Endings and beginnings: Reimagining the tasks and spaces of comparison

New Literary History

Volumn 40, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 583-607

  Layoun, Mary N ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 77950801419     PISSN: 00286087     EISSN: 1080661X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/nlh.0.0098     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. K. II. AIIANTAI 1896-1918 (Athens: Ikaros, 1982), 79
2. Pheng Cheah, "Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson," Diacritics 29, no. 4 (1999): 2-18
3. Jonathan Culler, "Whither Comparative Literature?" Comparative Critical Studies 3, no. 1-2 (2006): 85-97
4. See, for example, "The Multi-, the Pluri-, the Trans-, and the Marketplace: A few thoughts on the comparative and 'relational literacy,'" Passages: A Journal of Transnational & Transcultural Studies 1, no. 2 (1999): 173-213. Originally solicited and accepted for Charles Bernheimer's collection on comparative literature and multiculturalism in the mid-1990s, it was subsequently rejected by the editorial board of the Johns Hopkins Press. A singular "honor," it was the only essay in the collection eliminated at that stage of publication. Whether it was the inclusion of comic books, the discussion of Palestine and Israel, an unconventional assembly of texts, or an argument about comparison deemed unworthy, the concept formulated there of the comparative as "relational literacy" is one I would reiterate and to which I will return here in conclusion
5. For an insightful account of unevenness and theory, see Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, Theory in an Uneven World (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003)
6. Joseph Addison & Richard Steele, The Spectator 69, May 19, 1711
7. Harry Harootunian, "Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem, boundary 2 32, no. 2 (2005): 23-52. This proposition of a structurally enforced experience of comparison echoes Cheah's citation of the "inhuman automaton" as the specter of comparison in Benedict Anderson's work
8. David Damrosch, "Goethe Coins a Phrase," What is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2003), where Damrosch frames his twenty-first-century story of world literature as "an essay in definition, a celebration of new opportunities, and a gallery of cautionary tales" (36)
9. See also his subsequent How to Read World Literature (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)
10. And for an insightful and astute assessment of the comparative, see his "Rebirth of a Discipline: The Global Origins of Comparative Studies," Critical Comparative Studies 3, no. 1-2 (2006): 99-112 or "Comparative Literature?" PMLA 118, no. 2 (2003): 326-30
11. For example, Charles Bernheimer, 'The Anxieties of Comparison," Comparative Lit erature in the Age of Multiculturalism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994)
12. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2005)
13. and Susan Bassnett's reconsideration in "Reflections on Comparative Literature in the Twenty-First Century," Comparative Critical Studies 3, no. 1-2 (2006): 3-11, of the conclusion of her Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) in the light of Spivak's Death of a Discipline
14. Emily Apter, The Translation Zone (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006)
15. See Anthony Pym's review in Target: International Journal of Translation Studies 19, no. 1 (2007): 177-83 for an account both appreciative and critical of some of Apter's comparative readings
16. Natalie Melas, All the Difference in the World (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2007)
17. Peter Osborne, "On Comparability: Kant and the Possibility of Comparative Studies," boundary 2 32, no. 2 (2005): 3-22
18. Harootunian, "Some Thoughts on Comparability," 23-52
19. Marcel Detienne, Comparing the Incomparable, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2008)
20. Timothy Brennan, "Edward Said and Comparative Literature," Journal of Palestine Studies 33, no. 3 (2004): 23-37
21. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978)
22. Though now often cited, including by Spivak herself, this provocative phrase was tucked away in a footnote early in her A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), 31
23. K. II. AIIANTA I 1896-1918 (Athens: Ikaros, 1982) 79
24. Though the translation here is my own, see C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, rev. ed., trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, ed. George Savidis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992). I've consulted Keeley and Sherrard's distinguished translations with interest and admiration. For a thoughtfully insightful account of Cavafy's life and poetry (as well as his considerable influence on international poetry) by way of a review of two recent translations of his poems by Daniel Mendelsohn, see Maria Margaronis, "Mixing History and Desire: The Poetry of C. P. Cavafy, " The Nation, August 3, 2009, 27-30. (Beirut: al-Muassasa al-Arabiyya lid-Dirasat wan-Nashr, 1977/2007)
25. Again, though the translations here are my own, see also Roger Allen's excellent translation, Endings (London: Quartet Books, 1988), which I've consulted with admiration and interest
26. The period from 1879-1882 was one of increasing political foment and peasant and worker protests in Egypt as the 'Urabi Revolt against British and French intervention in Egypt and the corrupt Egyptian Khedive organized for and achieved its initial successes. Alexandria was one of the centers of political organizing and actions. By the time the British bombarded Alexandria, the Cavafy family had already left for Constantinople. With the defeat of the "Urabi Revolt, the British occupied Egypt. But Alexandria remained an important center of political organizing and actions. This was the Alexandria in which Cavafy lived and wrote from late 1880s to his death in 1933
27. Margaronis, "Mixing History and Desire," 27
28. In K. II. AIIANTA I 1896-1918, 79. Please see the entire poem in the addendum
29. Sabry Hafez, "An Arabian Master," New Left Review 37 (January-February 2006): 39-66
30. As Hafez points out in his essay, "Munif's novels rarely designate the country in which they are set, even where the reference is clear" (42). He then quotes a wonderfully prescient observation by Munif from a 1999 interview, Crisis in the Arab World," in L'Orient Express translated and reprinted in Al Jadid, no. 45, 2004
31. See Kumkum Sangari's astute reformulation of magical realism and "the real" in her "The Politics of the Possible," Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, ed. Michael McKeon (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2000), 900-22
32. C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, revised edition. Trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sher-rard, ed. George Savidis. (Princeton UP, 1992), 71
33. K.II. AIIANTA 11896-1918, 79