Literature as Rejuvenation: A Defense of Herder's Defense of PoetryIllbruck, H.;
2014 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-2764048
This essay reexamines Johann Gottfried Herder's theoretical import for the idea and practice of comparative literature. To that end, it contextualizes Herder's defense of poetry within the historical debate between Kant and Herder over the genesis, cast, and practical value of critical reason, and also emphasizes Herder's turn to poetry as a molding influence on Erich Auerbach's conception of philology as effective preservation and a form of synthetic mythography. To delineate and defend Herder's position, the essay undertakes a revisionist theoretical reading of Herder's neglected essay “Iduna, or the Apple of Rejuvenation,” which offers a persuasive counter-position to Kant's critical trajectory. In reinvigorating the idea of rejuvenation tied to the formative power of the imagination and poetic synthesis, Herder sets out to explicate the generative power of poetry as configuring creative inventions and relative differences in poetic as much as cognitive structure, as a way of substantiating and legitimating his—comparative—defense of original poetry. The essay concludes by suggesting how Herder's historical intervention may be inserted, theoretically, into still current questions regarding ideas of “world poetry.” Johann Gottfried Herder Immanuel Kant Erich Auerbach defense of poetry world poetry
Ceremonial Theater and Tragedy from French Classicism to German ClassicismTang, C.;
2014 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-2764058
This essay investigates tragic theater from French classicism to German classicism in relation to the ritualized ceremonies and spectacles of the early modern state, which I summarily refer to as ceremonial theater. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the relationship between tragedy and ceremonial theater went through four major phases: 1) sponsored by the state, tragedy was initially continuous with ceremonial theater; 2) finding a new source of the tragic in the implacable conflict between public sovereign power and insistent desires of the royal flesh, Racine created a tragic theater that contested ceremonial theater; 3) after Racine, ceremonial theater and tragedy moved in sharply diverging directions, with the former falling into a steady decline and the latter turning towards the sentiments and concerns of private persons; 4) in German classicism, especially in Schiller's classical dramas, ceremonial theater and tragedy were joined together again—by means of the appropriation of ceremonial theater by the tragic stage. Now the tragic stage established itself as an autonomous realm of the imagination, in which the moribund ceremonial theater came back to life. In the course of these centuries, the aesthetics of tragedy had changed, while the political world witnessed dramatic transformations. A study of European tragic theater in relation to political rituals during this eventful period, therefore, provides a new perspective on the interaction between aesthetics and politics. tragedy ceremonial early modern Europe French classicism German classicism
Astonishing Politics: Emerson, Levinas, and Thinking beyond VirilityMastroianni, D.;
2014 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-2764068
This essay brings together Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emmanuel Levinas, two thinkers who are almost never paired, to examine their shared interest in the political implications of astonishment. The two have in common a way of inviting readers, persistently but enigmatically, to understand the political significance and performative force of their philosophical writing. The essay attends to the resonance generated when each thinker's words become the circumstances for reading the other's. In the disarming experience of astonishment Levinas and Emerson seek alternatives to conceptions of politics that celebrate the “virile virtues” of fixture, resistance, and comprehension. The essay focuses on three points of resonance: figures of imperiled but resilient selfhood, meditations on the power of thinking to astonish, and the use of figures of the hand to rethink established political concepts. Centrally, both Emerson and Levinas cast virility as a firmness or “fixture” that desirable political labor would relax. Fixture does not account for a kind of power so mobile, flexible, or fluid that it cannot even be said to resist that over which it exerts power. Reading Emerson and Levinas side by side allows a fresh approach to vexing aspects of their work, including the tension between Emerson's political activism and philosophical thought, and the dearth of Levinas's reflections on the transitive force of his own writing. philosophy American literature gender power transcendentalism
Conceptions of Time and History in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Train StoriesStahl, N.;
2014 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-2764078
The train had a remarkable and meaningful role in the process of modernization and secularization within European Jewish society during the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, this central role is reflected in the literature of the period, in what I would like to call “the train genre.” This essay examines the role of the train in three works by prominent Jewish writers: S.Y. Abramovitsh's “Shem ve-Yefet ba-agala” (“Shem and Japheth on the Train”), Sholem Aleichem's Di ayznbangeshikhtes ( The Railroad Stories ), and Shmuel Yosef Agnon's “Bi-kronin shel rakevet” (“In the Railroad Car”). All three writers use the train to represent a common experience in pre-World War I Eastern Europe. However, Agnon, who published his story decades later, assumed that his audience would be unfamiliar with this experience and even with the language of his protagonists. This distance both in time and in language suggests that Agnon's story should be read as a retrospective look at the experience with which the earlier works deal. The essay traces the transformations of the train as a symbol of modernity and shows how Agnon uses a different mechanism to reconstruct the symbolic role of the train against the collective post-World War II memory that had come to associate it with the Holocaust. Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the “chronotope” provides a theoretical tool that captures the unique characteristics of the use of time and temporality in the Jewish train genre. The speeding train and the interior of the railcars symbolize the conflict between dynamic changes and timeless space. These stories reflect the ambivalence that Jews felt toward the rapid changes of modernity and their dilemma about whether to take part in this process or to remain outside of it. Moreover, the theme of the train allowed Jewish writers to counter old and new understandings of causality and historical processes. These changes were represented both in the narrative content and in the structure of these works. train stories chronotope Mendele Mocher Sforim Shmuel Yosef Agnon Sholem Aleichem
Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Drug War: The Critical Limits of NarconarrativesZavala, O.;
2014 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-2764088
In the last decade, violence attributed to Latin American drug cartels has become a common theme in a proliferation of fiction and non-fiction about the drug trade written both in Mexico and the U.S. This essay shows how the majority of Mexican narconarratives—in particular the works of writers such as Orfa Alarcón, Yuri Herrera, Élmer Mendoza, Heriberto Yépez, and Juan Pablo Villalobos—while conceived as critical literary interventions, are in fact marketable commodities reproducing hegemonic discourses that frame the drug trade as a phenomenon operating outside of the state. Mexican narconarratives reify a mythology of drug cartels and their kingpins: that the violence threatening the country is attributable only to narcos, who radically oppose civil society and its government. However, there is an emerging current of narconarratives that articulate an effective critique of the drug trade as a dimension located within state structures, historically determined by state power and subject to it. The novels analyzed include Contrabando ( Contraband ) by Mexican author Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda, 2666 by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, and The Power of the Dog and Down by the River by U.S. writers Don Winslow and Charles Bowden, respectively. Reconsidering the classical notion of mimesis, this essay contends that, despite their varying proximity to their common referent—the drug trade—and their differing practices of realism, most narco-narratives replicate official representations of drug cartels. It is through a critical approach to the drug trade, as it intersects the power of the state, that alternative narconarratives resist the mediation of hegemonic discourses that permeate the fields of journalism, academic research, and literature. Mexico narconarratives drug cartels violence mimesis