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CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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Regarding World(S): A Review Of Elisha Cohn’S Milieu: A Creaturely Theory Of The Contemporary Novel (2025) And Daniel Wright’S The Grounds Of The Novel (2024), Katarzyna Bartoszyńska Jun 2026

Regarding World(S): A Review Of Elisha Cohn’S Milieu: A Creaturely Theory Of The Contemporary Novel (2025) And Daniel Wright’S The Grounds Of The Novel (2024), Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Milan Kundera As A Representative And A Theorist Of World Literature, Lucija Mandić Jun 2026

Milan Kundera As A Representative And A Theorist Of World Literature, Lucija Mandić

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The article traces the evolution of Milan Kundera’s notion of world literature across his career, contextualizing his writings within major historical events, including the so-called liberalization of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, the post-1989 transition of the former Soviet bloc, and the turn of the millennium. Throughout the years, but particularly after his own immigration to France in 1975, Kundera consistently tied the notion of world literature with that of Central Europe to emerge with a conceptual framework that enabled him to position (semi-)peripheral European literatures within the Western canon. In his influential 2005 essay “Die Weltliteratur,” Kundera ultimately reframed the …


Against Pleonexia: Auerbach, World Literature, And The End Of History, Simon During Jun 2026

Against Pleonexia: Auerbach, World Literature, And The End Of History, Simon During

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Erich Auerbach’s essay on world literature, written in the early postwar period, has become central to our understanding of the field. This essay contextualizes Auerbach on world literature by approaching it through his larger project, which it thinks about in relation to scholars rarely considered in this context. These scholars are the French literary historians and critics Hippolyte Taine and Remy de Gourmont, and the German historical sociologist Alexander Rüstow. To place Auerbach at an intersection of these very different figures turns out to be illuminating. It both enlarges our sense of him and helps us better understand why he …


Small Nations, Big Debates: Empowering The Slovenes As A Subject Of World History In The Critical 1930s, Marko Juvan Jun 2026

Small Nations, Big Debates: Empowering The Slovenes As A Subject Of World History In The Critical 1930s, Marko Juvan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The article looks at how Slovene intellectuals and writers in the 1930s attempted to redefine the role of a small nation within the world-system in the face of global economic crisis, authoritarianism, imperialism, and the threat of fascist expansion. Three central interventions are examined in detail: firstly, Josip Vidmar’s culturalist defense of Slovenia as a nation defined by its intellectual and artistic achievements, which is contrasted with Edvard Kardelj’s Marxist reinterpretation of the Slovene national question as part of a broader anti-imperialist struggle; secondly, Anton Ocvirk’s peripheral model of comparative literary history, which emphasizes the creative contribution of small literatures …


Zheng Zhenduo And The Problem Of Priority In World Literature, Daniel M. Dooghan Jun 2026

Zheng Zhenduo And The Problem Of Priority In World Literature, Daniel M. Dooghan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay investigates how Zheng Zhenduo (郑振铎 1898–1958) developed a theory of world literature in response to threats to China both politically from without and culturally from within. Centered on an analysis of his 1922 article “A View on the Unification of Literature” (Wenxue de tongyiguan 文學的統一觀), the essay argues that although Zheng believed like many of his contemporaries in the transformative effects of reading world literature in translation, that does not constitute the entirety of his theorization of world literature. Instead, he accepted the first-move advantage of other national literatures in defining both world literary standards and literature …


Beyond The Great Wall: Zheng Zhenduo’S “Unification” Of World Literature At The Juncture Of China’S May Fourth And Post-World War I Era, Wenxin Liang Jun 2026

Beyond The Great Wall: Zheng Zhenduo’S “Unification” Of World Literature At The Juncture Of China’S May Fourth And Post-World War I Era, Wenxin Liang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article examines Chinese literary scholar Zheng Zhenduo’s 1922 essay “A View on the Unification of Literature” (Wenxue de tongyiguan 文學的統一觀) as a counter-narrative to both imperial isolationism and post-World War I nationalist fragmentation. Writing at the intersection of China’s May Fourth Movement and the global post-war crisis, Zheng developed a theory of world literature that challenged both Goethean Eurocentrism and the compartmentalization of comparative literary studies. Through systematic analysis of Zheng’s theoretical writings, editorial projects, and pioneering work on folk literature (suwenxue 俗文學), this article demonstrates that Zheng’s project of “the unification of literature” operated on three …


An Arc Stretched Between East And West: World (Or Universal?) Literature In Maxim Gorky’S Publishing Utopias, Francesca Lazzarin Jun 2026

