Comparative Literature

Freed-Thall, Hannah; Freed-Thall, Hannah; Cadieu, Morgane

2021 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8874051

This introduction theorizes the littoral zone as a space for rethinking comparative literature and the environmental humanities. Beaches and ports are among the twentieth century’s most vexed and polyvalent cultural geographies. The article contends that the tidelands should be approached as a representational and geophysical overlap, an amalgamation of industry, biology, text, and image. Beaches and ports are ecological and industrial force fields: spaces of prohibition and pleasure, labor and play, exposure and refuge. They are the staging grounds and terraformed dreamscapes of carbon-based capitalism—but they are also potential commons in which different rhythms of existence come into view.

Smailbegović, Ada; Freed-Thall, Hannah; Cadieu, Morgane

2021 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8874062

This article theorizes the edge between the land and the sea in Marianne Moore’s poetry and in Jeff Wall’s photograph “The Flooded Grave.” For these artists, the edge is constituted as an array of fluctuating temporal rhythms created by living organisms and dynamic abiotic elements, such as changing tides and the rocky or sandy substrates that make up the geological formation of the coastline. The edge appears in a number of Moore’s poems, including “The Fish,” which depicts the intertidal zone populated by injured “crow-blue mussel-shells,” “ink- / bespattered jelly fish,” and sea-stars, which resemble “pink / rice-grains.” Wall’s photograph, in turn, portrays a transposition between an aquatic and a terrestrial environment by placing an intertidal pool filled with star fish and sea anemones into the rectangular space of a grave. This article reads such moments as experiments in the textured edges of displacement. In these instances of intertidal encounter, organisms find themselves in unlikely configurations of space and time as a consequence of geophysical and ecological redistributions associated with effects of climate change.

Wells, Sarah Ann; Freed-Thall, Hannah; Cadieu, Morgane

2021 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8874073

Shifting away from the paradigmatic factory gates, this article examines what comes into view as cinema approaches the port. Through a reading of Aloysio Raulino’s experimental short film Santos Port (Brazil, 1978), it shows how the port film is uniquely poised to view livelihoods that trouble narrow definitions of work and its spatial, temporal, and corporeal limits. Through its montage and unusual soundscape, Santos Port presents laboring bodies in excess of their labor in an elusive portrait of both a strike and of work-life relationships. Unwaged, overlooked forms of work and their relationship to broader modes of life are subject to an unprecedented attention. In the process, the port film queries what is meant by work, and in particular its spatial-temporal dimensions—the work site and the working day, the key site of struggle for labor under capitalism. Crucially, the port film is also where the labor of gender is thrown into stark relief, for understandings of work-time and work-space are indelibly and insistently gendered. The article concludes by suggesting how these expanded understandings of work are inflected by the geopolitical position of port films and their relationship to global capitalism.

Feinsod, Harris; Freed-Thall, Hannah; Cadieu, Morgane

2021 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8874084

How have cities reorganized attention to their waterfronts after the decline of urban seaports? What kind of cultural record attends this reorganization? This article investigates the politics of historical memory at several sites of postindustrial harbor redevelopment since the 1960s. It locates the aesthetic sensibilities of waterfront renewal in a scattered network of comic tableaux in literature, art, and moving images, including the documentaries of Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, the sitcom Arrested Development, and a mural at Baltimore’s National Aquarium. Like fragments of Benjamin’s dialectical image, these scenes bring together the allegorical ruin of the urban seaport with comic efforts to inaugurate its future as a commercial esplanade, as if virtualizing and intensifying those two phases of Benjaminian historiography (early modern allegory and nineteenth-century commodity). Intermittently, where this dialectical image begins to be realized, these sites have erupted in acts of de-monumentalization by anticolonial and alter-globalization activists. The article locates fragments of this dialectical image in seaports including Rotterdam, Baltimore, Barcelona, Long Beach, and Genoa, studied under the names given to their harbors by developers: Europoort, Harborplace, Port Vell, Rainbow Harbor, and Porto Antico.

Uphaus, Maxwell; Freed-Thall, Hannah; Cadieu, Morgane

2021 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8874095

Where beaches and harbors have frequently been taken to signify openness and intermingling, a different coastal setting, the cliffs of Dover, overtly bespeaks opposition and closure. Demarcating the British coast at its closest point to continental Europe, the cliffs often stand for Britain’s supposedly elemental insularity. However, the chalk composing the cliffs makes them, in their own way, as malleable and permeable as a beach. I argue that poems by Matthew Arnold, W. H. Auden, and Daljit Nagra contest the cliffs’ association with an exclusive Britishness by focusing on their material composition. In these poems, the cliffs’ chalk—formed by fossilized marine microorganisms at a time when what would become Britain was at the bottom of a prehistoric sea—attests to Britain’s geohistorical contingency. Arnold, Auden, and Nagra use this chalk geology to develop a new model of British identity as contingent, permeable, and linked with the wider world. In these poems, that is, Dover’s cliffs collapse oppositions rather than enforcing them: they blur the lines between Britain and the world, past and present, organic and inorganic, human history and geological history. The literature of the Dover cliffs thus highlights the revisionary potential of this distinctive kind of littoral space.

Ravindranathan, Thangam; Freed-Thall, Hannah; Cadieu, Morgane

2021 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8874106

This essay considers the unworldly setting of Jean Rolin’s novel Ormuz (2013), composed around the attempt by a shadowy character named Wax to swim across the Strait of Hormuz. This twenty-one-nautical-mile-wide stretch of sea separating Iran from the Arabian Peninsula, through which is shipped 35 percent of the world’s petroleum, is a waterway of the utmost geopolitical importance, its harbors built not for dreamy swimmers but for giant oil tankers and the elaborate maritime-military infrastructure assuring their passage. Such a setting would seem to stand as a bleak other to the novel as genre. Yet if one thinks of the history of the novel as inseparable from that of carbon capitalism (as Amitav Ghosh has argued), such a claim is reversed—this site where powerful strategic interests drive the flow of oil, capital, and power is the place of the continual making and unmaking, by night and day, of the world order, and thereby of the modern novel. The essay reflects on what Wax’s weird wager—as an emblem for a remarkable narrative wager—may owe to such intertexts as Google, Descartes’s Meditations, and Jules Verne’s Tour du monde, and argues for reading Ormuz as an ecological novel for our times.

Cadieu, Morgane; Freed-Thall, Hannah; Cadieu, Morgane

2021 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8874117

The museum, the mausoleum, and the memorial are key concepts for theorizing beaches and ports in twenty-first-century literature and cinema. On the littoral, these constructions suggest the very opposite of a sealed off monumentality to become living museums of women’s labor in modern and contemporary France (Sciamma, Varda), bodily mausolea of migration on the Senegalese shoreline (Diop), and shapeshifting war memorials in Atlantic and Pacific tidelands (Darrieussecq, Rolin, Virilio). Examples of anamorphic seascapes, especially in photography, underscore the reversibility of sand and cement in Japan (Narahashi, Ono), as well as the dereliction of Cuban beach architecture and American industrial harbors (Morales, Sekula). In art as in criticism, the waterfront stages gender and class crossings (Dumont) and tangles fields. The afterword thereby weaves the major threads of the special issue: textures, labor, and ruins; social mobility and migration; marine life, geological time, and the history of sensation.