Comparative Literature

Newman, Jane O.; Sadan, Ron

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9989204

Erich Auerbach (1892–1957), best known as the author of Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (1946; Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953), wrote about the eighteenth-century philologist and philosopher of history Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) fifteen times over the course of his life. The translations offered here are among the earliest of these writings. These early essays on Vico refine the picture both of Auerbach himself and of the significance of his work for comparative literary studies today in important ways. First, they allow a reconsideration of the progressivist literary historical secularization thesis often claimed for Auerbach’s oeuvre writ large. Second, they display Auerbach’s early aspiration to reach “ein allgemeineres Publikum” (a more general public) through his work as a “Schriftsteller” (writer). Finally, they open a window onto the Vichian calculus upon which his assessment of the texts discussed in Mimesis may have been based. The modes of representation (Darstellung) Auerbach favored may thus be understood not as part of a restrictive canon but rather as examples of the human “Schauspiel” (drama) and fateful “Lage . . . der Menschen” (human condition) in a world whose literatures reach far beyond the European archive enshrined in Mimesis.

Pre, Tyler Grand

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9989217

Aimé Césaire’s long poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal is the most expressive example of his ambitious effort “infléchir le français” (“to inflect the French”), as he famously put it in an interview, “pour exprimer, dison: ce moi, ce moi-nègre, ce moi-créole, ce moi-martiniquais, ce moi-antillais” (translated by Brent Edwards, this reads: “in order to express, let’s say: “this I, this nègre-I, this creole-I, this Martinican-I, this Antillean-I”). Many scholars have read the Cahier’s inflection of French language and discourse in terms of its elaborate use of Latinate neologisms, archaic terminology, and typographic wordplay; however, less attention has been given to the implications this poem’s tortuous shifts in address have as a radical critique of the formal desires and ontological exclusions of Enlightenment universalism. Through the way Césaire rearticulates the basic components of grammatical address in a vexed, lyric encounter with the colonial reality of Martinique, he gradually recalibrates the relationship between the poem’s speaker and the African-diasporic community of and beyond Martinique as that between a kind of intersubjective voice of négritude and a globally discursive locus of anticolonialism—what he later calls the “rendez-vous de la conquête” (“convocation of conquest”).

Vanwesenbeeck, Birger

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9989230

This essay seeks to fill a gap in the scholarship on Paul de Man by taking stock of the scattered references to Flemish in his later writings. Taking its cue from a passing remark in the most recent de Man biography—namely, that late in life the theorist attested repeatedly in private to the experience of “losing” his native tongue—this article has two aims. One is to show that de Man’s later works bear witness to this ongoing experience of native-linguistic loss; the other is to relate this experience to the theory of deconstruction that de Man had espoused by then. To this latter end, the essay establishes a comparison between de Man’s later works, from Allegories of Reading (1979) onward, and Jacques Derrida’s 1996 autobiographical essay Monolingualism of the Other in order to show how the deconstructive theory conception of language-as-other is rooted in these two thinkers’ respective experiences of native-linguistic loss. The essay closes by reflecting on the contrast between a major language's relative resilience to native-linguistic loss, as in the case of Derrida’s French, and the far more precarious condition of a minor language in exile such as de Man's Flemish.

Beeber, Matthew

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9989243

This essay addresses Pablo Neruda and Nancy Cunard’s Spanish Civil War poetry anthology Los poetas del mundo defienden al pueblo espanol alongside Cunard’s earlier anthology, her massive and eclectic Negro: Anthology (1934). I argue that when read alongside Cunard’s later, lesser-known collaboration with Neruda, Negro can be seen as one part of Cunard’s larger trajectory as an editor of coalitional anthologies. Los poetas, an understudied collection of modernist poetry deserving of recovery in its own right, also allows greater perspective of Cunard’s earlier anthology. Reading Negro alongside Los poetas makes clear that the stakes of the project, along with the current academic discourse surrounding Cunard, are rooted in questions of the possibility of coalition. Ultimately, I argue that these anthologies uniquely model within their aesthetic form the organization of the political coalitions they seek to produce. They are coalitional, with the goal of bringing disparate elements into productive harmony, in both aesthetics and praxis. I locate what I call coalitional aesthetics within each volume, simultaneously attesting to the disparity of its constituent parts and to their unity. Coalitional aesthetics do not smooth over incongruities between individual parts but rather emphasize them, insisting on their singularity even within the whole they comprise.

Tanna, Natasha

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9989256

This article analyzes queer literary politics and the engagement with cultural precursors in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century in works by Cuban writer Ena Lucía Portela and Argentine writer María Moreno. The lack of a clearly defined tradition of lesbian/queer literature by women in Cuba and Argentina leads these two writers to appropriate or invent their own during periods of increasing liberalization in their respective countries. At first glance, Portela and Moreno’s joyful gestures of what this essay conceptualizes as “creative plagiarism” appear to signal their reveling in a cosmopolitan commons, largely situated in the United States and Europe, via Paris of the années folles (Crazy Years), from which fragments can be drawn to create queer counter-canons. However, the article concludes that through their highly intertextual works both writers reflect critically on the location of the so-called cosmopolitan in queer literary genealogies and on power dynamics and hierarchies among both authors and characters and different creative forms, including academic writing. The article argues that while the diegesis of their texts is largely set outside their local contexts, both writers’ works are deeply located in Cuba and Argentina. Ultimately, Portela and Moreno claim authority for creative writers themselves, as well as their nonliterary cocreators, reflecting critically on literary scholarship.

Harrison, Nicholas

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9989269

Srinivasan, Ragini Tharoor

2022 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-9989282