Showing papers in "Comparative Literature Studies in 2000"

Seeing into the Life of Things. Essays on Literature and Religious Experience (review)

Abstract: As the discourse of contemporary cultural studies brings questions of race, nationality, and gender to the center of critical attention nowadays, there is a strong sense that religious, or perhaps religious experience, should command the attention of the academic and wider reading community. Seeing into the Life of Things is a response to that need. By combining the theoretical and the practical, this book serves as both a pioneering scholarly contribution to a devleoping field and a valuable guide for those who read, reflect on, and discuss points of intersection of religion and literature. The contributors to this pioneering study represent a range of voices and viewpoints, some of them established leaders in their fields, others in the process of becoming new leaders. E. Dennis Taylor, Joseph Appleyard, Philip Rule, John Boyd, and Jane and Charles Rzepka work toward the development of a discourse that can take its place with discourses that have developed around a New Historicism and Feminism. Robert Kiely, Stephen Fix, Keven Van Anglen, J. Robert Barth, Richard Kearney, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Judith Wilt, John L. Mahoney, David Leigh, Melinda Ponder, John Anderson, and Michael Raiger offer more focused approaches to writers as varied as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Katherine Lee Bates, Flannery O'Connor, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and Seamus Heaney and to special genres like spritual autobiography and film.

In the Wake of Orientalism

Abstract: The New York Times Sunday Magazine several years ago ran a cover article with the (at least at that time) provocative title of "Is Deconstruction Dead?" The author of the article asked Stanley Fish what he thought, and he replied "Yes, deconstruction is dead. It is dead like Freudianism is dead. It is dead and it is everywhere." We may well ask the same question of Edward Said's influential Orientalism.1 In the various disciplines comprising what we understand be Asian Studies, we now live in the wake and, if you will, "counterwakes" of Edward Said's landmark work. This is a time when seemingly every academic volume, paper, and conference panel uses Said's critical framework as the de rigeur point of departure, a trope positive or negative for any critical exercise embracing Asia, at least through the lens of culture or any of its manifestations:

The Comedy of the Monk's Tale: Chaucer's Hugelyn and Early Commentary on Dante's Ugolino

Abstract: Whatever other information they may provide for us, the no fewer than eight learned commentaries on all or part of Dante's Comedy produced between Dante's death in 1321 and the time of Chaucer's birth in the early 1340s offer resounding, sometimes cacophonous testimony to one undeniable fact: Dante's Italian audiences in the Trecento thought that the Comedy needed to be explained if it were to be fully understood.1 Scholarship on the relationship between Chaucer and Dante, however, has generally proceeded on the tacit assumption that, in contrast with Italian readers, the English poet neither encountered nor desired any such explication, and further, that Chaucer despite what we know about his reading of Boethius, Virgil, and the Vulgate read Dante in an unmediated way.2 While this comparative work on the Chaucer/Dante relationship has been extremely useful indeed, my ongoing study of this subject has been greatly informed by the work of Howard Schless, Winthrop Wetherbee, Richard Neuse, and others it needs to be supplemented and challenged by an approach to the problem that takes into greater account the interpretive environment within which Dante's great poem was read and reproduced. This environment, the critical dialogue in the Trecento of commentary on Dante, is relevant to Chaucer studies for two reasons. First, I would suggest that it is likely, given Chaucer's reasonably extensive and at times firsthand experience with Italian culture, that Chaucer would have encountered, perhaps have actively sought out, commentary on Dante as well as on Dante's own poetry. In fact, he may well have been as surprised and impressed by the very phenomenon of the Comedy's reception the unprecedented explosion of learned commen-

