{"title":"“Re-expression” as Expression: Race and the Environment in the Work of Mary Hunter Austin","authors":"Ana Baginski","doi":"10.3138/ycl-64-020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ycl-64-020","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:If Anthropocene discourse considers environmental breakdown as a post-racial horizon in light of which the human might be reconceptualized as geological agent, this article turns to early twentieth-century environmental writer Mary Austin to identify a similar positioning of particular environmental conditions beyond the scope of human habitability as a horizon in relation to which she could imagine Indigenous and settler territorial boundaries to “fail together.” The idea of un-inhabitability serves a regulative function when it comes to conceiving of difference—racial, cultural, gendered —thought to be both bridgeable and unbridgeable. Austin’s poetic “re-expression” of what she termed “Amerindian songs” into written poetry has been read as attempting, appropriatively, to bridge such a divide. This article reads Austin’s “re-expressions” in the context of her autobiography and fictional narrative work to argue that the writer did not believe in the aesthetic promise that she is often criticized for espousing. Austin’s understanding of the gendered, racializing, and individualizing aspects of disclosure makes her poetic “re-expressions” of Indigenous oral forms as written poems examples of a self-conscious failure of both literary and anthropological modes of cultural representation. Her work is full of this tension. On the one hand, there is an appeal to the aesthetic in a philosophical register, an abyss that also impossibly bridges what is known and what is understood; on the other hand, a realization of literary production’s desire for a kind of anthropological presentation of what it is not. In this sense, Austin’s early twentieth-century environmental writing can help us to recognize the stakes of twenty-first-century environmentalisms that are full of, but rarely conscious of, similar tensions.","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"33 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":"132866243","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":"Extreme Sports: An Exercise in Imitation","authors":"Herschel Farbman","doi":"10.3138/ycl.63.010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ycl.63.010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:A phenomenon of the late twentieth century, the professionalization of so-called \"extreme\" sports is a second wave of the professionalization of sports, the first wave being the tsunami of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which left behind it the world of \"mainstream,\" \"traditional,\" \"dominant,\" or \"established\" sports in relation to which extreme sports position themselves as such. As in the first wave, the ideological proposition that sports are a \"metaphor for life\" figures largely in the second wave, but not in the same way. This article explores what changes: what happens to the figure of the fanatic, who had worn the mantle of the madness of the metaphor; what happens to the figure of the professional athlete as exemplary worker; and what effects these transformations have on the relation between athlete and writer in the ideological scheme of the corporate capitalist division of labor. Underlying these questions, the article pursues, in its form as well as its argument, a sustained reflection on the limits of mimetic play in the unbounded field that extreme sports have opened up.","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"85 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124997190","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":"Walls, Towers, Books: Borges, Kafka, and the Limits of the Proper","authors":"Kate Jenckes","doi":"10.3138/ycl.63.004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ycl.63.004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Against prevalent interpretations of Jorge Luis Borges's and Franz Kafka's works as illustrations of entrapment or celebratory postulations of unrestrained infinity, this article argues that Borges's engagements with Kafka elude both extremes by staging contradictions internal to the structure of the proper, from imperial sovereignty to cultural patrimony. This article begins with Borges's account of Kafka's \"On Building the Chinese Wall,\" in which the construction of empire is described as infinite subjugation, infinitely deferred, akin to Babelic dispersion coinciding with the construction of the Tower of Babel. The article then examines Kafka-inspired constructions of the proper and their internal difference and deferral in Borges's \"On Exactitude in Science,\" \"The Wall and the Books,\" and \"Kafka and His Precursors.\"","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114568935","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":"Conic Sections, Kafka's Babel","authors":"Simon Horn","doi":"10.3138/ycl.63.003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ycl.63.003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Before we can think building, or Kafka's buildings, we must bring a little-known Kafka into view: not the narrator of built worlds, but the theorist of the unbuilt. Kafka stakes out his theory on the construction site of the Tower of Babel, the originary unbuilt building. Yet Kafka finds that Babel is most present precisely when it is most absent—that the nothing where the Tower should stand is the source of a strangely strong faith, the sure foundation of all our politics. Producing space and time, Kafka's Babel draws us unwittingly into a regime of conic sections: ideal shapes of authority and desire that, without our laying even the first brick, build our world.","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127062027","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":"Transmedial Noise: Babel and the Translation of Radio","authors":"Erin Graff Zivin","doi":"10.3138/ycl.63.002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ycl.63.002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In his 1923 essay \"The Task of the Translator,\" Walter Benjamin takes a strong stance against the idea of communicability in poetry: \"But what then is there in a poem—and even bad translators concede this to be essential—besides a message? Isn't it generally acknowledged to be the incomprehensible, the secret, the 'poetic'?