This article focuses on the concept of randomness as the absence of goal-oriented movement in literary walks. The literature of walking displays the happenstance of adventure as one of the great antidotes to our inane, highly technologized, digitalized twenty-first-century lifestyle. In the end, however, such randomness may reveal itself as not so random after all, as the purpose of the journey, its inherent telos, discloses itself while travelling or in hindsight. This article provides brief glimpses into the history of literary walks to examine this tension between apparent randomness and the non-random. By drawing on a range of cultural theories and theorizations of travel and especially of walking, I look at literary foot travel in the nineteenth century, the Romantics and American Transcendentalists, some great adventure hikes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the urban and rural flâneur. In doing so the article does not lose sight of the question of how we can instrumentalize the literature of walking for life during the current pandemic.
{"title":"Random Pandemic Perambulations: A Brief History of Literary Walks in the Age of Corona","authors":"Peter Arnds","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2021.0402","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2021.0402","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on the concept of randomness as the absence of goal-oriented movement in literary walks. The literature of walking displays the happenstance of adventure as one of the great antidotes to our inane, highly technologized, digitalized twenty-first-century lifestyle. In the end, however, such randomness may reveal itself as not so random after all, as the purpose of the journey, its inherent telos, discloses itself while travelling or in hindsight. This article provides brief glimpses into the history of literary walks to examine this tension between apparent randomness and the non-random. By drawing on a range of cultural theories and theorizations of travel and especially of walking, I look at literary foot travel in the nineteenth century, the Romantics and American Transcendentalists, some great adventure hikes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the urban and rural flâneur. In doing so the article does not lose sight of the question of how we can instrumentalize the literature of walking for life during the current pandemic.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48569585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In recent years, the legendary Hong Kong author Jin Yong has been referred to in Anglophone media as ‘China's Tolkien’, but the basis for that comparison has been disregarded by Sinologists for valid reasons. However, the very establishment of the comparison, even on questionable grounds, may be a stroke of serendipity. This essay probes the Tolkien-Jin Yong comparison from a literary perspective, arguing that the comparison is often made on the basis of fundamental misconceptions, but that it is nevertheless serendipitously apt for reasons that have remained unexplored. Identifying Jin Yong and Tolkien as influential modern literary medievalists, the essay shifts the Tolkien-Jin Yong comparison from the problematic terrain of genre to the firmer ground of medievalist antiquarianism, with important implications for questions of cultural identity, historical reconstruction and narrative form.
{"title":"A Serendipitous Comparison? Jin Yong and J. R. R. Tolkien: Genre, Prosimetrum and Modern Medievalism East and West","authors":"Jonathan Y. H. Hui","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2021.0407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2021.0407","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, the legendary Hong Kong author Jin Yong has been referred to in Anglophone media as ‘China's Tolkien’, but the basis for that comparison has been disregarded by Sinologists for valid reasons. However, the very establishment of the comparison, even on questionable grounds, may be a stroke of serendipity. This essay probes the Tolkien-Jin Yong comparison from a literary perspective, arguing that the comparison is often made on the basis of fundamental misconceptions, but that it is nevertheless serendipitously apt for reasons that have remained unexplored. Identifying Jin Yong and Tolkien as influential modern literary medievalists, the essay shifts the Tolkien-Jin Yong comparison from the problematic terrain of genre to the firmer ground of medievalist antiquarianism, with important implications for questions of cultural identity, historical reconstruction and narrative form.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42247003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Thinking fungi as a way of considering randomness gives rise, in particular, to thinking about categorization, comparison, as well as creating (more-than-human) communities through strange and unexpected commonalities. These ideas inform comparative literature more broadly, along with the desire to identify and understand culturally codified motifs – that is, meanings as they gather around particular images and generate certain ideas of being in the world. By bringing fungi to the table, this contribution considers agency and ruin with contemporary narrativized deliberations on all kinds of fungi matter(s). Textually, it examines memoirs, (new) nature writing, as well as cultural studies work on fungi; theoretically, it draws on etymology and systems of classification more broadly, impulses from new materialism, as well as STS-informed deliberations on knowledge generation, classification, and circulation.
