Comparative Literature Programs Research Articles

Introducing Greek Tragedy

Introducing Greek Tragedy George Kovacs A.F. Garvie. The Plays of Aeschylus. Classical World Series. London: Bristol Classical Press, 2010. Pp. 80. £11.99. ISBN 9781853997075. R. Mitchell-Boyask. Aeschylus: Eumenides. Duckworth Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy. London: Duckworth, 2009. Pp. 157. US $24.00. ISBN 9780715636428. A. Kelly. Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus. Duckworth Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy. London: Duckworth, 2009. Pp. 176. £12.99. ISBN 9780715637135. E. Hall, E. Greek Tragedy: Suffering Under the Sun. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. xiv + 413. £30.00 ISBN 9780199232512. Greek tragedy always finds new readers. We, as educators, functional custodians and publicists of antiquity, must do what we can to optimize that readership, both for quantity and quality, attracting newcomers and training them in the critical appraisal and appreciation of some of the most culturally significant texts in human history. Thus the recent surge of books designed for those readers new to the experience of Greek tragedy is a welcome one. These books target various demographics: Rabinowitz 2008 and Scodel 2010 are for new readers of tragedy, while works like Goldhill 2007 and Walton 2009 aim to bring Greek tragedy to contemporary theatre practitioners. Prior to Gregory 2005 and Storey and Allan 2005, there were few books in this category. Ley 1991 (revised 2006) is short, while McLeish 2003 spends much time summarizing each of the plays and supporting material (glossary, bibliography) is limited. Each of these volumes has its strengths. The mandate for this review is a broad one: to assess collectively and reflect upon the recent spate of books billed [End Page 69] as introductions to Greek tragedy. The volumes here under specific review are for different niches in academic pedagogy, but all include the word “introduction” somewhere on the jacket. Considering the range of audience competencies one can expect to find in academia, from first-year undergraduates with little experience of theatre or literature to graduate students (or beyond) in cognate fields, such as drama or comparative literature programs, the idea of an “introduction” becomes a moving target. This is to say nothing of those potential readers outside the academy, in whom we must believe if we are going to make claims of relevancy in the world today. Many of the variables of defining an introduction have been examined in the debate on companionship: the phenomenon of self-identified “companions” to authors, genres, historical periods, et cetera, usually professing a mandate of accessibility. Two of my review volumes self-identify as companions, and in fact are most deserving of the term, given that the Duckworth volumes are each intended to be read in tandem with their play. Josiah Ober has recently questioned the value of this trend (cautioning without condemning), noting that the definition of “Companion” is sorely tested when applied to such a range of works. How then to define an introduction and judge its value? I have mainly limited myself to concerns of pedagogy within the (Canadian) university. This may prove unfair to some of the works on my list, but these are the new readers we know best, the ones we can shape and train. How useful are these volumes to students, both during the run of a University course and afterwards? To which students are they useful? The introductory volume must be accessible, thorough, and well rounded, with as many approaches represented as possible, alongside supporting paratext (glossaries, chronologies, lists of suggested reading). One metric I found telling was the appropriateness of each volume in the bibliography for a student paper. If I require a given number of sources in a student’s bibliography, would I count Garvie’s volume on Aeschylus toward that quota? Probably not, given its brevity, though Garvie would swiftly lead the student to several other useful sources. I have a similar conversation with classes about online sources: Wikipedia is not a suitable bibliographic source, but it may lead to proper peer-reviewed sources and it takes only a short time to determine this. Wikipedia is a research tool, not a source. We are not going to keep our students from these resources, and part of our job must be to train the students to recognize their...

