American Comparative Literature Association Research Articles

(After)Word

Research Article| May 01 2023 (After)Word Poulomi Saha Poulomi Saha POULOMI SAHA is Associate Professor of English and Co-Director of the Program in Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Their research and teaching interests span postcolonial studies, ethnic American literature, feminist and queer theory, critical theory, and psychoanalytic critique. Her first book, An Empire of Touch: Women’s Political Labor and the Fabrication of East Bengal (Columbia, 2019), was awarded the 2020 Harry Levin Prize for outstanding first book by the American Comparative Literature Association and the Helen Tartar First Book Award. Saha’s scholarship has appeared in differences, qui parle, Signs, Interventions, The Journal of Modern Literature, Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and the Journal of American Studies, among other places. They are currently at work on Fascination: America’s “Indian” Cults. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Representations (2023) 162 (1): 144–148. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2023.162.10.144 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Poulomi Saha; (After)Word. Representations 1 May 2023; 162 (1): 144–148. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2023.162.10.144 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRepresentations Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2023 by The Regents of the University of California2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Literature as an Exotic Substance in Pre-Modern Literate Societies

This text was written for the "Seminar: World Literature: Circulations Outside the Modern” organized by Alexander Beecroft and Galin Tihanov at the ACLA (online) meeting on April 11, 2021 (Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association).

Review Symposium: Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires

This article is the authors’ response to the Transilvania journal special issue dedicated to Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell University Press, 2022). The issue (no. 10, 2022) featured articles and review articles on inter-imperiality and decolonial thought, alongside several pieces on world literature and cultural representations of Romania. In response to the critiques formulated by the contributors, Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă clarify some aspects and offer further insight into their theories. Since its publication, the book has attracted much deserved attention, being awarded the 2023 René Wellek Prize for best monograph from the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) and the 2023 Barrington Moore Award from the Comparative and Historical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA).

Contributors

Sunil Agnani, associate professor in English and history at the University of Illinois Chicago, is the author of a book on Denis Diderot and Edmund Burke, Hating Empire Properly: The Two Indies and Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism (recipient of the 2014 Harry Levin Prize for Best First Book from the American Comparative Literature Association), which examines the role of ressentiment and revenge in European anticolonial thought of the Enlightenment.Jason Fitzgerald is assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan, where he specializes in theater studies and post-1945 US cultural history. He is currently working on a book about the late 1960s US theatrical avant-garde, with an essay from that project published in Modern Drama. He was formerly the book review editor for Theatre Journal and is an assistant editor at boundary 2.Joshua Lam is assistant professor of English at Michigan State University. His research focuses on race, science, and technology in US literature. His current book project examines racialized automaton figures in the modernist era; a second project focuses on racial objectification in contemporary experimental Black poetry. His essays have appeared in the Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Journal of Modern Literature, College Literature, Callaloo, The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology, and The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century.Robert D. Richardson is the author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1986), Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995), and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2006).

Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age

Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age

Literatures in Translation: Literary Translation and Comparative Literature in the Turkish Context

As the latest American Comparative Literature Association reports (the ACLA state of the discipline reports) suggest, following the “translational turn” in comparative literature, novel intersections between translation studies and comparative literature have paved the way for further negotiations between these two subjects in a promising way. The aim of this article is to discuss the changing roles of translation and comparative studies of (translated) literature to reconsider the supposedly close relationship between the two adjacent fields in the Turkish context. We agree with Gürsel Aytaç that the intersection between translation and comparative literature occurs in literary translation. Literary translations are interventions of source texts into the receiving polysystem, meaningfully affecting the host culture and its literary system. Therefore, we argue that literary translations as rewritings should serve more as an object of investigation in the field of translation studies as well as comparative literature. We also argue that unorthodox approaches in comparative studies of translated literature can make these disciplines come together in more fruitful ways. The present study therefore encourages border-crossings in comparative literature and translation studies to open a space for new-fangled approaches in comparative studies of translated literature.

