New Comparative Criticism – serie

What if the human species were to get in touch with another intelligent species, thus far unknown? This question is the impetus for a vast, exciting catalogue of science fiction and fantasy stories. They serve as hypothetical answers in narrative form but can also be regarded as cognitive exercises by which we investigate the nature and destiny of humanity. In other words, any creature and any story produced in response to this question requires an assessment of our notion of the human and a redefinition of our position and role in the world. This volume aims at mapping and analysing the very rich catalogue of non-human figures which inhabit our contemporary imagery, with particular regard to science fiction literature and film. It is suggested that monsters, clones, zombies, aliens, artificial beings, cyborgs and mutants can function as ideological tools intended to confirm the role of humankind (and Western civilization) as the only possible standard of intelligent and ethical life. But they can also become cognitive instruments devised to question or criticize our vision of and behaviour toward the world, other species and ourselves. This privileged critical perspective – and the point of arrival of the book – is the category of the posthuman, which is regarded as the symbol of a possibly revolutionary vision of humanity, a wish and an invitation to embrace a new, more humble way of being and living.

«This fine, scholarly, richly detailed and persuasively argued book is an original and timely contribution to debates about why translation and multilingualism matter in a time when rising waters may deprive us all of island futures.» (Michael Cronin, Irish Journal of French Studies, No. 22, 2022)This book investigates twentieth- and twenty-first-century Caribbean literatures in translation. Covering three of the largest linguistic areas of the region – the so-called English-, French- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean – the volume offers a comparative study of the region’s literary output across a variety of genres: poems, novels, short stories and essays. Caribbean texts and their translations are analysed through the prism of the threshold, which serves a dual purpose. On a textual level, thresholds correspond to paratextual elements (e.g. prefaces, afterwords, foot/endnotes, glossaries, blurbs) that are used by various cultural agents to frame Caribbean literatures for global, regional and local audiences. On a broader level, thresholds, which both open into but also signal a limit or break, allow the author to examine and remap routes of (non)circulation for Caribbean literatures within regional, national and transnational frameworks. Analysing liminality alongside Glissantian notions that interrogate authorship, transparency, originality and hospitality in translation, the book tests the applicability of relational thinking to the imperatives of translation and literary circulation. Ultimately, the author asks whether traditional core–periphery models of global literary traffic can be challenged, inviting the reader to envisage alternative pathways of cultural exchange from Southern, archipelagic locations.This book was the winner of the 2018 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Comparative Literature.

This book traces the development of literary poetics after postmodernism and outlines the most important features of what is defined here as «post-postmodernism». This new literary form simultaneously recovers the characteristics of the traditional novel and abandons the ironic approach of postmodernism, while also retaining some postmodern narrative devices such as autofiction and metafiction. To render the global dimension of this phenomenon, this book focuses on the theme of the Second World War, an increasingly pivotal subject for historical novels in the twenty-first century worldwide. The study analyses the work of a variety of authors from several national literatures, focusing mainly on Roberto Bolaño, William T. Vollmann and Jonathan Littell, and drawing comparison with other authors, such as Rachel Seiffert, Sarah Waters, Laurent Binet, Ian McEwan and Giorgio Falco.

«Thinking Through Relation brings together an outstanding collection of essays that explore the diverse ways in which works of art and aesthetic experience generate a richness of relation which escapes the straightjackets of rigid disciplinary and institutional boundaries. Clearly demonstrating the creative potential of critical writing, these essays are a fitting tribute to the creativity, originality and subtlety of Timothy Mathews’s scholarly accomplishment and his contribution to our understanding of art and of the aesthetic relation.»(Dr Ian James, University of Cambridge) «This book in honour of Timothy Mathews is much more than a Festschrift. It is a collection of thought-provoking, daring insights into the crucial place of literature and the arts in our world and in our being human. It is an exhilarating multifarious demonstration of how creativity can undo, without for a moment losing intellectual rigour, the disciplinary and academic structures that constrain our thinking. Driven by curiosity and by care – love, even – the many contributions to the volume show, in their different ways, how criticism can be at its most effective by being at its most imaginative and its least predictable.»(Professor Lucia Boldrini, Goldsmiths, University of London) This book is an offering. It contains eighteen essays in honour of Timothy Mathews, written by leading scholars in the fields of French, Comparative Literature, Visual Culture and Creative Critical Writing. These essays examine the power of serendipitous encounter between artists, thinkers and artistic media as well as the importance of creative interjection in the arts and humanities. They advance fresh interpretations of some important figures in twentieth-century European culture – Apollinaire, Beckett, Benjamin, Calvino, Dalí, Genet, Nooteboom, Roubaud – using modes of reading that are both intellectually brave and open to fragility, intimate as well as critical, at once playful and earnest. They bring texts and artworks into relation in order to amply demonstrate that relation itself is a form of thinking.

We live in an era of global anxiety – about rising nationalism, civil and human rights struggles, the ramifications of declining white male hegemony, about driving ourselves and other species toward extinction. So it’s no surprise that we also seek transcendence of our material circumstances. But exploring the possibilities of transcendence of our materiality – whether through religion, philosophy, psychology, or literature – is not a new feature of thought, art, or action. This book explores approaches to the immanence-transcendence problem in works of French, German, Italian, and Russian literature and philosophy between 1762 and 2016, in an effort to understand how different thinkers have approached this dynamic. The volume is divided into four "suppression" approaches and four "infliction" approaches, sometimes combining sympathetic source material from different centuries and countries that take complementary stances. While this book takes a skeptical approach as to whether a person can experience sensory comprehension of transcendence of his or her own embodiment, we are clearly in need of literature that provides guidance for our current sociological and psychological circumstances in an effort to help us navigate our global future.