{"title":"Thinking Fungi, or Random Considerations","authors":"Kylie Crane","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2021.0405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2021.0405","url":null,"abstract":"Thinking fungi as a way of considering randomness gives rise, in particular, to thinking about categorization, comparison, as well as creating (more-than-human) communities through strange and unexpected commonalities. These ideas inform comparative literature more broadly, along with the desire to identify and understand culturally codified motifs – that is, meanings as they gather around particular images and generate certain ideas of being in the world. By bringing fungi to the table, this contribution considers agency and ruin with contemporary narrativized deliberations on all kinds of fungi matter(s). Textually, it examines memoirs, (new) nature writing, as well as cultural studies work on fungi; theoretically, it draws on etymology and systems of classification more broadly, impulses from new materialism, as well as STS-informed deliberations on knowledge generation, classification, and circulation.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48340207","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article studies transnational biography avant la lettre by looking closely at Klaus Mann's 1943 portrait of the French writer André Gide. Writing against the backdrop of the battle against Nazism and war, Mann presents Gide as an exemplary European, who combined a strong national identity with an open, cosmopolitan mindset. The article shows how he unpacks his subject's multiple identities, while presenting a coherent life narrative, structured around the polarities of individual/communal and national/European. It further examines how writing Gide's biography influenced Mann's self-presentation as a European artist in his autobiography The Turning Point, thus aiming to reach a better understanding of how transnationalism is lived and produced through life-writing practices. Finally, this article explores the pitfalls and challenges of transnational biography by looking closely at Mann's use of national categories and his tendency to associate transnationalism with idealizing notions of crossing and breaking down borders.
{"title":"Transnational Auto/Biography and European Identity: Klaus Mann's Portrait of André Gide","authors":"M. Rensen","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2021.0416","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2021.0416","url":null,"abstract":"This article studies transnational biography avant la lettre by looking closely at Klaus Mann's 1943 portrait of the French writer André Gide. Writing against the backdrop of the battle against Nazism and war, Mann presents Gide as an exemplary European, who combined a strong national identity with an open, cosmopolitan mindset. The article shows how he unpacks his subject's multiple identities, while presenting a coherent life narrative, structured around the polarities of individual/communal and national/European. It further examines how writing Gide's biography influenced Mann's self-presentation as a European artist in his autobiography The Turning Point, thus aiming to reach a better understanding of how transnationalism is lived and produced through life-writing practices. Finally, this article explores the pitfalls and challenges of transnational biography by looking closely at Mann's use of national categories and his tendency to associate transnationalism with idealizing notions of crossing and breaking down borders.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45481416","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay examines the concept of randomness in three novels by contemporary Arab novelists, employing chaos theory and complexity theory. The three novels are Lebanese Rabie Gaber's dystopian novel Beirutus: Underground City ( Beirutus: Madīna Taḥt al-Arḍ, 2005), Egyptian Ezzedine Choukri Fishere's realistic novel Exit ( Bāb al-Khurūj, 2012), and Algerian Yasmina Khadra's detective novel What are Monkeys Waiting for? ( Qu'attendent les singes, 2014). Although they belong to different genres, all three are speculative novels and present different forms of political-security complexity and chaos in the contemporary Arab world. They represent unpredictable, random events that both resonate with and anticipate forthcoming events and political changes in the Arab world. Exit, for instance, represents the unexpected downfall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the return of the military rule after the 2011 revolution, and Beirutus the unexpected rubbish and environmental crisis in 2016 in Lebanon, while What are Monkeys Waiting for? anticipates the contemporary political turmoil in Algeria. Randomness and unpredictability in the three novels are used as a means of political projection and prediction, and as narrative strategies of literary activism against repressive realities and authoritarianism. By representing the unpredictable, Gaber, Fishere and Khadra implicitly incite resistance by warning of appalling forthcoming realities.