An Arc Stretched Between East And West: World (Or Universal?) Literature In Maxim Gorky’S Publishing Utopias, Francesca Lazzarin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The Vsemirnaia Literatura publishing house was founded in Petrograd by Maxim Gorky less than a year after the October Revolution. Aligned with the objectives of the new regime, its mission was to translate and publish a substantial body of European and Asian poetry and prose, thereby contributing to the broad cultural education of the emerging Soviet generations. These ambitions clearly reflect a key element of Gorky’s conception of culture as well: for Gorky, culture in its broadest sense (encompassing literature, art, music, and science) had the potential to unite humanity under the ideals of peace and harmony. Within this new …


A World Without Literature? Tagore’S Words For His Times And Ours, Salmoli Choudhuri Jun 2026

A World Without Literature? Tagore’S Words For His Times And Ours, Salmoli Choudhuri

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In 1907, Rabindranath Tagore delivered a lecture on world literature to an audience in Calcutta, the then capital of British India. Amid powerful and intersecting forces—colonialism and nationalism, industrial modernity and mass poverty—Tagore’s position on literature was neither disengaged nor defensive, insofar as he related it to the human condition and the capacity for world-making. Far from staking a representational claim to world literature on behalf of Indian or Bengali literature, I argue in this article, Tagore reconceptualized the idea from its earlier canonical formulation by Goethe. He departed from dominant nineteenth-century philosophies that conceived the world as a spatial—and …


Reconsidering Karl Marx’S Concept Of World Literature, Kenneth Cheng Jun 2026

Reconsidering Karl Marx’S Concept Of World Literature, Kenneth Cheng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

It is widely assumed that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels regarded world literature as an epiphenomenal product of the capitalist world market, and therefore as a symptom of rather than potential cure to the crisis of modern society. However, this conflicts with the fact that they designated the Communist Manifesto itself as a world-literary production—the joint work of communists of various nationalities—and opposed it to the national limitations of German socialist literature. This article challenges existing interpretations by outlining how Marx and Engels incorporated the humanistic idealism of the Goethean Weltliteratur tradition into the theoretical framework of historical materialism. It …


World Literature: From Perpetual War To Perpetual Peace (And Back Again), Sándor Hites Jun 2026

World Literature: From Perpetual War To Perpetual Peace (And Back Again), Sándor Hites

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this article, I address the relationship between world literature theories and questions of peace and war. I argue that the genesis of the concept of world literature in the 1790s was informed by profound transformations, in political theory, of the issue of the relevance and meaning of war and peace and their public perception. Theorists such as Wieland, Novalis, Jean Paul, and Fichte offered their concepts in response to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, adjusting them to shifting frontlines and the change of military fortune. Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur already reflected on the geopolitics of the post-Napoleonic age, …


Worldbuilding, Brent Ryan Bellamy Jun 2026

Worldbuilding, Brent Ryan Bellamy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'


Style, Clint Burnham Jun 2026

Style, Clint Burnham

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'


Rhetoric, Fintan Calpin Jun 2026

Rhetoric, Fintan Calpin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'


Nature, Christina Chalmers Jun 2026

Nature, Christina Chalmers

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'


Metonymy, Rob Jackson Jun 2026

Metonymy, Rob Jackson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'


Language, Richard Godden Jun 2026

Language, Richard Godden

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'


Review: The Poetics Of Science: Marx’S Literary Style By Ludovico Silva, Thomas A. Laughlin Apr 2026

Review: The Poetics Of Science: Marx’S Literary Style By Ludovico Silva, Thomas A. Laughlin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Cultural Negotiations In Revisionist Mythmaking: Comparative Reading Of Bahram Beyzaei And Mary Zimmerman, Sepehr Karimi Mr., Bahee Hadaegh Apr 2026

Cultural Negotiations In Revisionist Mythmaking: Comparative Reading Of Bahram Beyzaei And Mary Zimmerman, Sepehr Karimi Mr., Bahee Hadaegh

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

 Although more than fifty years have passed since feminist scholars pioneered revisionist mythmaking, drama remains underexplored in this field despite its unique potential for cultural and social reinterpretation. This study offers a comparative analysis of revisionist mythmaking in Iranian and American drama, specifically examining Bahram Beyzaei’s play, One Thousand and First Night alongside Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses as examples. This research aims to establish general principles for revisionist mythmaking within drama, spotlighting the complexities that emerge in transnational contexts. It explores how Beyzaei and Zimmerman negotiate cultural narratives and try to reshape traditional stories and reflect contemporary issues, emphasizing gender dynamics …


