Comparative Literature

Piechocki, Katharina N.;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3462611

Renaissance poet and physician Girolamo Fracastoro (1478–1553) coined the neologism “syphilis” in the first poem that fictionalizes Columbus's voyage to the New World. Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus (1530) captures, as this article shows, the bonds among poetic, philological, and medical discoveries as an unprecedented inquiry into the emerging discipline of immunology. A unique hinge between poetics and medicine as well as between ancient and modern languages, the poem takes the shape of a powerful philological intervention that is here called immunopoetics . An immunopoetic look at Syphilis not only underscores Fracastoro's crucial role in the history of immunitas , a juridical term that acquired, from the Renaissance on, an increasingly medical connotation and meaning. It also offers a new etymology for the word syphilis, which has hitherto remained obscure. Fracastoro Esposito syphilis immunology philology

Kuzma, Joseph D.;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3462621

In this article I explore the status of intimate relationality in Maurice Blanchot's fictional writings and critical essays of the 1940s and 1950s. Focusing primarily on his 1951 text When the Time Comes , I show that intimacy in Blanchot's writings is an impersonal covenant established at the extreme limit of separation. Rather than thinking of intimacy and distance in a traditional manner, as fundamentally at odds with one another, Blanchot insists that the most profound intimacy occurs only when separation has been experienced, and affirmed, in its most radical form. Blanchot intimacy the imaginary Proust Abraham

Hansen, Morten;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3462631

This essay argues that we should read Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place as part of a larger recurrence and metamorphosis of the epic on a global scale, a new genre that grapples with the economic and spatial conditions of our contemporary age by combining formal innovations with classical tropes in its attempt to circumscribe a world of ever-increasing complexity. Only in recognizing A Small Place as a text that aspires to envision a culture in its totality—that is, as an epic—can we make sense of its pioneering strategies of representation. By showing the many hidden relations between the centers and the peripheral small places of our time, Kincaid maps a new globalized world that we are only beginning to come to terms with. Jamaica Kincaid A Small Place Globalization Epic Irony

Rowland, Antony;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3462641

János Pilinszky's ruminations about trauma and memory struck a particular chord with Ted Hughes. At the same time as the Yorkshire poet was working on translations of Pilinszky's poetry with János Csokits in the early 1970s, he was writing two of his own collections that contain similar stylistics: Cave Birds , which he started in 1974, and Gaudete , which he worked on intensively in 1975. This synchronicity resulted in two collections that often read as if they were translations. I analyze Pilinszky poems such as “Unfinished Past” and “You Have Had to Suffer Wind and Cold” and extracts from Hughes's Cave Birds and Gaudete sequences in order to demonstrate the dialectic of influence between the two writers in the early 1970s, when, critics such as Neil Roberts argue, Hughes produced his best work. Ted Hughes János Pilinszky Holocaust poetry influence Eastern European poetry

Hutton, Margaret-Anne;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3462651

Mohsin Hamid has acknowledged the influence of Camus's The Fall (1956) in his use of implied dialogue in The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). Although the works have other elements in common, I focus primarily on this and other formal features, including degrees of self-reflexivity and metanarrative, the representation of the past, and the use of pronouns. This leads to an analysis of the reception of The Fall and the manner in which critics have turned to paratextual material in their historico-political interpretations, a form of “reading into” which I suggest is prompted by the monologic, “terroristic” nature of the narrative. Hamid's Reluctant Fundamentalist , by contrast, has been interpreted predominantly in terms of post-9/11 geopolitical issues articulated within the diegesis: a “reading in” rather than “into.” To redress the critical balance, the article closes with a reading of Hamid's text that decenters such interpretations, focusing instead on the representation of books, global markets, and diegetic novelists, a “return of the author” in another guise. implied dialogue 9/11 reception terroristic narrative metanarrative global publishing industry

Naiman, Eric;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3462661

This article explores the role of surveillance in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pnin both within its contemporary political context and as a response to two earlier examples of American campus fiction: Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution and Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe . In particular, Pnin resonates not only with the text of McCarthy's novel but also with McCarthy's practice of appropriating the lives of others in her fiction. In important respects, McCarthy and Nabokov take their cue from Dostoevsky's The Possessed , but while McCarthy depoliticizes Dostoevsky's novel by turning it into dark comedy, Pnin transforms the world of Dostoevsky's novels from a forum of ideas into an arena for the struggles of metafiction. At a time when Joseph McCarthy was concerned with the infiltration of American institutions by communist agents, Russian literature, and in particular Dostoevsky, played a crucial part in the birth of the American campus novel. Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe campus novel Randall Jarrell predatory narration

Hamilton, John T.;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3462671

Scrivener, Michael;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3462681

Mostow, Joshua S.;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3462691

Bozovic, Marijeta;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3462701