Comparative Literature

Ong, Yi-Ping

2021 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8738851

How do we come to share an ethical outlook with others? Is it possible to teach ethics? What does it mean to live with others when we do not (always) inhabit the same world? J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello engages these profound ethical questions in its very form. Whereas critics argue that the novel either takes up or evades the task of ethical instruction, this article shows that the text disputes the basic assumptions of ethical literary criticism. Elizabeth Costello makes a powerful case for the difference of the novel vis-à-vis other forms of ethical discourse. What is at stake in Coetzee’s choice of the novel qua fiction is an attempt to engage the status of fiction in relation to the status of ethical discourse in our time. Contemporary ethical discourse unfolds within a context in which it is considered to be no more than a necessary fiction. Coetzee’s text places this stance within the framework of fiction—not primarily to demonstrate its falsity but to stage an alternate or rival fiction, one that challenges our fundamental assumptions about fiction, ethics, and existence.

Berdichevsky, Dina

2021 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8738862

This article explores the moment of “invention” of the Hebrew mood. Around the year 1900 a new expression for mood appeared in Hebrew: matsav ruah. The articulation of a new linguistic expression was paralleled by the rise of an original atmospheric prose, mood prose, in Hebrew. By analyzing these parallel events, the article suggests that the matsav ruah of the early 1900s was a new form of self-experience and that this new form stimulated original poetic language created by a cohort of Hebrew, East European writers, including Yosef Hayim Brenner, Uri Nissan Gnessin, and others. The author suggests that, with mood, Hebrew prose figuratively stretched language itself, giving form to a new sense of “being there.” Furthermore, this poetics of mood offered authors an alternative to psychological realist prose and to the fixed subject position it implied. Thus, this article suggests that Hebrew phrasing and poetics of mood offer a potent concept for the analysis of epistemological foundations of early twentieth-century modernism in Hebrew literature while drawing an outline for a wider, comparative view on early twentieth-century European modernism in light of the concept of mood.

Zaitseva, Lusia

2021 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8738873

This article expands our understanding of cultural exchange between the Soviet Union and writers from the third world during the eras of Thaw and Stagnation. It examines Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s little-known Urdu-language travelogue about his time in the USSR, Mah o sāl-i-āshnā’i: yādon kā majmūʻah (Months and Years of Friendship: Recollections; 1979), arguing that Faiz’s text is distinct from earlier, Western travelers’ accounts in its articulation of the complexities of his subject position vis-à-vis the Soviet state. It does so by translating his experience into the richly ambiguous Indo-Persian literary and cultural idiom. The article examines the ambiguities introduced into Faiz’s text through intertextuality with this idiom derived from the Persian dastān and Urdu ghazel traditions. With the help of both direct and indirect allusion to those traditions, Faiz’s complex attitude toward what Terry Martin has called the world’s “first affirmative action empire” and Nancy Condee has described as an “anti-imperial empire” comes most clearly into view. Ultimately, Faiz’s text suggests that socialist internationalism was not just a vertical structure controlled by Moscow but a horizontal network shaped by powerful cultural allegiances that were not easily overcome.

Lazzari, Gabriele

2021 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8738884

This article examines contemporary Somali diasporic literature by proposing a comparative analysis of Nuruddin Farah’s Maps and a selection of texts written by authors of Somali origin currently writing in Italian: Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, Cristina Ubah Ali Farah, and Igiaba Scego. Drawing on diaspora studies, theories of narrative space, and contemporary theories of world literature, this article argues that Somali diasporic literature places at its imaginative and symbolic core the concept of the border. In so doing, Somali diasporic literature interlocks formal and narrative strategies to political and literary histories in order to challenge the naturalized perception of linguistic and territorial boundaries. Through the investigation of how processes of border production and contestation define both the narrative geographies and the dynamics of institutional recognition of Somali literature written by the members of its global diaspora, this article further suggests that Somali diasporic writers engage with border epistemologies to articulate more historically conscious modalities of belonging to place and language.

Bhattacharya, Sunayani

2021 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8738895

This article examines the novels of the nineteenth-century Bengali author Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay in light of classical Sanskrit literature and the rasa theory and argues that practices of Sanskrit kāvya literature are as dominant in the structural and aesthetic elements of the Bengali novel as are Western forms of novel production. The arguments are located in the reader to suggest that Bankim’s novels train readers to read the Sanskrit past as encoded in the text and as coexisting with the westernized colonial present, albeit in a difficult relationship. The article pays particular attention to the novelist’s adaptation of two forms of Sanskrit prose, the kathā and the ākhyāyikā, and his exploration of the śṛngāra (erotic) rasa. While the Bengali novel emerges after the introduction of its Victorian counterpart, the former is a product of engagement with tensions foreign to the British novel. Exploring this alternative reading practice provides an opportunity to understand how Bengali and Sanskrit—in terms of literature and culture—are part of the lived experience of both Bankim and his nineteenth-century readers, and part of the aesthetic and ethical foundation of the early Bengali novel.

Quint, David

2021 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8738906

This analysis of the structure and meaning of The Tale of the Hunchback, the most novelistic of the tales of the Thousand and One Nights, shows how the Nights stages the relationship of reader to fiction (the fictitious lives of others) as a power relationship and in terms of distance and familiarity. Through its juxtaposition of stories, the tale anatomizes fortunate and unfortunate human lives; it dramatizes the latter through the practical joke. The tale and its storyteller, Shahrazad, try to teach brotherhood and compassion for human weakness to a reader figured as an all-powerful Caliph-King who demands to be amused by the strange and who laughs at stories of the unfortunate. This reader’s power vis-à-vis the stories presented to him is above all to dismiss them as fictions that do not apply to him, as freakish as the deformed hunchback entertainer for whom the stories substitute within the tale. The tale and the larger Nights show how the estrangement that is the means of literary fiction can lie at cross-purposes with the ethical end of self-recognition and empathetic identification with others.

Pahl, Katrin

2021 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8738919