Comparative Literature

de Zepetnek, S. T.;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2861979

“Systems Theories and the Study of Literature and Culture” introduces the ACLA Forum on systemic and empirical approaches for the study of literature and culture. While both micro- and macro-systemic approaches have been prominent in the study of literature and culture in European scholarship since at least the 1980s, these approaches remain under-utilized in humanities scholarship in the U.S. This essay provides definitions or tenets of systemic and empirical frameworks for the study of literature and culture and aims to show how these approaches highlight the social relevance of the study of literature. systemic approaches to literature and culture empirical approaches to literature and culture macro-systems micro-systems

Wilkens, M.;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2861911

“Digital Humanities and Its Application in the Study of Literature and Culture” examines the relationship between comparative literary and cultural studies, systems theory and model building, and recent work in digital humanities. Areas of specific application include the topology of German literature, modernist poetics in China, Japan, and the United States, and the geography of nineteenth-century fiction, as well as a range of associated computational methods. Wilkens argues that computational work represents a unique opportunity for comparatists interested in large-scale cultural analysis and that digital humanities would benefit from increased participation by comparatists. digital humanities large-scale cultural analysis cultural studies systems theory

Carroll, J. C.;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2861969

This essay argues that the sciences most relevant to literary study form an integrated complex summarized by the term “biocultural theory.” Foundational theories accepted currently in literary scholarship are incompatible with a biocultural understanding of the evolved character of the human mind. Psychological and social theories that form part of the amalgam designated “poststructuralism” identify important areas of human concern but can now be replaced with empirically grounded concepts that are more complete, more correct, more nuanced. The most important elements in biocultural theory are the theory of human life history and gene-culture coevolution. Biocultural theorists argue that basic human motives are channeled into cultural norms that are articulated in imaginative form through myths, legends, rituals, images, songs, and stories. Biocultural theory offers an opportunity to develop literary research in company with our developing scientific understanding of human motives, emotions, identity, social interactions, and forms of cognition. biocultural theory gene-culture coevolution

Estok, S. C.;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2861991

This article argues that the systemic focus of empirical studies of literature offers an approach consonant with the goals and methods of ecocriticism, which foregrounds interconnectedness and varieties of systemic analyses. In generating empirically viable comments about how representations (or non-representations) of nature function systemically, contextual analyses of ecophobia as an often obsolete adaptive survival strategy prove more useful than more myopic analyses that fail to see biophilia as part of a spectrum condition. The article highlights the shortcomings of Edward O. Wilson's pronouncements on literature, which hinder the very mediation between the sciences and the humanities that he promotes. If we are to take seriously the activist goals of ecocriticism, then we need to be earnest about the idea that, as opposing points on a continuum, ecophobia and biophilia can be measured and contextualized through comparative cultural analyses. empirical studies systems studies ecocriticism ecophobia biophilia

Filimowicz, M.;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2862001

“Sysemics and Semiotic Informatics” offers a close reading of Derrida's use of Norbert Weiner's thought. Cybernetics is seen as a particular moment of resistance for deconstruction, as it is the encounter between a discourse of general systems, which includes even sign systems, versus a semiotic philosophy that would potentially circumscribe all discourses including discourse on systems. The cybernetic categories of matter/energy, information, and organization in forms of relative openness and closure are used to offer a counter-reading of Derrida's concepts of writing (gramme, arche-writing, the trace). At stake is the notion of “whole organization” that informs all systems thinking from Ludwig von Bertalanffy forward, a schema of contemporary techno-scientific thinking typically evaded by postmodern discourses, which offer instead tropes of “schizo-fracture” or “liquid fluidity” as a consequence of the anti-structuralist animus towards heuristics of meaning. sysemics semiotic informatics cybernetics Derrida Norbert Weiner

