Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0647
Leo Tak-Hung Chan, Jindan Ni
abstract:The article examines the use of archaization as a strategy of aesthetic translation in rendering modern Japanese fiction into Chinese. The "classical" style, which resurged at the end of the twentieth century after decades of active championing of the vernacular in China, has been deployed in domesticating major Japanese fictional works originally written in quite different registers. Through close textual analyses of Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's "Portrait of Shunkin (1933)," Kawabata Yasunari's Snow Country (1935–1947), and Murakami Haruki's Norwegian Wood (1987), this article shows how the inclusion of elements from the literary language significantly reshapes the source texts for the Chinese audience and how attempts were made to justify these stylistic deviations. In reading these cases against the belles infidèles tradition in seventeenth-century France and contemporary translation theories that favor foreignization, one sees the underlying ideology that led to the preference for "elegant paraphrase" in the late twentieth-century China.
{"title":"Archaism, \"Elegant Paraphrase,\" and the Chinese Translation of Three Modern Japanese Novels","authors":"Leo Tak-Hung Chan, Jindan Ni","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0647","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0647","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:The article examines the use of archaization as a strategy of aesthetic translation in rendering modern Japanese fiction into Chinese. The \"classical\" style, which resurged at the end of the twentieth century after decades of active championing of the vernacular in China, has been deployed in domesticating major Japanese fictional works originally written in quite different registers. Through close textual analyses of Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's \"Portrait of Shunkin (1933),\" Kawabata Yasunari's Snow Country (1935–1947), and Murakami Haruki's Norwegian Wood (1987), this article shows how the inclusion of elements from the literary language significantly reshapes the source texts for the Chinese audience and how attempts were made to justify these stylistic deviations. In reading these cases against the belles infidèles tradition in seventeenth-century France and contemporary translation theories that favor foreignization, one sees the underlying ideology that led to the preference for \"elegant paraphrase\" in the late twentieth-century China.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"21 1","pages":"647 - 672"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139298651","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}
Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0719
Xiaofan Amy Li
abstract:This article explores queer masquerade and risk by comparing Mishima's Confessions of a Mask with Qiu's Notes of a Crocodile. Although masquerade is typically discussed in terms of performativity, insufficient attention is paid to masquerade as a play-form, particularly in scholarship on East Asian literatures. This offers a new perspective on Confessions and Notes, which are persistently read as autobiographical representation. Focusing on the trope of the mask in Confessions and Notes, this article shows that masquerade oscillates between different masks rather than between being and appearance. It reveals risks to identity and the body, and experiences and interpretive modes that are obscured by identitarian and epistemic categories. Instead of a gay novel, Confessions vehemently opposes fixing identity in any way. Similarly, Notes does not reflect Qiu's own life and sexuality so much as a queer postcolonial rewriting of Confessions. While both novels demonstrate that masquerade is coercive play when it is a "straightening device," they also suggest the notion of "ludic risk," showing that masquerade offers the possibility to play with different identities and disrupt established patterns of behavior and recognition. Mishima's and Qiu's fiction helps us understand masquerade as risky play and a queer method.
{"title":"Risky Masquerades: The Play of Masks in Yukio Mishima's Confessions and Qiu Miaojin's Crocodile","authors":"Xiaofan Amy Li","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0719","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0719","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article explores queer masquerade and risk by comparing Mishima's Confessions of a Mask with Qiu's Notes of a Crocodile. Although masquerade is typically discussed in terms of performativity, insufficient attention is paid to masquerade as a play-form, particularly in scholarship on East Asian literatures. This offers a new perspective on Confessions and Notes, which are persistently read as autobiographical representation. Focusing on the trope of the mask in Confessions and Notes, this article shows that masquerade oscillates between different masks rather than between being and appearance. It reveals risks to identity and the body, and experiences and interpretive modes that are obscured by identitarian and epistemic categories. Instead of a gay novel, Confessions vehemently opposes fixing identity in any way. Similarly, Notes does not reflect Qiu's own life and sexuality so much as a queer postcolonial rewriting of Confessions. While both novels demonstrate that masquerade is coercive play when it is a \"straightening device,\" they also suggest the notion of \"ludic risk,\" showing that masquerade offers the possibility to play with different identities and disrupt established patterns of behavior and recognition. Mishima's and Qiu's fiction helps us understand masquerade as risky play and a queer method.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"28 1","pages":"719 - 745"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139305572","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}
Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0673
Choi-Kit Yeung
abstract:This article investigates the thought on literary language that arose from the circulation of the New Sensationalist School in Japan, Shanghai, and Taiwan. Divided into three sections, it first examines Yokomitsu Riichi's modernist formal renovation, which was based on a rediscovery of the Chinese ideogram's physical and visual features. Situating this formal renovation in the literary Sinitic context (Kanbunmyaku 漢文脈) sheds light on Yokomitsu's ambition to build a modernist nationalist literary language. Second, this article analyzes the characteristics of the multilingual fragments in Liu Na'ou's works and suggests three possible explanations for his linguistic style. This article also points out that Liu's linguistic diversity might be criticized for being a kind of comprador literature, which, consciously or not, imported the colonial or orientalist gaze inherent in foreign literary texts. Third, this article focuses on Weng Nao, a Taiwanese New Sensationalist writer working in Japanese, and highlights how his eclecticist writing strategy championed archetypically Taiwanese subjects while allowing the form to parallel those of his Japanese counterparts. In the conclusion, we discuss the hybridity of the literary languages of Yokomitsu, Liu Na'ou, and Weng Nao, and some possible ways to reflect upon written language (bun/wen) in the Sinosphere (Kanjibunkaken/Hanjiwenhuaquan).
