Comparative Literature

Quint, David

2023 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-10160615

Contrary to the views of Hegelian critics, epic from its Homeric beginnings has projected a future time and future readers beyond its narrative frame. The genre does not close itself off in a heroic past. The episode of the Phaeacian banquet in the Odyssey places a utopian, technologically advanced and wealthy mercantile society side by side with its heroic world. The Phaeacians who listen to Odysseus’s wanderings and tales of Troy at their banquet figure a future, nonheroic audience for the poem itself. Subsequent imitations of this episode in major epics—the Aeneid, Orlando furioso, Os Lusíadas, Gerusalemme liberata, The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost—measure a modern, critical distance, fed by science and a commercial economy, upon epic and its heroic values. The genre contains a historical dialectic of past and present from its outset.

Rodríguez-Pliego, Mariajosé

2023 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-10160628

This article explores the relationship between storytelling and prophecy by reading narratives of extractivism in the US-Mexico borderlands that raise questions about the apocalyptic aftermaths of colonialism. Specifically, it analyzes contemporary migration stories narrated through Indigenous cosmovisions in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991) and Yuri Herrera’s Señales que precederán el fin del mundo (2009). It contends that Silko and Herrera’s novels employ Maya, Nahua, Yaqui, and Laguna Pueblo migration narratives to eschew colonial cartographic portrayals of the borderlands and reclaim them as dynamic spaces of mobility, as opposed to static cartographic lines. The article demonstrates how Indigenous epistemologies afford Silko and Herrera opportunities to extend their stories into underground spaces and lay bare a history of extractivism—specifically of mining. In doing so, the novels materialize the land’s colonial history and lay out prophecies for the end of our present world.

Newman, Scott

2023 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-10160641

This article examines the figuring of Black voices in literature, specifically addressing the grotesque sonority of Anglophone and Francophone African writing. The analysis focuses on the Zimbabwean Dambudzo Marechera’s stuttered speech in the semi-autobiographical short fiction The House of Hunger (1978) and the Congolese Sony Labou Tansi’s tropical sounds in the dictator novels La vie et demie (1979) and Les septs solitudes de Lorsa Lopez (1985). The article argues that the authors reprise colonial misconceptions of Africa as a noisy continent and parody racist mishearings of Black voices as illegible or dissonant in order to establish a literal and conceptual proximity of voice to violence. Marechera and Sony Labou Tansi thus identify the truly grotesque brutality of colonialism, including its sounded modes of bodily regulation, racist accent policing, ableist speech norms, and inimical linguistic control. The authors reject notions of proper speech and beautiful sound altogether. Instead, they turn to screaming, stuttering, and other postlingual utterances to cast doubt on the governability of sounded language in both graphic and phonic iterations. The article contributes to postcolonial literary criticism and sound studies by revising approaches to orality in African writing and racialized sound in literature more broadly.

Norgaard, Lara

2023 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-10160654

This essay analyzes representations of Asia in the satirical 1911 short story “O homem que sabia javanês” (“The Man Who Knew Javanese”) by Brazilian author Lima Barreto. Like much of Barreto’s work, the short story critiques the deterministic categories of scientific racism popular in elite circles during the First Brazilian Republic. However, this essay asserts that the references to Java in the story are not arbitrary means through which to carry out that critique. Instead, drawing on Lisa Lowe’s concept of residual intimacies and Bruno Carvalho’s engagement of cartografia letrada (lettered cartography), it argues that Barreto crafts a fiction of plausible contact between Brazil and Java, revealing transpacific spatial and racial entanglements that categories of canonized knowledge at the turn of the twentieth century failed to manage and control. Barreto imagines Java on the streets of Rio, revealing the tangible closeness of two experiences categorized as different and distant. The essay considers how the plausible yet fictional intimacies in this literary counternarrative conceptually reorient readers toward both the Pacific and the Atlantic.

Taylor-Batty, Juliette

2023 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-10160667

This article demonstrates that Beckett’s play Not I derives from a hitherto unrecognized source: Rimbaud’s poem of synesthesia, “Voyelles.” Revealing the significant intertextual links between Beckett’s play and Rimbaud’s poem, the article demonstrates that the striking central image of Not I—the disembodied mouth spewing out an almost incomprehensible torrent of words—directly recalls Rimbaud’s image for the vowel I in “Voyelles.” Beckett uses Rimbaud, the article argues, in a way that is distortive and translational: the image for I is carried across languages and across sensory planes: from French to English, from words on the page to theatrical performance; from verbal to visual and sensory experience. The correspondences between Not I and “Voyelles” are not only directly intertextual, however, but conceptual. Beckett draws particularly on two Rimbaudian concepts: the otherness of the poetic I, and the notion of a “dérèglement de tous les sens.” Adapting and translating Rimbaud’s conception of synesthesia in “Voyelles,” Beckett develops a theatrical mode that explores and manipulates various forms of cross-sensory experience, including synesthesia, to produce a “theater of the nerves.”

Hutchinson, Ben

2023 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-10160680

This article revisits the emergence of “comparative” and “world” literature within the early nineteenth century, arguing that we can only understand the full normative force of the two terms if we read them rhetorically. In order to do this, the article draws on Roman Jakobson’s classic essay “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances” (1956). Jakobson makes a number of claims in this essay, the most celebrated of which is his distinction between the two poles of “metaphoric” and “metonymic” language. The motor of metaphor, Jakobson reminds us, is similarity (one thing is like another); the motor of metonymy, on the other hand, is contiguity (one thing is next to, or part of another). Jakobson’s distinction, this article suggests, maps instructively onto the mechanisms of comparative and world literature: where the former compares one text to another, the latter situates one text within the global field of others. For comparison to be possible, initially, the things being compared must stand apart; to claim the status of world literature for a given work, conversely, is to make it part of a broader whole. Comparative and world literature may thus be said to function as a mobile army of metaphors and metonymies.

Caplan, Marc

2023 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-10160693

Wright, Timothy

2023 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-10160706