本文运用混沌理论和复杂性理论对当代阿拉伯小说家的三部小说中的随机性概念进行了考察。这三部小说是黎巴嫩拉比·加伯的反乌托邦小说《贝鲁斯：地下城》（贝鲁斯：Madīna Taḥt al Arḍ, 2005年），埃及人Ezzdine Choukri Fishere的现实主义小说《出口》（BāB al-Khurúj，2012），以及阿尔及利亚人Yasmina Khadra的侦探小说《猴子在等什么？（Qu’attendant les singes，2014）。尽管这三部小说属于不同的类型，但都是思辨小说，呈现了当代阿拉伯世界不同形式的政治安全复杂性和混乱。它们代表了不可预测的随机事件，既能与阿拉伯世界即将发生的事件和政治变化产生共鸣，也能预测这些事件和政治变革。例如，退出代表着埃及穆斯林兄弟会的意外垮台和2011年革命后军事统治的回归，以及2016年黎巴嫩意外的垃圾和环境危机，而猴子在等什么？预见阿尔及利亚当代的政治动荡。三部小说中的随机性和不可预测性被用作政治投射和预测的手段，也被用作文学激进主义对抗压迫现实和威权主义的叙事策略。Gaber、Fishere和Khadra通过代表不可预测的事物，含蓄地通过警告即将到来的可怕现实来煽动抵抗。
{"title":"Randomness and Political Complexity in the Contemporary Arab Novel","authors":"Jihan Zakarriya","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2021.0406","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2021.0406","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines the concept of randomness in three novels by contemporary Arab novelists, employing chaos theory and complexity theory. The three novels are Lebanese Rabie Gaber's dystopian novel Beirutus: Underground City ( Beirutus: Madīna Taḥt al-Arḍ, 2005), Egyptian Ezzedine Choukri Fishere's realistic novel Exit ( Bāb al-Khurūj, 2012), and Algerian Yasmina Khadra's detective novel What are Monkeys Waiting for? ( Qu'attendent les singes, 2014). Although they belong to different genres, all three are speculative novels and present different forms of political-security complexity and chaos in the contemporary Arab world. They represent unpredictable, random events that both resonate with and anticipate forthcoming events and political changes in the Arab world. Exit, for instance, represents the unexpected downfall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the return of the military rule after the 2011 revolution, and Beirutus the unexpected rubbish and environmental crisis in 2016 in Lebanon, while What are Monkeys Waiting for? anticipates the contemporary political turmoil in Algeria. Randomness and unpredictability in the three novels are used as a means of political projection and prediction, and as narrative strategies of literary activism against repressive realities and authoritarianism. By representing the unpredictable, Gaber, Fishere and Khadra implicitly incite resistance by warning of appalling forthcoming realities.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41390824","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
No literary genre is fully predictable or controllable – but some are more unpredictable and uncontrollable than others, and China's battler poetry is a case in point. In China, up to three hundred million people have left the countryside to flee from poverty and make their way into city life. Exposed to the extreme dynamic of global capitalism, these ‘battlers’ are the foot soldiers of China's economic rise but not invariably its beneficiaries. Many live and work under gruelling conditions and are deprived of basic civil rights, as second-class citizens in socio-economic and cultural terms. And… they write poetry. Not all of them by any means, but enough for a phenomenon called ‘battler poetry’ to enter the public eye. What is battler poetry, and what does it do? What happens when dominant logics of ideology, literary aesthetics and cultural expectations encounter the circumstances of battler life? The force field around this poetry is dizzyingly complex and rife with opportunities for disconnect and the unexpected, throwing into sharp relief the randomness that is part and parcel of cultural production.
