Comparative Literature

Wurth, Kiene Brillenburg;Wurth, Kiene Brillenburg

2018 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-6991688

In the introduction to this special issue I investigate the feasibility of a material turn in comparative literature. I approach this turn in the sense of the Greek kronos: as a circular, not linear, movement. I propose that this material turn has materialized in the practice and criticism of artists’ books; the study of comparative textual media; research in avant-garde poetry; and a line of criticism incorporating memory studies and book as well as paper history. Through an intermedial analysis of Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” I show that the material turn in comparative literature emerges out of—rather than against—what is perceived to be its oppositional figure: poststructuralist thought and the linguistic turn. This insight urges us to reconsider the material turn not as a new development in the history of the humanities, but as a set of ongoing concerns, insights, and methods across time.

Hofmeyr, Isabel;Wurth, Kiene Brillenburg

2018 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-6991700

In the British Empire, much printed matter originated from outside the colony and was funneled through port cities, where customs checked the material to see that it was not pirated, obscene, or seditious. Customs and Excise hence became the section of the colonial state responsible for copyright. However, their task was not straightforward since officials faced a tangle of colonial, imperial, and international legislation. Unable to work out which law applied where, customs officials elaborated their own practices, which they generated from their daily routines. Any understanding of copyright hence requires a focus on the dockside politics of customs and how notions of copyright emerged from these practices. Taking southern Africa as a case study broadly representative of white settler colonies in the British Empire, the article explores the workings of customs and its implications for new interpretations of copyright.

Kaiser, Birgit Mara;Wurth, Kiene Brillenburg

2018 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-6991711

Focusing on Hélène Cixous’s OR les lettres de mon père (1997), the article considers how a prominent work of the “linguistic turn” already works with the entanglement of matter and meaning. Cixous foregrounds the materiality of language, showing it is indispensable to signification. The materially inscribed letters “or” (for example, in or, hors, Georges, gorge, Oran, mort, mord, orage, sort, oreille, corps, encore) germinate multiple narrative lines that revolve around a box of letters from the narrator’s dead father. Cixous’s work explores this entwinement of language-as-materiality with materiality-as-signification in exceptional ways, which problematizes the idea of a material turn coming “after” the so-called linguistic turn of poststructuralism. The text’s polyphonic physique resists conventional oppositions of materiality and signification and unfolds a space where they are co-productive of each other. Writing in this sense—feminine writing—sidesteps the subject/object split and explores subjectivity as uniquely textured formations of continuous meaning-mattering.

Zuern, John David;Wurth, Kiene Brillenburg

2018 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-6991722

Tapping the critical resources of the disciplines of comparative literature and electronic literature, this essay conducts two cross-media comparative studies to show that a supple and dynamic concept of literary “materiality” emerges when we view the specific material characteristics of texts as inseparable from their linguistic, historical, cultural, and political attributes. The first study examines the politics of typography in the work of two Indigenous poets, Wayne Kaumualii Westlake and Jason Edward Lewis; the second analyzes the gains and losses of inter-linguistic and inter-media translation in Ingrid Ankerson’s digitally animated adaptation of a poem by the nineteenth-century Japanese artist Ōtagaki Rengetsu. The essay develops the idea of textual “integrity” as a means of grounding comparative analyses in the feedback loops between material and conceptual components of literary artifacts.

Pressman, Jessica;Wurth, Kiene Brillenburg

2018 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-6991733

Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s Between Page and Screen (Siglio Press, 2012) is an augmented-reality book of poetry: a codex filled with Quick Response codes that, when activated by a web-camera connected to the Internet, project the appearance of text between the book’s pages and the reader’s computer screen. The work’s title suggests its formal aesthetic and also the type of reading practice it promotes: a comparative textual media approach. This essay uses Between Page and Screen as a case study for considering what new possibilities and orientations are opened up by the conjunction of comparative literature and comparative textual media and why we need such approaches now.

van Maas, Sander;Wurth, Kiene Brillenburg

2018 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-6991744

This essay investigates what the word “book” in the concept of the audiobook has come to refer to, and how contemporary material book cultures suggest ways to reperceive audiobook experience. The essay uses audiobooks by David Foster Wallace and Jacques Derrida, which appear to maintain complex yet normative relations to their printed editions, to show how the margins of the audiobook are brought into focus by raising the question of aurality. What does the audiobook suggest in terms of its relation to technologies of listening, hearing, and overhearing? Suggesting that the audiobook’s insistence on the book is matched by its adherence to experiences of phantasmatic aural centeredness, the essay turns to ways in which the book’s materiality might inspire a reaffirmation of the interaural. Case studies include book alterations by Doug Beube and an electronic composition by Yannis Kyriakides, which suggest ways to reperceive audiobookness as a form of sonic tabularity.

Baetens, Jan;Wurth, Kiene Brillenburg

2018 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-6991755

This article deals with the material turn in literary criticism at the level of the visual and spatial aspects and dimensions of the text. First, it analyzes the different tendencies and changes that helped increase our awareness to this often neglected form of textual materiality. Second, it examines what may be at stake when we read these visual and spatial elements in a more conscious way. Third, it presents the work of two French theoreticians, Jean Gérard Lapacherie and Anne-Marie Christin, whose work on visuality offers both interesting theoretical insights and useful methodological tools for a better understanding of the visual material turn.