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age

Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age

Editors’ Note

Editors’ Note Aimee Pozorski and Maren Scheurer Teaching W.S. Merwin’s 1978 translation of Euripides’s Iphigeneia at Aulis earlier this spring revealed striking similarities between the concerns of the Ancient Greeks and our own. Threats of illness, autocratic leaders, and interminable wars are just three examples that come to mind, now over a year into the most recent global pandemic. The circumstances surrounding the production of this special issue on Roth and Scandal read like scandals themselves—at least if we go back to the Ancient Greek meaning, where σκάνδαλον could refer to a “trap” or a “stumbling block”: our long-anticipated seminar on the topic for the American Comparative Literature Association conference in Chicago was cancelled due to the pandemic; further, the authors in these pages balanced their commitment to Roth scholarship with home schooling, quarantining, videoconferencing, securing vaccination appointments for aging parents, and recovering from COVID-19—all in a political climate leading to despair and bureaucratic inefficiencies making our public health crises all the more scandalous. But if the Greeks teach us about scandal, they also teach us about the opposite: arete, or excellence. Despite the scandalous circumstances and pressures under which this volume came together, there was always a focus on excellence—from archival research to revision and editing to the organization required to keep all of the pieces moving forward, together. We thank especially Maggie McKinley, who collected these essays and conceived of this remarkable topic at the very beginning of this process, and we thank Jessica Rabin, who has been here with us at the very end of the process with her extraordinary copy-editing skills—and who has been here since the very first issue of Philip Roth Studies, 1.1. In the Merwin edition of Iphigeneia, William Arrowsmith suggests that arete, like its opposite, bad faith, “can be taught—taught by the liberating contagion of example” (xi). And while, in 2021, we may recoil when we see [End Page 1] the word “contagion,” it is clear from this excellent volume that arete can be taught from the examples of Maggie, Jessica, and all of the authors in these pages who kept at their craft despite the riotous atmosphere and virus spreading just outside our doors. WORK CITED Arrowsmith, William. “Editor’s Foreword.” Euripides: Iphigeneia at Aulis, translated by W.S. Merwin and George E. Dimock, Jr., Oxford UP, 1978, pp. v–xiii. Google Scholar Copyright © 2021 Purdue University

From the Editor

From the Editor Brenda Machosky On Editing Dedicated to the Memory of Helen Tartar, editor extraordinaire Before I wrote my first book, I didn't fully understand how the "editor" really worked. In shepherding that first book to publication, I had the good fortune and excellent guidance of Helen Tartar, longtime humanities editor at Stanford University Press, underappreciated there and in a fit of downsizing, forced to relocate to Fordham University Press, where she was given the means and the opportunity to flourish, especially in her forte, working with young scholars. My book had its particular fits and starts and a bit of a challenge getting past the review board. I'll never forget sitting with Helen at a book exhibit, probably at the American Comparative Literature Association annual convention, a moment of quiet while everyone was in sessions, and figuring out the last revisions to my manuscript. It wasn't a long conversation, or a demanding one, but somehow, she was working her magic. I left that convention knowing exactly what I needed to do, and I marveled at her ability to help me figure that out. At that point, I started to know what an editor could do, to understand when writers talked about "my editor" and all that this relationship implied. I realized the full power of a talented and successful editor at the memorial service for Helen Tartar after her untimely death, again at a meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association in New York City. Attendees were encouraged to bring copies of their books to display—too many to count and an awesome display of her range. But the stories told by those, like me, who were fortunate enough to work with her as an editor, deepened my understanding of what a good editor can do. Here were people, now well respected and established scholars, talking about their own "quiet moments" receiving her advice to get their struggling books through to publication. So now I am an editor, of a journal, a different kind of editing, and I am new at it. After a few issues in which I have learned the process, how to work with the publishing platform, and started to develop systems for solicitation and reviewers, I can now reflect on what it means to be an editor of this journal, Antipodes, and the editorial decisions I have already started to make. As I reviewed this issue's content, while simultaneously working on new submissions and calls for future issues, I started to reflect on my role, and responsibility, as an editor. The people I've admired most in academia have all been like Helen. They make the time to "pay it forward" to the next generation. Kuleana is an untranslatable Hawaiian word for something like fundamental responsibility. As an editor, my kuleana is to treat each submission with respect and encouragement. Teaching at a university without graduate students, editing is an opportunity for me to work with scholars making [End Page 3] their way into publishing, as an associate editor at Speculum did for me with my first article (when I barely knew what a page proof was, and the proof came in the mail!). And being an editor is a growth opportunity for me as I work with established scholars on publication. In editing a journal sponsored by an organization, the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies (AAALS), I have been thinking of ways to make the project of each issue more shared, more collective. In the first issue I edited, there was already a special section devoted to the work of Alexis Wright, edited by Belinda Wheeler (33.1). And then, fortuitously, an opportunity to publish a special section on the topic of Southeast Asian Diasporic literature in Australia emerged from a Modern Language Association convention session that AAALS cosponsored (33.2). With volume 34, a pattern established itself, with a featured writer in the first issue of the volume and a special topic in the second. In this first issue of volume 34, Peter Mathews has edited the featured writer section about Brian Castro, and following, Eva Rueschmann is editing a special topic on film in...