{"title":"No One in Control? China's Battler Poetry","authors":"Maghiel van Crevel","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2021.0401","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2021.0401","url":null,"abstract":"No literary genre is fully predictable or controllable – but some are more unpredictable and uncontrollable than others, and China's battler poetry is a case in point. In China, up to three hundred million people have left the countryside to flee from poverty and make their way into city life. Exposed to the extreme dynamic of global capitalism, these ‘battlers’ are the foot soldiers of China's economic rise but not invariably its beneficiaries. Many live and work under gruelling conditions and are deprived of basic civil rights, as second-class citizens in socio-economic and cultural terms. And… they write poetry. Not all of them by any means, but enough for a phenomenon called ‘battler poetry’ to enter the public eye. What is battler poetry, and what does it do? What happens when dominant logics of ideology, literary aesthetics and cultural expectations encounter the circumstances of battler life? The force field around this poetry is dizzyingly complex and rife with opportunities for disconnect and the unexpected, throwing into sharp relief the randomness that is part and parcel of cultural production.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48582120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Georges Perec's La Vie mode d'emploi ( Life: A User's Manual) was famously based on a number of meticulously crafted lists, including a list of errors that should be made in the writing of each chapter. The engagement with imperfection in Perec's novel is central in the way it balances structure and composition with random and exchangeable elements and throughout his work the random plays a significant role. In this article, I will move from Perec's work to a wider discussion of the values of imperfection in two distinct domains: the idea of the classic and the vision of the posthuman.
乔治·佩雷克（Georges Perec）的《生活：用户手册》（La Vie mode d’emploi，Life：A User’s Manual）以一系列精心编制的列表为基础，其中包括每章写作中应该犯的错误列表。佩雷克小说中与不完美的接触是其平衡结构和构图与随机和可交换元素的核心，在他的作品中，随机性发挥了重要作用。在这篇文章中，我将从佩雷克的作品转向更广泛地讨论两个不同领域中的不完美价值观：经典的思想和后人类的愿景。
{"title":"The Values of Imperfection","authors":"Mads Rosendahl Thomsen","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2021.0404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2021.0404","url":null,"abstract":"Georges Perec's La Vie mode d'emploi ( Life: A User's Manual) was famously based on a number of meticulously crafted lists, including a list of errors that should be made in the writing of each chapter. The engagement with imperfection in Perec's novel is central in the way it balances structure and composition with random and exchangeable elements and throughout his work the random plays a significant role. In this article, I will move from Perec's work to a wider discussion of the values of imperfection in two distinct domains: the idea of the classic and the vision of the posthuman.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45329977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Isabel Burton, née Arundell, was a model cosmopolitan wife to her famous explorer husband Richard Francis Burton for thirty years. Yet, two pieces of twenty-first-century neo-Victorian Burton-biofiction – The Collector of Worlds by Iliya Troyanov and The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder – write her clean out of their core narratives. Having explored these conspicuous absences, my article turns to the historical Lady Burton's life writing, focussing on The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, in which she narrativizes the couple's transnational lives. Two of its stylistic devices are discussed in detail – paratexts and the peculiar use of first-person narration – in order to trace in them a double-gesture by which Isabel Burton combines self-erasure with self-empowerment. The detailed analysis of six paratexts, as theorized by Philippe Lejeune and Gérard Genette, supports the claim that Isabel, from the text's fringe, constructs for herself a role that combines elements of the scribe, editor/curator, narrator and author. Looping back to the neo-Victorian biofictional texts, I propose that, in Life, the historical Isabel Burton fuses self-erasure (which Troyanov picks up) with self-empowerment (which Hodder picks up), to forge a female writerly identity compatible with her self-fashioning as the wife/widow of a Victorian transnational cosmopolitan.
