Comparative Literature

Spanos, Adam

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9434485

This article tracks the engagement of several twentieth-century writers with a line from Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Journal of a Homecoming): “et il est place pour tous au rendez-vous de la conquête” (and there is room for all at the appointed place of conquest; translated by C. L. R. James as “there is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory”). This line came to define an ethics and an aesthetics for the cultural movement that ensued in the wake of the Bandung conference, which brought together heads of state from the third world in pursuit of national independence. In the critical commentaries and artistic engagements with Césaire’s work by James, Frantz Fanon, Nadine Gordimer, and Edward Said, a form of internationalism emerged that was sustained by a common investment in this poetic image. These writers weren’t bound by an identity of interest, however, but rather by the displacements to which they subjected Césaire’s poem through their linguistic, generic, affective, and semantic translations. The essay concludes that Bandung humanism supposed a contingent and revisable understanding of the human and promoted an aesthetic of reworking rather than timeless forms.

Grewal, Sara Hakeem

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9434498

While the ghazal has appeared in many linguistic traditions, its diversity is undermined by the imposition of a singular definition of this genre, which is further compounded by the overly simplistic identification of ghazal as lyric; these lyricized readings of the ghazal as both transhistorical and transnational rely on a discourse of “worlding” as an imperial project of cultural recovery and homogenization. In contrast, this article employs the methodology of historical poetics to argue via a reading of meta-ghazals in Persian, Urdu, and English that reading practices around the ghazal—including definitions of the genre that variously emphasize form versus theme—change according to the historical and geographical context of its circulation. However, by celebrating the ghazal’s travel as seemingly apolitical and/or ahistorical, the discourse of world poetry, particularly in the reception of the ghazals of Agha Shahid Ali, participates in an ongoing imperialism in world literary study. In contrast, we can read the ghazals of Adrienne Rich as exemplifying the tradition of vernacularization that has enabled the ghazal’s movement between languages, such that her work, like the work of historical poetics as a methodology, honors the history of the form’s travel through its appearance in contemporary American English.

Yudkoff, Sunny S.

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9434511

This article examines the intersection of the Yiddish modernist Yankev Glatshteyn’s poetics of old age with the cultural politics of language. Specifically, the article draws on Robert Pogue Harrison’s concept of “heterochronicity”—the ability to embody many ages at once—to investigate how a young Yiddish poet textualized old age and age ambiguity in his early work. To do so, the article first investigates the cultural assumptions concerning age in European Yiddish writing circulating toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. It then turns to Glatshteyn’s early work, “Mayne lider” (My Poems), in which the heterochronic management of old age functions as a rejoinder to Glatshteyn’s American Yiddish literary predecessors and as a model of his modernist poetics. Finally, the article turns its attention to Glatshteyn’s 1925 poem “Tsu mayn tsveyhundertyorikn geburtstog” (“On the Occasion of My Two-Hundredth Birthday”), analyzing the text as a tendentious reading of T. S. Eliot and the hierarchy of Yiddish-English difference. To grow old in Yiddish was not simply a biological experience for Glatshteyn. Rather, it was an aesthetic commitment—a mode of writing energized by heterochronic entanglements, intertextual confrontation, and the intersecting age-driven assumptions of Yiddish literature and Anglo-American modernism.

Wang, Emily

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9434524

Lord Byron’s reputation in Russia’s literary imagination might surprise those who remember him not only as a multifaceted poet or political commentator, but also as a sexual libertine. Following his death in Greece, the tempestuous Byron came to stand for both freedom and romanticism in Russia, especially for the poets who would become associated with the Decembrist Uprising, a failed attempt by liberal nobles to reform the absolutist state by military coup in 1825. Perhaps even more importantly, Byron also became identified with the primary candidate for the role of Russia’s national poet: Alexander Pushkin. Though much as been written about Pushkin’s “Byronic apprenticeship,” this article focuses on how Pushkin’s responses to the English poet led him to depart from—and even conflict with—a specifically political version of Byronism promoted by his contemporaries. In particular, it analyzes Russian poetic response to Byron’s death, including works by Pushkin, Ivan Kozlov, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, Kondraty Ryleev, and Dmitry Venevitnov. It also considers Pushkin’s “To the Sea” (1824), analyzing an extended polemic with Prince Pyotr Viazemsky about Byron’s political legacy that this poem initiates.

White, Jerry

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9434537

This article posits that Pier Paolo Pasolini’s long engagement with Catalonia offers important insights into his practice as a poet, filmmaker, and thinker about language, as well as explaining the nature of his influence on other European cinemas. The first part of the article focusses on the special issue “Fiore di poeti catalani” of Quaderno romanzo alongside Pasolini’s poetry in and advocacy for the Friulan language. The second part of the article focusses on Joaquín (Joaquim) Jordà’s translation of Pasolini, published as Cine de poesía contra cine de prosa, alongside the emergence of the Barcelona school of filmmakers, of which Jordà was a part. Overall, the article argues that although there was clearly an Italian influence on Catalan cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, throughout the long course of his career there was a distinctly Catalan quality to Pasolini’s thought.

Lewis, Alexander

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9434550

This article looks at the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early philosophy of language on the Black Arts Movement. Amiri Baraka’s essay / prose poem “Expressive Language” ends with a quotation from Wittgenstein: “Can the concept of God exist in a perfectly logical language?” The problem is that Wittgenstein never wrote this. In tracking the meaning of Baraka’s pseudo ascription, this essay situates Baraka’s early work in the context of midcentury philosophy of language and the linguistic turn. It argues that Baraka’s extensive engagement with the form and thought of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is crucially important in Baraka’s narration of his conversion from Beat bohemianism to Black nationalism. Baraka’s argument with Wittgenstein anticipates the concerns of a debate that occurred several years later between Hans Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas. Reading “Expressive Language” and Baraka’s poetry and autobiographical writing alongside the exchanges of the Gadamer-Habermas debate, the essay argues that Baraka’s writings challenge the identification of critique with progressive politics that informs the work of Habermas and Paul Gilroy.

Kantor, Roanne

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9434563

Khotimsky, Maria

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9434576