Christian Motifs In Forough Farrokhzad’S Works: A Comparison With T.S. Eliot’S Poetry, Mona Monsefi Apr 2026

Christian Motifs In Forough Farrokhzad’S Works: A Comparison With T.S. Eliot’S Poetry, Mona Monsefi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Forough Farrokhzad’s (1934–1967) film The House is Black (1962) is a visual poem set in a leprosarium in Iran. Farrokhzad was a prominent modernist poet who merged poetry with contemporary art forms, primarily cinema. In this film, she employed a camera to express her poetic vision, highlighting her signature style that prioritizes unique imagery. This emphasis on visual and literary images is often intertwined with themes such as religion. Notably, Farrokhzad recomposed verses from the Old Testament, infusing them with her poetic language to enrich the film’s narrative. This article explores her unique, Western-influenced interpretation of Christian motifs in …


Cineture: Shared Narratives And Cultural Exchanges Between Iran And The Us (Introduction), Naghmeh Esmaeilpour Apr 2026

Cineture: Shared Narratives And Cultural Exchanges Between Iran And The Us (Introduction), Naghmeh Esmaeilpour

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Las Filipinas: The Persistence Of Spain In Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters, Blake Seana Locklin Jan 2026

Las Filipinas: The Persistence Of Spain In Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters, Blake Seana Locklin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay argues for the significance of the legacy of Spain in Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters. Critical analyses have explored many aspects of the novel's portrayal of relations between the Philippines and the United States, a more recent colonizer whose influence on politics and culture is prominent in Dogeaters. The effects of Spanish colonization are more subtle in the novel, but pervade its representation of characters, language, and society. While highlighting the fragmentation of individual and national identities, Dogeaters depicts a Philippines in which many social and political problems have roots in the Spanish colonial era. Building on the …


Derrida In Mesopotamia: On The Import Of The Cuneiform Inscriptions In Of Grammatology, Will Greenshields Jul 2025

Derrida In Mesopotamia: On The Import Of The Cuneiform Inscriptions In Of Grammatology, Will Greenshields

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Cuneiform writing has a small but privileged position in Derrida’s Of Grammatology – providing the text with its first two epigraphs. By elucidating the source and import of these inscriptions and evaluating Derrida’s understanding of the cuneiform writing system in reference to more recent grammatological studies, this paper explains the significance of these references to the ancient Near East for Derrida’s arguments regarding the origins of Western metaphysics and logocentrism. In the first part, I analyze Derrida’s brief paragraph on cuneiform writing in Of Grammatology as evincing a “fundamental synaesthesia” of phonetic and non-phonetic elements that problematizes the phonocentric definition …


Ancient Chinese Poetry As A Trans-Lingual And Cross-Cultural Textual Resource In Gustav Mahler’S Das Lied Von Der Erde, Jun He Jul 2025

Ancient Chinese Poetry As A Trans-Lingual And Cross-Cultural Textual Resource In Gustav Mahler’S Das Lied Von Der Erde, Jun He

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article analyzes the use of classical Chinese poems in Gustav Mahler’s song cycle The Song of the Earth, which is almost unanimously deemed as a musical work with a number of Chinese motifs. After elaborating on these texts, especially the original poem in the second and third movement, the author examines the background to Mahler’s adaptation. This includes his personal physical and mental crisis, the context of the prevailing Chinese cultural influences in Europe, especially the utilization of Taoism in light of the epistemology of death, and the social context of anti-Semitism in fin-de-siècle Vienna.


"El Corregidor" At The Crossroads: Desire, Law, And Coloniality In Martel's Zama, Leisa Kauffmann Jul 2025

"El Corregidor" At The Crossroads: Desire, Law, And Coloniality In Martel's Zama, Leisa Kauffmann

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "'El Corregidor at the Crossroads: Desire, Law and Coloniality in Martel's Zama" Leisa Kauffmann discusses Lucrecia Martel's filmic adaptation of Antonio DiBenedetto's 1952 novel, Zama. Highlighting the director's emphasis on the psychoanalytic (as opposed to the existentialist) dimensions of the novel, the essay follows the titular characater's unravelling and shows how Martel's film allegorizes colonial(ist) subjectivity. In Kauffmann's essay, various psychoanalytic theories (such as the work of Bhabha, Fanon, and Žižek), and critiques centering the notion of race in the Lacanian tradition are applied. In addition, differences between the novel and film, particularly regarding Zama's mutilation and …


