Comparative Literature

Sivaram, Sushil

2019 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7709569

This article reasons that the Jaipur Literature Festival between 2008 and 2011 attempted to institute via polemics, judgment, and celebration the category of the Pakistani novel in India by importing an alterity industry. By failing to contextualize alterity in a South Asian context, the festival reinforced a national, linguistic, and religious division between India and Pakistan. It produced a category like “Moonlight’s Children” as an “other” to an imagined Indian literature that is confused with a post–Salman Rushdie postcolonial and global anglophone canon. However, this analysis of the discourse produced at the festival by the discussants and the audience shows that a coconstituted South Asian literary history was consistently placed against a regionally competitive model. Importing alterity to produce an Indian or Pakistani literary identity was undermined by an attitude of disavowal toward the literary object and received categories like the global anglophone, postcolonial literature, and world literature. The author argues that this is not postcolonial resistance; rather, it is a trepidation to arrive at a conclusion, because to conclude is also to value, evaluate, and declare the existence of the “other” phantasmagoric literary identity and history.

Sacks, Jeffrey

2019 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7709580

This article considers the work of Hannah Arendt and Ghassan Kanafani in relation to the social and juridical logic and form of the settler colony and of the settler-colonial logic and form of the Israeli state and its ideology, Zionism. The argument is framed in relation to two moments: (1) the notion and practice of Bildung—education, training, formation—where the subject of language, in becoming literate, thoughtful, and self-reflective, is to become a being that recognizes itself and others in these and related terms: as legible, autonomous, and self-determining; and (2) the ongoing debates around the politics of death, articulated through the writing of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Carl Schmitt, Achille Mbembe, and Arendt. The article argues that, insofar as they presume an understanding of Bildung as a principal category of social thought, these debates reiterate the terms they claim to diagnose or contest. It also argues that, in their affective relation to decolonization, Arendt—and Foucault and Agamben—conjures and advances a social panic in a desire to domesticate the destabilizing force of anticolonial struggle. Finally, the article reads Kanafani’s Rijāl fī al-shams (Men in the Sun) to argue that Kanafani’s novelistic practice discombobulates the terms privileged in the settler colony and in its social and literary logic and form, as it promises a nonredemptive, anomic, and non-state-centric futurity.

Hicks-Bartlett, Alani Rosa

2019 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7709591

Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il Piacere (Pleasure) feints at being a bildungsroman. Even as it incorporates the genre’s defining tropes, it repeatedly undermines them, staging an educational process that is continually frustrated and problematized. Il Piacere can therefore be read as the story of a bad education, as it foregrounds an educational model that is upended before it even starts. More specifically, due to his faulty education, the novel’s protagonist sputters through the stages of his formation, failing to mature or develop appropriately. He founders in a crisis of representation as the fullness of creative, artistic, and amorous satisfaction continues to elude him. The objective of the bildungsroman thus stands as the elusive and problematic ideal to which Il Piacere’s protagonist should strive and remains a constant, tortured concern throughout the novel. D’Annunzio prefigures this impasse in his overlooked dedicatory letter, which recalls and subverts traditional models of formation. The letter uses a Catullan intertext to emphasize and model the importance of instruction and guidance to growth and artistic maturation. By understanding the portrayal of education in the dedicatory letter and the novel, readers learn that the structures that might have upheld the bildungsroman’s implicit promise are in short supply. The same dynamic is reiterated through classical topoi like the stories of Pygmalion and Zeuxis. These artistically grounded intertexts anticipate the major concerns of Il Piacere’s protagonist: how to engage with beauty and art to obtain pleasure, and how to overcome an improper orientation to reach amorous, artistic, and authorial objectives.

Rasmussen, Irina D.

2019 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7709602

In the “Oxen of the Sun” episode of Ulysses, James Joyce dramatizes the evolution of English prose styles by creating a stylistic matrix for gestation. This article links the episode’s stylistic evolution to the historical development of liberal thought about autonomy and self-determination, reading Joyce’s styles as rhetorical gateways to liberal discourses on statehood, politics, socioeconomics, national health, and sexuality. In the immediate historical context of national agitation in Ireland, the episode’s bodily tropes of reproduction, birth, emergence, and break dislocate the rhetoric of national conception, providing a critical insight into the development of liberal thought, particularly into the contradictory blend of progressive and regressive thinking from which liberal notions of autonomy and self-determination have emerged. By demonstrating how the stylistic evolution in “Oxen” moves through a series of breaks, the article relates Joyce’s disruptive tactics to the aesthetic practices of the historical avant-gardes, showing how the affinities with the avant-garde in “Oxen” work on the level of form, content, and imagined life praxis. The main argument at stake is understanding how Joyce creates a literary position of being in advance by way of engaging critically with biopolitics and the liberal discourses on national and social advancement.

Barzilai, Maya

2019 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7709613

This article examines Paul Celan’s use of the terms cola and breath-unit in his notes for the 1960 “Meridian” address. In the 1920s, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig developed their “colometric translation” of the Bible, using the breath-unit to capture, in German, the spoken qualities of the Hebrew Bible by allowing the human breath to dictate line divisions. Celan repurposed the breath-unit for his post-Shoah poetics: it registered, for him, a further disruption of the Hebrew-German translational link, following the demise of the Jewish community of readers. Celan’s breath-unit became a measure of silence, marking the pauses between poetic lines as sites of interrupted breathing, which entail a painful encounter with deformation and murder. Furthermore, if Buber and Rosenzweig used their breath-inspired cola to bypass the traditional line divisions of biblical verse, Celan’s radicalized breath-unit can be understood as a response to the musicality attributed to his earlier poetry; he drew on the singularity of the breath to forge ever shorter lines and vertical, severed poems that culminate in the lost or buried word.

Collier, Patrick

2019 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7709624