\" The theory of translation that flows from this statement is one in which concepts such as transparency and originality are cast aside in favor of the notion of the secret that, he claims, lies at the heart of poetic language. Here, the idea of Babel as a site of confusion, as a fall from grace, is called into question. How do we approach Babel today, and what new forms, what new media allow us to reconsider Benjamin's assertions? This article considers the way in which conceptual art has approached the question of untranslatability through the motif of noise. Evaluating the role sound plays in thinking through the problem of untranslatability, I suggest that it is through \"transmedial exposure\"—the exposure of one medium to another—that we can begin to think about the ethics and politics of untranslatability, of Babel. The article takes as a case study Brazilian conceptual artist Cildo Meireles's 2001 large-scale sculptural installation Babel, a tower of radios each tuned to a different station that, taken together, produce an overwhelming experience of cacophony.","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"89 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115151054","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":"Precarious Futures: Kafka's Prose of Survival","authors":"Dominik Zechner","doi":"10.3138/ycl.63.009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ycl.63.009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Philosophical readings from Walter Benjamin to Hans Blumenberg and beyond often emphasize the death-boundness of Franz Kafka's prose, characterizing his work as a literature determined by the certainty of finitude. This article explores a series of critical moments in Kafka's oeuvre where finitude is explicitly called into question for the sake of a movement of survival (\"Überleben\"). Survival manifests as a fragile mode of persistence that is neither governed by the authority of death, nor does it simply fall on the side of infinity. Instead, it indicates something like a precarious future—the subjunctive anticipation of a remainder beyond the limit of finitude. Advancing an understanding of Kafka's work in terms of a prose of survival, this article suggests an intense kinship between Kafka's works and other literary endeavors invested in probing the limits of finitude, most notably in works by Jorge Luis Borges.","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132790490","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":"The Moral Meaning of Babel: Kafka, Ahad Ha'am, Borges","authors":"P. North","doi":"10.3138/ycl.63.008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ycl.63.008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The moral meaning of the Tower of Babel is diaspora, but there are many thoughts of diaspora. A comparative evaluation of disapora thoughts is needed. I compare two esoteric ones, that of Ahad Ha'am and Jorge Luis Borges, with some reference to Franz Kafka, in order to evaluates the effects of a pattern of dispersal on a human community. In the battle between Borges's and Ha'am's diaspora thoughts, the more radical and morally better pattern belongs to the less radical thinker. Both commit to a negative concept of diaspora. Borges commits, however, to an absolute diaspora, in which a person or a people can only get lost. Ha'am commits to a relative diaspora, in which a people takes its orientation continually from multiple vectors of distance and foreignness.","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"485 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133273979","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":"Architectures of Totality: Structure, History and Polemos in Kafka and Borges","authors":"P. Dove","doi":"10.3138/ycl.63.001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ycl.63.001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Parable in the works of Franz Kafka provides a literary site for exploring the relation between likeness and difference and between what can be compared and the limit of comparison. By the same token, the parabolic topos of Babel points toward an internal limit for political power and the logic of sovereignty, a limit that both gives rise to sovereignty and ruins its attempts to consolidate itself as all-encompassing and permanent. With Jorge Luis Borges, meanwhile, his return to the parable of Babel gives rise to a consideration of the absolute or specular identity of thought and being and of how such an identity would in fact announce the end of history as such. For Borges, it is from the temporality of time that history draws its possibility, above and beyond all claims to unified thought and being.","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121486413","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":"Le Type Espagnol","authors":"Jacques Lezra","doi":"10.3138/ycl.63.007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ycl.63.007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Today, \"untranslatability\" marks the limit of translation's articulation with global capital's value form. The concept of value enabled by translatability and limited by untranslatability expresses itself in Babelian narrative—narratives regarding an originary unity of languages and their eventual dispersal and antagonism. In the system formed, in Droit de regards, by Jacques Derrida, Marie-François Plissart, and Jorge Luis Borges, the hypothesis of untranslatability takes a form incompatible with the paradigm of Babelian narrative and offers another stance, lexicon, and time for thinking the ends of capital in its global form.","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128064179","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":"Politics in a Small Room: Subterranean Babel in Piglia's El camino de Ida","authors":"D. Kelman","doi":"10.3138/ycl.63.005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/ycl.63.005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Ricardo Piglia's El camino de Ida (2013) is a meditation on the global shift from a political sovereignty that depends on visibility and height to a mode of political action that is as violent as it is \"invisible.\" In other words, we witness a shift from the Tower of Babel to what Franz Kafka called \"the pit of Babel,\" a digging downwards that is also a mode of construction. While the age of literary modernity is very familiar with the figure of the isolated writer, political theory would have us believe that this drive toward a \"pit of Babel\" precludes political action. Nevertheless, Piglia's emphasis on the role of literature—and even \"comparative literature\"—in the story of the Unabomber (or \"the Recycler\" in the novel) allows Piglia to think through a notion of politics in the age of the \"loner,\" a politics that emerges from a small room.","PeriodicalId":342699,"journal":{"name":"The Yearbook of Comparative Literature","volume":"37 7","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"113958322","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}