Haunting Pasts, Cancelled Futures: Polish And Argentinian Experiences Of Postdependency, Ewa Kobyłecka-Piwońska Jul 2025

Haunting Pasts, Cancelled Futures: Polish And Argentinian Experiences Of Postdependency, Ewa Kobyłecka-Piwońska

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The aim of this article is to compare Polish and Argentinian experience of democratic transitions of the 1980s and 1990s. Establishing new political and economic orders in both countries did not entail a change in their citizens’ post-dependent mentality. In the first part of the paper, a connection is drawn between Polish and Argentinian collective memories in line with the methodology of transcultural memory studies (Erll, Rothberg). The post-dependent condition is articulated twofold: through the remembrance of the disappearance (of the Jews, the victims of the Argentina’s state terrorism, the indigenous peoples), and through the confusion in grasping the sense …


Melodramatic Joy In Ibrahim Nasrallah’S Trilogy Of The Bells, Adam V. Spanos Jul 2025

Melodramatic Joy In Ibrahim Nasrallah’S Trilogy Of The Bells, Adam V. Spanos

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay argues that absurdist humor, so often theorized as a challenge to metaphysical and identitarian claims, in fact supports such claims within the context of anticolonial nationalist melodrama. In his Trilogy of the Bells [2019], Palestinian writer Ibrahim Nasrallah uses the conventions of melodrama to make an epistemological claim specific to Palestinian experience. Confronting a regime that has been largely successful in determining the internationally accepted common sense about the conflict, Nasrallah aims to present the external world with a narrative of Palestinian history, experience, and aspirations. The Manichean distinctions, spectacular displays of pathos, and manifestations of suppressed secrets …


From Prison To The World: A Comparative Reading Of Naji’S Hirz Mikamkim (Rotten Evidence, 2020) And Abd El-Fattah’S You Have Not Yet Been Defeated (2021), Teresa Pepe Jan 2025

From Prison To The World: A Comparative Reading Of Naji’S Hirz Mikamkim (Rotten Evidence, 2020) And Abd El-Fattah’S You Have Not Yet Been Defeated (2021), Teresa Pepe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article analyses Ahmed Naji’s Hirz Mikamkim (Rotten Evidence) and Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s You Have Not Yet Been Defeated through the lens of ‘prison literature’, that is “literary works produced in, about, or through the experience of political detention” (Taleghani 13). Comparing them to previous forms of prison literature from Egypt, it shows that both books depart from the social-realistic mode that has prevailed throughout the 20th century. Rather they renovate the genre with aesthetic traits drawn from postmodern and digital literature, exemplified by autofictional or anonymous modes of authorship and co-authorship, narrative fragmentation, and bodily exposures. These aesthetic …


Khairy Shalaby’S Novel The City Of The Enslaved: Egyptian Prison Literature With A Russian Twist, Sarali Gintsburg Jan 2025

Khairy Shalaby’S Novel The City Of The Enslaved: Egyptian Prison Literature With A Russian Twist, Sarali Gintsburg

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Although the interconnectedness of Russian and Arabic literatures has been demonstrated by Soviet/Russian and, to a limited extent, Western Arabists, this research remains limited to a few names. However, the role that the Russian/Soviet literary tradition had in shaping contemporary genres of Arabic literature is complex and diverse. This is, for instance, the case with prison literature—Russian/Soviet literature has a long tradition of turning to the topic of imprisonment. It was Dostoyevsky, who turned to the genre of katorzhnaya proza (prison literature) and popularized it. Later, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gorky dedicated a number of their influential literary works to further …


The Absurdity Of Liberation In Moroccan Prison Narratives, Hakima Choukri Jan 2025

The Absurdity Of Liberation In Moroccan Prison Narratives, Hakima Choukri

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Moroccan prison narratives have been credited with major political and social changes, yet their existential value is equally worth acknowledging. The prison narratives of Aziz Binebine, Mohamed Raiss, Malika Oufkir, and Fatna El Bouih, to mention but a few, are fraught with existentialist patterns that are uncovered upon reading them comparatively. One pattern that persists through these narratives is the absurdity of liberation. Borrowing Camus’ concept of the absurd, this article highlights the absurdity of the post-prison chapter for being nothing more than an extension of the prison episode that makes the impossibility of freedom acutely felt. The absurdity of …


Review Of Emily Sun’S On The Horizon Of World Literature, Jing Yang Aug 2024

Review Of Emily Sun’S On The Horizon Of World Literature, Jing Yang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.