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Abstract: Arich and unmistakable irony is implicit in Theodore Ziolkowski's essay "Nietzsche among the Novelists." While Ziolkowski does some excellent work identifying fictions written about the nineteenth-century philologist, his analysis of those texts is ultimately unconvincing, because Ziolkowski lacks a basic grasp of the way the genre of biofiction uniquely functions and signifies. What makes this deficiency so ironic is that Nietzsche himself formulated why biofiction as an aesthetic form had to come into being, and he authored one of the most important biofictions—so if anyone should have a compelling framework to analyze, interpret, and assess the genre, that person should be a Nietzsche scholar.In what follows, I ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: For nearly three hundred years, Jonathan Swift has vexed readers of his 1726 Gulliver's Travels.1 Gulliver's controversial statements upon his return to England from Houyhnhnm land, such as "my friends often tell me in a blunt way that I trot like a horse," and "I converse" with my horses "four hours every day," have created perennial critical polarization over the hero's apparent equiphilia (GT, pp. 235, 244). That is, because his experiences with the superbly rational Houyhnhnms have led Gulliver to prefer horses to humans, readers have diagnosed him either as madman or misanthrope.2 Gulliver, it seems, is not too swift—his kingdom for a horse.Recent scholarship frames Gulliver's odd behaviors with sympathetic ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Many scholars have seen Nietzsche's treatment of Euripides in The Birth of Tragedy to be perplexing and even unjust precisely because it overlooks so many of the elements of Euripides's Bacchae—especially the multifarious depictions of Dionysus—which seem to cohere with, rather than to contradict, Nietzsche's own notion of the Dionysian throughout The Birth of Tragedy.1 According to Albert Henrichs, Nietzsche's overtly negative treatment of Euripides, as the man who (along with Socrates) helps bring about the death of Greek tragedy through his rationalism and optimism, is a result of the fact that Nietzsche simply adopts many of the predominant nineteenth-century denigrations of Euripides as a bad tragedian ("LD," ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In his thought-provoking book The Distance of Irish Modernism, John Greaney embarks on a metacritical journey to unravel the paradoxical nature of Irish modernist fictions. The book delves into the enigma of how these works serve as vessels for national and transnational histories while simultaneously presenting themselves as elusive and peculiar in terms of their temporal and geographical settings. Greaney skillfully examines the complexities of Irish modernism in the twenty-first century through close reading, formal analysis, narratology, philosophical accounts of literature, historicist and materialist approaches, and postcolonial and world literature paradigms. The result is a groundbreaking narrative that ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The relevance of translation to the construct of world literature is one of the thematic concerns in David Damrosch's now-classic What Is World Literature',1 which establishes the centrality of translation to the global circulation and reception of a literary work. Since Damrosch, a myriad of high-profile articulations around translation have been developed by scholars in world and comparative literature. Among these are Pascale Casanova, who positions translation as an act of consecration for minor literatures migrating toward metropolitan centers of publishing, notably Paris;2 and Rebecca Walkowitz, who advances the new quasi-genre "born-translated" fiction—novels written with a global audience in mind and ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Since the late 1990s, with the acceleration of globalization, the world has seen a steady revival of interest in and discussion of the Goethean idea of Weltliteratur, which was put forward and elucidated by the poet in the 1820s. Although Johann Wolfgang von Goethe didn't coin the term, as previously supposed, his use and promotion of the concept helped it get established among international literary and academic circles. His pronouncement during conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann that "national literature is now rather an unmeaning term, the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach"1 has been widely acknowledged as the proclamation of the "epoch of world ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Only that which is lost remains eternal.In this essay, I provide a philosophical reading of a famous tragedy of love and jealousy, one that, in A. B. Feldman's words, "for three centuries … has served as a lesson in jealousy,"2 i.e., Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice.3 I am assuming that the reader is familiar with the play, but let me begin with a few introductory words about the characters and the play's structure that will also help to contextualize my exploration. Othello is a valiant military commander at the service of the Venetian Republic. He has won Venice many battles and he is, in this respect, highly esteemed by the Duke and the Venetian senators. However, Othello is deeply aware ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Literary studies takes interpretation as its primary and proprietary mode of explanation. Elaine Auyoung observes, "As much as critics might disagree on the merits of reparative reading, paranoid reading, just reading, distant reading, close reading, surface reading, symptomatic reading, descriptive reading, or denotative reading, they share an implicit assumption that in all these cases reading is a synonym for interpretation."1 Interpretation in this sense is what John Guillory calls the "sophisticated practice of reading, beyond the ability to comprehend basic meaning."2 It is less about what John Frow calls the "traditional hermeneutic question of how to interpret correctly" than about "textual exegesis and the ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Wang Ning's lead article in this symposium invites us to consider the tantalizing proposition that "world poetics is a theoretical sublimation of the research results of world literature and comparative poetics."1 If we leave aside the psychoanalytically charged term "sublimation," which would merit examination in its own right and is beyond the scope of this paper, the principal issue I detect in his formulation is the need to scrutinize more