considered the artistic merit of Langston Hughes's so-called radical poetic production of the 1930s to be far below the standard the poet set in the previous decade. Its detractors (as well as its precious few champions) tend to distinguish it from Hughes's 1920s poetry, associating the latter with a black nationalist literary aesthetic linked to an embrace of Pan-Africanism and the former with a proletarian poetic tied to a decidedly Marxist analysis of race and class-conflict. This article offers a counter-narrative to these reigning critical discourses by focusing on an instance where Hughes mined his experience as a translator to offer an ethical, albeit pessimistic, vision of black internationalism infused with a Marxist outlook and conveyed through poetic innovations of hybrid ethno-linguistic origin. Specifically, I argue that when Langston Hughes translated Vladimir Mayakovsky's “Blek end uait” (“Black and White”) and “Sifilis” (“Syphilis”) during his Moscow residence in the winter of 1932–33, a resulting epiphany motivated Hughes to strive to reconcile his Pan-Africanist views with his newly aroused vision of class struggle. The essay's first half demonstrates that Hughes's engagement with Mayakovsky left a trail of historical and literary evidence that reveals how Mayakovsky's poetics had a profound impact on Hughes's own political outlook and poetic palette. Nowhere is this influence more clear than in Hughes's poem “Cubes” (1934), a reading of which forms the second part of this essay. “Cubes” exhibits poetic innovations provoked by his engagement with Mayakovskian poetics — particularly with Mayakovsky's notion that revolutionary poetry succeeded best when it both invoked and transgressed the rules governing “antiquarian” poetry in a dialectical process that he labeled as “coup.” The article examines how Hughes's “Cubes” creatively echoes, reworks, and critiques Mayakovsky's portrayal of international race relations to ethically address the paradoxes, potentials, and problematic limitations of Pan-Africanist and Soviet internationalist collectivities while simultaneously staging two poetic coups that play with and against avant-garde and agitprop poetic conventions to draw into focus the uneasy relationship between empire, aesthetics, and racial politics. The literary mastery manifest in this endeavor displays the often-overlooked aesthetic sophistication of Hughes radical poetry. “Cubes” offers a nuanced vision of black internationalism and demonstrates the role that translation played in Hughes's overall creative process.

Barnes, A.;

2014 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2682229

Garcia, H.;

2014 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2682238

Brenner, N.;

2014 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2682247