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BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATUREVolume 9, Number 2 (Fall 2011) |
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BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATUREVolume 9, Number 2 (Fall 2011) |
The last decades have witnessed a steady growth in the disciplinary range of comparative literature, one that has led its practitioners to venture into both neighboring and distant fields, including art history, film studies, gender and sexuality, philosophy, history, transnational studies, anthropology, and psychology. The books reviewed in this issue represent this protean development, as they engage in reflecting on and analyzing the interconnectedness of literary study with evolutionary biology, globalism, literary market economies, theology, and philosophy. Each of the reviews, moreover, indicates underlying tensions: controversy, tension between literature and the economy, between views on Darwinism, the tensions of WW II and its aftermath. It may be a truism that comparison fosters tension--but then, such tensions often enrich our understanding of the literature in question.
Carlo Salzani's review essay examines Joseph Carroll's Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice and Virginia Richter's Literature After Darwin: Human Beasts in Western Fiction, 1859-1939. Carroll calls for what Salzani describes as "a sort of literary-study adaptation of social Darwinism" whereby "the survival of the fittest means the elimination of all"--namely, other schools and approaches (especially postructuralist) to studying literature. Salzani reveals the irony in a methodology of exclusion, supposedly Darwinian, but only in a narrow sense. However, as Salzani notes, Literature after Darwin deploys, as an "epistemological frame," a Darwinism understood by Richter to relish diversity and to "favor unpredictability and asystematicity rather than the endless repetition of the same universal pattern" (6). Moreover, Richter draws upon other disciplines, "combin[ing] history of science and new scientific developments with philosophy and literary and cultural studies . . . "
Gregory Byala's review of Donna V. Jones's recent study, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity, also considers biological reductionism's threat to notions of the literary and of life, especially as these are understood to be galvanized "by a sense of the irresolvable." As Byala explains, however, Jones "is ultimately wary of the implications that an unmediated return to mystical or vitalist conceptions of life will have," given that such resistance remains interlaced with the discourses and practices of European racism. At the same time, Jones points out that vitalism also functioned as "the chief weapon of [African and Caribbean] postcolonial resistance and emancipation" (21).
As Simona Sawhney stresses in her review of Sanjay Krishnan's Reading the Global: Troubling Perspectives on Britain's Empire in Asia, even though Krishnan maintains that "empirical events, flows and movements" remain fundamentally related to a "theoretical stance," his work pointedly unsettles the concept of the "global" as affording a "single, unified" perspective. Contesting, in particular, "the ways in which the 'global' has been uncritically assimilated, in the humanities and social sciences, to a transparent comprehension of the world" (1), Krishnan calls for reading the global by remaining (in Sawhney's words) "attentive to how the global constitutes and presents itself as the global."
Two reviews in this issue trace tensions between literature (and literary study) and powerful long-standing or emergent forces and fields in the early modern period.
As Paul Innes relates, David J. Baker's On Demand: Writing for the Market in Early Modern England seeks not only to account for the pressures that the wider market for writing exerted on the production and reception of literature, but, in Baker's words, to produce a "more inclusive 'reckoning,' one that explores how "cognition and affect work together in the financial thinking" of, for instance, Shakespeare's playing companies as well as other "literary entrepreneurs" (x-xii).
Willis Goth Regier's review of volume 78, Controversies, in The Collected Works of Erasmus examines the work of the great defender of the humanities as they were just emerging from the "shadow of theology." For Regier, the formidable controversies sparked by Erasmus, "the champion of translation, pioneer of modern philology, and scholar of sacred texts," raise complex, timely issues, including "whether detachment is a virtue, whether interpreters must know the original languages of their texts, how much difference of opinion can be tolerated, what constitutes authority, [and] who may challenge it …"
Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb's Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden analyzes the relations between the works of a philosopher and a poet whose texts mark the profound, continually unfolding effects of WW II. Arendt and Auden, in reviewer Anne O'Byrne's words, "both emerge from their parallel experiences of Europe at and after war with a shared concern for the fate of language in dark times." Yet their response to the crisis of meaning brought on by the catastrophic events of the mid-twentieth century evinces, for Gottlieb, a "shared idiosyncratic messianic sensibility," one that eschews defensive investments in sovereign power or apocalyptic thinking and refuses the putatively consoling return offered by dogmatic, singular thinking; such a sensibility instead praises our "contingency," our remaining "subject to uncertainty and unpredictability."
In this issue, we append a list of Books Received in 2010-11. We would be glad to hear from readers interested in reviewing any of them.
PAST ISSUES
Volume 9, Number 1 (Spring 2011)
Volume 8, Number 1 (Fall 2009/Spring 2010)
Volume 7, Number 1 (Fall 2008)
Volume 6, Number 2 (Fall 2007)
Volume 6, Number 1 (Winter 2007)
Volume 5, Number 2 (Winter 2006)
Volume 5, Number 1 (Spring 2005)
Volume 4, Number 2 (Spring 2004)
Volume 4, Number 1 (Summer 2003)
Volume 3, Number 2 (Fall 2002)
Volume 3, Number 1 (Fall 2001)
Volume 2, Number 2 (Spring 2001)
Volume 2, Number 1 (Summer 2000)
Volume 1, Number 1 (Summer 1999)
GUIDELINES FOR REVIEWERSThe usual length for reviews is 1,000-4,000 words, or about 4-10 pages. Reviews should note author, title, place and date of publication as well as name of publisher, number of pages (100+ x....) and ISBN number. If the review copy is a paper edition, note this immediately after the ISBN number.
We prefer to incorporate bibliographical references directly into the texts. Reviews should employ footnotes only if they are absolutely necessary. In other respects, reviews should follow the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing.
Please send reviews in Microsoft Word attachments. We will contact reviewers about changes in their texts. Each issue of the Review will be copyrighted.
The main purpose of reviews is to foster intellectual dialogue by informing readers about books and issues of interest in the field of comparative literature. These books may include texts that focus upon the literature of a single country but nevertheless focus upon questions or topics important to comparatists. The editors welcome proposals for reviews of books, and for longer review essays, that fall within this framework. Books listed in "Books Received" are also available for review.
BOOKS RECEIVED