Comparative Literature

Arnott, Luke;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3698457

Noting the resurgence of popular and academic interest in epics across disparate media, this essay proposes a theory of the epic genre that transcends particular media and cultures. It seeks to reconcile discussions of the epic in Aristotle, G.W.F. Hegel, Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, Erich Auerbach, and Northrop Frye, arguing that traditional definitions of epic narrative are instead subsets of a greater generic structure. The epic is, following Gregory Nagy and Franco Moretti, among others, a literary “super-genre” that encompasses as many other kinds of narrative as possible. The essay explains how epic narrative, disembedded from earlier oral poetry, is then situated in new cultural contexts. Using the Roman epic as a paradigm, the essay also outlines a fourfold framework within which the interrelationship of the epic's symbolic content can be assessed. It concludes by suggesting some of the implications this theory has for new media epics in postmodernity. Aeneid epic genre theory novel postmodernism

Fernández, José María Pérez;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3698467

This essay focuses on two early English Hispanists, James Mabbe (1571/2–1642?) and Thomas Percy (1729–1811), who exemplify different stages in the pre-history of Comparative and World Literature. It explores their appropriation of La Celestina and Don Quijote as case studies for the use of certain tropes to legitimize the traffic of political and cultural capital involved in the creation of domestic and transnational literary canons. These tropes include conquest and war, finance and trade, community, and language as currency. The networks throughout which their texts circulated, their different formats and means of production, all exemplify the mechanisms for the establishment of an International Republic of Letters. This led in turn to the gradual emergence of a World Canon created under the auspices of Enlightened Universalism, but also driven to a considerable extent by the self-interested policies of cultural imperialism. James Mabbe translation and trade translation and empire Anglo-Hispanic relations English Cervantism

Rettová, Alena;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3698477

A central discussion in African Philosophy concerns the “African concept of time,” famously theorized by John S. Mbiti. Mbiti makes a distinction between a circular and a linear concept of time, associating the former with Africa and the latter with the West. Critical of such essentialist binaries, this article develops a nuanced understanding of the concepts of time and history expressed in two categories of novels in three African languages: Ujamaa novels in Swahili (Tanzania) and Chimurenga/Umvukela novels in Shona and Ndebele (Zimbabwe). While Ujamaa novels often operate on a circular concept of time, the Zimbabwean novels are based on a view of time as linear progress. The article argues that these concepts of time are determined by the genre conventions of the novel and the tale and that the adoption and hybridization of these genres has been decisively impacted by the state ideologies in Tanzania and Zimbabwe. African concept of time Chimurenga Ujamaa war novel Zimbabwean literature

Grumberg, Karen;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3698487

This essay argues that the gothicism of Lea Goldberg's play ba'alat ha-armon ( The Lady of the Castle , 1956) undergirds its key concern: the role time plays in the encounter between art and reality, poetry and ideology. I compare key signifiers of gothic spatiality and temporality in Goldberg's play and Edgar Allan Poe's “Masque of the Red Death” (1842) to expose a shared conceptualization of the relationship between art and the real: the aesthetic sanctuary, designed to exclude time and other agents of the real, is nevertheless subject to and even dependent on its trespass. In light of the ideological quandaries that shaped Goldberg, I argue that the paradigm of insecure sanctuaries and competing temporalities underlies her revision of both gothic and Zionist notions of victimization. Goldberg's play thus reflects her ambivalence regarding the development of Hebrew national culture while also participating in a broader ethical dialogue about victimhood and oppression. Lea Goldberg Edgar Allan Poe Hebrew gothic temporality sanctuary victimhood

Larisch, Sharon;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3698497

In traditional crime literature, the cordoned-off crime scene functions as a spatialized representation, fixing the now-absent crime in preparation for a subsequent interpretative process. This article questions such spatial stasis as well as the pretension of the crime scene to define and contain criminal traces, arguing that Roberto Bolaño's and Teresa Margolles's works point, rather, to the potentiality of criminal space to project itself onto other locations. Their diffuse and globalized crime scenes have structural similarities with what Giorgio Agamben terms generalized spaces of exception, where (im)potentiality and actuality merge, where everything, however unthinkable, can be realized. This article focuses on several of Margolles's crime-scene installations and two of Bolaño's works: the essay “Los personajes fatales” and “La parte de Amalfitano” from 2666 . Roberto Bolaño Teresa Margolles potentiality of the crime scene state of exception Ciudad Juárez

Stimilli, Davide;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3698507

Emden, Christian J.;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3698517

Whalan, Mark;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3698527

Rosinberg, Erwin;

2016 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3698537