Comparative Literature

Apter, Emily

2019 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7546142

Rather than stand down the naysayers with a nihilistic credo of the humanities for its own sake, this essay examines the apparently weak resources of “justification” as a set of rhetorical procedures that navigate that which is ungrounded or untranslatable. Justification, as a problem of translation and material embodiment emerges as a transversal theoretical project in its own right for the contemporary comparative humanities. It also continues to name the problem of procedure and procedural new beginnings in a more strictly legal frame.

Mani, Preetha

2019 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7546181

This essay examines the Hindi Nayī Kahānī, or New Story, Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which was influential for the short stories, criticism, and literary history that its writers produced. Incorporating a view toward the larger “metaliterary” corpus in relation to which properly “literary” nayī kahānī texts were written, the essay shows how the movement inaugurated a modernist realism characterized by attention to genre, rhetoric, and style on one hand, and commitment to social reality on the other. Combining rhetorical strategies—such as shifting narrative voice, allegorical descriptions of landscape, and implicit reference to authorship and the condition of postcolonial literary production—with structural and thematic tensions between form and content, this mode developed an interchangeability between author, reader, and character, which did not previously exist in Hindi literature and which reconfigured the category of the middle class in the universally recognizable terms of alienation. Using the case of the nayī kahānī, the essay offers a new literary historical approach that moves beyond sweeping accounts of a single postcolonial mode to attend to regional realisms and modernisms.

Bo, L. Maria

2019 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7546276

This article examines Eileen Chang’s 1953 translation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea into Chinese as Cold War propaganda for the United States Information Service (USIS). It argues that this translation, meant to show the truth of democracy through its high modernist form, directly influenced the writing and translating of The Rice-Sprout Song (1955), the novel Chang wrote next for the USIS to expose the truth of famine in Communist China. I show that Chang’s translation practices connect US and Chinese literary modernisms in a showdown of literary forms and their disparate claims to the truth. Chang navigates political ideologies by eschewing linguistic equivalence to favor equivocation instead, ultimately transforming Hemingway’s modernist form via her own. It thus adds to transpacific studies and Cold War historiography by revealing the intimate relationship between political ideology and literary form, and their cross-fertilization in the process of translation.

Gould, Rebecca Ruth

2019 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7546287

This article engages with cosmopolitan conceptions of culture that flourished in the nineteenth century Caucasus with a view to clarifying the relevance of these legacies today. I focus in particular on the polymath writer ʿAbbās Qulī Āghā Bākīkhānūf (1794–1847). Bākīkhānūf’s historical work conceptualizes community outside the framework of the nation, while conjoining distinctive strands of epistemic and cultural cosmopolitanism. As I explore Bākīkhānūf’s historical writing, I consider how the Persianate literary tradition of which he partakes advance a cosmopolitan conception of community that contrasts with and occasionally contests the nationalist histories promulgated by modern European nations. As a scientific and literary project, Bākīkhānūf’s cosmological cosmopolitanism shows how epistemic openness advances cultural inclusivity, in part by recognizing the relationship between the literary imagination and scientific inquiry.

Peterson, Christopher

2019 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7546298

This article explores the unstable distinction between “who” and “what” in Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! The story’s moral that “a person’s a person no matter how small” has often been read as atoning for the racist cartoons that Geisel drew of the Japanese during World War II. Seussian pedagogy teaches us to hear all persons as whos rather than whats or things. Yet this essay argues that all persons are also things. While this thingliness remains unequally distributed thanks to persistent sociopolitical hierarchies, it also calls on us to think about ethics and politics differently. Diverging from the person/who equation, Jacques Derrida conceives the who as an absolute singularity that resists its subjection to the what, and by extension, its reduction to particularity and identity. Expanding beyond Horton’s racial context, the final section of the essay considers how the contemporary “Black Lives Matter” movement reckons with the problem of particularity and identity while also gesturing toward an incalculable singularity—infinitely deferred yet always “present.”

Kimmel, Seth

2019 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7546323

Early modern editors of Iberian popular ballads, known in Spanish as romances, excluded the poems’ musical notation from their publications. They also catered to contemporary audiences’ tastes by focusing on poems that represented battles among Christian and Muslim nobles. These publications in this way confused the romance’s oral origins at the intersection of medieval Castilian and Arabic cultural practices, one the one hand, and the early modern reception and revival of the genre, on the other hand. This essay examines how and why debate about this complex history of the romance has long served as a test case for Iberian history as a whole. Putting early modern literary theorists and musicians into conversation with late modern scholars influenced by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, the broad argument that emerges from this particular account of the romance is that the printed record better captures oral culture than either Parry and Lord or their successors thought possible.