Comparative Literature

Ziolkowski, Theodore;

2017 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3865373

This essay analyzes two variations on the theme of dismemberment. In Egyptian myth, when Osiris is killed and dismembered by his brother, Isis reassembles his body and consecrates the places where she finds the pieces as sites of veneration. This version, clearly anticipating the veneration of saintly relics in Christianity, was secularized in the tale of Lemminkäinen in the Finnlandic epic Kalevala . In the biblical tale of the Levite of Ephraim, in contrast, the dismembered parts of the protagonist's violated spouse are sent to the tribes of Israel to unite them against a common enemy. The tale was taken up in the eighteenth century by Voltaire, Rousseau, and Bodmer as an occasion to reflect on the differences between a state of nature and civilization and on the morality of vengeance. In Kleist's Hermannsschlacht it was secularized into a purely political exhortation. Secularization of the Bible Egyptian myth Voltaire Rousseau Kleist

Arner, Timothy D.;

2017 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3865383

The life and work of the Roman poet Lucan functions as an important intertext for Chaucer's Legend of Good Women . It demonstrates that the vita Lucani and the Bellum Civile were widely available in medieval Europe and that Chaucer likely used both sources in both the Prologue to the Legend and the “Legend of Lucrece.” Chaucer uses Lucan as a model for critiquing Richard II and illustrating the problem of tyrannical monarchy. The article demonstrates the presence of republican poetics and thought in fourteenth-century England. Chaucer Lucan republicanism intertextuality

Burt, E. S.;

2017 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3865393

Around the time he was conceiving his thesis on allegory in the Baroque mourning-play, Walter Benjamin equated perception with reading. To align phenomenal experience with reading texts is unusual, and gives rise to questions. Benjamin's teacher, Georg Simmel, had identified a crisis in perception brought on by the development of the metropolis. What is the effect of the crisis in terms of reading and writing for Benjamin? What happens to the responsibility of art? More specifically, which genres and modes are apt 1) to help the city-dweller adapt to perceptual changes and 2) to clear the way for further invention? The usual answer to the last question has been cinema and the allegorical image. This essay proposes that, while for Benjamin cinema and images aid in adapting to existing circumstances, the disappearing poetic art and the allegorical writing modeled on it provide more chances for invention. sensation allegory symbol The Origin of the German Tragic Drama Georg Simmel

Huh, Jang Wook;

2017 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3865403

After Langston Hughes was shadowed by Japanese police in the port city of Chongjin, Korea, on his trip from the Soviet Union to Japan and China in 1933, he drew a parallel between the racialization of Koreans under Japanese colonial rule and that of American Negroes under Jim Crow rule. This essay examines Hughes's writings on Korea in conjunction with Korean translations of Hughes. Hughes employs the poetics of what I call “overlapping dispossessions” to analogize Korean colonial subjugation with African American racial oppression. In what I call a form of “cross-racial ventriloquism,” Korean translators subtly insert subversive slogans into Hughes's radical poem “Our Land” in order to encourage anticolonial sentiment against Japanese censorship. By focusing on both Hughes's disaggregate representations of Asians and Korean circulations of black culture, this essay reconsiders the discourse of Afro-Orientalism that represents Asia as an undifferentiated, static entity and thus marginalizes Asian cultural production. Langston Hughes Korea the Harlem Renaissance translation anticolonialism

Ebileeni, Maurice;

2017 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3865413

This article focuses on a rare leitmotif in literary productions by Palestinians. Both Susan Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin and Sayed Kashua's Second Person Singular present Arab characters who, under unusual circumstances, impersonate or literally acquire the identity of the Israeli-Jewish other. In the fictional creations of Ismael/David and Amir/Yonatan, Abulhawa and Kashua, respectively, construe characters whose existence blurs the borderline between various versions of today's Palestinian Arab and mainstream projections of its Israeli-Jewish counterpart. These characters represent, as the article demonstrates, the authors' attempts to work out the implications of the idea that — as a result of the historical events of Israeli Independence and the consequent Palestinian Nakba — the collision of two national yearnings has created a liminal space in which both Israeli and Palestinian narratives gradually infiltrate one another, developing an inextricable and dynamic bond between the Palestinian identity and its counterpart. Sayed Kashua Susan Abulhawa Ghassan Kanafani Israeli other Palestinian literature

Bongie, Chris;

2017 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-3865423

Not so long ago, Negritude was an object of scepticism in many postcolonial quarters for its supposed implication in a variety of no-longer respectable patterns of thought: its purportedly essentialist approach to cultural identity seemed dated in relation to the more open-ended poetics of creolization, and its politics was seen as either too committed to Manichean patterns of anti-colonial thinking or too accommodating in its willingness to envision federalist as opposed to nationalist solutions to the problem of decolonization. Over the past decade that situation has changed dramatically, both in relation to Negritude politics (see the ground-breaking work of Gary Wilder) and in relation to its poetics. This review essay examines the recent (re)turn to Negritude by looking at Carrie Noland's 2015 Voices of Negritude in Modernist Print: Aesthetic Subjectivity, Diaspora, and the Lyric Regime , engaging with its revisionist, Adorno-based take on “the Negritude poem” (specifically the poetry of Aimé Césaire and Léon-Gontran Damas) and contextualizing her approach in relation to the recent “aesthetic turn” in post colonial studies. Aimé Césaire Léon-Gontran Damas Caribbean modernism postcolonial poetics francophone studies