... for God, and to replace him. The essay argues that rationalism involves a melancholic gesture, whose structural representative in Freudian terms is obsessive-compulsive discourse. Empiricism, in turn, arises as a manic phase of attempted (and failed) mourning, stabilized in what will come to be known...

...Anna A. Berman Abstract What is a family novel ? Russian literary scholars—who use the term frequently—claim that it is originally an English genre, yet in English scholarship the term has virtually disappeared. This article recovers the lost history of the family novel, tracing two separate...

...Annette Damayanti Lienau Abstract This essay introduces the American Comparative Literature Association Forum “Vernacular Comparisons beyond the Europhone.” Characterizing the Europhone “vernacular” as a protean term of diverse application, the essay highlights the paradoxes associated with its use...

.... In this article, I explore British soldiers' poetic accounts of the Second World War in the Oasis archive, which contains around 20,000 items by over 200 authors. The concepts of victim and perpetrator testimony are both relevant and problematized in relation to soldier testimony. Clearly, the origin of the terms...

... to two moments: (1) the notion and practice of Bildung —education, training, formation—where the subject of language, in becoming literate, thoughtful, and self-reflective, is to become a being that recognizes itself and others in these and related terms: as legible, autonomous, and self-determining...

...Amir Engel Abstract While there is growing interest in the postwar era, the cultural characteristics of the period after World War II and the period’s historical scope are still largely underdetermined. The purpose of this article is to offer a more nuanced use of the term postwar and insights...

...Kevin Newmark This essay considers Baudelaire's “Le Cygne” in terms of the crucial place the poem should occupy in any theoretical reflection on literary and historical “modernity.” Despite the proliferation in recent years of references to Walter Benjamin in the reception of Baudelaire's poetry...

... of forcing us to confront silences that can never be filled? Through a series of detailed close-readings, the essay argues that Tropique de la violence takes a nuanced and often ironical approach to the facile equivalences between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean (in terms of migratory tragedy...

...Byungsam Jung Abstract This article analyzes two types of visual perception in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955): camera obscura and camera lucida , terms that are taken from photography and painting, respectively. By applying these terms, this article identifies a visual dilemma in how an artist...

... for “vernacularization” as a process of opening spaces for “the local,” vernacular languages, ontologies, and epistemologies are paradoxically oriented towards English/the West. What happens if the word, term, concept, process “vernacular” loses this purchase? What might we notice if we refused to rehabilitate...

... tragic drama in terms of their contrastive nature.” However, to do so “something must be added” that the book he wrote failed to supply. The aim of this essay is twofold: to reconstruct what Benjamin might have said about French classical tragedy and to identify the mysterious addition. Why does...

... and cosmopolitanism: the cultural critic and novelist Germaine de Staël (1766-1817). It argues that de Staël conceived of exile in terms of translation—as the necessity, even the opportunity, of crossing borders that are not only national but also linguistic and cultural. I begin by situating de Staël in relation...

... controversial. Indeed, in the view of some medievalists the Middle Ages cannot be “postcolonial,” because the term by definition refers to historical circumstances and cultures that emerged only after the disintegration of the global empires that were formed in the modern period by European powers...

..., and Jean-Paul Sartre for examples of this defiance. Yet Aragon himself looked to Bertran de Born as a poet in revolt, and the poetic form remains a better venue for the expression of what Kristeva terms the semiotic—that is, the rhythmic bodily forces that resist reduction to the symbolic. Bertran...

... to the capsular space of his mother tongue for protection and the gestation of a monolithic poetic idiom, a movement that reflects Crnjanski's incomplete integration of the English language in his own verbal creativity. Crnjanski thus represents interlinguality in terms of an enclosed space whereby the exiled...

... is compared in Women in Love and Anna Karenina , with which Lawrence was preoccupied when he wrote Women in Love . The article discusses ideas on consciousness in the novels' own terms, its interpretative goal being comparative rather than thematic. Its method is to compare the states of consciousness...

... of “passion,” a term that in its various Greek, Latin, and vernacular forms signifies not only a psychological affect but also a state of being-acted-upon more generally. The Rime 's participation in this discourse is signaled by certain features of its vocabulary, its adoption of ancient poetic tropes...

... of the event. I also employ Sianne Ngai's term “stuplimity” to discuss Cage's 1977 performance of “Empty Words” and to deconstruct the affective dynamic generated between Cage and his audience. While Cage is seeking to disintegrate the distance between music and language, he is simultaneously dependent...

... or object of knowledge, but instead activates the reader's faculty of reflection and self-reflection. Kundera addresses this reflective attitude to the text as maturity and applies it to life at large. Maturity is not about learning correct values or coming to terms with reality; it is not about attaining...

... to define and contain criminal traces, arguing that Roberto Bolaño's and Teresa Margolles's works point, rather, to the potentiality of criminal space to project itself onto other locations. Their diffuse and globalized crime scenes have structural similarities with what Giorgio Agamben terms generalized...