Empson and Mu Dan: Modernism as “Complex Word”Shen, Shuang
2018 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-4344046
This article discusses the uneven treatment of William Empson’s encounter with China. While Chinese accounts of Empson’s brief stay in China in the late 1930s present him as one of the progenitors of Chinese modernism, his second stay, during the founding of the People’s Republic, is rarely mentioned. Empson’s significant work The Structure of Complex Words, completed in Peking in the early 1950s, remains untranslated and under-studied. Empson’s encounter with China illuminates the material mediation of language, local and global politics, and cultural difference, which have conditioned both intercultural dialogues and the practice of literary modernism. Using this historical case as polemical leverage, the article emphasizes two aspects of modernism’s global trajectory: modernism as modernisms, that is, simultaneous and similar cultural practices that take place in multiple languages and different locations, intersecting and diverging; and modernism as a missed encounter, an imaginary dialogue either facilitated or foreclosed by global geopolitics. Together, they present a picture of global modernism not as one holistic entity, but as errant and reiterative articulations.
Scenarios of Power in Turgenev’s First Love: Russian Realism and the Allegory of the StateKliger, Ilya
2018 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-4344056
This essay attempts a reading of Ivan Turgenev’s First Love as a case study within a broader inquiry into the social imaginary of Russian realist fiction. One way to formulate the central question of the essay is to ask what happens when, on some deep structural level, an ostensibly realist text turns out to be oriented not to the problematics of civil society (contractarian) aggregation but rather, like tragic drama, to the coercive logics of the state? Put another way, what happens when a realist narrative, with all of its inherited civil-society paraphernalia (as an ostensible tale of competitive and desiring socialization), enters the force field of a state-oriented social imaginary and becomes warped within it? With these questions in mind, the essay takes up First Love, interpreting it as a political allegorization of an ostensibly straightforward coming-of-age story.
Writing as Philosophy: Deconstructing Plato in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s “In the Pupil”Spektor, Alex
2018 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-4344066
This essay investigates philosophic trends of Russian modernism through an analysis of recently discovered author Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s short story “In the Pupil,” which can be said to be a philosophic allegory. In order to understand its place in the history of Russian modernism, I read the story through the prism of three key allegories from Plato’s The Republic: the allegories of the sun, the line, and the cave. I argue that Krzhizhanovsky deconstructs the main postulates of Platonic philosophy by showing that the acquisition of knowledge and the act of writing inevitably lead to the loss of the subject’s ontologic wholeness. Krzhizhanovsky offers this insight as literature’s corrective to idealistic philosophy’s treatment of language and a foundation for a new, intersubjective ethics that takes the splintered subject as a given. This essay argues that reading the story as a paradigmatic text of (Russian) modernism is useful for understanding its philosophic complexities.
Limbotopia: The “New Present” and the Literary ImaginationGomel, Elana;Shemtov, Vered Karti
2018 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-4344076
This article analyzes a new form of historical representation that we term “limbotopia” (by analogy with utopia and dystopia). Limbotopia is a genre of the “broad present,” in which history seems to come to a standstill and characters inhabit a changeless—and often hopeless—fictional world. We argue that limbotopia is characterized by a chronotope of durational, rather than chronological, time. The narrative structure of limbotopia exhibits several consistent features: an episodic format, the absence of closure, a broken or shifting narrative voice, and an incoherent or inexplicable fictional world. Limbotopia not only reflects the loss of temporality in postmodernism but also responds to very specific historical and political configurations. We analyze the incidence of limbotopia in works by Israeli, American, British, Russian, and South Korean writers and film-makers.
Race, Tone, and Ha Jin’s “Documentary Manner”Xiang, Sunny
2018 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-4344086
This essay tracks the discourse of “Oriental writing” in Ha Jin’s fictional Korean War memoir War Trash and the autobiography of Wang Tsun-ming, an actual Korean War POW. “Oriental writing” designates a racialized ambiguity between a self-present subject and an automatized mechanism. This ambiguity, I argue, can have salutary effects. In attenuating the boundaries between subject, object, and device, “Oriental writing” renders inoperable the “politics of representation” through which race has been thought. I use the term tone to designate the sensory effect of the racialized indistinction between subject and mechanism, voice and noise. Tone, in my case studies, indexes failed acts of representation. Wang’s tone is excessively animated, insofar as a compensatory liveliness exceeds Wang’s own person. By contrast, the tone of War Trash is neutral. In approximating “Asian” through noise rather than essence, a neutral tone undercuts the management and representation of race in our post-Cold War present.