Editor's Column: Changes and Continuities in The Comparatist

Abstract

In introducing my first issue of The Comparatist, I am deeply aware of the growth and development of the journal under the guidance of my predecessors. From its beginnings as a vehicle primarily for the publication of papers delivered at the annual conference of the Southern Comparative Literature Association to its status as a nationally and internationally recognized publication in the field, The Comparatist has been enriched by the editorial wisdom and hard work of Jeanne Smoot, Mechthild Cranston, Marcel Cornis-Pope, and John Burt Foster. The current issue introduces not only a new editor but also a major change in the journal's publication status: it is the first to be published by the University of North Carolina Press at Chapel Hill. The journal's new look and streamlined distribution, among other changes, come from the press's professional oversight. In addition, the journal has in a sense come home, in that it is now sponsored again by North Carolina State University at Raleigh, where it began. The contributions to this issue reflect certain traditions of the SCLA and of The Comparatist, together with innovative scholarship. From its inception, the SCLA conference offered sessions on literature and the other arts, as well as on East-West literary relations. The Comparatist has published a number of essays dealing with the relations of literature to visual arts and music and has been encouraging a more globalized approach to comparative literature. The essays here grouped under Inter-Art Relations and East /West Intersections offer fresh approaches as well as continuities in those fields. The question of comparative literature's relationship to cultural studies, which has preoccupied our discipline at least since the publication of the Bernheimer report ten years ago, has also been evident in the journal. The authors in the final grouping address that issue from divergent angles. Ben Stoltzfus's essay on Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jasper Johns approaches the traditional inter-art subject of literature and painting through the lenses of meta-fiction, autopoesis, and chaos theory. Robbe-Grillet's text La Cible is unique in that it incorporates and reworks in verbal terms items from Johns's painting Target With Plaster Casts. The visual and the verbal artist each restructures the apparently random elements in his composition through the orderly disorder described in chaos theory. Working against the grain of established doxa, both painting and text deconstruct meaning, while attaining higher levels of insight. Stolzfus provides new perspectives on this vital relationship. The possibilities of visual-verbal artistic interactions are illuminated from a different perspective in Corinne Andersen's comparison of Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas with the photograph by Man Ray that serves as its frontispiece. Using the comparison to refute traditional criticisms of The Autobiography as exemplifying Stein's monumental egotism, Andersen demonstrates how the construction of the photograph calls attention to and complements Stein's critique of autobiography as a genre purporting to be referential or to tell the truth. In Stoltzfus's and Andersen's esays, verbal and visual languages appear to refract each other while constructing their own realities. The East-West comparative axis that seemed clearly delineated years ago has become more complex in our current understanding of global configurations, where the identity of the cardinal points is not always so clear and the interactions among cultures is more frequent. Two types of East-West intersections are emphasized in the essays under the second rubric, edited by John Burt Foster, Jr. Ling Chung also uses visuals to help illustrate the far-Western poet Gary Snyder's encounter with Eastern religions by way of perceived correspondences between Native-American and Asian shamanism. Moving between anthropology and literature, Chung demonstrates how experience with shamans not only influenced Snyder's personal life but also how shamanistic initiation rites are embedded in the deep structure of his poetry. …