Comparative Literature

Lienau, Annette Damayanti

2018 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-6817336

This essay introduces the American Comparative Literature Association Forum “Vernacular Comparisons beyond the Europhone.” Characterizing the Europhone “vernacular” as a protean term of diverse application, the essay highlights the paradoxes associated with its use in Global Southern contexts. Drawing attention to the asymmetries of conceptual exchange that accompany vernacular comparisons across former colonial contexts, this essay raises the following questions: How might we explore and move beyond the insufficiencies of the Europhone term “vernacular” to frame non-Europhone literatures and literary histories? If we displace Europhone terms of analysis as conceptual categories, what alternatives emerge in their stead from non-European languages, lineages, and source materials? In pursuing lateral comparisons within the Global South, how can the risks of anachronism, distortion, and incommensurability be managed across disparate contexts? This introduction offers an overview of the contributing essays and concludes with remarks on the advantages and drawbacks of employing the term “vernacular” in pursuing South-South comparisons.

Tageldin, Shaden M.

2018 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-6817346

Does the Latinate vernacular capture non-Europhone relationships of speech to writing? Surveying non-equivalences between the vernacular and its East/South translations, I focus on the Arabic ʿāmmiyya. Vernacular hails from verna, the slave born on his master’s estate; ʿāmmiyya, from al-ʿāmma, the common people. Long-ninth-century Arab-Islamic thought defined al-ʿāmma as a “middle” class, or its language and that of al-khāṣṣa (the elite) as shades of one Arabic, converging at an ideal midpoint. I trace echoes in late-nineteenth-century Algerian, Syro-Lebanese, and Egyptian theory, which derived ʿāmmiyya (dialect) from fuṣḥā (standard) or redefined fuṣḥā as a generalist language that ideally addresses a middle audience. I suggest that a long (if suppressed) continuity in Arabic between common and elite language, if not between dialect and standard, opens horizons of relation between speech and writing different from those the vernacular ushered into Europhone contexts. Reframing language as medium, such horizons limn a polycentric literary comparatism.

Patel, Geeta

2018 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-6817363

Vernacularization as a concept has gained circulation in our time within the ambit of South Asia: scholars use it to name what they designate as local—whether sexuality, language, architecture, religion, capital, or aesthetic practices. When claims are made for “vernacularization” as a process of opening spaces for “the local,” vernacular languages, ontologies, and epistemologies are paradoxically oriented towards English/the West. What happens if the word, term, concept, process “vernacular” loses this purchase? What might we notice if we refused to rehabilitate vernacularization in this fashion and mobilized instead an accounting of the brutalist colonial histories where it was deployed for colonial transformation? The Urdu modernist poet Miraji (1912–1949), eschewing the term “vernacular,” mined English and European languages, and other Asian and Indian literary lineages, to fill Urdu’s possible legacies through translation. Miraji established possible futures for Urdu through bygone chronicles, stories, and lyrical possibilities that were not subservient to the fluctuations of value that vernacularization carried with it.

Lahiri, Madhumita

2018 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-6817374

Whereas most modern South Asian vernacular literatures emerged in concert with nationalism, Tagore moved Bengali literature to its contemporary colloquial form even as he became ever more critical of Indian nationalism. This essay follows Tagore’s anti-nationalist and pan-Asianist predilections, considering his transformations of Bengali towards an increasingly vernacular literature in concert with those of Chinese literature. The essay focuses on Tagore’s 1901 story “Nastanirh,” known in translation as “The Broken Nest,” and contextualizes it within Tagore’s Bengali writings on Bengali literature. These writings are framed with respect to Tagore’s Anglophone ruminations on language while in China, as well as his interactions with Chinese linguistic reformers such as Hu Shi. Tagore’s 1917 dichotomy between the language of books (পুঁথির ভাষা) and that of speech (মুখের ভাষা) maps intriguingly onto early twentieth-century Chinese vernacularization debates and offers a transnational method for the study of vernacularization that decenters European models.

Jaussen, Paul

2018 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-6817386

Critical assessments of the literary catalogue often stress its desire for order, highlighting the device’s encyclopedic tendencies of inclusion, exclusion, totality, and transparency. This article offers an alternative approach, arguing that the catalogue of persons can function as a document of loss, whose formal structure produces spectral, ghostly, and even traumatic effects. Analyzing catalogues from Homer’s Iliad, Charles Dickens’s American Notes for General Circulation, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, this essay demonstrates that the formal capacity for spectrality is an underappreciated affordance of the catalogue, through which it confronts actual historical violence. A comparative reading of Homer, Dickens, and Bolaño demonstrates that the catalogue, far from establishing mastery and transparency, is a literary device shot through with virtual effects, emergent echoes, and palpable absences. These affordances challenge the catalogue’s claims for totality while also making it a powerful mechanism for measuring history as loss.

Morse, Heidi

2018 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-6817398

Since the 1970s, the topic of feminist adaptations of Greco-Roman mythology has been dominated by narratives of revision and retelling from the perspective of female characters, including—via Hélène Cixous—Medusa as a creative muse for women’s writing. Pairing the modernist US poet Louise Bogan’s 1921 lyric “Medusa” with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, this essay asks what modes of women’s engagement with myth have been left out or undertheorized in the wake of feminist critics’ investment in narratives of reclaimed voice. Instead of being a prosopopoeia in which the imagined woman speaks, Bogan’s Medusa is a metonymic figure—the ancient Gorgoneion mask that preceded the woman in myth—whose silent rhetorical force dislodges a literary history of petrified gender relations first consolidated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. By rethinking Ovidian mythological figures in Bogan’s “Medusa” and related twentieth-century poems by US women writers, this essay identifies alternative modes of feminist revisionist mythmaking.

Rose, Sven-Erik

2018 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-6817409

When Piotr Rawicz’s (1919–82) semi-autobiographical novel Le Sang du ciel (Blood from the Sky) was published in 1961, Rawicz expressly rejected documentary status for his novel and eschewed moral indignation in his self-consciously philosophical and literary treatment of the Nazi genocide. Rawicz rejects moral and historical frameworks because they do not engage the Holocaust on the level he finds most salient: as a terrifying experience of ontological truths about the nature of God, subjectivity, and Being writ large. I situate Rawicz’s novel alongside his pronouncements and theorizations about the Holocaust as an extreme yet paradigmatic experience of ontological truth. Following allusions in the novel to concepts and tropes in the thought of Martin Heidegger, I unearth a provocative dialogue with Heidegger’s postwar anti-humanism and infamous refusal to confront the significance of the Holocaust, arguing that Rawicz brings Heidegger’s anti-humanist ontology and the Nazi genocide into an irreducible intimacy that Heidegger seemed determined to avoid or deny.

Kurmann, Alexandra;Do, Tess

2018 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-6817419

In this article we argue that a cohort of French, Canadian, and Australian authors of Vietnamese descent are adapting postmemory narratives to fit the purposes of the 1.5 generation. Linda Lê, Kim Thúy, and Nam Le each displace the Vietnam War to reimagine in its stead, for the first time in Vietnamese diasporic writing, the trauma of the refugee boat journey. Breaking the silence of parents wont to forget, in short fiction they narrativize shared accounts of flight by sea that have until this time remained the domain of autobiography and memoir. Through a process of spectral recuperation, these children of survivors employ the figure of the child to tell the event of their own refugee becoming. Former child refugees recently come of writerly age across a multilingual global diaspora are thus reappropriating an in-between generation’s collective postmemory to form what we call the sub-genre of “the boat narrative.”

Geroulanos, Stefanos

2018 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-6817429