Renan and Pater’s Marius the Epicurean

Abstract: Any account of Marius the Epicurean would naturally refer to the cultural significance of Marcus Aurelius for literate British people in the later nineteenth century. As a more recent translator remarks of George Long's 1862 version of the Meditations, the book "quickly became a cultural 'must' to the mid-Victorian generation, from great and eminent persons like the Dean of Canterbury and Matthew Arnold down to innumerable lesser folk." Over the next forty years, "printings and reprintings must have been legion."1 The editor of a new edition of Mrs Carter's eighteenthcentury translation of Epictetus commented in 1910 that "Marcus Aurelius seems to have become a fashion with Omar Khayyam" in "an age of sentimentalists."2 The noble emperor doing his duty in a collapsing world became part of the baggage of civil servants and administrators in the British Empire. The Stoic saint met the spiritual needs of numerous reverent agnostics, and became, in Arnold's words, the "especial friend and comforter of all clear-headed and scrupulous, yet pure-hearted and upward striving men."3 It would be natural to expect what Denis Donoghue and other critics have suggested, that Arnold's review of Long's translation, later reprinted in Essays in Criticism, would have been present in Pater's mind when he came to explore Marcus Aurelius, and the Second Century. Arnold's copious extracts from the Meditations and the pathos and appeal of his account of the emperor were clearly seminal to the Aurelius cult. As Denis Donoghue remarks, Pater was certainly aware of this, making Marcus Aurelius adopt Arnold's most famous phrase ("To see the object as in itself it really is") in the disquisition to the Senate on the world, life

An Allegory of Return: Murakami Haruki's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Abstract: Murakami Haruki (1949-) has made no secret of his fascination with the West and his admiration for Western things. His fiction abounds in references to jazz, rock and roll, European authors, and American brand names. For ten years, he lived abroad, first in Greece and Italy, and then in the United States. He even claims to have developed his distinctive style by writing first in English, and then translating into Japanese.1 His deadpan fantasies, with their parodie echoes of American authors such as Raymond Chandler, have earned him considerable success in the West; he is, for example, one of the few foreign contributors to the New Yorker. But in 1995, Murakami decided to return to Japan, and to judge from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Nejimakidori kuronikuru, 1994-1995; tr. 1997), his return coincided with a new direction in his career.2 For the first time, Murakami has written a novel that deals explicitly with Japanese history and culture. The novel's protagonist, a rootless man with tastes and habits like Murakami's own, descends into a dry well in Tokyo; there, he enters a parallel world where he must do battle with the demons of Japan's recent history the horrors of the war in China, and the corruption of the modern state. This descent can be seen as an allegory of Murakami's own return to Japan, of his attempt to understand and reenter the world he left behind. This brief outline suggests that Murakami's career resembles that of many modern Japanese writers: after studying and admiring Western things from afar, he went to live in the West; when disillusion set in, he returned home in order to re-discover and embrace his own tradition. But

Reconceptualizing the Linguistic Divide: Chinese and Western Theories of the Written Sign 1

Abstract: At a time when cultural relativism has become the accepted paradigm for cultural and literary studies, it seems increasingly difficult to find conceptual premises upon which to build bridges across different traditions and cultures. This is especially so in the areas of China and West studies. Chinese literature and culture have been viewed by not a few scholars as fundamentally different from their Western counterparts. The root cause of the difference has often been traced to the difference in language and writing, which has been further narrowed down to the nature of the written sign. The difference of the written sign has, since medieval times, been viewed as a conceptual divide that separates the Chinese and Western Languages. This view seems to find support in linguistic science. In his Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure divided world's languages into two large writing systems: the ideographic system in which "each word is represented by a single sign that is unrelated to the sounds of the word itself and the phonetic system which "tries to reproduce the succession of sounds that make up a word."2 "The classic example of an ideographic system of writing," Saussure declared, "is Chinese"(26). Needless to say, the alphabetic European languages belong to the phonetic system. Saussure further pointed out that in an ideographic system, "each written sign stands for a whole word and, consequently, for the idea expressed by the word." By contrast, phonetic systems of writing are "based on the irreducible elements used in speaking." Saussure's classification was not only a summary of the similar views held by scholars in the field up to his time but also anticipated the dominant theme in the repeated debates concerning the nature of the Chi-

Historical Representation and the Scriptural Economy of Imperialism: Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

Abstract: L'A. propose ici une lecture comparative des strategies narratives de la subversion de « l'economie scripturale de l'imperialisme » (Certeau), et de la destabilisation de la construction teleologique de l'historiographie nationale dans L'Amour, la fantasia de Assia Djebar et Blood Meridian de Cornac McCarthy.

