The Yearbook of Comparative Literature最新文献

{"title":"Foreign Poems","authors":"Peter Nicholls","doi":"10.3138/ycl-65-003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ycl-65-003","url":null,"abstract":"The article begins by considering Giuseppe Ungaretti’s fascination with an early Canzone by Leopardi, “Alla Primavera, o delle favole antiche” (1822). The poem draws on old superstitions about the so-called demonio meridiano said to haunt the earth at noontime. Ungaretti takes this “blind hour” when vision becomes mirage as the inaugural moment of a new poetics, Leopardi finding in the “uncertainty” of modern experience an alternative to the comfortable clichés of neoclassicism. Mallarmé and Valéry later perceive these intensities of light and heat as conditions of a poetry the latter describes “à la fois étranger et étrangère.” Valéry develops this idea of “foreignness” by describing the poet as “un espèce singulière de traducteur qui traduit le discours ordinaire … en ‘langage des dieux’.” The article considers ways in which some later French poets develop this nexus of poetry, painting and translation to explore the kinds of “foreignness” said to animate poetic language.","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"244 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139018963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“A Stratagem for Self-Oblivion”: Rosselli, Real Talk, and the Abolition of the “I”","authors":"Ramsey Mcglazer","doi":"10.3138/ycl-65-008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ycl-65-008","url":null,"abstract":"This essay analyzes the poetry of Amelia Rosselli alongside accounts of urban displacement, deinstitutionalization, and political militancy. I show that Rosselli comes to see poetry as allowing for a suspension of the self that is also a way of taking distance from the demands addressed to it, including the demands that it defend itself, assert itself, pursue its interests, and reproduce the same. Poetry becomes a means of resisting ideology and its “lure of identity,” a practice on its way to what Rosselli, translating and altering a phrase from Charles Olson, calls “the abolition of the I.” Before turning to this process as it plays out in Rosselli’s poetry, I ask what gets in the way of the self’s suspension, what thwarts self-abolition, making it appear unthinkable and impossible. I take bourgeois ideology to be one answer to this question, and I argue that ideology sustains the “reparative” and “postcritical” tendencies traceable to the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Analyzing a key scene in Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” that stages a refusal to read, I study the implications of this refusal and consider counterfactual alternatives.","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"53 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139016848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Damage and Repair in Environmental Assessment","authors":"C. Malcolm","doi":"10.3138/ycl-64-050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ycl-64-050","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Contemporary scholarship regards the acknowledgment of harm as an ethically necessary precondition for work on the environment. In this article, I show that the admission and subsequent management of harm have long been central to racial and colonial projects. To do so, I trace a logic of what counts as tolerable damage and what is thought to be able to be repaired in environmental assessment reports produced for the Alberta tar sands. What I find in these documents is that anxiety over complicity with historical damage leads to fantasies of reparability. In analyses of the political culture of the tar sands, I argue that conceding damage is better understood as an attempt to manage the appearance of violence and reinterpret its history. In the different examples on which I focus, responsibility for harm is performed. By making impacts legible and detailing plans to address them through mitigation, compensation, or replacement, resource extraction companies engage in fantasies of repair and admissions of destruction. This article works to theorize what function such gestures serve and how they contribute to perceiving the environment as something that must be managed. I show that its function is to describe the nature of loss along with a theorization of its reality.","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"78 19","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"113943254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Abolish Species: Notes toward an “Unfenced Is,” Part I","authors":"M. Ty","doi":"10.3138/ycl-64-080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ycl-64-080","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Despite its provenance in racial paradigms of colonial research, the notion of species has proved to be remarkably resilient and adaptable to post-racial frameworks of thought. Species has survived both the death of the subject and the cancellation of man. In their ascendance over nineteenth-century evolutionary theories of life, white environmentalisms have relegitimated this keystone of biological racism by deploying species as if it were an ideologically agnostic articulation of a meaningful grouping. This article unsettles the common portrayal of species as a culturally unmarked and racially neutral concept, whose function is to denominate what remains of the planet. Working against the orthodox definition of species as the “basic unit of biodiversity,” I apprehend species as a form of onto-epistemic incarceration that has been imposed, globally, as the dominant mode of biological understanding and, subsequently, as the prevailing structure of