Comparative Literature

Reitman, Nimrod

2018 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7215451

The article reads Sigmund Freud and Claudio Monteverdi’s understanding of musicality, its affinity with rhetoric, and the way this relation informs their individual oeuvres. Both Monteverdi and Freud, each in his own way, were condemned to live with an aversion to musicality that strengthened their hermeneutics of psychic and discursive disturbance. Through the specific rhetorical figure of the musical lament found in psychoanalytical discourse, the article demonstrates the way dissonances implicate opera, the madrigal, and the talking-cure, making aporetic claims, especially in the face of Freud’s self-attestation—his resolute conviction that he was “ganz unmusikalisch”—which astonishingly matches Monteverdi’s own resistance to music.

Corrigan, Yuri

2018 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7215462

This essay explores Donna Tartt’s adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels The Adolescent, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov in The Goldfinch as a guide to understanding Dostoevsky’s unorthodox and theologically inflected theory of trauma. The essay argues that both authors approach traumatic memory through the ancient folkloric archetype of the “external soul” (the inner essence displaced into external objects for safekeeping) and conceive of the healing process as the attempt to bring the externalized soul—and its unwanted memories—back into the body. This motif allows both writers to reimagine the concept of the soul in modern secular terms: in Tartt’s conception of post-traumatic “soul loss” as a critical stage in the moral and aesthetic education of the self, and in Dostoevsky’s view of wounded memory as opening up the self to the more expansive, overwhelming trauma of religious experience. Tartt’s use of Dostoevsky in The Goldfinch underscores the Russian author’s value to contemporary trauma studies as an alternative to the prevailing canon.

Molde, Klas

2018 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7215473

This essay addresses the question of lying in the lyric with reference to both canonical and lesser-known works by Rilke, including several of his relatively neglected poems in French. Taking as a point of departure Rilke’s late lyric “Mensonges,” the essay proceeds via a series of close readings to formulate his poetics of lies and deception in positive terms. Special attention is given to the relationship of fraudulence to lyric form, animation, and praise. Ultimately, Rilke’s lesson is not to lie more but to lie better. Thus he puts on display a fundamental lyric operation: From its inception as counter-mythology, presupposing the existence of myth that it can either affirm or critique, the lyric does not present an alternative between enchantment and disenchantment but rather—in negotiating between the two—shows us the agency we have in fashioning our enchantments as well as our embarrassments.

Robinson, Benjamin Lewis

2018 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7215484

J. M. Coetzee conceived of Life & Times of Michael K (1983) as an “interpretive translation” of Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas (1808/10). Drawing on Coetzee’s notes and drafts, this essay explores his attempt to generate the literary and political “passion + urgency” of Kleist’s text, which Coetzee felt the times called for but his own writing lacked. While Michael Kohlhaas became a guerrilla out of his “passion for justice,” Michael K, despite the incessant provocations of the state, does not join the guerrillas but emerges instead as a very different kind of figure: a gardener who “just lives.” Between the guerrilla and the gardener, Coetzee elaborates an antinomy of justice not only in apartheid South Africa but inherent to the institutionalization of modern political life.

Mann, Barbara E.

2018 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7215495

This essay analyzes the depiction of “things” in three modernist novels: Dovid Bergelson’s The End of Everything (Yiddish, 1913), a tale of ennui set in a provincial town outside Kiev, where faded fabrics and cherished ornaments in drawing rooms emblematize the end of an era; Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934), where the detritus of a Lower East Side childhood become symbolic totems of a violent coming-of-age; and S. Y. Agnon’s l7215495C1Just Yesterday (Hebrew, 1946), an epic novel of immigration, cultural renaissance, and insanity set in Jaffa and Jerusalem, wherein taxidermy and olive-wood craft figure as metonymic symbols of a new national self. My comparative reading of these novels highlights a complementary set of conditions—objects in books, and the book as object. I argue that the genre’s engagement with things, and its emergence as a thing, suggests how writing both fears and revels in its own commodification and immersion in the economic sphere. These novels exemplify how modern, transnational Jewish literature was reconceived as material culture.

Kantor, Roanne L.

2018 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7215506

This article seeks to explain the recent popularity of South Asian Anglophone literature (beginning in 1981 and peaking between 1998 and 2008) in light of the boom in Latin American literature of the 1960s. It argues that the phenomenon of regional literary “booms” shares features across both eras, and that a unified theory of booms is increasingly important to understanding the way contemporary literature circulates around the globe. Scholarship about both eras has tended to coalesce around three types of boom-driving agents: “creators,” “contexts,” and “curators.” Within that broader agreement, however, scholarship about the South Asian boom has tended to overemphasize the political symbolism of recent South Asian Anglophone literature and its global popularity, while under-emphasizing the political realities that create the conditions under which that literature became popular. This line of criticism has come at the expense of attention to literature’s other dimensions as a cultural object, as well as contextual explanations of popularity involving the role of governments, demographics, and market flows. The more diverse scholarship on the Latin American boom offers a corrective with insights for both the future of South Asian Anglophone literature and the field of World Literature.