Tags: Issue 1

back to issue 1 A Note from the Editor: The Role of the Critic   What is comparative literature? How to define a field of study whose boundaries vary so vastly depending on the person delineating them? In general it is a field that examines the overlaps, differences, interactions, and oppositions among national literatures, individual works of literature, and the theoretical foundations driving all of their creations. More simply put,…

Thomas Prendergast The University of Chicago   Im Anfang war das Wort: Vichian Theories of Language, Genius, and History in Goethe’s Faust   While traditional historiography regards Romanticism as a reaction against the dominant rationalist discourses of the eighteenth century, opposition to the Enlightenment in fact predates this movement by nearly five decades. The basic question addressed here is therefore: what do the…

  Sophia Natasha Sunseri The University of Toronto   The Incommensurability of Past and Present: An Exploration of Subjectivity in “Philomena and Procne”   Chrétien de Troyes's adaptation of “Philomena and Procne,” the sixth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, has been described by one scholar as a "pure gem of atrocity.” Replete with deceit, kidnapping, rape, mutilation, and cannibalism, it is hardly surprising that this…

Yasmeen Malik The University of Georgia   Perec’s New Approach to Nihilism in Life, A User’s Manual   Georges Perec’s life was marked by tragedy and loss—his parents killed by the Nazis, his own untimley death—and one might assume that his literary works reflect a negative view of life. However, this paper argues the opposite: that Perec developed a new approach to nihilism, one which accepts the brevity and pointlessness of…

Lucy Beeching The University of Georgia   Make me Unhappy: The Pursuit of True Happiness in Etgar Keret’s “So Good”   Etgar Keret reflects on the concept of true happiness in his short story “So Good,” and the tale of his protagonist Itzik becomes a parable calling into question contemporary ideas of happiness and the influence of consumerism and capitalism on these ideas. This paper discusses the implications of this parable and…

Adrianna Gregory The University of Georgia   The Flâneur as Reader: Effects of Memory and Recognition in Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book   The flâneur, or wanderer, is a prominent figure in literature—perhaps most notably in Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal, which feature figures meandering through the city with no purpose except exploring it. Citing the relationship between…

Dominique Hétu Université de Montréal     Seeking Home and Spatializing Daily Struggle: Strategies for Survival   In Bonheur d’occasion (The Tin Flute, 1945), Hey Waitress and Other Stories (1989), Les enfants Beaudet (The Beaudet children, 2001), and Lullabies for Little Criminals (2006), the characters struggle with exclusion, confinement, and lack of social recognition in precarious…

Emil Archambault Concordia University, Montreal   Silence from the Past: Keats and Kierkegaard on Coldness and Temporality   While Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling both seek to understand artworks from a distant past, they differ in regard to the value their respective analyses assign to the historical context. The silence experienced by the Poet facing the Urn is caused by…

Saudamini Deo Jadavpur University   The Iliad and the Ramayana: Narrative Techniques   Milman Parry and his student Albert Lord studied the South Slavic Bards of Yugoslavia for years before formulating the Parry-Lord thesis which, arguably, established the oral tradition. The Iliad, which until then was believed to be an invention in isolation by a single poet named Homer, was studied as an oral composition…

El Habib Louai Ibn Zohr University Faculty of Letters   Unveiling a New-Orientalist Discourse in Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns   Over the past few years, a great number of fictional works and memoirs have been produced by various writers belonging to diasporic literary scene in response to an impassioned Western eagerness to know more about the East. This…