{"title":"Global Modernism: The Literary Language of the Japanese, Shanghainese, and Taiwanese New Sensationalist Schools","authors":"Choi-Kit Yeung","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0673","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0673","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article investigates the thought on literary language that arose from the circulation of the New Sensationalist School in Japan, Shanghai, and Taiwan. Divided into three sections, it first examines Yokomitsu Riichi's modernist formal renovation, which was based on a rediscovery of the Chinese ideogram's physical and visual features. Situating this formal renovation in the literary Sinitic context (Kanbunmyaku 漢文脈) sheds light on Yokomitsu's ambition to build a modernist nationalist literary language. Second, this article analyzes the characteristics of the multilingual fragments in Liu Na'ou's works and suggests three possible explanations for his linguistic style. This article also points out that Liu's linguistic diversity might be criticized for being a kind of comprador literature, which, consciously or not, imported the colonial or orientalist gaze inherent in foreign literary texts. Third, this article focuses on Weng Nao, a Taiwanese New Sensationalist writer working in Japanese, and highlights how his eclecticist writing strategy championed archetypically Taiwanese subjects while allowing the form to parallel those of his Japanese counterparts. In the conclusion, we discuss the hybridity of the literary languages of Yokomitsu, Liu Na'ou, and Weng Nao, and some possible ways to reflect upon written language (bun/wen) in the Sinosphere (Kanjibunkaken/Hanjiwenhuaquan).","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"1 1","pages":"673 - 718"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139299062","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}
Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0771
Roxanne Covelo
abstract:For many contemporary readers, the flâneur is synonymous with the Paris of Baudelaire, its Haussmannised Grands Boulevards, and the so-called "bain de multitude"—that is, the idea of the crowd as immersive spectacle. In his reading of Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin points to texts like "Les Foules," from Le Spleen de Paris, as well as "L'Homme des foules," a translation of Poe, as interpretive keys to understanding the Baudelairian flâneur. However, Benjamin overlooks an earlier and arguably more important text of Baudelaire's on the subject: 1860's Les Paradis artificiels. Baudelaire's extended study of drug use and creativity is comprised mainly of a translation and adaptation of Thomas De Quincey's 1821 memoir, the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. As their titles suggest, both the Confessions and Les Paradis artificiels are centred mainly on addiction; but they are also, on a core level, texts about modernity, the urban space, and the flâneur (or the "peripatetic," as De Quincey calls him). This article considers Baudelaire's translation of De Quincey's crowdscapes in Les Paradis artificiels and the re-emergence of De Quinceyan imagery and expressions in Baudelaire's subsequent writing on flânerie and the modern city.
