Comparative Literature

Gulddal, J.;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2890937

This article explores the link between the novel and the passport system as one of the defining legal institutions of modernity. The late eighteenth-century introduction of modern strategies for controlling mobility brought about a reconfiguration of political space which was now no longer freely travelable, but crisscrossed by internal and international borders. This process is crucial in terms of the history of the novel because it undid the nexus of space, mobility, and narrative characteristic of the early-modern novel and forced the genre to invent plots that better aligned with the reality of modern movement control. Taking a first step towards a literary history of movement control, this comparative study identifies three successive modalities of the novel/passport interface via readings of exemplary literary works: Schnabel's Insel Felsenburg (1731–43), Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96) as compared to Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), and Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme (1839). Passports and movement control history of the novel J.G. Schnabel J.W. von Goethe Stendhal

Barca, L. A.;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2890947

This essay explores how the poets Emily Dickinson (American, 1830–1886), Giovanni Pascoli (Italian, 1855–1912), and Rainer Maria Rilke (Bohemian-Austrian, 1875–1926) each use celestial imagery, such as the sun and stars, to represent the modern mystery ushered in by scientific epistemologies and the waning of religious belief. In mapping the poets' respective strategies for speaking of the “eclipse” of God, the essay analyzes the rhetorical choices each poet makes in evoking the transcendent while highlighting its unknowability. As one moves into the twentieth-century high modernism of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus and Duino Elegies , the possibility of a transcendence compatible with secular modernity becomes increasingly evident. Engaging a vocabulary of religious images whose authority has been attenuated but which have not been emptied of significance, the poetry reflects a modern mythos that locates the sacred in the here-and-now. Emily Dickinson Rainer Maria Rilke Giovanni Pascoli science and religion poetic modernism and mystical language

Apostol, R.;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2890957

Both the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer and the Greek poet Giorgos Seferis attempted to solve the problem of classical reception by connecting the modern reader with the poetry of ancient Greece. Read according to Gadamer, Seferis's poetry of the 1930s articulates and enacts the classical world's final gasp, as its supposedly timeless significance and power is used one last time in order to inaugurate its relegation to the category of the insignificant, the arbitrary, the personal, and merely local. This abdication of the Classics' claim to universality under the aegis of their own authority could only be managed without paradox by a Greek poet, in whose work the transition from Classical to “merely Greek” could occur seamlessly and without contradiction. In turn, the poetry of Seferis reveals that Gadamer's hermeneutic enterprise is in essence a late attempt to justify the modernist project in the postmodern period. Seferis Gadamer Classical reception

Lee, S. S.;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2890967

In June 1932, Langston Hughes and twenty-one other African Americans traveled to Moscow to make a movie. Set in the contemporary U.S. South, Black and White was to have exposed Jim Crow to the world, but soon after Hughes and his companions arrived the project was cancelled — due, officially, to technical difficulties and script defects. This essay revolves around a puzzle: Hughes's much-cited account of these defects (from his 1956 autobiography) is almost a complete distortion. I provide the first in-depth discussion of the original Russian-language script to argue that Black and White would have been a fascinating film, advancing a cross-racial International committed both to left revolutionary politics and modernist experimentation. I then explain Hughes's dubious account by arguing that it enabled him to distance himself from the Soviet-oriented left on his own terms, preserving the USSR as a beacon of hope. Langston Hughes Mezhrabpomfil'm Soviet avant-garde cultural authenticity Cold War culture

Ramirez, D.;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2890977

In this article, I argue that two novels by writers from Hispaniola rescript the long-term idealization of heterosexual coupling in both colonial and nationalist narratives from the Caribbean and Latin America. Mère-Solitude (1983) by Haitian-Canadian Émile Ollivier and El tiempo del olvido (1996) by Dominican-American Marisela Rizik expose the sexual violence that women and other persecuted subjects have suffered historically, and which has engendered the idealized mixed-race nation in nationalist narratives. Using several shared motifs, these two novels question the reproductive optimism central to the post-independence works that imagined the nation as a large family with a powerful patriarch and ideal mixed-race children. The novels' spotlight on sexual violence and its results challenges the symbolic overlap between women's bodies and the land. Dominican Republic Haiti sexual violence genealogy nationalist discourses

Blanco, J.;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2890987

Fajardo, S. J.;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2890997

Kliger, I.;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2891007

Ty, E.;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-2891017