Comparative Literature

Khanna, Neetu

2020 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8537720

This article revisits the Marxist anticolonial feminist writings of Urdu author Ismat Chughtai through a materialist exploration into how the female body—with its erotic curvatures and grotesque protuberances, its sticky and viscous textures and fluids—becomes the focalized object of what the author terms the erotics of disgust. Chughtai is perhaps most famous for her being tried for obscenity in 1942 for her most famous short story, “The Quilt” (“Lihaaf”), which narrates a young girl’s encounter with the erotic relationship of a middle-class Muslim woman and her female servant. As Chughtai herself recounts, however, she was acquitted because the prosecution could never point to the exact words that were to be considered obscene. The author argues that we read Chughtai’s extraordinary inquiries into the imbrication of desire and disgust as the visceral sites of gender discipline, as the question of the “modern” Muslim female citizen subject hangs in the balance of an emergent Indian nationhood. The author offers a queer feminist critique of the traditional phenomenology of disgust by analyzing the codes of erotic texture produced out of histories of colonial hygiene and bourgeois sexual discipline in late colonial India.

Johnson, Christopher D.

2020 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8537731

This article examines Jorge Luis Borges’s ingenious, largely dehistoricized interpretations and imitations of seventeenth-century writers typically called Baroque. It contends that the aesthetic, epistemological, and metaphysical values Borges assigns to works by Cervantes, Góngora, Quevedo, Gracián, Marino, Browne, Pascal, Leibniz, Angelus Silesius, and Spinoza depend largely on his conservative notions of how style and, specifically, metaphor should work. While writers from the historical Baroque often require readers to embrace hermeneutic difficulty, Borges, despite the ingenious difficulty of his own writings, refuses to countenance this stance. This refusal turns also on Borges’s distinction between writing he fervently praises as “classic” and writing he ambiguously blames as “baroque.” The former serves as the explicit model for his own invention; but the latter implicitly, agonistically, informs much of his thinking and writing as well. Borges’s unwillingness to distinguish the historical Baroque from a recurring, eternal baroque is understandable, given his philosophy of art and history; however, it ignores how periodization can have the heuristic and conceptual function of finding unity in multiplicity, a unity that includes divergent styles and ideologies.

Bouzaglo, Nathalie

2020 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8537742

This article explores the connection between modernismo, a literary movement that relied heavily on imitation and intertextuality, and accusations of plagiarism, copying, and appropriation. It contextualizes the analysis within a nineteenth-century legal moment in which intellectual property protections were just beginning to take hold at the international level. It examines claims of authorship in the absence of meaningful intellectual property legislation, and in an asymmetrical context in which European authors were widely reprinted and read in Latin America but Latin American authors were barely read in Europe. And it considers performances of plagiarizing and of being plagiarized—that is, the unease expressed by one who suspects his work has been copied. Specifically, the article analyzes an accusatory epistolary exchange between Enrique Gómez Carrillo and Manuel Díaz Rodríguez; the novel El hombre de hierro (The Iron Man; 1907) by Rufino Blanco Fombona, which was interpreted as a copy of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary but justified by its local character; and the very curious case of Rafael Bolívar Coronado, whose writing implodes the category of authorship that underlies intellectual property legislation. Taken together, the three cases demonstrate the development of the notions of authorship and plagiarism in Venezuelan literature at the turn of the century.

Moy, Olivia Loksing

2020 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8537764

In the 1950s, the Argentinian author Julio Cortázar (1914–84) composed Imagen de John Keats, a little-known work that merges his own life with that of the British Romantics. Part biography and part autobiography, it includes personal essays and literary criticism that weave through the poems, life, and letters of Keats from his early youth to death. This article positions Imagen de John Keats as an important case study in world literature criticism. It demonstrates how Cortázar was not only a Latin American Boom writer who enjoyed international fame but also an idiosyncratic practitioner of reading and writing methods that transcend nation and period. Modeling innovative techniques that the author calls “automatic translation” and “global close reading,” Cortázar anticipates some of the problems recently voiced in critical debates surrounding world literature. Imagen de John Keats is simultaneously an example of world literature that blends fiction and nonfiction, and a model for world literature criticism.

Wacks, David A.

2020 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8537775