Sorcery, and: Stop, and: Complaint

Sorcery, and: Stop, and: Complaint Marilyn Kallet (bio) Sorcery Why did his ex dump him? Once freed, Euridice never would. Just the word wood made her swoon. But it wasn’t words that drew her, or the lyre. She was stuck on his rock-climber’s body. He could bolt her out of this pit, flash up the narrow chute. She’d wrap her legs around him and he’d forget his shaky Elvis knee, the eons she’d been wasted. She knew how to fold a man in the cocoon of her hair and silk him down. He never called. Stone smothered the cave mouth, and Ali Baba signed with Disney. She tried to whistle but her lips cracked and the tunnel kaboomed in 1970. The only orifice was dream, she aimed her ribbon of song. The tabby on the master bed turned an ear to the ripple. Orpheus was so far gone inside himself [End Page 28] at first he thought he was Rilke, on leave from countess Marie. Then reverie secreted something about black silk, black cherry lipstick, the hardwood cherry sideboard in his dining room. Gleaming, it lured him. Stop Stop in the name of love! —The Supremes Stop being beautiful, just stop, Dante urged radiant Beatrice. He spied her once— Judge Judy: Shush! I’m dialing. Bea? Dante claims he eyeballed you, one shot. And nights when your parents weren’t home? How many times? Two, three? Men and thirteen-year-olds are liars. LIARS! I’ve raised lots of them! Bea needed a nap. Heaven and all the judging kept her up. Stop yourself, she hissed at Dan. So your hair has launched a thousand hips! Your curls snake my side-view. Thank God for your arthritis that, at least, Eros can’t translate. Danny, let me ease into immaculate without your floating hair waving me back. One Way. Senso Unico. No more sidelong glances stirring me like a swizzle stick. You act thirteen. In human years, I’m sixty-one. You’ll never be half. [End Page 29] Dante moaned stop. Bea tried to end being beauteous, but the edges of her radiated heat that D turned to light. Do that for me, too, poetry begged. Ditched for words, Bea yowled, Take your rapt hands with you! Complaint Surrounded by my designer products, how can I die? Decleor for my face, Coach for my credit cards, I’m headed for Eternity. Though yesterday when the pimply teen at the Johnson City Wendy’s offered me the senior citizen’s discount, I was crushed for a sec. Today in fleet Nikes & Adidas racing pants [End Page 30] I’m back, outstripping my own best time. Only my downcast boobs toll an elegiac note. Marilyn Kallet Marilyn Kallet is the author of fourteen books, including Packing Light: New and Selected Poems (Black Widow P). When she started graduate work at Rutgers in 1968, no tenured women professors were in the comparative literature program, and 95 percent of the books on the reading list were by men. Her essay about surviving that time, “Poetry Began Me,” is included in her anthology of personal essays, Sleeping with One Eye Open: Women Writers and the Art of Survival, coedited with Judith Ortiz Cofer. Copyright © 2009 University of Nebraska Press

Challenging Monolingualism: Institutional Implications of Postsecondary German Language Instruction

We often pose the question How much German in German Studies? in more specific form, as, for example, does William Donahue when he wonders whether we shouldn't give our conference papers in German (German Quarterly 78.4 [Fall 2005]). Donahue's sensitive observations concerning our use of German as professionals in formal scholarly contexts may provide for many of us non-native speakers of German an uncomfortable occasion for recognizing our inadequacies and discomfort with being foreigners in foreign-language departments, of facing, as one older colleague once described it, our discomfort with a lifetime of impersonating a German. Yet whatever pangs of conscience I personally may suffer when I rely on my native tongue instead of my hard-won foreign one in a scholarly context, specialists of German should be sharply aware of the distortions that occur when we pursue the life of the mind as a matter of guilt and redemption meted out depending on whether we practice our spoken German at scholarly meetings. We write for publication in the language in which we are best able to formulate our ideas at a particular moment in our life history and we write in the language required by the venue in which we plan to publish and by the audiences we wish to address. When we speak to our colleagues and collaborators, moreover, we speak in the language in which we are both emotionally and intellectually most comfortable with one another-indeed, sometimes that medium of exchange will involve frequent code switching from one language to the other, maybe even with a smattering of Italian, French, Dutch, Danish, Polish, Czech, Turkish, or Yiddish. Neither the GSA nor the AATG can serve as language enforcers, and one would hope that neither organization would ever do anything but strive to create the most open, inclusive, and productive forum possible for the exchange of ideas. For me the question How much German in German Studies? has other implications. I urge that we consider first and foremost what this question means institutionally; in the end, it surely pertains to the resources, both human and monetary, that colleges and universities are going to devote in the future to the teaching of the German language. German departments or German sections within foreign-language departments have long been entrusted with teaching German to undergraduates. This is an important mission, for the study of a language not one's own can offer students one of the more radical confrontations with human difference provided in postsecondary education. Especially at this moment in the history of the United States, it is critical that our students participate in such encounters and undertake such engagement as a central feature of their undergraduate education. Therefore, any respectable future we envision for ourselves in American academia as Germanists, German cultural historians, or professors of German studies, or whatever we prefer to call ourselves, must in my view include the continued teaching of the German language at multiple levels at postsecondary institutions. As a non-native speaker of German, I remind all of us that learning German well, if one is not actually living in a German-speaking country, is a long and arduous path. Non-native speakers of German cannot develop adequate language facility in this American context unless they are taught systematically. Without the language there is little justification for making appointments in an administrative unit called German or, for that matter, appointing our German Ph.D.s at all. German history can be taught in a history department-and indeed is taught at some institutions by the colleague who teaches European history and actually specializes in, for example, France; the teaching of German literature-if it is done in English only-can be subsumed by a comparative literature program or perhaps a department of literature or English; contemporary culture can be taught in the context of a department of geography, anthropology, or ethnology, and so on. …

What Are You Reading?