How to Be a Good Reader of World Literature

How to Be a Good Reader of World Literature

Introduction

Abstract This essay introduces the American Comparative Literature Association Forum “Vernacular Comparisons beyond the Europhone.” Characterizing the Europhone “vernacular” as a protean term of diverse application, the essay highlights the paradoxes associated with its use in Global Southern contexts. Drawing attention to the asymmetries of conceptual exchange that accompany vernacular comparisons across former colonial contexts, this essay raises the following questions: How might we explore and move beyond the insufficiencies of the Europhone term “vernacular” to frame non-Europhone literatures and literary histories? If we displace Europhone terms of analysis as conceptual categories, what alternatives emerge in their stead from non-European languages, lineages, and source materials? In pursuing lateral comparisons within the Global South, how can the risks of anachronism, distortion, and incommensurability be managed across disparate contexts? This introduction offers an overview of the contributing essays and concludes with remarks on the advantages and drawbacks of employing the term “vernacular” in pursuing South-South comparisons.

Locations of Comparison

What difference does it make who compares? From what location? What kinds of comparison are possible, inevitable, even necessary at particular historical moments? What are the extra-literary conditions of literary comparison? How and when does literature qualify for comparison? Revisiting Harry Levin’s seminal essay, “Comparing the Literature” (1968), this paper—originally presented as the presidential address at the 2017 American Comparative Literature Association conference—considers the historical conditions and locational contingencies that motivate acts of literary comparison. Looking at how specific comparisons of African literature to European literature have been mobilized at different times and locations, I argue that comparative literature’sde factoimmigration policies (its [in]hospitality to other worlds of literature) may be read in the histories of comparisons that have been done before—comparisons once regarded as improper, impertinent, or insurgent that are now commonly practiced to give old Eurocentric fields new life, new prestige, and new authority.

Introduction

Introduction Jim Hicks ON RARE OCCASIONS, academic conferences turn out as they should, and pilgrims making the journey find what they seek. The trek to the American Comparative Literature Association's annual meeting is one I've made more times than I can count, in part because its seminar format—where participants assemble around a theme and meet as a group for two or three days running—favors such an outcome. This year, I fled to Los Angeles for the ACLA, during a week of so-called spring in New England, and found there a panel on poetry and public feeling, convened by Tristam Wolff and Lily Gurton-Wachter—one site where the call was answered. On the second day of this seminar, the latter session leader began with a rumination on Blake's second chimney sweeper poem, that song of experience where "a poor black thing … taught to sing the notes of woe" comments: "And because I am happy and dance and sing, / They think they have done me no injury." Gurton-Wachter, in a problem-posing move worthy of Freire himself, focused our attention on a troubling existential claim: the sweep does say, "I am happy"—not "I was" (as in the previous stanza) or even "I seem." How, she wondered, can we make sense of this claim? The word "happiness," she reminded us, is related to luck and fortune, and likely borrowed into English from Scandinavian roots. We're happy when fortuitous things happen. That Blake's sense of "happy" might bear a trace of its original meaning suggests his use of "injury" may as well; early on, this Latinate term was largely legal, "wrongful action or treatment," "infringement of another's rights." As Nancy Armstrong and others have shown, English literature during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries called upon readers to sympathize with disenfranchised classes, to care about their rights and the wrongs done to them. A posttalk discussant emphasized the prescient presence of minstrel theater in Blake's lines: a "poor black thing" said to "dance and sing" would soon take center stage across the Atlantic. What [End Page 192] it takes for an object to become a subject, for "happiness" to become internal, or "injury" to be embodied are issues that Blake's prophetic poetry envisions, and the centuries following have yet to resolve. Just such a nightmare weighs on the brains in these pages, from Bob Hicok's opening "artist's statement," where he's "the lone yak forever surrounded by wolves," to James Haug's riverine thoughts, "a murky reflection of the heavens." In our summer issue, people make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. Whether it's Mhani Alaoui's young Aya, who stands up to her "expat," or Mirfet Piccolo's protagonist, who fails to save his children from the fascism he chose to follow, or the dutiful sons tormented by their aging fathers in stories by Charles Swift and Dave DeRicco—in each case, history weighs on and frames the struggle. Whether it's Sarah Rose Cadorette seeding hope in Haiti, Molly Quinn prompting a scene change in the psych ward, or Geneviève Piron recalibrating our compasses in Siberia, the lesson is clear: it doesn't matter what happens to you, all that matters is what you make of it. There have been better moments: Roger Mills recalls JFK's tribute to Robert Frost (first published in this magazine, back in 1964), where our nation's leader saluted the arts and pledged to support them: "If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him." Joel Westerdale also returns to Frost, demonstrating that the Good Green Poet's most famous poem is best read as an exemplar of Nietzschean amor fati. One wonders, nonetheless, what any of these éminences grises would have made of Panteha Abareshi's searing testimony to the contemporary experience of women of color, front and center in this issue. William Blake, perhaps, understood something of Abareshi's message over two centuries ago: "God and his Priest and King … make up a heaven of...