摘要:对于许多当代读者来说，"嬉皮士 "是波德莱尔笔下的巴黎、其奥斯曼化的林荫大道以及所谓的 "人群之池"（bain de multitude）的代名词--即人群作为沉浸式奇观的概念。在对波德莱尔的解读中，瓦尔特-本雅明指出，《巴黎脾脏》中的 "Les Foules "以及坡的译作 "L'Homme des foules "等文本是理解波德莱尔式的 "嬉皮士 "的诠释钥匙。然而，本雅明忽略了波德莱尔关于这一主题的一篇更早也可以说更重要的文章：1860 年的《人造天堂》。波德莱尔对吸毒和创造力的深入研究主要包括对托马斯-德-昆西 1821 年的回忆录《一个英国鸦片食客的自白》的翻译和改编。正如书名所示，《忏悔录》和《人工乐园》都主要以吸毒成瘾为中心，但在核心层面上，它们也是关于现代性、城市空间和流浪者（或德-昆西所称的 "流浪者"）的文本。本文探讨了波德莱尔在《人工乐园》中对德-昆西的人群景观的翻译，以及德-昆西式的意象和表达方式在波德莱尔随后关于逃亡者和现代城市的写作中的重新出现。
{"title":"\"Prendre un Bain De Multitude\": Origins of the Flâneur in Baudelaire's Translations of De Quincey","authors":"Roxanne Covelo","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0771","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0771","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:For many contemporary readers, the flâneur is synonymous with the Paris of Baudelaire, its Haussmannised Grands Boulevards, and the so-called \"bain de multitude\"—that is, the idea of the crowd as immersive spectacle. In his reading of Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin points to texts like \"Les Foules,\" from Le Spleen de Paris, as well as \"L'Homme des foules,\" a translation of Poe, as interpretive keys to understanding the Baudelairian flâneur. However, Benjamin overlooks an earlier and arguably more important text of Baudelaire's on the subject: 1860's Les Paradis artificiels. Baudelaire's extended study of drug use and creativity is comprised mainly of a translation and adaptation of Thomas De Quincey's 1821 memoir, the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. As their titles suggest, both the Confessions and Les Paradis artificiels are centred mainly on addiction; but they are also, on a core level, texts about modernity, the urban space, and the flâneur (or the \"peripatetic,\" as De Quincey calls him). This article considers Baudelaire's translation of De Quincey's crowdscapes in Les Paradis artificiels and the re-emergence of De Quinceyan imagery and expressions in Baudelaire's subsequent writing on flânerie and the modern city.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"57 1","pages":"771 - 786"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139302296","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}
Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0746
Katharine Ann Jensen
abstract:In her 1804 La Duchesse de la Vallière, Genlis and Opie, in her 1805 Adeline Mowbray portray the fallen woman. In each novel, the heroine's fall leads her to condemn herself in an exceptional way because this distinguishes her from women like her and isolates her from a world that would integrate her. In seeking to singularize themselves through their active, willful self-repudiation, la Vallière and Adeline reveal an ambitious wish to be publicly recognized as individuals. Yet by casting their heroines' singularity in terms of self-castigation, Genlis and Opie portray female ambition in a paradoxical fashion.
{"title":"Ambitious Self-Condemnation: The Fallen Woman in Novels by Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis and Amelia Opie","authors":"Katharine Ann Jensen","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0746","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0746","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In her 1804 La Duchesse de la Vallière, Genlis and Opie, in her 1805 Adeline Mowbray portray the fallen woman. In each novel, the heroine's fall leads her to condemn herself in an exceptional way because this distinguishes her from women like her and isolates her from a world that would integrate her. In seeking to singularize themselves through their active, willful self-repudiation, la Vallière and Adeline reveal an ambitious wish to be publicly recognized as individuals. Yet by casting their heroines' singularity in terms of self-castigation, Genlis and Opie portray female ambition in a paradoxical fashion.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"6 1","pages":"746 - 770"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139301662","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}
Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0787
Nicolás Fernández-Medina
{"title":"Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation","authors":"Nicolás Fernández-Medina","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0787","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0787","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139303168","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}
Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0789
Charlotte Rogers
{"title":"American Mediterraneans: A Study in Geography, History, and Race","authors":"Charlotte Rogers","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0789","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0789","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"189 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139304223","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}
Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0621
Haomin Gong
abstract:This article examines two modern artistic explorations of the Chinese character. It takes Xu Bing's Square Word Calligraphy and Jonathan Stalling's Sinophonic English Poetry as examples and investigate how contemporary art reimagines and reconstructs the "potential" of Chinese characters and what ideological and political implications these processes may have for transcultural communication in today's world. Situating the production of both works in Xu's and Stalling's respective creative experiences and larger sociocultural conditions, this article shows how both works, which deploy the graphics and the phonetics of the Chinese character as interfaces, engage in the politics of transcultural art creation and communication, and achieve their generative effects. Through this investigation, it hopes to illuminate the critical power of the Chinese character used as an interface in challenging linguistic, ideological, and cultural "norms" and questioning racial, national, and political prejudice.
