Neoliberal Riskscapes and Preemptive Poetics in Orly Castel-Bloom’s Dolly CityAlon, Shir
2019 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-7217012
Focusing on Hebrew writer Orly Castel-Bloom’s novel Dolly City (1993), as well as on her short stories published in the same period, this essay analyzes how neoliberal principles of risk management, primarily risk privatization and speculation, shape postmodernist literary genres and techniques. It argues that Dolly City reflects, thematically and formally, a shift between two biopolitical models of governance: from a welfare model based on a calculable and statistical futurity and on communal sacrifice, to a neoliberal model grounded in a speculative futurity and a zero-risk principle of preemption. Dr. Dolly, the narrator of the novel, who suffers from the neoliberal “illness of improbable possibilities,” applies this preemptive principle to language itself, creating what this essay defines as “preemptive poetics:” a literalized and material approach to language that protects it from the infinite improbable possibilities of figurative expression. Dolly City traces the postmodernist problem of the destabilized text, detached from any knowable intention, to neoliberal political-economic principles of risk management.
Verticality and Vertigo: Spatial Effects in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the NorthSamatar, Sofia
2019 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-7217023
This essay examines spatial effects in Tayeb Salih’s novel Season of Migration to the North, drawing on the work of eleventh-century theorist Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani and two twentieth-century theorists, Joseph Frank and Julia Kristeva. Attending to formal patterns that create a sense of synchronicity, repetition, or rupture, the essay shows how such effects serve to disrupt the representation of linear time, introduce intertextuality by quotation or allusion, and situate the novel’s setting, a small Sudanese village, in a global network of power. This reading uncovers shared ground between al-Jurjani’s theory of nazm, or construction, Frank’s concept of spatial form, and Kristeva’s “spatialization” of the word in the practice of intertextual reading and demonstrates the centrality of spatial concerns to the novel’s critical commentary on the experience of modernity.
Spiritual/Spectral “Structures of Feeling” in Andrey Platonov’s Soul and Juan Rulfo’s Pedro PáramoWind, Ariel
2019 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-7217034
Despite linguistic and cultural divides, the works Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo and Soul by Andrey Platonov parallel each other in their strikingly overlapping literary treatment of the spirit—one in the spectral form of the ghost, and the other in the internal, intangible form of the soul—and its affective manifestation in comparable contexts of postrevolutionary modernization and agricultural-economic transition. Both texts rupture the social realism that had dominated the literary scenes of Russia and Mexico, respectively, in the early twentieth century through the use of the social figure of the spirit/specter that emerges in the protagonists’ return to places of origin. In the liminal yet visionary desert landscapes haunted by the Comalan ghosts and the enduring Dzhan dispossessed, the Hegelian notion of historical development is unseated and, with it, the dialectical (im)possibility of utopia after upheaval, generating consideration of a new political and social order. In both works, the reader is left to make meaning in a spatialized, affective framework wherein spectral melancholy is not necessarily tied only to mourning or loss but also to imagination, endurance, and ambiguity about the future, loosely in the vein of Fredric Jameson’s linking of death to utopia and Walter Benjamin’s vision of “mortification.”
The Rhythm of Unity: Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française and Leo Tolstoy’s War and PeaceCenedese, Marta Laura
2019 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-7217045
Published in 2004, Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française is a historical novel set during the French debacle and the German Occupation of France (1940–42). Scholars have studied it in relation to other French novels that touch upon similar issues; however, little attention has been given to its literary sources and to Némirovsky’s creative process. This article fills this gap by presenting an analysis of the relation between Suite française and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It will also show the “creative influence” of the Russian master on Némirovsky, addressing how Suite française engages creatively with War and Peace and its reception. Building on archival material and close textual analysis, the article unravels the complex relation between the two novels by exploring questions of structure, the connections between history and fiction, and the use of music as a literary tool.
Splitting the Colonizer: Discarding Centrality as FreedomMorales, Rafael Acosta
2019 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-7217056
This article explores a divide between the affective effects of freedom as a political core concept and its discursive articulation. It analyzes the failure of a Hegelian discourse of freedom that is often articulated in relation to colonial relationships. Departing from the idea of the life-and-death struggle in dialectical thought, the article argues for a different goal for postcolonial thought than dialectic unity as promised in Hegelian philosophy, examining the position of four writers: Alfonso Reyes, Mário de Andrade, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. The essay concludes that freedom is not as desirable a political goal as it would appear. First, while logically it is fairly easy to distinguish freedom from coercion, the freedom of self-mastery, and, ultimately, the freedom to impose our own world upon others, affectively, these concepts are in fact often conflated. Second, as Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby demonstrates, the promise of dialectic unity is unattainable not only for the colonized or oppressed; it is also beyond the reach of the oppressor. Through the study of other postcolonial authors, the article proposes certain lines of inquiry through which split consciousnesses may offer political alternatives to the use of freedom as a political goal.