In one way or another, most of my recent readings have focused on diasporic and ethnic-minority literatures, experiences, and performances. From the late spring through midsummer, the readings I did in the context of a migratory experience in Europe produced new perspectives on questions of displacement, marginalization, and cross-cultural connections. I was invited to teach a graduate course on a departmental exchange with the Comparative Literature program of the University of Lisbon, and I designed a course called “Crossing Continents: Multiethnic Literatures of Europe and North America.” The course, taught in spring 2005, focused on understanding ways in which the critical paradigms used by literary and cultural critics in the United States might be extended profitably to the examination of immigrant and racial-minority cultures in Western Europe, and how diasporic and postcolonial models of migration developed by European scholars could expand the dimensions of U.S. ethnic studies.

"Forty Percent Is Luck": An Interview with C. Y. (Chin Yang) Lee

Andrew Shin California State University, Los Angeles On October 2, 2001, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles premiered David Henry Hwang's adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song to glowing reviews. Its initial run was extended, and after several months, the production moved to Broadway. Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical, which opened at the St. James Theater in December 1958, is itself adapted from C. Y. Lee's novel The Flower Drum Song published in 1957. Rodgers and Hammerstein's original production was the first Broadway show to feature Asian American players, and the film version, released in 1961, inaugurated the careers of the first generation of Asian American actors, including Nancy Kwan, James Shigeta, and Jack Soo. C. Y. Lee's work and career, however, have been largely overlooked because of the reception of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song, which many observers felt perpetuated Orientalist stereotypes of Asians. Although Lee's novel was a New York Times bestseller, it quickly went out of print and rarely appeared on university reading lists. Ironically, the inception of the nation's first ethnic studies programs in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which aimed to overhaul a curriculum focusing on a received canon of predominantly white, European, and EuroAmerican writers, proved inimical to Lee's playful vision of the mixing of Chinese and American traditions in Chinese American life. The very identity politics and cultural nationalism that fueled ethnic consciousness-raising refused Lee's evocation of the Chinese experience in America. Hwang's musical, Flower Drum Song, meditates on its own process of artistic renewal, restaging, in a contemporary idiom, Lee 'S analyses of cultural and generational conflict as a struggle between Old Master Wang's desire to sustain Chinese traditions in the form of a run-down Chinese opera house and the Americanborn son Wang Ta's desire to transform the opera house into a Western-style nightclub. Significantly, Hwang's adaptation draws attention to Lee's modernity: the novel's representation of cultural conflict and the invention of new traditions in immigrant life is timeless and remains as relevant for contemporary audiences as it was in 1957. Indeed, Lee's depiction of life in San Francisco's Chinatown is undergoing a renaissance due in large part to Hwang's intervention: the musical, reinterpreted by Hwang, is once again on Broadway; in 2002, forty-five years after its initial publication, Penguin Books reissued Lee s novel. Also in 2002, the Enlightening Noah Publishing Company of Santa Clara, CA published four of Lee's works in Chinese: The Flower Drum Song. Lover's Point, Corner of Heaven, and a collection of short stories, Changsan Girl. Traditional Magazine of Taiwan is currently publishing Lee's memoirs in Chinese, with the English version forthcoming. C. Y. Lee's life offers a window to the historical and political upheavals of the time. He was born on December 23, 1917, in Hunan Province, China, and his family moved to Beijing when he was ten. Shortly after Lee enrolled at Jinan's Shandong University, Japan invaded China, forcing him to flee to Yunnan where he completed his bachelor's degree at Southwest Associated University in Kunming, Yunnan Province, in 1942. That same year, driven by the continued turbulence in China, he traveled to the United States and enrolled in a graduate comparative literature program at Columbia University. After less than a year, he transferred to Yale University to study drama with Walter Pritchard Eaton, Eugene 0 'Neill's mentor, graduating with an M.F.A. in 1947. After completing his studies, Lee worked as a journalist, editing a Chinese-language newspaper, and wrote a daily column for Chinese World, a newspaper published in San Francisco's Chinatown; he also taught Chinese at the Monterey Army Language School. Lee is fond of telling the story of how he managed to stay in the United States and continue his writing career: in 1949 he won a Reader's Digest-sponsored contest for Forbidden Dollar, a short story anthologized in Best Original Short Stories later that year. …

Theory 911

It was inevitable that the events of September 2001 and the rapidly shifting world picture they have generated should force us to reexamine our programs, methods, orientations, and presuppositions. Having set out to address the role played by theory in comparative literature programs, I find myself caught between a wish to anticipate this fast-changing history we half live, half dream, in front of television screens and a need to take more distance, to survey a longer history. Besides, since I completed a book entitled The Future of Theory just weeks before these events, I feel the urge to check the relevance of some of my analyses and predictions.