closely the status of theory and poetics, which Wang appears to be treating—as most scholars of world literature do—as synonymous. In what follows, I discuss in more depth the relationship between world literature and literary theory, but also that between theory and poetics; ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: To look at the entire range of contributions to the discussion on comparative poetics in English—let alone in other languages, including Chinese, or even to interventions by Chinese in English—would exceed the limitations of the present article. An article by Xiaolu Wang and Liu Yan offers a useful overview of the Chinese archive.4 For Anglo-American scholars interested in comparative poetics specifically encompassing Chinese poetics, the earliest relevant texts usually cited are by James J. Y. Liu,5 Stephen Owen, Earl Miner, Longxi Zhang, and Wai-lim Yip. More recent contributions in English by Chinese scholars include those by Zong-qi Cai, Zhang, and Wang Ning. Particularly active in Chinese, along with Wang, has ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Dass Ihr erkennt: Weltpoesie Allein ist Weltversöhnung.(That you understand: world poetry Alone is world reconciliation.)In the nineteenth century, in the year after the death of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, orientalist linguist and poet Friedrich Rückert posited something called "world poetry." Possibly, Rückert meant the term to be synonymous with world literature, but given that he used the phrase within a poem that was to serve as a preface to his German translation of the Book of Songs, the Shi Jing, one of the Confucian classics sometimes called in English the Book of Odes, I will interpret the word's referent as "world lyric." What, however, does "world lyric" mean' Possibilities include: the sum total of ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: "World literature," envisioned by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the early nineteenth century, has come of age. After occupying the minds of thinkers, scholars, and readers for a considerably long period since Goethe first proposed the term, it has now evolved into a special category of literature in institutions of higher education, existing alongside such branches as Arabic literature, Chinese literature, Indian literature, Japanese literature, English literature, American literature, European literature, and so on. A solid proof of its maturity is to be found in college textbooks. In the English-speaking world, several anthologies have appeared that take the titles of "world literature," "masterpieces of world ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: "In any event, our philological home is the earth: it can no longer be the nation."The Germanic and internationalizing literary magus Johann Wolfgang von Goethe conceptualized the long-lasting term Weltliteratur in Enlightenment-era contexts of increasing relativization after having been inspired by various non-Western literary works he had read, including Persian lyric poems of sublime grandeur as well as some lesser-known Chinese literary works. The ongoing construction and transformation of world poetics thus had its foundation in both the reading and writing of "world literature" as such, and in the ongoing theorization of comparative poetics in all the shifting geopolitical entanglements of West and East. ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Bob Dylan, like Dante's Virgil, takes us on an odyssey through sixty-six levels, not of the Underworld but of Songworld, in The Philosophy of Modern Song. With playful prose rhythms measured for pleasure and effect, these vistas are almost all seen through second-person portrayals. His gorgeous write-up on Uncle Dave Macon's "Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy" (1924), for instance, conveys the "happy wanderer, the chicken thief," embodying the flagrant aristocracy of freedom: "You're the Dalai Lama, the Black Monk … The Thief of Baghdad … prowling and shoplifting … Multiracial, bisexual, celibate … freethinking … fucking and farting … Long John Silver … a pastry chef … hash slinger" (pp. 237–38). In Dylan's telling ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In what may seem an odd pairing, this essay puts the fiction of Ralph Ellison and the moral theory of Iris Murdoch in conversation. Why should we read the Anglo-Irish philosopher and novelist Murdoch and the African American novelist and essayist Ellison together, what common ground might we find, and what might be illuminated by this pairing' For starters, both Ellison and Murdoch favor the Platonic metaphor of vision in their examinations of the moral life. Ellison shapes his 1952 magnum opus, Invisible Man, around this theme, while Murdoch makes it the central tenet of the moral philosophy she began to publish in the 1960s.Perhaps partly because of their classicism and Platonism, Ellison and Murdoch have both ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In his contribution on "Western poetics" to The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, B. M. Reed defines poetics as "the branch of lit. crit. devoted to poetry, esp. to the study of its characteristic techniques, conventions, and strategies. The word can also refer to theoretical texts on the topic, above all to Aristotle's famous philosophical treatise."1 Reed claims that poetics can also be used "both in a narrower and a more expansive sense." In a narrow sense, poetics designates "the compositional principles to which a particular poet subscribes," while in a broad sense, it may be used as "a label for any formal or informal survey of the structures, devices, and norms that enable a discourse, genre, or ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-22T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In the field of international comparative literature and literary theory studies, discussing the issue of world literature has been increasingly important and attractive to scholars of these two fields. The appearance of this phenomenon is by no means accidental, as the subject of world literature is closely related to the advent of globalization. That is why world literature has become a cutting-edge theoretical topic in the age of globalization. This is particularly important to current Chinese literary theory and criticism as, along with the rapid development of the Chinese economy, Chinese humanities scholars are trying to construct their own theoretical discourse.Thus, for us Chinese scholars, to discuss world ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-22T00:00:00-05:00