...Philippe Codde In recent years, Itamar Even-Zohar's Polysystem Theory seems to have lost much of its appeal for students of comparative literature, while more recent forms of systemic approaches to literature—most conspicuously, Pierre Bourdieu's praxiology and Siegfried Schmidt's and Niklas...

.... Reading them one after the other is an interesting experience, because there are numerous divergences, and these raise important questions concerning especially the relationship between narratology, or narrative theory, and history. This essay aims to deepen this experience and to offer a comparative...

...Lisa Zunshine There is a growing sense among scholars working in cognitive literary studies that their assumptions and methodologies increasingly align them with another paradigmatically interdisciplinary field: comparative literature. This introduction to the special issue on cognitive approaches...

... methods, topics, languages, cultures, and periods, which are bound together by a common focus on historical change and comparative reflections. The statue Granskende pige ( Scrutinizing Girl , 1934) by Anders J. Bundgaard shows a girl kneeling over a runic inscription, intent on deciphering...

... 1977 “Reiterating the Differences:A Reply to Jacques Derrida,” Glyph 1 : 198 -208. Whose Acts? Which Communities? A Reply to David Gorman Sandy Petrey 6104 Poetics Today / 21:2 / sheet 159 of 214 Comparative Studies...

... Herrnstein 1968 Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Poetic History between Reference and Materiality Eyal Segal Poetics and Comparative Literature, Tel Aviv 6104 Poetics Today / 21:2...

...Karin Kukkonen Comparative literature and cognitive literary studies both consider literature as a worldwide phenomenon. The move toward world literature in comparative literature made salient the issue of reading some texts in translation, and world literature turned its attention to whether texts...

...Ming Dong Gu Mimesis is one of the most fundamental ideas in Western poetics. Mimetic theories constitute a mainstream in Western aesthetics. In comparative studies of Chinese and Western poetics, however, there exists a widely accepted opinion that mimetic theory is a cultural invention unique...

...Lisa Zunshine This article suggests that comparative literature scholars may benefit from the awareness that different communities around the world subscribe to different models of mind and that works of fiction can thus be fruitfully analyzed in relation to those local ideologies of mind. Taking...

... at length in this issue does not require a concomitant turning away from theory. The essay begins with an examination of some important links between Gadamer's most significant assertions about the hermeneutic consciousness and comparably significant assertions about the study of the material book...

... that of the English eighteenth-century novel enables a method which combines quantitative studies and close readings. By examining the prefaces to the eighteenth-century Danish novels and studying the Danish novel compared to the Volksbuch , I argue that the genre is formed by a reflexive use of fictionality. I show...

..., such as providing the occasion for reflective normative discussions. Comparing the continuities and disjunctures between women's reading groups over time demonstrates that broad social and cultural “frames” (to use Erving Goffman's [1974] term) strongly influence how literature enters our individual and collective...

...Daniel Punday Role-playing games have many qualities of narrative (character, plot, setting), yet they have received virtually no attention from narratologists. This essay discusses the way that role-playing games construct narrative worlds and compares that to recent theories of fiction based...

... with a biblical text), all composed in response to works of visual art, in order to attempt an assessment of the possible scope (and limitations) of the undertaking to reflect images in tones. To concretize the idea of correspondence between pictorial and musical configurations, I conclude with a comparative case...

... frame my analysis of Shelley's dramatic style with a set of poetic and critical contrasts. Judged in the light of twentieth-century treatments of the Cenci story by Antonin Artaud, Bertrand Tavernier, and George Elliott Clarke, Shelley's style appears comparatively unmixed and unrealistic or, as Stuart...

...David Darby This essay compares two distinct traditions of narrative theory: on the one hand, that of structuralist narratology as it emerged in the 1960s and in its various subsequent manifestations; on the other, that of German-language Erzähltheorie as codified in the 1950s, with a prehistory...

... construction and in evaluation if not as the very condition of literary reading insofar as the latter relies on a sacralization of literature. Finally, doxa appears as a valuable tool for the analysis of reading effects when we consider its modes of enunciation. The essay thus compares the innocent doxa...

... of events in this tale helps us evaluate the characters’ behavior and draw critical conclusions about Chaucer’s aesthetic purposes. It also enables us to trace the development of the genre of lai, to which this tale belongs. A comparative study of the earlier lais of Marie de France and Sir Orfeo suggests...

... habitus. The second part of the essay compares the proposed theory of narrative in culture to existing narrative theories about circulation and negotiation and to the traditional model of narrative as a form of communication, which it tries to overcome. Finally, the essay offers a detailed analysis...