representation used to account for environmental loss and abundance. In excess of its taxonomic function, species serves as an instrument that, practically and ideationally, converts flesh into potential wealth. This investigation begins by checking the conventional presumption that captivity is incidental to species and examines how, on the contrary, species is productive of capture, whose economic and epistemic dimensions are mutually enriching. This critical reappraisal then moves toward an argument for the abolition of species, made on the basis of four overlapping grounds. First, the institution of species enforces mono-lingualism and consolidates white entitlement to bestow a universal name on everything living. Second, species normalizes extractive incarceration as a means of accumulating value. Third, species secures Euro-American hegemony over the way difference is “objectively” defined—restrictively, in terms of heteronormative logics of reproduction that, in turn, lend coherence to projects of racialization. Fourth, the notion of species enforces a normative paradigm for processing environmental loss that blocks perception of the colonial violence that it reproduces.","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122073878","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Receding Margins: Black Rice and the Rhythms of Tidal Transfer","authors":"Anne-Lise François","doi":"10.3138/ycl-64-040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ycl-64-040","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Plants and their cultivators play a privileged, if ambiguous, role in the recreation, maintenance, and transmission of cultural practices that settler colonialism believes to have definitively erased for having violently interrupted. Raising the question of what does and does not carry over in the transfer of roots and transport of seeds, survivance through the continued flourishing and tending of certain plants brings into focus what this special issue’s call for papers identifies as the dialectic of priority and incompletion defining a destruction that both precedes contemporary environmental calamity and escapes conclusion, remaining as unfinished, as unachieved, as it is still ongoing. In the words of the call, the articles collected here proceed from “a dual impulse: both to say there are things that have been destroyed which have yet to be perceived, and, there are things which have not been destroyed, which subsist without the need for critical recovery.” Numerous times when trying to write this essay, I have been stopped in equal measure by awe and grief: awe at the beauty of the cosmic rhythms of rise and fall, flood and recession, in relation to which human societies have learned to move and live, bringing these rhythms into relief through scalar mimesis and selective accentuation; grief at settler colonialism’s violent disruption of this mutual patterning.","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"119 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114056466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction to Environment and Loss","authors":"Ana Baginski, C. Malcolm, E. Trapp","doi":"10.3138/ycl-64-010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ycl-64-010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this introduction, the authors lay out the problem of an environmental consciousness that is grounded in a logic of recuperability, one that foregrounds the environment as an “object” external to human experience. The introduction shows how discourses of grief, mourning, and disaster are anthropocentric in the sense that they find and perceive the conflicts that go under the name “climate crisis” as always first in the external environment. In a counterintuitive way, this holding outside of human experience names destruction in the external environment as relatable only to the extent that it bears the imprint of human activity. On this model, attempts to show the intensification of loss continually misrecognize the work that the environment does to provide structures of continuity and the thought of the unconscious or inaccessible. Without this, climate breakdown is figured within an economy of “overrepresentation,” where no one can be outside it. The effect is to prioritize a racialized libidinal economy that projects proximity to crisis as always elsewhere and which then seeks “natural” figures for annihilation that testify to imminent extinction. The nonhuman, as paradoxically outside, but nevertheless within, the scope of regulation, is therefore always subtended by a racializing logic of availability. Instead, the authors seek to move environmental thinking to a different epistemological frame where what is withdrawn from view, recuperation, and speculation provides the basis for a reorientation to what is otherwise thought of as “past saving.”","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114501894","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ruin Gazing: Robert Frost and the Afterlives of Settler Environmentalism","authors":"S. Rahimtoola","doi":"10.3138/ycl-64-060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ycl-64-060","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article considers a paradox that structures the internal logic of the ideology of improvement, a central justification for settler colonialism’s strategies of cultural and material dispossession. Far from establishing a limit to settler colonialism as predicted by the writings of John Locke, scenes of ruined, abandoned land are seen to extend settler sovereignty. Specifically, the article examines settler representations of, and encounters with, ruin in the poetry of Robert Frost to argue that irony’s “infinite absolute negativity,” as Søren Kierkegaard