Volume 53, Issue 2

This essay begins by investigating the possibility of a global literary history through the lens of periodization and its challenges for comparatists, starting from World War I. Second, by examining neglected texts from the periphery, it seeks to ‘provincialize’ the Eurocentric focus of our histories of war literature. To address the complex temporality of this epoch, we must accommodate the multicultural contexts from which these works emerge, as well as the long-term recovery of texts. Belatedness reflects the reemergence of memories from trauma, the discovery of manuscripts, the paucity of translations, and the long silencing of marginalized voices from the periphery. In turn, shifts in critical values and the translation of materials permit us to enlarge and reconstitute a globalized archive, as a few examples demonstrate. Great War texts by Huidobro, Svarnakumari, and Diallo as well as oral laments offer fruitful perspectives from the periphery on that epochal experience.

The article explores the concept and practice of world literature from the perspective of postcolonial Anglophone literature. To account for the agency of literature and to move beyond the old centre/periphery model, the contribution focuses on literary acts of worldmaking rather than on the circulation of literature across the globe. It is argued that Anglophone world literature thrives on a poetics that bind diverse literary histories, languages, and distinct creative practices into patterns of exchange and thus exposes the constitutive exteriority within European (literary) histories. The use of the vernacular is identified as a central element of world literature’s poetics, staging a conflictual interplay between transcultural relationality and the formative impact of locality. As the vernacular binds the global and the local into loops of relation, it also offers an opportunity to consider the classification of “language as a language” (Young 1209). A reading of Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) provides insights into literary ways of worldmaking, showing how the poetics of Anglophone world literature shuttles among several places to create a vernacular cosmopolitanism (Bhabha). Finally, the article examines how an understanding of world literature as a polycentric network emerging from different literary traditions changes our practice of comparative literary history.

The focus of this article is the relation between time and transcultural space in literary history. The argument is that the concept of anachronism can help us understand the complexity of temporality and that the analysis of transcultural exchanges between European and Latin American art and literature may change literary history and further an understanding of the anachronism of Eurochronology. Two examples of a transcultural and anachronistic relation between Europe and America will be analyzed, both of them novels and writers of magical realism. Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Cien años de soledad ( One Hundred Years of Solitude ) is analyzed as a challenge to European historicity, while the transcultural aesthetics of Miguel Ángel Asturias is analyzed as a challenge to the understanding of avant-gardistic modernity. The analyses are carried out in critical dialogue with historicism and theories about world literature.

“Minor literature” is an elusive concept in literary scholarship. Its widespread use stands in sharp contrast to the paucity of its theoretical development, which is limited to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s 1975 seminal book Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure . We claim that a comparative history of minor literatures in European languages – a nonexistent project so far – requires three preliminary steps, namely, conceptual clarification, cross-pollination between comparative literary history and the digital humanities, and a bibliometric analysis of the minor-literature constellation . First, conceptual clarification is needed to show, on the one hand, how Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments on minor literatures significantly differ from those of what they posit as their source (Kafka’s discussion on kleine Literaturen ) and, on the other hand, the existence of alternative genealogies. Second, by adhering to a Braudelian definition of comparative history, the massive data needed for addressing the production and reception of (minor) literatures in specific social and cultural contexts would immensely benefit from recourse to digital tools. Third, and as an example of approaching conceptual clarification with digital tools, a quantitative study of the minor-literature constellation must be performed using a key tool of international scholarship (the MLA International Bibliography). In the current paper, we may only provide an introductory survey of these three fields and, therefore, the results are tentative and further research is needed.

This essay examines Walter Benjamin’s opposition against traditional aesthetics and his development of an alternative, a decidedly anti-aesthetic approach. More specifically, it focuses on how Benjamin launches a frontal attack on Idealist aesthetics in the theory of ancient tragedy expounded in the Trauerspiel book and how he develops his own alternative conception in critical delineation from it. Closely examining his engagement with Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Hegel, and Solger, the essay shows how Benjamin’s entire theory is construed as a pointed response to a long and complex discourse on tragedy. Through a reconstruction of these debates, it becomes evident that the core of Benjamin’s critique concerns the relation between universal and singular in Idealist aesthetics, spelled out in a theory of reconciliation that is directly tied to the themes of fate and sacrifice. Against this background, the essay then analyzes – drawing both on Benjamin’s reception of Franz Rosenzweig as well as the work of Giorgio Agamben – Benjamin’s notion of silence as a retreat from language and meaning, as an immersion into the body. Instead of offering an image of reconciliation, tragedy, for Benjamin, then appears as the site where bodily singularity and impotentiality fragments the totality of signification, where meaning is disrupted and reduced to degree zero.

With its numerous offers of entertainment on the festival ground, the fair – site and event at the same time – represents an ‘extra-ordinary’ diversion with regard to the uniform working rhythm. However, because of its persistent (annual) return, it is nevertheless solidly anchored in people’s everyday lives. This article analyzes the phenomenon’s topographic and functional dimensions through the example of three prose poems by Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. It first focuses on the fair ground and the fair’s heterotopic character according to Michel Foucault is carved out. Secondly, from the perspective of leisure event , the fair, according to Roland Barthes, becomes the modern myth, in which the naïve crowd of visitors functions as the reader of myths and the poems’ sophisticated speaker as mythologist. In this interpretation, the latter takes another role besides that of the poet: the speaker is the producer of myths who turns the fair into an aesthetic piece of art.

In the wake of the so-called postmodernist turn in literary studies and criticism, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath has been subjected to a major interpretative revision that has reoriented the focus solely on the chapters dealing with the Joads while leaving out those that provide a detailed analysis of larger socioeconomic forces at work. The latter are laid out in documentary interchapters that constitute the backbone of dialectical montage, a narrative method used by Steinbeck to create a consciousness-raising novel. Documentary interchapters, as this paper argues, shed light on the integrated forms of systemic exploitation that agricultural workers face in capitalism. Overlooking the significance of documentary interchapters results in a reductive reading of Steinbeck’s classic, which in turn also undermines its consciousness-raising potential in our era.

Representations of the devastation of nuclear annihilation are undoubtedly confrontational, yet crucial to understanding the ongoing trauma and impact of atomic warfare. In examining how survivors “translate into words an extraordinarily painful landscape” (Tōge 1952), this paper explores the abject imagery utilized by hibakusha poets in order to express the violent horrors of the A-bomb. It focuses on how explicitly grotesque images function to give shape to events regarded as ineffable, and to make potently real the experiences of those whose identities were defined by shame and revulsion. Drawing upon Kristevan notions of abjection, and the poetry of hibakusha such as Kurihara Sadako, Tōge Sankichi, Kawamura Sachiko, and Shōda Shinoe, it contends that by seeking to graphically confront that which is ineffable, hibakusha poets are able to contest the liminal spaces to which their bodies and experiences have been relegated; indeed, by “reopening the grave” (Gotō, qtd. in Treat 1995, 29), survivor poets refuse silence, and give form and shape to trauma.

In light of two new strands of research, this study’s focus on the contacts between the world of the Iberian Peninsula in the premodern world, and the interest in Christian-Muslim relations globally, brings together two related texts from the early Middle Ages that illustrate a significant proximity between both cultures. Hrotsvit von Gandersheim’s “Pelagius” and the contemporary vita of the abbot Johannes of Gorze demonstrate that 10 th -century Christian audiences north of the Alps were considerably informed about the situation in the Iberian Peninsula and made significant efforts to learn about the political and religious conditions there. Together, the literary account and the biographical narrative confirm a much more open exchange between both worlds than has previously been assumed.