What do we mean by ‘dialogue’? What can the use of dialogue tell us about a text, its author, and the larger cultural or political climate of the author’s production? This book examines the notion of dialogue adapted from the work of Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin, who elaborated a critical methodology for interpreting the East–West postcolonial encounter. His concept is further complicated by issues of race, gender, class, nationality, and ethnic and religious identity that proliferate in such contexts and serves to reconfigure the power dynamics that characterize these encounters.This study explores dialogue in a selection of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century ethnography, fiction, and travel writing by authors as diverse as Laura Bohannan, Ryszard Kapuściński, Amitav Ghosh, V. S. Naipaul, and Zadie Smith, set in Africa, India, and Europe. These dialogues are viewed through the lenses of phenomenology, history, the philosophy of language, and postcolonial theory. The book also explores how these writing genres have evolved over time in correspondence with crucial historical transitions.

The stories of migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe have made the headlines in the news over the last twenty years. How have these human itineraries been represented in contemporary culture? This book considers the migrant’s story as portrayed in literature, cinema, museums and festivals in Italy and France, in order to explore the widespread ethical complexities related to agency and advocacy. While typically produced in support of migrant communities, these narratives often confine the experience of displaced individuals within a Eurocentric, humanitarian discourse that is difficult to overcome. Through an interdisciplinary and postcolonial approach, the book analyses, among others, recent works by Laurent Gaudé and Emanuele Crialese, the Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration in Paris and a community festival in Lampedusa, to highlight the complexity of advocating for migrants from a European perspective.

«How to become Jacques Derrida’s reader? By letting his texts engender you. Such a birth is taken literally by Jeremy Stewart, who proves by algebra that he is the author’s bastard son. In this wonderful, intense, witty, and gripping exercise in autotheory, deconstruction meets autofiction with a vengeance.»(Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, American Academy of Arts and Sciences)«With I, Daniel, Jeremy Stewart offers a reading, both rigorous and adventurous, of ‘Envois,’ one of Jacques Derrida’s most fascinating works. Unfolding and refolding the text around a blind spot in the philosopher’s journey, seeking to recognize in the twists and turns of this variously encrypted text the traces of an unutterable filiation, he takes us with him into the labyrinth, losing ourselves to better find ourselves. Through his personal commitment, Jeremy Stewart gives this close reading its full legitimacy, with the name ‘Daniel’ playing the role of révélateur, in the photographic sense of the term.»(Benoît Peeters, author of Derrida: A Biography)　Jacques Derrida’s book The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1987) has often been read in purely philosophical terms. Derrida, alluding to Freud’s talk of «theoretical fiction,» describes the opening section («Envois») as a «project for a «fiction.» «Envois» (that is, «sendings») takes the form of hundreds of postcards to an unnamed lover.　Enter a figure called «Daniel.» In some ways, he resembles Derrida’s unrecognized third son. In others, he resembles the author; this book’s creative-critical approach thus turns scandalously personal. In addressing literary questions, it draws on dreams, faith, the author’s middle name, and a testimony to illegitimacy.　One of «Envois» key conceits is that it is «the preface to a book […] not [yet] written.» Taking, as cues, fleeting references to the biblical book of Daniel and George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda, «Envois» is read as a preface not so much to an unwritten book as to the text that is the name «Daniel.»

Why do revivals and adaptations of Greek tragedy still abound in European national theatres, fringe stages and international festivals in the twenty-first century? Taking as its starting point the concepts of myth developed by Jean-Luc Nancy and Roland Barthes and the notion of the ‘classical’ outlined by Salvatore Settis, this book analyses discourses around community, democracy, origin and Western identity in stage adaptations of Greek tragedy on contemporary European stages. The author addresses the ways in which the theatre produces and perpetuates the myth of ‘classical’ Greece as the origin of Europe and how this narrative raises issues concerning the possibility of a transnational European community. Each chapter explores a pivotal problem in modern appropriations of Greek tragedy, including the performance of the chorus, the concept of the ‘obscene’ and the audience as the demos of democracy. Modern versions of Women of Troy, Hippolytus and Persians performed in Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Poland and Greece are analysed through a series of comparative case studies. By engaging with the work of prominent theatre-makers such as Mark Ravenhill, Michel Vinaver, Katie Mitchell, Sarah Kane, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Romeo Castellucci, Calixto Bieito and Rimini Protokoll, this volume offers a critique of contemporary democratic Europe and the way it represents itself onstage.

The comparative gesture performs both the act and the question of transition between the terms compared. Understood as an intercultural practice, comparative literature may thus also be understood as both a transitive and a transnational process, creating its own object and form of knowledge as it identifies and analyses lines of relation and exchange between literary cultures. When navigating between languages, the discipline becomes critically engaged with the possibility and methods of such navigation. Interdisciplinary and intermedial versions of comparative studies likewise centre around transitions that may themselves remain under-analysed.This collection of essays, with contributions ranging from medieval literature to digital humanities, seeks to illuminate and interrogate the very diversity of comparative situations, with their attendant versions of comparative discourse. The volume as a whole thereby reflects, however fragmentedly, a field of study that is itself faced with the reality of transition. As both a thematic and formal concern in comparative work, transition emerges, within any historical period or other configuration in which it is charted and analysed, as key to the renewed relevance of comparative literary scholarship and study today.