Oceanic Routes: (Post-It) Notes on Hydro-Colonialism

This article outlines the genesis and intellectual framing of the American Comparative Literature Association Forum on Oceanic Routes. Marshaling both “Routes” and “Oceanic,” the introduction sketches out the scholarly vectors associated with these terms as a way to assess the current field of Oceanic Studies. “Routes” points to work on the chronotope of the ship; vernacular and subaltern cosmopolitanisms at sea; inter-imperial assemblages; new metageographies; and the resource exploitation, militarization, and securitization of the ocean. “Oceanic” points to recent work on the hydromateriality of the seas from a post-human and planetary perspective. To these streams of scholarship, the article adds the notion of “hydrocolonialism.” The article ends with a summary of the contributions that make up the forum.

Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Reviewed by: Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen Alfred Kentigern Siewers jeffrey jerome cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Pp. 376. isbn: 0–8166–9257–6. $91 (cloth); $25.95 (paperback). Jeffrey Jerome Cohen in the introduction to his poetic and breathtakingly sweeping book (winner of the 2017 René Wellek Prize for best book in comparative literature from the American Comparative Literature Association) describes how his love affair with the lithic began in childhood playing at a glacial erratic known as Big Rock: 'For friends and siblings I wove an elaborate mythology around Big Rock, tales of how its enduring solidity entangled distant pasts with far futures' (p. 17). Years later as a Harvard-trained medievalist, from his professorship at George Washington University inspiring an insurgent movement in medieval studies that follows the 'material turn' of theoretical approaches, Cohen has continued his fascinated weaving of story and stone in a scholarly yet lyrical volume that is a must-read for both medieval and environmental humanities scholars alike. Andy Bittner, a renowned docent at the Gothic-style National Cathedral in Washington, DC, describes to visitors the way stone medieval cathedrals functioned as a kind of 'time machine.' Ranging from medievalisms in art to landscapes of the first millennium CE and beyond, Cohen's book expands the elemental sense of stone as a geophilic Tardis. Whether at Stonehenge or Canterbury Cathedral, Brittany's Carnac or the saga-laden crags of Iceland, and even in the texts of Chaucer, Thomas Aquinas, or Hildegard of Bingen, this book unpacks a symphonic love letter to the links between ecology and story. As he writes of Stonehenge, despite its twenty-first-century tourism distractions, still the stones draw the eye . . . Something happens in that encounter, something perceived by Geoffrey [of Monmouth] as well as the Romans and the Normans and the peoples who became the British and the English, something known to those prehistoric groups whose presence we realize only from the changes they crafted to the architecture during its five-thousand-year flourishing: The rocks begin to move (p. 252). And rocks move throughout the book, both as physical presences related to the Middle Ages and as related figures in medieval literature, linking cosmic contexts into what the environmental phenomenologist Erazim Kohák has called the 'intersection of time and eternity' (The Embers and the Stars, 1984) in which authentic personalism arises. Paradoxically, the very humanistic endeavor of this exploration of stone as a kind of physical narrative draws deeply from inorganically inhuman realms. Yet, as Cohen observes, 'Geophilia is a middle region of creation and innovation, a space of convivial wayfaring—experimenting, working, and living together, a place of differences and disorienting danger, a forging of alliance and embrace that gathers a world so vast that even stones become fellow travelers along epochal, uncertain, but never uncompanioned ways' (252). The book is a great primer on the material turn in literary studies, full of engaging exempla. Yet its contemporary approach relates substantively to the complexities of mystical cosmology and anthropology woven into medieval cultures in a way that raises its discourse above merely posthuman brutalism or atomizing materialism. We [End Page 87] see in it a glimpse of the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel's search for a non-theistic intelligent design, despite its eschewal of holistic and transcendent ecologies. So too is the deistic cosmology of a God with no face welcome in the volume's erudite reflections and connections, along with the first-millennium Christian 'hidden God.' The poetic beauty of the writing forms a type of ecological iconography in words. A medieval apophatic emphasis on unknowable essence and participatory uncreated energies can fit, too, the vibrancy of stones that Cohen's work so engagingly describes, with nuance that rightly eludes any simple formula. Pericopes such as 'Cast not the first stone' and 'the stones shall cry out' both take new meanings here amid the time machine of geological presence and human accompaniment. Alfred Kentigern Siewers Bucknell University Copyright © 2017 Scriptorium Press

