COMPARATIVE LITERATURE最新文献

{"title":"Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848","authors":"Sean Franzel","doi":"10.1215/00104124-10475484","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-10475484","url":null,"abstract":"In a seminar I teach on seriality and small forms, students usually begin the course a bit perplexed by seriality as a concept, but, by the end of the semester, they commonly report back that they can’t help but see seriality everywhere they look. In our age of so-called peak TV, cascading sequels and prequels in the Marvel and DC universes, and the never-ending stream of social media feeds, it is certainly not hard to find oneself inundated by chunks of culture that are decidedly serial in structure and presentation. From a scholarly perspective, viewing cultural objects as parts in a series is a particular choice, one step in a methodological process: as the theorist of popular seriality Frank Kelleter has noted, “One and the same text can be regarded as simultaneously serial and non-serial, depending on the perspective from which it is seen.” Clare Pettitt is clear about where she stands on this choice: in her monograph Serial Forms she programmatically treats texts, images, artifacts, and performances as elements of various different sorts of multimedia series, and she calls for an understanding of seriality as the defining form of modernity. The methodological stakes for such a call are high, not least because much of the history of literary and cultural criticism has opted to look at a limited number of novels, poems, or plays by certain privileged authors as singular, self-standing works. Pettitt’s incisive monograph sets a new bar for studies of serial forms and their effects in shaping the cultural, social, and political imagination.It is quite in keeping with her topic that Pettitt has tasked herself with not one but three books on the history of modern seriality from the early nineteenth century up to the end of the First World War, and Serial Forms is the first, focusing on the period between 1815 and 1848. Locating the advent of familiarly modern modes of seriality in the nineteenth century is certainly a recognizable move to literary and cultural historians working in the fields of periodical studies and book and print history; indeed, critics commonly point to nineteenth-century serialized fiction when contextualizing the current boom in serial TV. Pettitt’s book builds on scholarship on nineteenth-century literary seriality, but she also advocates for expanding our focus beyond prose fiction published in installments, treating seriality not merely as a literary category, but also as a political, historical, and social phenomenon. This is a welcome approach that allows her to address news reporting and visual culture, historicism and public performance, new understandings of biological life and citizenship, and more, showing the significance of serial forms for a wide range of different elements of society. In particular, Pettitt argues that serial forms reorganize the awareness of time and of social life. As she puts it, serial media function as “technologies of capture,” selecting out and circumscribing certain noteworthy occurre","PeriodicalId":45160,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135394143","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Loose Yet Effective Link: Some Creative Aspects of Comparative Literature","authors":"Paelabang Danapan","doi":"10.1215/00104124-10475419","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-10475419","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract As a promoter of the literature of Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples, our most important task is to foster a relatively open and relaxed environment to encourage our people to continue and perpetuate their interest and vitality in “creative writing.” The purpose of this essay, by focusing on the aspect of “creative writing” and based on actual practice, is to raise several controversial issues that can influence writing for consideration. First, we deal with the strategic question of the choice of “language” that Indigenous literary creation must face; second, we examine the problem of “literariness” and “realness” in Indigenous literary creation; finally, we clearly pinpoint the distance between tribal and national imagination, in order to prevent Indigenous literature from being kidnapped by the so-called “national identity” in contemporary Taiwan.","PeriodicalId":45160,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135394151","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Pleasure’s Swerve: Philology among Lucretius, Derrida, and Deleuze","authors":"Jessie Hock","doi":"10.1215/00104124-10475432","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-10475432","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the 1983 article “My Chances/Mes chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies,” Jacques Derrida gives philological questions massive philosophical significance by reading the long âgon between idealist and materialist philosophy through a philological crux in the text of Lucretius’s De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things). Tracing philological debates that have surrounded Lucretius from the Renaissance onward, this article argues that Lucretius’s poetic theory of interlinked atomic and textual swerves and the philological history that has mediated them were important touchstones for both Derrida and the other major twentieth-century philosopher of difference, Gilles Deleuze. Additionally, the article argues that for both Derrida and Deleuze, the clinamen offers a theory not only of how atoms or alphabetical letters swerve or even split, but also of how a philosophical tradition such as materialism refuses to run in a straight, unitary line. This is a question of how to understand reception history: either as an unbroken tradition of faithful imitation and replication (a family genealogy, grouped under the name of the father, “Lucretius” for example), or else as something less patriarchal, less heteronormative, less faithful. Read this way, the swerve offers a rethinking of the methods of reception history itself.","PeriodicalId":45160,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135394141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Translating Line Breaks: A View from Persian Poetics","authors":"Kayvan Tahmasebian, Rebecca Ruth Gould","doi":"10.1215/00104124-10475471","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-10475471","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Line breaks are arguably the defining feature of poetry, in the absence of which a text becomes prose. Consequently, the translation of line breaks is a decisive issue for every poetry translator. Classical and modern literary theorists have argued that the potential for enjambment, which we understand as the effect that makes line breaks possible in poetry, constitutes the difference between poetry and prose. Yet, the translation of line breaks is among the least studied areas of translation theory. This essay explores the challenge of translating classical and modernist line breaks through examples from Persian and European literary canons. From Shams-i Qays’s classic treatise on Persian prosody to Arthur Rimbaud and William Carlos Williams to modernist poet Bijan Elahi’s poetic rewriting of One Thousand and One Nights, we explore the options