Haunting the Underworld in Nerval’s Les Nuits d’octobre

HAUNTING THE UNDERWORLD IN N ERVAL'S LESNUI TSD'OCTOBRE AinfieG Kilb3n6/s a docloni/ uifuHdate in the Comparative literature Program at the I niversity of California, Santa Barbara. It is temporary homelessness and a chance encounter that plunge the narrator of Gerard de Nerval's Les Niiits d'octobre into an evening designed to resemble la vie de boheme. However, bohemian absence of this fomierly lively most noticeable in the narrative. The date is 1852, and the only remains of such a life are stories of the past, because police presence has made the locations that were it is rather the nightlife that is once considered unsavory safe for visits from the bourgeoisie. The novella shows the imitation of the fabled urban wanderings of bohemians becoming a leisure activity for the bourgeoisie. The frequent references to the past draw attention to the changes in the city over the past generation, while invoking the ghosts of that live romanticism and bohemia on as legend. homelessness possible The idleness narrator's are temporary and his resulting voluntary, first and make subsequent encounters, flaneur, that with a friend whom he identifies only as a Charles Dickens article, called and then with an at article attributed to he comes across in a magazine. The 'The Key of the Street or London bourgeois narrator it, Night, recounts the experience of a who all decides to spend the evening slumming Ou'lls sont heureux les by staying out night with only nine pence in his pocket. is: The narrator's reaction to the story et lire Anglais de pouvoir ecrire des chapitres d'observation Paris, et denues de tout alliage d'invention romanesque! A demanderait que cela fut seme d'anecdotes on nous d'histoires

Standing Outside on the Inside: Black Adolescents and the Construction of Academic Identity

Standing Outside on the Inside: Black Adolescents and the Construction of Academic Identity, by Olga M. Welch and Carolyn R. Hodges. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 144 pages. $14.95, paper. Standing Outside on the Inside sheds light on the experiences of a group of disadvantaged African American adolescents who participated in a university-sponsored enrichment program called Project EXCEL (Encouraging Excellence in Children Extends Learning). Authors Welch and Hodges first launched Project EXCEL as a pilot project to provide enrichment in reading, writing, and foreign languages to college-bound, African American juniors from a local inner-city high school. After two years, the program was expanded to include sophomores as well as European American students from a second inner-city high school. This book details the authors' action research documenting how students' experiences in Project EXCEL helped them develop an academic identity or, to use a term coined by the authors, a ethos. Whether participation in the program and the development of this ethos improved students' academic achievement, as measured by their grade point averages and standardized test scores, was the focus of this study. Welch and Hodges, both African American women who teach at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, used their own educational backgrounds and personal experiences to develop the hypotheses and research questions examined in the study. Welch (a professor of Rehabilitation, Deafness, and Human Services) and Hodges (a professor of German and Slavic languages, and chair of the University's comparative literature programs) come from very different social backgrounds. Despite this, the two note that they both developed academic identities grounded in traditional African American values pertaining to education, family, and community: We came to understand that education was to be seen as a possession which, driven by a personal sense of pride in achievement, could never be taken away. Furthermore, this education could be passed on to others directly through teaching and advising, and indirectly through serving as role models. Because this commitment to excellence and to the life of the mind was recognized as a permanent possession, it was internalized as a way of being free and as a key to freeing others. (p. 6) The introduction to Standing Outside on the Inside outlines the study's conceptual framework and research methodology. Chapter one provides an extensive review of related literature and an in-depth exploration of the key themes explored in this work. In it, Welch and Hodges focus on the failed promise of reforms designed to promote equal educational opportunity for African American students. They suggest that inherent in these reforms is a presumption of African American students' deficiency that marginalizes these students and casts them as outsiders in the educational process. They further suggest that the development of a positive academic identity or scholar ethos is vital if African American students are to achieve academic success despite the culture of oppression prevalent in urban educational settings. Chapters two, three, and four are the most informative, for they offer specific details about Project EXCEL and case examples of students' and instructors' experiences in the program. The vignettes Welch and Hodges present throughout these chapters illuminating these experiences are the strength of the book, and should provide most readers with a deep understanding of the concepts presented. For instance, in chapter two, the authors argue one of Project EXCEL's primary tenets: that a positive academic identity is a component of global self-concept and is central to high performance and achievement motivation. To make this point, they contrast the experiences of two students: one an African American male whom they believed had a great deal of potential but who was aloof and unwilling to contribute beyond the minimal requirements, and the other an African American female who lacked confidence in her abilities and who was described by her high school teachers as a diligent, but not gifted, student. …

Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association

The association's most significant news is its change in name from PAPC to PAMLA to strengthen its identification with the Modem Language Association and to maintain the historic presence of classical languages. The association's ninety-third annual meeting will be held 3-5 November 1995 at the University of California, Santa Barbara, hosted by the College of Letters and Science with its Division of the Humanities, and cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the Department of Classics, the Comparative Literature Program, the Department of English, the Department of Germanic, Semitic, and Slavic Studies, and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Gerhart Hoffmeister, professor of German, is serving as chair of the local committee.

The Dictionary of Old English and the final design of its computer system

In June 1983, at a session chaired by Paul Bratley at the International Conference on Computing in the Humanities in Raleigh, North Carolina, I described what I thought was the final design of the computer system for the Dictionary of Old English. I have since discovered that the configuration for a computer system is seldom as final as one would wish. So I begin in truly medieval fashion with a retraction: the Dictionary of Old English did not purchase the Xerox STAR system about which I spoke at length in 1983. However, with a generous gift from the President of the University of Toronto, we were able to purchase a system which we think is superior, but which incorporates those features of STAR we found most attractive. The University hoped that our system might eventually also serve as a general humanities text processing and publication system. It is within this larger context I would like to begin. On the fourteenth floor of Robarts Library, where the Dictionary of Old English (DOE) has its offices, members of the Department of East Asian Studies presently hand-letter for their students exercises in Japanese; the Department of Religious Studies works with texts in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Coptic; the Zola Project produces editions in French; the Comparative Literature program trains students of Italian, German, and Spanish Literature; the Department of Middle Eastern Studies teaches Arabic; and the Dictionary of Old English makes use of those letters foreign to the Latin alphabet ce, ts, and b . What we all have in common is the need for text-editing and fast publishing, and some of us have the further need for a special alphabet or special character sets. Any computer system that will be useful to the humanities

Apples and Pommes : The Combined English and Foreign Language Department

THE present configuration of academic departments in American colleges and universities owes its existence to a series of organizational reforms in higher education begun in the 1840s and completed for the most part by the year 1900 (Duryea 24-28, Dressel and Reichard 392-94). The structure that emerged from this period of evolution was by and large geared to the expansion of student population (graduate as well as undergradu ate), increasing numbers of faculty, and relatively sta ble institutional resources. During this same period the administrative separation of English from foreign lan guages became common, though even today some in stitutions (mostly small to medium-sized colleges and universities) retain departments whose titles suggest that these fields are still considered a single academic unit.l My paper discusses the rationale for the combined En glish and foreign language department, describes the cir cumstances under which this form of academic organization might constitute an administrative unit su perior to separate departments, and suggests ways in which such a union of related disciplines could offer than just administrative convenience and efficiency. To begin, the combined English and foreign language department of today is not without precedent or pat tern. The rise of comparative literature programs has generated some movement toward such a union of lan guage disciplines,2 while the traditional classics pro gram (Greek and Latin) illustrates the way in which diverse academic fields can be amalgamated successfully. A program in classics typically includes courses in his tory and art as well as offerings in languages and litera ture. In an article on the interdisciplinary nature of classics programs, Karl Galinsky has characterized the decline in these programs during the 1960s and 1970s as a felix culpa from which the field has emerged in a form more resourceful, imaginative, and than ever (29). Galinsky is right of course, and in a sense his description of classics programs has always been right. They have traditionally been among the most imagina tive and versatile academic fields in curriculum develop ment. The problem of classics programs in American colleges and universities stems in large measure from the failure of these programs to consolidate and extend their curricular advances into the realm of academic politics and policy making. This fact, along with shifting tides of student interest, explains the origin of the programs' woes during the last two decades, woes so great that it is only very recently that the field has shown signs of reviving. Let me quickly add that I believe English and foreign languages should support the cause of classics Paul F. Reichardt