The Feminist Seduction: Cyborg Writing and Womanspeak

The Feminist Seduction:Cyborg Writing and Womanspeak Erin Holliday-Karre (bio) The death of Jean Baudrillard in 2006 brought about a resurgence of scholarship on his work. While writing this essay a wealth of specifically feminist scholarship appeared including a 2011 panel at the American Comparative Literature Association conference entitled "Rethinking Baudrillard and Feminist Theory." In her call for papers Ingrid M. Hoofd writes: "From Jane Gallop's 'French Theory and the Seduction of Feminism,'…to Douglas Kellner's 'Baudrillard's Affront to Feminism,' the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard has been widely condemned in the 80s and 90s as an anti-feminist philosopher." Hoofd suggests that it is not just Baudrillard's death but his increasing relevance that makes him important to feminism: "It has become urgent to revisit Baudrillard's relevance for feminist theory in light of the latter's decreasing grip on global politics." According to Hoofd, Baudrillard has become progressively relevant by defining many theories of global politics. Thus, Hoofd argues that feminists need to reconsider their earlier critiques of Baudrillard in order to increase and maintain their own political relevance. But in most of the recent feminist scholarship on Baudrillard, save for sociologist Victoria Grace's Baudrillard's Challenge: A Feminist Reading (2000), feminists have focused on Baudrillard's later theories of simulation, the trans-sexual, and cybernetics in order to maintain global relevance, forestalling any reconsideration of his earlier text Seduction (1979).1 In the most recent full length feminist work on Baudrillard, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture, and the Posthuman Body (2007), Kim Toffoletti only tangentially addresses Seduction: "My purpose here isn't to defend Baudrillard on the topic of seduction…rather I look elsewhere in his body of work using his theory of simulation to make sense of posthuman images in a climate characterized by the abundance of signs and the implosion of meaning" (2007, 49). [End Page 295] Toffoletti's assumption here is that a theory of seduction is not as important as simulation for understanding today's "climate." A critical engagement with Seduction is, I argue, key to understanding just how we, as feminists, are now in the position of not only trying to "make sense" of the "implosion of meaning" but also defending our "grip on global politics." I agree that a feminist revaluation of Baudrillard's work is "urgent," but I also argue that as long as feminists refuse to engage with Seduction, they will continue to miss an unacknowledged historical strand of feminist theory that speaks to our continued grip on global politics. Contrary to popular feminist belief, Baudrillard's work on seduction is not rooted in a fundamental disregard for or antagonistic stance toward women. But the fact that this remains a prevailing point of view proves that feminists ban together more than most people give them credit for. Jane Gallop blacklisted Seduction in the 1980s and, since then, most feminist scholars skip over this seminal work, usually with a nod to Gallop,2 before moving on to engage later works, such as Simulations or Transparency of Evil.3 In "French Theory and the Seduction of Feminism" Jane Gallop states that the "primary" reason for her dismissal of Baudrillard is what she sees as a "rather rabid attack on feminism" (1987, 113). He is the French theorist who outright establishes "an adversarial relation to feminism" (1987, 113). Gallop is admittedly not upset with what Baudrillard says about the feminine but rather by his assertion that women should allow him to counsel them: "Baudrillard cannot seduce feminism with his truth, because he protects his truth from being seduced by feminism" (1987, 114). Gallop's issue with Baudrillard, then, is that he refuses to see feminism as itself seductive. Thus, Gallop has laid down a challenge that many feminists have been loath to take up, preferring to reduce Gallop's critique to the idea that Baudrillard is sexist. In one such example, Rebecca Schneider argues that the timing of Baudrillard's theory of seduction is significant because it occurred just as women and people of color were beginning to gain access to the spheres of production: "Baudrillard might be read as representative of an anxiety born of...

