Comparative Literature

Berman, Anna A.

2020 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7909939

What is a family novel? Russian literary scholars—who use the term frequently—claim that it is originally an English genre, yet in English scholarship the term has virtually disappeared. This article recovers the lost history of the family novel, tracing two separate strands: usage of the term and form/content of the novels. The genre began in England with Richardsonian domestic fiction and spread to Russia, where it evolved along different lines, shaped by the different social and political context. In England, the fate of the term turns out to be tied up with the fate of women writers in the nineteenth century, and then with the rise of feminist studies in the late twentieth that, in validating the importance of the domestic sphere, caused family novel to be superseded by domestic fiction. In Russia, by contrast, the great family novels of the nineteenth century were not associated with women or the domestic sphere, nor—as it turns out—were they considered to be family novels at the time they were written. Only in twentieth-century scholarship, as the original meaning of the term was lost, did they become family novels. In recovering the lost history of the term, this article illustrates the way later ideology and theoretical emphases that shape the language of scholarship ultimately reshape our understanding of the past.

Hochberg, Gil

2020 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7909950

This article is about a recent wave of literary dystopias published in Israel, most of which center on the soon-to-come destruction of the Jewish state. Notable among these are The Third (Ha-shlishi) by Yishai Sarid (2015), Mud (Tit) by Dror Burstein (2016), and Nuntia (Kfor) by Shimon Adaf (2010). These texts draw on biblical or Rabbinic Hebrew, Jewish sources, and Jewish historical events (specifically the destruction of the First and Second Temples), making them just as much about a dystopian past as they are about a dystopian future. They are, in other words, dystopias of a circular temporality: emerging from and moving toward (Jewish) dystopia. This recent wave of Israeli dystopian narratives is primarily preoccupied with the past and future of Judaism, the Jewish people, and Israel as a secular-yet-Jewish state. Most interesting, perhaps, is the complete absence of Palestinians from these texts and from this dystopic imagination. Despite their obvious presence in Israel’s current reality, Palestinians have no role whatsoever in these texts. We are dealing therefore with exclusively Jewish dystopias. Read against some of the dystopian white South African writings under Apartheid, the complete absence of Palestinians in the recently published Israeli dystopias, appears particularly disheartening. Neither partner nor enemy, Palestinians do not even share in a future nightmare with Israeli Jews. We are left with the following questions: Does writing a Jewish Israeli dystopia require eliminating Palestinians from the narrative? Is it possible (how is it possible?) to think of a Jewish (Israeli) future, present, and past without thinking about a Palestinian past, present, and future? Following the example of South African dystopias, this article concludes that for such literary and ethical concerns to be critically explored, Israel must first be (officially) recognized as an apartheid regime.

Li, Xiaofan Amy

2020 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7909961

This article examines the question of reinventing Chinese antiquity in the works of the contemporary French writer Pascal Quignard. It focuses on three aspects of Quignard’s Chinese-inspired works: his rewriting of ancient Chinese texts, his views on the idea of language via classical Chinese language and thought, and his recreation of Chinese antiquity via a radical contemporization of the past. This examination demonstrates that Quignard poses important questions about cultural reception and appropriation, especially as regards the problematic relation between sinophilia, Orientalism, and the reception of antiquity. Finally, the article proposes a nuanced view of Quignard’s sinophilia that recognizes both its merits and drawbacks. It concludes by arguing that despite the pitfalls of cultural misunderstanding and misrepresentation, Quignard spells out the conceptual death of French Orientalism in his refusal to fetishize Chinese antiquity and attests to a tendency in contemporary French literature and thought to creatively recycle foreign cultures and revise one’s understanding through the other.

Dickson, Polly

2020 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7909972

This article examines the figure of an undulating line, or “squiggle,” printed initially in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and copied by two nineteenth-century writers: first, by the German E. T. A. Hoffmann, in a little-known fragment, and, second, more famously, by the French Honoré de Balzac as the epigraph to his novel La peau de chagrin. These three squiggles form a triangulated relationship of imitation across two centuries, three countries, and three languages. Through attention to William Hogarth’s line of beauty and Johann Caspar Lavater’s physiognomic contour lines, the article considers the history of the undulating line as a figure for reading. It suggests that, for Sterne, Hoffmann, and Balzac, the inclusion of a pictured line within text may be seen as a “reverse ekphrastic” maneuver, one that aims to reflect the movement of narrative in visual form. In this way, the “squiggle” is foregrounded as a new and concrete motif for comparative criticism on Hoffmann and Balzac, identifying a shared interest in Sterne, as well as in the relationship and entanglement of text and image.

Engel, Amir

2020 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7909983

While there is growing interest in the postwar era, the cultural characteristics of the period after World War II and the period’s historical scope are still largely underdetermined. The purpose of this article is to offer a more nuanced use of the term postwar and insights into the cultural landscape of this enormously significant moment in the history of the West. To do so, it examines three major works of what is termed here the immediate postwar. These works are fundamentally dissimilar and yet, it is argued, share an emotional disposition. As shown, all three works exhibit a complex dialectical coupling of horror and anticipation. In other words, this article demonstrates that the cultural production of the postwar period (in the exact sense of the term) is characterized, on the one hand, by a sincere depiction of suffering and depravity but, on the other, by an intense engagement with questions about the moral and social future.

Rosenbrück, Jonas

2020 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7909994

This article analyzes the notions of clarity and obscurity in the work of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and Maurice Blanchot, arguing that the latter’s thought of the “other night” proposes a radical reversal, indeed, a corruption, of Baumgarten’s founding of aesthetics as an ocularcentric discipline governed by clarity. Baumgarten, laying the groundwork for much of the “distribution of the sensible” that dominated the field of aesthetics after him, conceives of the poem as the paradigmatic instance of an aesthetic cognition of the sensible that is founded on the triad of clarity, attention, and liveliness. He thus opposes the poem to both the obscure fundus animae, the ground of the soul, and to utopian poetry, neither of which can be poetized. By contrast, Blanchot’s literature dissolves this triple foundation into a writing of obscurity, distracted fatigue, and a “death resurrected”; literature opens aesthetics to that which had been constitutively excluded at its founding moment. The clarifying powers of the poet-aesthetician are replaced by passive “fascination” and a “passion of the image” that delimits a radically different, countercosmic, and thus utopian space of literature.

Saint-Amour, Paul K.

2020 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7910005