Murderous Mothers and The Family/State Analogy in Classical and Renaissance Drama

Abstract: Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc begins with this summary of its action. The play, written in 1562 during the early years of Elizabeth's reign, is usually interpreted as a piece of advice to the young Queen on matters ranging from the issue of succession to the monarch's dependence on good counsel; having heard of its first performance, Elizabeth commanded a second for her own benefit, clearly recognizing the play's efforts at dutiful counsel. In light of the play's history, then, the portion of the Argument excerpted above is perplexing: rather than attributing the fall of Britain exclusively to Gorboduc's unwise political policies, it immediately shifts focus to the familial relationships at the heart of the kingdom's structure of rule relationships which could, at least apparently, have had little to do with the orphaned "Virgin Queen." Gorboduc, the argument clarifies, is not only king and head of the government; he is also a father and husband, and these family ties counterbalance his controlling authority over his kingdom with disastrous results. The country's demise, according to the Argument, is directly traceable to Queen Videna, who "more dearly loved" her elder son Ferrex, and avenges his death on his brother, thus committing child murder. Rather than foregrounding the king's unwise division of his country which leads to a general uprising

Nietzsche: Utility, Aesthetics, History

Abstract: A partir d'une analyse comparative des deux premieres oeuvres de Nietzsche, «La naissance de la tragedie» (1872) et «De l'avantage et de l'inconvenient d'une histoire de la vie» (1874), l'A. inscrit la metaphysique esthetique de Nietzsche, fondee sur la notion d'utilite, au sein de la tradition historique du XIX e siecle representee par Schiller, le romantisme allemand et Schopenhauer.

The Wrath of Priapus: Rémy Belleau's "Jean qui ne peult" and its Traditions

Abstract: In recent decades scholars have occasionally turned, with less distaste or embarrassment than earlier in the twentieth century, to a set of poems describing that not uncommon but dismaying condition: impotence.1 Sometimes this embarrassing sexual poverty a "Hell," Aphra Behn sue* cinctly calls it with the crispness of one who will never go there is the result of spending too much too soon; sometimes the sufferer realizes, like George Gascoigne, that age or misfortune has deprived him of the needed "pence."2 More often he claims to be young, vigorous, and puzzled. Sometimes he suspects that his problems are his partner's fault. European poets wrote of both sorts of impotence, that due to speedy excess and that caused by defect, sometimes in the same poem. The topic itself is compelling for obvious reasons, but its ruefiil poetic treatments from antiquity to the Restoration have considerable literary and cultural interest as well. Several informative articles have already traced the history of the "imperfect enjoyment" poems from Ovid to Nashe to Behn and Rochester, that series of sometimes interrelated texts in which the afflicted lover (usually, if not quite always, also the narrator) fails to stand stiffly to his task. The poor man's dysfunction is sometimes left mysterious, but more often he ascribes it to sorcery, his own overeager desire, the lady's excessive or insufficient attractiveness, or the wrath of the gods although never, so far as we know, the wrath of the Christian God. Because one of us, Roger Kuin, has recently been examining the three manuscript versions of a witty poem in this series by Remy Belleau (15281577), and because this poem "Jean qui ne peult," or "John Who Can't" has been noted only in passing and never examined in detail,

Return to Japan: the Case of Endô Shûsaku

Abstract: Many critics, including Doi Takeo, Kawai Hayao, Eto Jun, and Karatani Kojin,1 have pointed out the mother-oriented nature of Japanese culture and literature, and there is a long list of mother-obsessed modern Japanese male writers: Izumi Kyoka, Dazai Osamu, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Kawabata Yasunari, and Endo Shusaku (1923-1996). Of these, Endo is perhaps unique in that, as a Japanese Catholic writer, he was constantly and consciously concerned with the problem of reconciling and harmonizing his Christian faith with what he perceived as his "native Japanese sensibility."2 He compared his Catholicism, and by extension Western sensibilities in general, to a Western-style suit that had been placed on his Japanese body. He constantly felt this clothing ill-suited to his mental body, and this feeling was further intensified during his few years' stay in France where he went to study French Catholic writers such as Francois Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. He had thought of discarding this uncomfortable Western suit many times, but ultimately was unable to do so, because, he said, it was his mother who made him wear it, much as, at her instigation, he was baptized at the age of eleven. This fact may not be a mere coincidence, as upon close examination, one notices strong maternal elements in Endo's version of the Christian God as expressed through his literature and other writings. In this essay, I will focus on the role of the mother in Endo and his fiction to explore its implications in his return to his native Japanese sensibilities and his later journeys not only back to the West, but also to the Middle East (Jerusalem) and India. Through this examination, I will

Archeo-logies of Modernity in transition and Documents 1929/30

Abstract: Etude de l'histoire de l'art d'avant-garde en Europe, a travers les revues publiees a Paris dans les annees 1930: «Transition», edite par E. Jolas de 1927 a 1938, et «Documents», edite par G. Bataille et M. Leiris en 1929/30. Archeologues des sciences humaines et de la modernite, le poete C. Einstein et les representants de l'ethnographie surrealiste ont oppose la pensee mythique aux pressions grandissantes de la propagande fasciste et nazie.