Introduction: Philip Roth's Transdisciplinary Translation

Philip Roth’s Transdisciplinary Translation Maren Scheurer (bio) and Aimee Pozorski (bio) In translation, as in psychoanalysis, I try to adopt an ethics of respecting and maintaining the Other (or otherness), not attempting to reduce the Other to the same. —Bruce Fink, 2012 In the fall of 2015, we discussed what it would mean to bring together some of the most respected minds in Roth Studies, scholars who have been writing about Roth for over a decade, with scholars just starting out. The goal was to unite everyone to attend a three-day seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference, a conference that Harvard University hosted the following spring. In order to produce a coherent proposal for the ACLA, we needed to articulate what over-arching qualities linked our colleagues. In addition to being avid readers of Roth and fascinated with theoretical inquiry, they share a commitment to dialogue, debate, and, above all, mentoring relationships. Given this latter quality—one of mutual interest in helping develop the next generation of Roth scholars—we thought it would be remarkable to unite everyone for lively debate that continued from one day to the next to the next. That we could further this conversation via a special journal issue seemed at that time only a fleeting possibility. Given such lofty goals, we also, necessarily, discussed how to make a convincing case for the acceptance of a seminar on Roth in particular, admittedly a singularly American author who, on the surface, seems as interested in representing America as he is uninterested in taking up theoretical questions, an important focal point of the ACLA. And even after persuading the ACLA and each other of Roth’s relevance to an international and theoretically grounded audience, we remain, to this day, aware of persistent claims of Roth’s insularity —most recently articulated as Roth’s “narcissism”—which has become the ultimate criticism of this persistently relevant author. [End Page 5] As recently as October 2016, for example, Liel Leibovitz wrote for Tablet a review of the film adaptation of American Pastoral subtitled, “Not even Ewan McGregor can turn the author’s narcissism into a relatable work of art.” Later, Leibovitz writes that a profound “sense of self-centeredness, ironically, grows clearer with each of the author’s attempts to stride past the preoccupations of his youth and into bigger, bolder books that wrestle with the meaning of America.” The criticism mirrors the 2008 remarks surrounding predictions about the Nobel Prize that year. Although permanent secretary of the Nobel prize jury, Horace Engdahl, did not name names in his overview of the trends in American literature, everyone believed he was referring to Roth when he proclaimed: “[t]he US is too isolated, too insular. They [. . .] don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature” (qtd. in Crouch). The criticism of Roth’s “insularity” or even “narcissism” seemed perhaps too easy, even stereotypical, as Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi would later argue in a rejoinder to Leibovitz published in Tablet in December of 2016. Using the final scene of The Human Stain as an exemplary case of Roth’s ethics in terms of the tension between humanity and time, Ezrahi argues: “The ultimate emblem of this relinquishing of the future while gesturing to the artifice of eternity is the frozen pond covering the river’s flow at the end of The Human Stain.” In other words, for Ezrahi, even the Rothian scenes that emphasize the natural world, as at the end of this important novel, look outward rather than inward in their worry about the continuous flow of human connection, forebodingly threatened, as revealed by the image of frozen water. For us, one of the most important ways in which Roth continues to look outward and may best be defended against charges of narcissism is his persistent pursuit of dialogue—with other writers, thinkers, and researchers—and the lively debate this has inspired in both literary studies and other disciplines. As a result, we chose for our seminar the title “Philip Roth’s Transdisciplinary Translation” to highlight some of the stellar work in Roth Studies emerging from around the globe, from several national traditions and disciplinary points of view...