open to the translator-poet who seeks to create a new poem in and through translation.","PeriodicalId":45160,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135394146","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Architectonics of Hope: Fragments of Life and Text in Walter Benjamin and Hart Crane","authors":"John Hoffmeyer","doi":"10.1215/00104124-10475458","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-10475458","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay develops a comparative account of Walter Benjamin’s and Hart Crane’s architectonic metaphors for text, culture, and history. I argue that theorist and poet alike employ parallel conceptual frameworks that analogize the “building” of the text to the condensation and constellation of disjunctive historical materials, thereby resisting progressivist conceptions of literary and cultural tradition. I further highlight the ways in which, for both figures, experiences of built images are ever-mediated, in contrast to certain strains of extant scholarship that interpret Crane’s poetry and Benjamin’s philosophy as dependent on the fiction of immediate affective experience, as if sensory perception were not always-already conditioned by the mediating abstractions of cognition and memory. Motivated by the personal and political struggles both men faced as outcasts, their visions of the fragmented cityscape as imbued with a complex, compositional logic of form and history ground, at once, the possibility of textual communicability and the preservation and transmission of memory—personal, collective, historical, and cultural. It is by virtue of this shared formal-historical logic—and the faith in a better future persisting therein—that I develop and defend Benjamin’s and Crane’s “architectonics of hope.”","PeriodicalId":45160,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135394152","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Decolonizing US Comparative Literature: The 2022 ACLA Presidential Address","authors":"Shu-mei Shih","doi":"10.1215/00104124-10475380","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-10475380","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay examines how comparative literature as a discipline has never confronted its interlocking contexts of settler colonialism, imperialism, and racialization as its conditions of possibility in the United States. Inspired by recent efforts at decolonization in other disciplines, this essay calls for decolonizing comparative literature via a critique of the discipline from the nineteenth century to the present. From evolutionary scientism at its origin, overarching and continuing Eurocentrism, the disavowal of area studies, the rise of literary theory, and the primacy of non-US-focused postcolonial studies to problematic conceptions of multiculturalism, the discipline has scrupulously dissociated itself from the US reality. This dissociation, in the final analysis, replicates and supports the settler-colonial structure that evacuates the Indigenous peoples from their land and replaces Indigenous knowledge with settler knowledge, showing comparative literature to be a settler-colonial discipline. Hence, the necessary settler-colonial critique of comparative literature ought to be superseded by Indigeneity-centered practices in our work for decolonization to be possible.","PeriodicalId":45160,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135394144","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Spatiality of Poverty in Modern Chinese Realism","authors":"Keru Cai","doi":"10.1215/00104124-10475445","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-10475445","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Early twentieth-century Chinese realist depictions of indoor space, such as the crowded tenement house and the penniless writer’s abode, enabled the portrayal of the physical and psychological exigencies of poverty. This set of narrative concerns arose in a period when Chinese writers were preoccupied with the alleged material and cultural poverty of China in comparison to the West. To remedy this purported backwardness, Chinese writers appropriated from foreign literatures, especially Russian realism, narrative themes and techniques such as the use of metonymy in the depiction of spatiality, the figure of the impoverished flâneur-like urban perambulator, and the very topic of poverty itself. This gave rise to innovative forms of modern Chinese narrative, tracing the spatial, material, and bodily experience of poverty in painstaking detail. In particular, I examine how Yu Dafu elaborates on literary elements from Russia in his 1924 story “Nights of Spring Fever,” which deploys the metonymic confines of impoverished, narrow spaces in order to explore wider topics of social class and transcultural encounter.","PeriodicalId":45160,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135394148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Trans-Indigenous Lens: A Re-recognition","authors":"Chadwick Allen","doi":"10.1215/00104124-10475406","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-10475406","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Originally part of the 2022 Presidential Roundtable “Comparative Literature and Indigeneity,” this essay meditates on the ACLA president’s call to “decolonize” the field of comparative literature. Beyond providing a catchy slogan, what might “decolonization” mean for the practice of our scholarship and teaching? As a beginning of an answer, the essay revisits the author’s 2012 Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies and considers what has—and, importantly, what has not—changed within literary studies marked as “comparative,” “world,” and/or “global” in the decade since the book’s publication. How have provocations to center the Indigenous as an optics and as a mode of analysis been taken up, extended, critiqued, or reimagined by others? To illustrate the potential limitations of calls to “decolonize” dominant academic institutions, including the field of comparative literature, the essay offers a preliminary analysis of how a specific example of Indigenous self-representation produces meaning within two related but contrasting venues for display and interpretation: a conventional museum space implicitly coded as “colonial” and an avant-garde museum space explicitly labeled as “decolonizing.” The results are suggestive of the difficulty for dominant academic institutions to transcend colonial foundations and ongoing colonial habits.","PeriodicalId":45160,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135394150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Étude sur les retournements de perspectives critiques sur Baudelaire(1) : jusqu’aux années 1890","authors":"Hye-won Lee","doi":"10.21720/complit90.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21720/complit90.08","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45160,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80390675","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Satirical Novel and World Literature: The Acceptance Aspect of Aldous Huxley in the Colonial Period","authors":"Miyeong Kim","doi":"10.21720/complit90.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21720/complit90.02","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45160,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78939273","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}