Comparative Literature

Hassan, Waïl S.

2021 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8993912

According to a well-known narrative, the concept of Weltliteratur and its academic correlative, the discipline of comparative literature, originated in Germany and France in the early nineteenth century, influenced by the spread of scientism and nationalism. But there is another genesis story that begins in the late eighteenth century in Spain and Italy, countries with histories entangled with the Arab presence in Europe during the medieval period. Emphasizing the role of Arabic in the formation of European literatures, Juan Andrés wrote the first comparative history of “all literature,” before the concepts of Weltliteratur and comparative literature gained currency. The divergence of the two genesis stories is the result of competing geopolitical interests, which determine which literatures enter into the sphere of comparison, on what terms, within which paradigms, and under what ideological and discursive conditions.

Domínguez, César

2021 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8993925

This article discusses why it is necessary to rebuild comparative literature in terms of a geopolitics of comparison. “Geopolitics” is understood here, following Gearóid Ó Tuathail, to mean a distinctive genre of geo-power which brought about the systemic closure of the surface of the globe. Comparative literature has been part and parcel of this process by extending a Eurocentric concept of “(national) literature” worldwide. A rebuilt comparative literature has, on the one hand, to bring to light significant evidence of the discipline’s history within the historical and geographical context of power relations and, on the other hand, confront the coloniality of knowledge on three levels—locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. Here only the locutionary level is addressed by examining two journals—Comparative Literature and 1616: Anuario de la Sociedad Española de Literatura General y Comparada / Anuario de Literatura Comparada—from a bibliometric-analysis perspective.

Jobim, José Luís

2021 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8993938

Ferdinand Denis, Almeida Garrett, and Alexandre Herculano were European authors who, during the nineteenth century, formulated a meaning for local color below the equator, and contributed to a comparativism that geopolitically originated from the Old World, which created comparisons based on the representation of the New World chiefly derived from the supposed characteristics of its “nature.” This article will identify traces of the demand made by Ferdinand Denis (1798–1890) that the intellectual production of the Americas must reflect the effect of the nature that inspires us, and formulate local ideas derived from this nature, although from the nineteenth century onwards this opinion was challenged. It will also highlight the importance, for South America, at this moment in history when authoritarianism is rearing its head again, of using comparative approaches to study narratives that represent the period of military dictatorships in South America, as well as to critically analyze the issue of languages in postcolonial contexts in Latin America.

Ertürk, Nergis

2021 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8993951

Focusing on the life and work of the Turkish novelist and translator Vâlâ Nureddin (1901–67), this article provides a historical overview of Turkish and Soviet literary entanglement in the early twentieth century. A collaborator of the globally acclaimed Turkish communist poet Nâzım Hikmet, Vâlâ was educated at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East from 1922 to 1924. Returning to Turkey in 1925, he launched his career in the daily Akşam (Evening), bringing Soviet and Turkish literature into conversation in his serialized translations and literary adaptations of Soviet erotic fiction. In reading Vâlâ’s neglected 1928 erotic historical comedy Baltacı ile Katerina (Baltacı and Catherine), unique among Vâlâ’s writings in its direct and explicit imagination and specification of an entangled revolution, this article suggests, by way of specific attention to this work’s comedic elements, that Vâlâ imagined the collapse of both Russian and Ottoman imperial sovereignty in terms of sexual revolution. It argues that a study of this unjustifiably neglected erotic comedy not only deepens our knowledge of early republican Turkish literature and culture, but provides a more nuanced understanding of the Moscow-centered transnational literary space produced in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, or what scholars in Slavic studies have called the “Soviet republic of letters.”

Goulding, Gregory

2021 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8993964

The long poems of the Hindi poet Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (1917–64) present a series of fantastic narratives, in which a nameless speaker journeys through a fantastic landscape. These works, often analyzed solely in terms of a supposed mythic, romantic structure, should be considered as a response to formal problems of the novel and the lyric in midcentury Hindi literature. Despite acknowledging these long poems as his most important contribution, literary critics display a marked discomfort with what they see as their excesses. Muktibodh’s writings, however, reflect his substantive consideration of the problems of narrative poetry. In Muktibodh’s most famous work, “Aṁdhere meṁ” (“In the Dark”), the long poem’s distinct formal structure is deployed to produce the disjointed paratactic narratives that typify Muktibodh’s work. Furthermore, this poetic structure is crucially influenced by free verse poetics in Marathi, making clear that any consideration of modern Hindi literature must take into account the complex interrelationships of literary cultures in South Asia. Thus, Muktibodh’s long poem prompts a reconsideration of the role of genre and form in our understanding of South Asian literary cultures and their engagements with the world.

Herzovich, Guido

2021 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8993977

“Spanish American modernismo,” wrote Octavio Paz in 1972, “has no connection to what in English is called ‘modernism.’” Indeed, for a long time there was consensus in both critical traditions that “despite some parallels,” as Astradur Eysteinsson put it, “the differences between the two concepts are too many to warrant their critical coalescence.” In recent years, however, it has become the rule to discuss Latin American and Spanish modernismos within the Anglo-Germanic notion of modernism, as part of the broader concept of “global modernisms.” But how did two of the most important aesthetic concepts of the twentieth century from two distinct traditions go from misleading cognates to variants of the same phenomenon? This article offers a comparative history to explain the conditions of their mutual (un)translatability. It presents their divergent beginnings, briefly surveys their independent developments, and finally argues that, in the past few decades, both have similarly turned from differential to relational concepts mainly by transforming their relationship to mass culture. They have thus gone from high-literary ideologies of exclusion to fields of research on the networks and dynamics of modern culture. As they did, however, their standing within their respective critical traditions has changed in opposite ways.

Johnson, Rebecca C.

2021 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8993990

This article looks at cross-revolutionary writing among Arab writers who, after the 1967 War, looked to Vietnam as an anti-imperialist revolutionary co-cause of the Palestinians and a possible alternative future of national liberation, and to Vietnamese literature as a parallel “literature of resistance.” Taking the Vietnam-Palestine comparison as a focal point, this article illuminates a transnational Arab network of avant-garde literary production that corresponded with, translated, and published each other’s work in Morocco, Syria, Lebanon, and the United States. As such, rather than an example of direct South-South comparison, cross-revolutionary Arab writing via Vietnam triangulated its critiques through the United States and European leftist movements, producing a model of literary production and revolutionary vision that was distinct from and critical of those movements’ solidarity politics. Cross-revolutionary reading produced a distinct conception of literary commitment and a new aesthetic sensibility in Arabic literature, and provides a model of comparison that does not elide but circumscribes European and American literature within its visionary gaze.

Winant, Johanna

2021 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-8994003