Comparative Literature

Emmerich, Karen;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3631557

Standard texts for many ancient works were established long ago, but The Epic of Gilgamesh is an exception to that rule. Only in the mid-nineteenth century did stories of this ancient king resurface, thanks to pioneering Assyriologists whose project of recovery and decipherment was wrapped up in Orientalist thinking and politics of the time. Modern editions tend to present texts based on twelve tablets found in the ruins of the library of a seventh-century B.C.E. Assyrian king. Yet this “standard” text incorporates fragments from other places and times, and itself existed in multiple versions, in countless fragments still being discovered throughout the Near East. This article explores how modern editions negotiate the borders of what comprises this work. Even more basically, it proposes that the very process of deciphering a forgotten language in an unknown script involves assigning phonetic and semantic equivalents, and explores the role bilingual dictionaries play in structuring the terms of equivalence between ancient and modern languages and cultures alike. Epic of Gilgamesh fragments translation equivalence lexicography

Shutters, Lynn;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3631567

While there is a long history of viewing Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris (Famous Women) as a misogynist text in response to which Christine de Pizan's Livre de la Cité des Dames (Book of the City of Ladies) constitutes a proto-feminist critique, this essay compares these works for their similarities rather than their differences. Boccaccio and Christine are both profoundly concerned with marital affection, an emotion in a state of flux in late-medieval Europe. Through narrative, both authors attempt to theorize how this emotion should be experienced and performed by the virtuous wife. In De mulieribus and Cité , Boccaccio and Christine struggle to develop narratives of marital affection distinct from courtly love traditions, even as they repeatedly draw on courtly love to establish emotional authenticity. As a result, narrative cruxes and inconsistencies in De mulieribus and Cité point to emotional cruxes and inconsistencies, to aspects of marital affection that were difficult and troubling to late medieval societies. Giovanni Boccaccio Christine de Pizan marital affection courtly love history of emotion

Berman, Anna A.;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3631577

This essay explores the intellectual ties between Lev Tolstoy and the Nobel Prize winning pathologist Ilya Mechnikov. In Tolstoy's essays, letters, and diary entries he was notoriously critical of contemporary scientific study and its lack of a moral component. Beginning in the late 1880s he engaged in a virtually unknown polemic with Mechnikov about science and religion that culminated in a face-to-face meeting the year before Tolstoy's death. Despite Tolstoy's expressed disdain for Mechnikov's theories, in his final novel, Resurrection (1899), Tolstoy used Mechnikov's phagocytic theory as a metaphoric basis for the novel's moral philosophy. Moving beyond his earlier family ideal, he made phagocytes the model for a broader and more impersonal ideal of human unity. Thus, in Resurrection Tolstoy found a way to give moral meaning to science, just as he had called for in his journalistic writing. Tolstoy Ilya Mechnikov history of science Resurrection science and literature

Subialka, Michael;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3631587

By examining key sources Walter Benjamin uses in his essay “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,”1935–39), I recover essential depictions of early cinema that Benjamin obscures. The representation of diva culture in Luigi Pirandello's 1916 film novel Si gira … ( Shoot! ) and the dynamics of the “test performance” in his play Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore ( Six Characters in Search of an Author , 1921, 1925) enable us to revise our sense of how film interacts with older media such as literature and theater. I contend that Pirandello's plays and his vision of stage acting provide an alternative model of subversive performance that challenges Benjamin's assumptions about both the medium-specificity of film's effects and the nature of the new celebrity culture. This alternative further complicates our understanding of changes in aesthetic paradigms introduced by modernism. Italian modernism early cinema theater and film radical theater media aesthetics

de Oliveira, Marco Alexandre;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3631597

By exploring the ubiquity of Bashō's frog haiku in Brazil as the naturalization of a poetics of nature and the ideographic sign, this essay traces distinct affinities between the arts of Zen and concrete poetry, in both theory and practice. It begins by observing the spiritual significance of Zen for the haiku, especially present in the emblematic poetry and figure of Bashō, and proceeds by considering the various interrelations between haiku poetics and concrete poetry, particularly evident in transcreations of Bashō's poem by the Noigandres group of concrete poets. It concludes by positing a direct correspondence between concrete poetry and Zen, aptly represented in the work of Paulo Leminski. Along the way, the essay explores questions regarding the inscription of reality in the natural sign, the transcription (or translation) of experience in a language of words, and the poetic communication of an incommunicable beyond within. Bashō concrete poetry haiku transcreation Zen

Mucignat, Rosa;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3631609

Briceño, Ximena;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3631619

Stieber, Chelsea;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3631629

Quinn, Mary B.;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3631639