{"title":"The Cosmopolitan Wife: (Self-)erasure and (Self-)empowerment of Isabel Burton and her Neo-Victorian Representations","authors":"S. Mieszkowski","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2021.0417","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2021.0417","url":null,"abstract":"Isabel Burton, née Arundell, was a model cosmopolitan wife to her famous explorer husband Richard Francis Burton for thirty years. Yet, two pieces of twenty-first-century neo-Victorian Burton-biofiction – The Collector of Worlds by Iliya Troyanov and The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder – write her clean out of their core narratives. Having explored these conspicuous absences, my article turns to the historical Lady Burton's life writing, focussing on The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, in which she narrativizes the couple's transnational lives. Two of its stylistic devices are discussed in detail – paratexts and the peculiar use of first-person narration – in order to trace in them a double-gesture by which Isabel Burton combines self-erasure with self-empowerment. The detailed analysis of six paratexts, as theorized by Philippe Lejeune and Gérard Genette, supports the claim that Isabel, from the text's fringe, constructs for herself a role that combines elements of the scribe, editor/curator, narrator and author. Looping back to the neo-Victorian biofictional texts, I propose that, in Life, the historical Isabel Burton fuses self-erasure (which Troyanov picks up) with self-empowerment (which Hodder picks up), to forge a female writerly identity compatible with her self-fashioning as the wife/widow of a Victorian transnational cosmopolitan.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43649102","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
John Williams' Stoner and Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language are discrete texts, but both are accounts of literary lives. These are lives that have been moulded around language and literature, as well as lives that have been moulded into literature. Stoner is a fictional account of an unlikely individual's unexpected encounter with the sphere of literary studies, around which he then shapes the remainder of his life. Lost in Translation is a memoir about the author's struggle with language as an immigrant, a struggle that contributes to her exceptional ability to analyse and devise literary narratives. These fortuitous encounters with literature become a means to structure their respective fictional and non-fictional lives. In addition, Stoner and Hoffman are outsiders to academia, but both discover that their outsider status makes them especially attuned to the close analysis of words and to several questions of identity and the self. A comparative reading of Stoner and Lost in Translation thus draws our attention towards several large questions that reside at the heart of literary studies: What do we seek to translate into another language, into a commentary, into works of literary criticism or theory? What do we strive to render visible in our writing and teaching that revolves around these literary works? By reading John Williams' novel alongside Eva Hoffman's narrative, I aspire to lend these fairly abstract questions a more concrete guise. By way of conclusion, I emphasize how due to the force of chance and circumstance, Stoner and Hoffman stumble into literary studies where they are confronted by questions that underscore the arbitrariness and unknowability of literature, language and life.
约翰·威廉姆斯（John Williams）的《斯通纳》（Stoner）和伊娃·霍夫曼（Eva Hoffman）的《迷失在翻译中：新语言中的生活》（Lost in Translation:Life in a New Language）是离散的文本，但两者都是对文学生活的描述。这些都是围绕语言和文学塑造的生活，也是被塑造成文学的生活。斯通纳是一个虚构的故事，讲述了一个不太可能的人与文学研究领域的意外相遇，然后他围绕着这个领域塑造了自己的余生。《迷失在翻译中》是一本回忆录，讲述了作者作为移民与语言的斗争，这场斗争有助于她分析和设计文学叙事的非凡能力。这些与文学的偶然相遇成为构建他们各自虚构和非虚构生活的一种手段。此外，斯通纳和霍夫曼都是学术界的局外人，但他们都发现，他们的局外人身份使他们特别适应对词语的仔细分析，以及身份和自我的几个问题。因此，对《斯通纳》和《迷失在翻译中》的比较阅读将我们的注意力吸引到文学研究的几个核心问题上：我们寻求将什么翻译成另一种语言、评论、文学批评或理论作品？在围绕这些文学作品的写作和教学中，我们努力让什么变得可见？通过阅读约翰·威廉姆斯的小说和伊娃·霍夫曼的叙事，我渴望为这些相当抽象的问题提供一个更具体的伪装。最后，我强调，由于偶然和环境的力量，斯通纳和霍夫曼在文学研究中遇到了一些问题，这些问题强调了文学、语言和生活的随意性和不可知性。
