 |
BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATUREVolume 7, Number 1 (Fall 2008) |
|
BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATUREVolume 7, Number 1 (Fall 2008) |
This issue opens with Carlo Salzani's review essay on Samuel Weber's book on Walter Benjamin. Salzani finds Benjamin's -abilities "brilliantly textual" in the close attention it pays both to Benjamin's language (the German text and "the problems and inconsistencies of the English translation") and to his theory of language. As Salzani notes, Weber analyzes Benjamin's marked "tendency to form concepts by recourse to the suffix barkeit" (4) [which in English can be written either -ibility or -ability] "as the sign of a deeper connection between the linguistic constructions and Benjamin's mode of philosophizing."
A term like iterability becomes crucial in delineating Benjamin's resistance to hierarchical oppositions, most notably to subordinating possibility to actuality. For Weber, Benjamin's nominalizations offer a concept of the virtual, "inseparable from time insofar as it involves an ongoing, ever-unfinished, and unpredictable process" (7). While in Benjamin's own estimation, texts had to be understood not only in the context of their own time but also in their transformation and continual reworking in the constellation with our present, Weber's re-reading of Benjamin's writing as a permanence or reiteration of virtuality is problematic, Salzani contends. That is, it appears to stress the impossibility to translate, to interpret, and read at the expense of Benjamin's own outline of a methodology for reading his work and of his emphasis on actuality and actualization. In Salzani's view, Benjamin's method is not static in its effort to reach for coherence. Rather, it "almost prescribes a reading that will be polarized by," and "put into a constellation with our present." Further, "[a]s a cultural artefact, it asks to be violated and read against the grain of its time and our own and thus re-inscribed in new practices, re-assembled and re-made always anew."
A second review essay in this issue also focuses on how translation and theories of language and textuality matter for an understanding of history and the historical work's transformation and continued life in the constellation with our present. As Jon Solomon's review suggests, The Clash of Empires is noteworthy not only for its reading of British-Chinese international relations, but for its presentation of the ways in which semiotic theory deepens our understanding of colonialism, post-colonialism, international law, feminism, comparative grammar and (in a coda) the imperial throne, in place or looted, as fetish. The key to Liu's approach to British-Chinese relations lies largely in Peirce's semiotic theory. Liu's historically grounded argument links semiotics to "the novel military technology of telegraphic communication in the second half of the nineteenth century." Liu's reading of empire provides "theoretical and historical grids . . . [for] the issues of intersubjectivity [and foreignness], indexicality, and violence in the light of work" by Peirce, Foucault, Bataille, and other theorists.
For Liu as well, the dramatized "first encounter" of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe with Friday, in which deixis and indexicality -- Crusoe's pointing finger extends to his gun -- represent a "familiar ritual of subjugation and fetishism in the European imagining of first encounter." This episode helps advance Liu's argument to the "clash" symbolized in "the translation of the written Chinese character "yi" at the time of the Opium War." Did "yi" mean "foreigner"? "barbarian"? "stranger"? "non-Chinese"? The British believed that the Chinese character pronounced "yi" meant "barbarian" -- despite the Greek etymology of the latter term -- that it was directed at them, and therefore ensured that it was banned in two separate articles of the Treaty of Tianjin of 1858. As Liu writes, "A good deal is at stake when it comes to identifying the 'true barbarian' for civilization. The stakes rise higher with the scandal of the word "yi" because its enunciation issues forth from the language of a non-European society which is regarded as less than civilized by the British. In other words, the Chinese character "yi" appears to have thrown the barbarian back onto civilization itself and turned into its double and mirror image."
In this imperial encounter, we see the creation of a tripartite super-sign, the parts separated by slashes: 夷/"yi"/barbarian. Liu regards this as a "linguistic monstrosity," a "hetero-cultural signifying chain, a fantastic hybrid of translated concepts." From the realm of positive signs," we have been transported -- or translated -- "into the realm of enchanted meanings, excesses of signification," and more.
