Comparative Literature

Zerba, Michelle;Russo, Adelaide;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3137198

Zerba, Michelle;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3137207

This essay reads Homer's Odyssey alongside several poems by the Greek-Alexandrian writer C.P. Cavafy who, although widely removed from the epic in time, shares a common geographical imaginary located in the Mediterranean and explores questions of cultural identity, memory, and gender in ways that resonate with the Odyssey 's own preoccupations. The conceptual framework used to bring these poets into dialogue draws from ancient skepticism as a posture or way of being in the world that shapes philosophical and literary works bound up in what the Pyrrhonists called “the searching way.” Odyssey Cavafy skepticism eros memory

Pireddu, Nicoletta;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3137216

Within the context of the divisive intellectual debate on the cultural legacy of ancient Greece in the development of Europeanness, this essay focuses on three contemporary writers—Magris, Kundera, and Schmitt—who engage with a seminal European humanistic text, Homer's Odyssey , to challenge the cohesiveness of the idea of Europe. The authors' responses to the treatment of exile, return, homeland, and identity in Ulysses' voyage problematize not only the boundary between belonging and not belonging to Europe but also the distinction between center and periphery within the European space. Approaching the European question from borderline areas, Magris, Kundera, and Schmitt elaborate a politics of home transcending fanatic closure and absolute drifting. Their odysseys enact what I call critical nóstoi , ironic homecomings that undermine Husserl's “spiritual telos of European man” but place a wager, nonetheless, on a European cultural and political project founded upon the value of the temporary as both a promoter of mobility and pluralism and a custodian of limits. literary constructions of Europeanness European cultural history exile and migration literature myth rewriting European identity

Lionnet, Françoise;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3137225

J.-M.G. Le Clézio and Amitav Ghosh are prolific award-winning writers who train their reader's eye on transversal and lateral exchanges in the Indian Ocean. This essay presents an approach to the study of their novels as littérature mondialisante rather than littérature-monde , that is, as world-forming literature rather than world literature. Borrowing from Jean-Luc Nancy's philosophical discussion in The Creation of the World or Globalization , I propose a notion of world literature as a critical practice attentive to the mobilities within the texts. Theoretical considerations about postcolonial world literature are coupled with anthropologist Engseng Ho's distinction between the colonial and the imperial. I argue that the respective aesthetic priorities of these authors, and their fictional use of the histories of slavery and indenture in Mauritius, are best understood by means of the notion of interactive universalisms, which I borrow (and modify) from Seyla Benhabib. world-forming interactive universalisms indenture creolization coolitude

Saussy, Haun;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3137234

Predictions of an age of “secondary orality,” brought on by the diffusion of electronic media, are characteristic of the 1960's version of technological globalization, but draw on earlier accounts of orality as the primordial human communications medium. In these accounts, writing, as the technology of technologies, is imagined as a finite episode in human history and a superficial differentiation, whereas orality would reveal both a universal human endowment and a means of passage between the cultural and physical faces of our species identity. These examples bespeak a common imagination of the “return” as a figure of modernity's self-overcoming. orality-literacy ethnography conservatism Third Republic France Homer's Odyssey

Dimock, Wai Chee;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3137243

Beginning with Margaret Atwood's novella The Penelopiad and its staging in regional and experimental theaters in Canada, the U.K., and around the world, this essay traces a long history of network mediation for the Odyssey , beginning with the performative decisions made by itinerant rhapsodes, who variously selected, arranged, and circulated the Homeric epics in ancient Greece, and extending well into the twenty-first century, in the self-conscious invocations of the Odyssey by filmmakers such as the Coen Brothers and Richard Linklater. Crowdsourcing, the unruly and never-ending input from masses of people, is the morphological ground of the epic, an art form energized by its downward percolations. Penelope, that infinitely patient and longsuffering wife, becomes a variety of things as a result, much changed since Homer's times. In the hands of Atwood, she shares the stage with her twelve maids. epic novel theater film network mediation

Russo, Adelaide;Raffoul, François;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3137252