{"title":"The Chinese Character as an Interface for Artistic Creation: Re-cognition of Graphics and Phonetics","authors":"Haomin Gong","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0621","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0621","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article examines two modern artistic explorations of the Chinese character. It takes Xu Bing's Square Word Calligraphy and Jonathan Stalling's Sinophonic English Poetry as examples and investigate how contemporary art reimagines and reconstructs the \"potential\" of Chinese characters and what ideological and political implications these processes may have for transcultural communication in today's world. Situating the production of both works in Xu's and Stalling's respective creative experiences and larger sociocultural conditions, this article shows how both works, which deploy the graphics and the phonetics of the Chinese character as interfaces, engage in the politics of transcultural art creation and communication, and achieve their generative effects. Through this investigation, it hopes to illuminate the critical power of the Chinese character used as an interface in challenging linguistic, ideological, and cultural \"norms\" and questioning racial, national, and political prejudice.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"2 1","pages":"621 - 646"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139301146","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}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.5325/complitstudies.60.3.0475
Emily McGiffin
abstract:Although the human relationship with aluminum is short, the metal has affected our lives and societies more profoundly than perhaps any other. A light metal that does not corrode, aluminum is a key ingredient in airplanes, automobiles, and artillery—three industries that transformed twentieth-century society. As such, aluminum propelled Western modernity toward new understandings and cultural orientations within an increasingly globalized world. Yet as it became a defining ingredient of modernity, aluminum also helped entrench an unequal and racialized international order through extractive systems built on older infrastructures of exploitation. The aluminum supply chain that enabled twentieth-century modernity maps across an earlier transatlantic network that produced the enslaved human labor that was equally formative of our modern era. Racialized landscapes and labor at sites of raw aluminum ore extraction are central to Western modernity, though they are generally erased from its histories. Fully understanding Western industrial modernity requires centering the African lands and bodies that have shaped it, and correcting its destructive tendencies requires prioritizing alternative African visions.
{"title":"Material Modernities: Aluminum in the Making of a Global Cultural Economy","authors":"Emily McGiffin","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.60.3.0475","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.60.3.0475","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Although the human relationship with aluminum is short, the metal has affected our lives and societies more profoundly than perhaps any other. A light metal that does not corrode, aluminum is a key ingredient in airplanes, automobiles, and artillery—three industries that transformed twentieth-century society. As such, aluminum propelled Western modernity toward new understandings and cultural orientations within an increasingly globalized world. Yet as it became a defining ingredient of modernity, aluminum also helped entrench an unequal and racialized international order through extractive systems built on older infrastructures of exploitation. The aluminum supply chain that enabled twentieth-century modernity maps across an earlier transatlantic network that produced the enslaved human labor that was equally formative of our modern era. Racialized landscapes and labor at sites of raw aluminum ore extraction are central to Western modernity, though they are generally erased from its histories. Fully understanding Western industrial modernity requires centering the African lands and bodies that have shaped it, and correcting its destructive tendencies requires prioritizing alternative African visions.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"60 1","pages":"475 - 484"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45412870","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}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.5325/complitstudies.60.3.0561
Christoph Solstreif-Pirker
abstract:Building on the definition of contemporary modernity as an "ecology of fear," this article formulates a counter-hegemonic concept of modernity that is not oriented toward a future end but toward the intensities of the present moment—referring to the Latin root of "modernity," which means "now," "just now," or "presently." The article asks whether we can ever grasp the event of "just now" and, if so, what new paradigms of thought and action might emerge from this particular condition. For this venture, the article calls on the Matrixial Theory developed by feminist psychoanalyst, philosopher, and artist Bracha L. Ettinger since the 1980s. With Ettinger's theory, the modernist narratives of fear, anxiety, death, and sacrifice—as put forward by Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger—are redefined from a specific transitive perspective, as are the processes of subjectivation and sociopolitical practices of the (Post-) Anthropocene. This article thus serves as an innovative call not to put aside modernity but to become modern in the first place—to initiate an "ecology of love" and start caring for momentary and compassionate forms of thought and action beyond phallocratic paradigms.
{"title":"Toward a Feminine-Matrixial Understanding of Modernity: Subjectivity-as-World-Fabric, the Ecology of Love, and the Temporality of Just Now","authors":"Christoph Solstreif-Pirker","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.60.3.0561","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.60.3.0561","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Building on the definition of contemporary modernity as an \"ecology of fear,\" this article formulates a counter-hegemonic concept of modernity that is not oriented toward a future end but toward the intensities of the present moment—referring to the Latin root of \"modernity,\" which means \"now,\" \"just now,\" or \"presently.\" The article asks whether we can ever grasp the event of \"just now\" and, if so, what new paradigms of thought and action might emerge from this particular condition. For this venture, the article calls on the Matrixial Theory developed by feminist psychoanalyst, philosopher, and artist Bracha L. Ettinger since the 1980s. With Ettinger's theory, the modernist narratives of fear, anxiety, death, and sacrifice—as put forward by Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger—are redefined from a specific transitive perspective, as are the processes of subjectivation and sociopolitical practices of the (Post-) Anthropocene. This article thus serves as an innovative call not to put aside modernity but to become modern in the first place—to initiate an \"ecology of love\" and start caring for momentary and compassionate forms of thought and action beyond phallocratic paradigms.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"60 1","pages":"561 - 577"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42360710","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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