Reviews of three texts in this issue mark the persistent interest in the liminal quality of experience and artifacts, situated at the border between human and nonhuman. As Dorian Stuber writes in his review of Daniel Heller-Roazen's Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language and The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation, "[t]ogether they explore the relation of rationality to its excess, where rationality is defined as the conjunction of language and consciousness, and … excess is …whatever troubles, undoes, and yet grounds that rationality." In Echolalias "excess inheres at the pre-verbal borders of language; in The Inner Touch excess inheres in … the sense common to all beings that allows them to feel themselves as sensing and thus as living."
Daniel Nisa Cáceres situates Elaine Freedgood's The Ideas in Things within the now expansive field of object studies or thing theory, an interdisciplinary body of work that continues to test the rigid border between people and things that has guided much of Western culture. Invoking Bill Brown's A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (2003) (and Gustavus Stadler's review of that text in Volume 5, Number 1 [Spring 2005] of BMRCL), Cáceres illuminates how Freedgood "retrieves the cultural, historical, social and material qualities" of "seemingly unimportant objects of consumption." For Cáceres, Freedgood performs a "strong metonymic" reading of manufactured goods (evoked in Jane Eyre, Mary Barton and Great Expectations) "by taking a literary thing literally and relying on 'mediations'" -- "those of historians of textiles and tobacco, of forestry and furniture" (5) -- that can illuminate [a thing's] past." As such, her study eschews "the routinized literary figuration that precludes the interpretation of most things of realism" (5), and underscores how things are not "indentured to a metaphorical relation in which they must give up most of their qualities in the service of a symbolic relation" (10).
Martin Seel's Aesthetics of Appearing offers a meditation on the liminal encounters that inform our experience of objects, surroundings, people, and atmospheres. Even if, as Mario Wenning notes, Seel's work departs from studies that are wary of searches for the "essence of art and aesthetic experience," aesthetic appearing nonetheless underscores provisional borders and relations: "[it] enables us with the awareness of the ephemeral nature of reality and our place in this reality." An awareness of reality and our place in it raises profound ethical and political questions. Although, for Wenning, Seel does not explore these as directly and fully as he might, such questions emerge persistently, especially when Seel argues that the meaning of the violence that occurs, for instance, between a perpetrator and victim "cannot be understood independently of the additional position of … spectators" (188) (since such acts "are often committed with the perspective of a present or absent spectator in mind").
As Megan Craig notes, "[a]lthough the title" of R. Clifton Spargo's Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death "suggests it is a study of Levinas in light of the Holocaust, it is also a multifaceted defense and critique of Levinas, a response to Alain Badiou's criticism of Levinas's ethics as apolitical, a warning against the "fallacies of Western democratic culture…" (120). Vigilant Memory squarely aims "to test the viability and the limits of Levinasian ethics in the twenty-first century and to ask "in what sense an ethics would be said to have force in a political world" (18).
Two texts reviewed in this issue demonstrate the importance of understanding genre or specific genres in broad terms. For Gregory Byala, Martin Puchner's Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestoes and the Avant-Garde presents a highly original examination of the formidable influence that The Communist Manifesto exerted on the shape of modern art. As Puchner describes it, Marx and Engels developed the form "that would help revolutionary modernity to know itself, to arrive at itself, to make and to manifest itself" (1). Focusing on the translation and distribution of The Communist Manifesto, its more explicit "modulation from political into artistic form," and the manifesto's "notions of futurity, theatricality, and performativity … Poetry of the Revolution reveal[s] how the manifesto moved from a socialist document, to an artistic genre, to a form of art."
As Byala points out, analyzing a seminal political work in terms of a category -- genre -- that it was perhaps thought to transcend allows Puchner to chart the expansive artistic influence of The Manifesto. Rita Felski's collection of essays, Rethinking Tragedy, likewise exhibits an understanding of genre that eschews "rigid taxonomies." As Verna Foster notes, while Felski's collection "retains a sense of the aesthetic form that contains and shapes the tragic as experience," the more inclusive concept of "mode" allows the essays to address the tragic as both a philosophical idea and a component of many contemporary art forms and fields. As such, the collection moves beyond the conventional constraints of many studies to consider the persistence of the tragic in contemporary expression and in forms and fields other than drama -- namely, film, popular culture, philosophy, and politics.
In this issue, we append a list of Books Received in 2008. We would be glad to hear from readers interested in reviewing any of them.
PAST ISSUES
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