Introduction to “The Orientalist Photograph”

Introduction to the 2015 Milan Dimic Memorial Lecture. Behdad’s lecture, “The Orientalist Photograph: An Object of Comparison,” takes up several elements of his...book, Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography of the Middle East (U of Chicago P, 2016), and integrates them with observations on the current status of the discipline of Comparative Literature. Professor Behdad, who served as the President of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2014, shares anecdotes of his experiences, obtained from decades of academic and administrative service, to reflect on the challenges in front of the discipline, regarding both its intellectual relevance and its workforce training. Looking back at the originating history of Comparative Literature in American and Canadian universities in the early twentieth century, Behdad argues that the “identity crisis” within the discipline, which has constantly been marked as a serious threat to its integrity, has a potential as the distinguishing factor to make it positively stand out within the humanities in the twenty-first century.

Malaysia. Sinophone Malaysian literature: Not made in China By Alison M. Groppe Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2013. Pp. 325. Bibliography, Index.

Malaysia Sinophone Malaysian literature: Not made in China By ALISON M. GROPPE Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2013. Pp. 325. Bibliography, Index. Sinophone literatures from Southeast Asia have long been doubly marginalised: they have been deemed 'sectional' literatures, produced in languages other than the national language, and thus for consumption by minority populations only. At the same time, they were regarded as derivative texts, far removed from the centre of cultural production in China. At least with regard to the latter aspect, the situation has changed dramatically with the rise of the Sinophone as a critical paradigm, which has recently been declared an 'Idea of the Decade' by the American Comparative Literature Association. With an outpouring of new, innovative research and a flurry of publications, Southeast Asia has very much become the centre of critical inquiry in Chinese literary studies. Alison Groppe's timely new book is an important addition to this rapidly growing literature. Importantly, Groppe's well-researched study moves beyond the larger horizon of the 'Sinophone' by zooming in onto one particularly vibrant literature, that produced by authors born in colonial Malaya or independent Malaysia. Giving sustained attention to authors such as Ng Kim Chew, Li Yongping, and Zhang Guixing, Groppe asks how Sinophone Malaysian writers position themselves with a view to three major nodes of identity formation, namely, the imaginary homeland 'China', the vibrant cultural and intellectual world of Taiwan, and Malaysia--space of memory and roots, affiliations and imagination, longing as well as trauma. 'Sinophone Malaysian literature,' says Groppe, 'grows from a complex web of attachments' (p. 20); the links of the writers discussed here to Malaysia, Taiwan, and China 'are not accepted as given but are subject to scrutiny, conceptualisation, even interrogation' (p. 12). Sinophone Malaysian literature consists of seven chapters and a conclusion. The Introduction addresses the terminological and conceptual problems raised by the Sinophone, in both English and Chinese, which eventually points to questions of identity and identification. As a critical concept, the Sinophone, or Huayu, has the advantage of highlighting conscious linguistic choices and positions, without however subsuming the resulting literary production under a hegemonic, China-centric world view. It acknowledges that Sinophone literature in Southeast Asia coexists (and, to some degree, interacts) with multiple other local languages, official or non-official; and it disrupts the claim of congruence between nation-states, languages, and literatures. Chapter 2 provides a good historical overview of modern Sinophone Malaysian literature (Mahua wenxue) since its inception in the 1920s, based on a synthesis of much of the existing research in both English and Chinese. This chapter will prove especially useful in the classroom. The third chapter, 'Language, place, and identity', places the book's theoretical core concerns in historical perspective. The creation of a distinctive literary voice has been a central issue in Sinophone Malaysian literature since at least the 1940s. Realist authors from the 1950s and 1960s pursued a strategy of colloquialisation, which allowed them to express local sensibilities and create cultural identity by incorporating vernacular elements into the literary language. …