Comparative Literature

Orsini, Francesca;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3327481

This essay questions the geographical categories used to underpin current theoretical and methodological approaches to “world literature,” which end up making nine-tenths of the world, and of literature produced in the world, drop off the world map or appear “peripheral.” Focusing on the multilingual north Indian region of Awadh in the early modern period, it argues that an approach to literature and space that takes multilingualism within society and literary culture as a structuring and generative principle and holds both local and cosmopolitan perspectives in view is more productive for world literature than approaches based only on cosmopolitan perspectives of circulation and recognition. world literature multilingual literature north India

Mucignat, Rosa;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3327492

This article considers how the concept of national character changed in post-revolutionary Europe by examining how Italians are depicted in Madame de Staël's Corinne , Percy Bysshe Shelley's “Lines Written among the Euganean Hills,” and Giacomo Leopardi's “La ginestra.” I show how national typing based on immutable factors such as climate and physiology was reformulated in a way that foregrounded history and human agency. The old discourse of civic humanism, with its emphasis on virtues and good government, is invoked here both as explanation and remedy for Italy's decline. Staël's “immersive” version of Italian history, Shelley's indictment of moral degeneration, and Leopardi's theory of society all hark back to the values of citizenship, liberty, and solidarity of classical republicanism. By connecting representations of Italy to contemporary developments in the philosophy of history and national typing, this essay raises new questions about the Romantic engagement with the idea of Italy. Romanticism Italy Staël Leopardi PB Shelley

Forbes, Aileen;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3327503

In their disparate dramatizations of the legend of the sixteenth-century Cenci family, Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and avant-garde dramatist Antonin Artaud simulate the transmission of a trauma. With reference to trauma theorists Ruth Leys and Cathy Caruth, among others, this essay traces the structures of trauma across Shelley's and Artaud's Cenci plays, showing that, like a trauma, what resists representation in Shelley's nineteenth-century drama recurs embodied on Artaud's twentieth-century stage. In so doing, the essay illuminates less a straightforward shift than a complex interplay between diegesis and mimesis at the heart of the plays. Shelley and Artaud might then be seen to co-opt the trauma scenario as an epistemological paradigm whereby their theaters assume revolutionary potential. Shelley Artaud Cenci trauma romantic drama

Sandler, Matt;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3327542

This article tests Americanist claims about Edgar Allan Poe's racism against Latin American, Caribbean, and contemporary African-American literature written under his influence. I start with a discussion of Toni Morrison's agenda-setting reading of Poe in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). I show how Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), resists Morrison's interpretation by playing ironically on white anxiety and Black creativity. I then follow this mode along an international itinerary of authors working in styles and modes pioneered by Poe: Comte de Lautréamont, Ruben Darío, the Negritude poets, and the contemporary African American novelist Mat Johnson. I submit that these later writers exploit Poe's formal strategies for more explicitly anti-racist and anti-colonial aesthetics. Edgar Allan Poe Comte de Lautréamont race slavery symbolism

Dekel, Mikhal;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3327563

This essay argues that in emotionally and politically fraught terrains tragic literature may offer an embodied, affective critique of the existing political order that is more effective than theoretical-didactic critiques. As a form that makes room for conflict, violence, and desire, tragic literature has the capacity to engender a non-utopian, engaged political critique that is truer to experience and less vulnerable to disintegration or attack than most modes of polemic political critique. As a dialectic, morally flexible form, it is able to contain its own contradictions; and as a genre embroiled in emotion and trauma, it can speak to all sides wounded by conflict without moralizing. It is in the hero's direct encounter with and response to conflict and violence, what Raymond Williams calls “its experience, its comprehension, and its resolution,” that the essay locates tragedy's potential for serious political work. The essay takes Hebrew culture as its primary example. Tragedy Zionism Oedipus Antigone Ronit Matalon's Sarah Sarah Butler

Teskey, Gordon;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3327572

Ng, Su Fang;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3327612

Burwick, Frederick;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3327622

Ehlers, Sarah;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3327637

Chasar, Mike;

2015 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3327703