states, enables settler subjects to defend against the threat of settler dissolution and magnify settler subjectivity. In a contemporary moment in which damage and devastation have become dominant modes of settler presence on the land, Frost’s poetry prepares us to consider the settler histories of ruin gazing that remain sedimented within contemporary environmental discourse.","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123669040","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Seafloor for the Disaster","authors":"Herschel Farbman","doi":"10.3138/ycl-64-030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ycl-64-030","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Across discourses and genres, stories of climate change often follow a race-against-time plot, as if confronting environmental disaster meant accepting the terms of the disaster film genre. The objective of this article is to elucidate some of the anxieties these terms manage, in particular, anxiety provoked, paradoxically, by the stability of the earth even in the worst-case scenarios—even, for example, in the case of the total uninhabitability of the earth for human beings. Within the framework of the race-against-time plot, the earth cannot appear as simultaneously stable and uninhabitable; uninhabitability can appear only as a breakdown of stability. Through readings of Sylvia Wynter, Jules Michelet, Jules Verne, and Lars von Trier, who takes the disaster film genre to its limit in Melancholia, this article elaborates an alternative to this splitting, starting from the seafloor, whose primal uninhabitability for human beings is unaffected by the wells that now puncture it and the cables that now cross it. Of course, there is a difference between the disastrous uninhabitability caused by capitalist production and the uninhabitability that precedes it primordially, but the latter is part and parcel of the stability that holds even in the worst-case scenarios. That this limit cannot be destroyed does not mean that there is any limit to how far the desire to destroy it can go. Rather, it helps account for the inextinguishability of the destructive desire, the acknowledgment of which, a condition for change, cannot happen within the terms of the race-against-time plot.","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"31 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114034011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On “The Edge of the Sea”: Climate Breakdown and Psychoanalysis","authors":"E. Trapp","doi":"10.3138/ycl-64-070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ycl-64-070","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article connects Rachel Carson’s idea of what “seem[s] unchanged” to a specific point in psychoanalysis’s narrative of loss, where the tension between letting go of an object that is external (mourning) and the incorporation of the lost object (melancholia) persists to such an extent that the indeterminacy of the internal/external object becomes the matter at hand for interpretation. This indeterminacy is experienced in and as unconscious phylogenetic phantasy, which I locate in Carson’s figure of change at the “edge of the sea.” This article attempts to bring the realm of unconscious phantasy directly to bear on ideas of the environment, using Harold Searles’s ideas of the nonhuman environment and phylogenetic regression to explore the idea of the psychical significance of the environment. It then extends these ideas about the significance of the nonhuman environment to thinking about change and reality in the clinical psychoanalytic space in the writing of Betty Joseph and Hans Loewald.","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"263 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115025483","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cinematic Genre and Viewer Engagement in Hitchcock’s Psycho","authors":"James F. Conant","doi":"10.3138/ycl-64-090","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ycl-64-090","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Alfred Hitchcock’s admirers are fond of praising his work for being cinematically innovative. This article seeks to determine wherein his achievement in this regard lies. It begins by reflecting on the ways in which his movies harbor a form of “false bottom”—one that characterizes the new form of cinematic genre that Hitchcock pioneers. It then examines some of the particular ways in which this allows for novel kinds of viewer engagement. It does so, in particular, by attending to the forms of cinematic invisibility and disclosure enabled by the shower scene in Psycho. That this scene is somehow remarkable is hardly news. Yet in priding ourselves on being struck by its cinematic virtuosity, we are apt to fail to appreciate how that impression deflects our attention from the scene’s real achievement— namely, the extent to which it enables the following five maneuvers all to be performed simultaneously in a manner permitting none of them to strike us on a first viewing: (1) the mediation of a transition from one organizing center of narrative subjectivity to another; (2) the dilation of the temporality of the scene in a manner that facilitates a registration of its significance; (3) a mode of aestheticization of the horror of the scene that opens up space for a very different form of experience of cinematic shock; (4) the artful concealment of the murderer’s identity requisite to the unfolding of its plot; and (5) the consolidation of a “false bottom” in the movie’s generic structure found throughout Hitchcock’s masterworks.","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"22 6S 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122811297","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}