Caribbean Creolization. Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity (review)

Abstract: Brings together prominent writers from the English, French, Spanish and Dutch-speaking Caribbean in an examination of creolization and its impact upon the region's literary production. The collection seeks to redefine Caribbean identity and aesthetics.

Tanizaki Jun’ichirô’s Pilgrimage and Return

Abstract: It is all but impossible to reflect on any aspect of modern Japanese culture without considering the impact of the West. For more than a century, it has been an integral part of Japanese culture. Since the opening of the country at the beginning of the Meiji era, many Japanese have spent their youth shocked, moved, overwhelmed, and even paralyzed by what they saw or knew of Western civilization. Nevertheless, after their youthful infatuation had passed, and a measure of restraint had returned, they often turned back to their roots. This cycle has been repeated so often that it has become a recognized pattern, particularly for modern Japanese intellectuals and artists. For many of these, their pilgrimage to the West, whether physical or spiritual, has been the first step along the road to full maturity. It goes without saying that the destination, the perceived "West," varied from person to person, and from time to time. The West of the Japanese imagination has taken as many shapes and hues as the East has been endowed with in the fantasies of the West. To these pilgrims, the West was a hold-all that was made to contain whatever best suited each of their wishes and dreams; and understandably enough, the Japan they returned to was often as void of concrete reality, as shaped by their own desires, as their "West" had been. The "West" that was the object of their pilgrimage had been a "West" born of exoticism, and the "Japan" to which they returned was a "Japan" distilled from nostalgic fantasies. Exoticism and nostalgia have a common foundation, after all: a yearning for the faraway, in space or in time. Maturity changed the object of their yearn-

Myth in Black Elk Speaks and Aterui: The Empowering Matrix

Abstract: It is by no means a "story" unique to any one country or region: communities of aboriginal groups come under the authority of a central admin* istration that comes to dictate the historical narratives of the countries. However, there are occasions when, in contradistinction to the dominating victors* voices, narratives of the defeated survive to tell a quite different story that continues to have social relevance and resonance several decades or even centuries after the actual occurrence of the factual events in question. Black Elk Speaks, the story of a Native American Sioux medicine man active in the nineteenth century, and Aterui, the tale of a northeastern Japanese tribal chieftain killed in the ninth century are two such narratives. Interestingly, key plot features in the two narratives show marked similarities: contact with an invading foreign power committed to economic and territorial hegemony, initial victory, followed by defeat, "death," and "return." Beyond the bones of structural parallels, however, lies a deeper point of comparison in the thematic heart of the narratives, namely the mythopoeic viewpoint that are their raison-d'etre. For Black Elk and Guantei Yusa1 there is truth implied in the mythic consciousness of their cultural group, and it frames their interpretation of history. Despite their formalistic disparities Black Elk Speaks is autobiographical memoir from direct personal experience, and Aterui is a solo theater piece recreated from historical records and folk tales the texts can be compared thematically due to analogous epistemological intentions to explain present

German Images in Japanese Literature—An Intercultural and Intertextual Analysis

Abstract: In this paper, I will examine images of Germans and descriptions of Gei> man qualities in Japanese literature as well as in Japan. Although the relationship between Japan and Germany has a tradition of over four hundred years, there are as few Japanese novels in which Germans appear and play important roles as German novels in which Japanese appear. We have, however, a few remarkable discussions of the mutual images of each people.1 In the first part of my paper, the common German images in non-literary Japanese texts will be discussed from a historical and a geopolitical viewpoint. In the second part, the German images will be dealt with in historical order. In the last part, the problem of otherness will be discussed.