{"title":"Chance Encounters with Literature, Language and Meaning in John Williams' Stoner and Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language","authors":"Megha Agarwal","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2021.0400","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2021.0400","url":null,"abstract":"John Williams' Stoner and Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language are discrete texts, but both are accounts of literary lives. These are lives that have been moulded around language and literature, as well as lives that have been moulded into literature. Stoner is a fictional account of an unlikely individual's unexpected encounter with the sphere of literary studies, around which he then shapes the remainder of his life. Lost in Translation is a memoir about the author's struggle with language as an immigrant, a struggle that contributes to her exceptional ability to analyse and devise literary narratives. These fortuitous encounters with literature become a means to structure their respective fictional and non-fictional lives. In addition, Stoner and Hoffman are outsiders to academia, but both discover that their outsider status makes them especially attuned to the close analysis of words and to several questions of identity and the self. A comparative reading of Stoner and Lost in Translation thus draws our attention towards several large questions that reside at the heart of literary studies: What do we seek to translate into another language, into a commentary, into works of literary criticism or theory? What do we strive to render visible in our writing and teaching that revolves around these literary works? By reading John Williams' novel alongside Eva Hoffman's narrative, I aspire to lend these fairly abstract questions a more concrete guise. By way of conclusion, I emphasize how due to the force of chance and circumstance, Stoner and Hoffman stumble into literary studies where they are confronted by questions that underscore the arbitrariness and unknowability of literature, language and life.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42886916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In 1910, the young Austrian writer Stefan Zweig dedicated a biographical study to the internationally acclaimed Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren. As part of Zweig's international publishing strategy, the study was translated into French and published in Paris a few months before it came out in its original language, German. An English translation was intended for publication at the same time, but was delayed until November 1914, when the First World War was to separate Verhaeren and Zweig forever. Zweig's biography permitted him to define his own European and cosmopolitan ideals through Verhaeren's life narrative. This article shows that one and the same text of life writing can be appropriated through national(ist) and cosmopolitan lenses within the context of ideological and political agendas. Zweig's biography presents Verhaeren as a ‘New European’, but at the same time as ‘part and parcel of German culture’. The publication of the English translation by Jethro Bithell in 1914 provoked criticism in the British press that was directed against Zweig's nationally biased perception and his alleged closeness to the Belgian poet. The example illustrates how claims of cosmopolitan openness are not always incompatible with a national or patriotic agenda. It also qualifies Zweig's reputation as the epitome of Europeanism and pacifism by providing new insight into his ideas before 1914.
{"title":"Cross-Border Narratives and Life Writing: Émile Verhaeren by Stefan Zweig and its English Translation in Wartime","authors":"C. Dessy","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2021.0415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2021.0415","url":null,"abstract":"In 1910, the young Austrian writer Stefan Zweig dedicated a biographical study to the internationally acclaimed Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren. As part of Zweig's international publishing strategy, the study was translated into French and published in Paris a few months before it came out in its original language, German. An English translation was intended for publication at the same time, but was delayed until November 1914, when the First World War was to separate Verhaeren and Zweig forever. Zweig's biography permitted him to define his own European and cosmopolitan ideals through Verhaeren's life narrative. This article shows that one and the same text of life writing can be appropriated through national(ist) and cosmopolitan lenses within the context of ideological and political agendas. Zweig's biography presents Verhaeren as a ‘New European’, but at the same time as ‘part and parcel of German culture’. The publication of the English translation by Jethro Bithell in 1914 provoked criticism in the British press that was directed against Zweig's nationally biased perception and his alleged closeness to the Belgian poet. The example illustrates how claims of cosmopolitan openness are not always incompatible with a national or patriotic agenda. It also qualifies Zweig's reputation as the epitome of Europeanism and pacifism by providing new insight into his ideas before 1914.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48174621","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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