Coker, W.;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2862011

This essay aims to contribute to a growing body of criticism devoted to the paradox of John Keats's peculiarly political aestheticism. Keats places a seemingly disinterested aestheticism squarely within the matrix of history, at a time when history itself was coming into its own as a philosophical category. Hyperion 's figurations share the theoretical horizon of Keats's contemporaries in post-Kantian philosophy and betray a concern with one of the formative impulses behind Hegel's system-building: the interplay of myth and rationality. Reading Hyperion in comparison with a line of dialectical thinkers from Schiller to Adorno, I locate Keats's engagement with history precisely where he appears to suspend it: in those sculptural figurations of stasis in which the poem depicts, and to no small degree fetishizes, the archaic. An ironic myth of myth's demise, Hyperion exposes the fetishism latent in post-Enlightenment mythography. Keats Hegel Hyperion System-Program Post-Enlightenment Mythography

White, C.;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2862021

This article reads George Sand's Le Compagnon du Tour de France (1840) alongside Karl Marx's “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” It considers how these contemporaries bring to bear on their accounts of labor, estrangement, and the structures of property an attention to the fate of the senses under capitalism. Both elaborate a critique of political economy—Sand's voiced by her worker-hero—that demonstrates how the individual's sensuous life is circumscribed by the pressures of material subsistence. The article examines how this attention to the senses inflects their visions of a communist future in which the very character of labor is transformed. In showing how Sand and Marx place the development and emancipation of sensuous life at the heart of their humanist projects, this discussion attends to the place of Sand's fiction in a wider history of ideas and argues for the relevance of Marx's early writing to sentimental fiction. George Sand Le Compagnon du Tour de France Karl Marx “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” sentimental fiction

Wichelns, K.;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2862033

Marguerite Duras's 1962 theatrical adaptation of Henry James's short story offers a feminist alternative to Eve Sedgwick's famous interpretation. The precise elements that for Duras reveal James's interest in “feminine” forms of expression also are significant for queer theoretical readers, after Sedgwick, who emphasize James's style rather than his biography. However, in none of those recent discussions do notions of temporal or stylistic queerness in James's work resonate with the ideas about gendered time and language that are central to Duras's approach, and to twentieth-century French feminism more generally. Duras's adaptation, grounded in heteronormative assumptions, suffers from a parallel blind spot; James Lord, her collaborator in the project, suggests that she undermined the queer elements in both James's story and his own first draft. This article uses the unexamined resonances between Duras's and Sedgwick's readings to offer a possible counter-narrative to ongoing scholarly divisions among contemporary feminisms and queer theories. feminist queer Marguerite Duras Henry James

Desai, M.;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2862043

In 1965, the critic Manohar Namdeo Wankhade completed a Ph.D. in American literature in the U.S. and returned to Maharashtra, where he published several influential essays for the nascent Marathi Dalit literary movement. This essay examines the role that American literature played in Wankhade's criticism, from early writings on Whitman's “spiritual democracy” to essays on the Black Arts Movement and Ralph Ellison, which were repurposed by a generation of Marathi Dalit writers. These writings imagined new terms of Dalit identity outside of the discourse of the Indian nation and the restrictive language of the caste system. By constructing a racialized, “culturally dualistic” America, Wankhade's Marathi essays sought in African American narratives a way of describing the historical trauma, alienated labor, and “double consciousness” of Black life that could resonate with Dalit subjectivity and the ongoing injustices of caste prejudice and violence. Dalit Marathi Manohar Namdeo Wankhade Walt Whitman Black Arts Movement

Infante, I.;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2862053

This article examines how El hacedor (de Borges), Remake (2011) by the Spanish writer Agustín Fernández Mallo, a remake of Jorge Luis Borges's El hacedor (1960), constitutes an extremely relevant manifestation of contemporary poetics and transnational literature. I analyze the formal and conceptual relation between Fernández Mallo's version and Borges's original work and key theoretical implications connected to the removal of El hacedor (de Borges), Remake from publishing markets world-wide soon after its publication. By focusing on the concepts of intertextuality, intermediality, and transnational cultural circulation, I examine from a comparative perspective how Fernández Mallo's remake closely relates to Jeffrey Nealon's notion of “post-postmodernism”—as the contemporary cultural logic of neoliberal global capitalism—and to the transnational process of cultural exchange that Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma have defined as “cultures of circulation.” Agustín Fernández Mallo Jorge Luis Borges intertextuality intermediality cultural circulation