Make it Old: Lucian’s A True Story, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Homeric Patterns in Ancient Fiction

Abstract: For fifty years after the publication of Ulysses, the relation between Homer's epic and Joyce's novel was a central feature of Joyce criticism. Since the seventies, as interest in the Homeric parallels began to wane, Bakhtinian and poststructuralist approaches continued to enhance our knowledge of Joyce's ties to antecedent texts and discursive practices. Between the earlier studies of allusion and influence and more recent

The Structure of a Tragedy through the Coming of the Black Ships: Shimazaki Toson's Before the Dawn, and Hamlet

Abstract: Most of the commentators on Before the Dawn (Yoake Mae 1932) have declared that all that Toson Shimazaki (1872-1943) wanted to communicate could be found in Before the Dawn; this book is the greatest monument of modern Japanese literature.1 Toson was trying with all his strength here to get to the root of his own character. He was passionately trying to express all of himself in this one book. He was expressing the great changes wrought by the Meiji Restoration and how it affected the Japanese people. Before the Dawn tried to express this period as it was in reality, in a modern poem.2 The average reader would not be allowed to assume that the character of Toson should be seen in the main character, Hanzo Aoyama. If the reader considers Tosonis greatest work Before the Dawn from the standpoint of comparative literature, and not from the autobiographical viewpoint, however, he will have reason to reevaluate this book, and his enjoyment will increase. Moreover the reader will see that Before the Dawn has a universal scale, beyond that of merely great Japanese literature. Why did Toson write about the coming of the Black Ships? If we do not understand the reason why he brought up the coming of the Black Ships, we cannot understand the cause of the confusion and the madness of Hanzo Aoyama. After Toson finished Before the Dawn, he had a conversation with Suckichi Aono, in which Toson uses music as an analogy for his novel:

An Anglo-Norman Prose Tale and the Source of the Seventh Novel of the Seventh Day in the Decameron

Abstract: Prior to the publication of Schofield's classic study The Source and History of the Seventh Novel of the Seventh Day in the Decameron,1 there was general unanimity among critics that the source of Boccaccio's novella was the Continental French fabliau La Borgoise d'Orliens.2 Schofield, however, was influenced by an episode in the Old French Romans de Bauduin de Sebourc, dating from the first half of the fourteenth century, to believe that Boccaccio's version of "le mari cocu, battu et content" theme was founded "on a floating story of which both the Borgoise and the episode in Bauduin are variants independent of each other and of Boccaccio" (190). He did not speculate further on what might have been the nature of this "floating story" other than to trace the early history and possible sources of those features common to the episode in Bauduin and Boccaccio's novella but missing from La Borgoise d'Orliens. No version of "le mari cocu, battu et content" story which would satisfy the criteria stipulated by Schofield has been discovered since he published his study, but some evidence which he ignored or undervalued contributes to a better understanding of the probable nature of this lost exemplar. Once collated with the known facts, this new evidence supports an interpretation of Boccaccio's source materials different from that suggested by the texts assembled in Schofield's study. The key text for such a revaluation is an Anglo-Norman (AN) prose version of "le mari cocu, battu et content" theme found in the four Bfamily manuscripts of the six surviving copies of La Maniere de langage de 1396, one of a group of treatises written as a guide to correct French

Return to Japan or Return to the West?: —Lafcadio Hearn's "A Conservative"

Abstract: Many Japanese writers' returns to Japan from a real or spiritual pilgrimage to the West seem to follow a psychological pattern. I would like to discuss this phenomenon by using the American writer Lafcadio Hearn's "A Conservative,"2 as the story poignantly describes a typical case of a modern Japanese intellectual's return to a Japan of nostalgia from his pilgrimage to an idealized Europe and America. First let me explain how I have earlier approached the problem and how I am going to deal with it in this paper. For the Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 5,3 devoted to the nineteenth century, I provided the seventh chapter entitled "Japan's Turn to the West." After having dealt with Meiji Japan's westernization movement, I concluded the chapter with this phenomenon of the Westernized intellectuals returning to native traditions. Marius Jansen, the editor of the Cambridge History, named that part of the chapter "Return to Japan," which is precisely the theme of this paper. Therefore, please allow me to first take up that section in which I analyzed the phenomenon as exemplarily described by Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904). Although volume 5 of the Cambridge History of Japan was published in 1989, in order to meet the terms of my contract with the publisher, I had written that chapter as early as 1980. As I grew older, I kept finding relevant observations, so my interpretations have inevitably changed. I would like to take this opportunity to amend the shortcomings of my former views and to put the