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  • Editor's Column:Sustained Connections, Future Focuses
  • Zahi Zalloua

It is with great pleasure that I assume the position of editorship for The Comparatist. I am grateful to Dorothy M. Figueira for her assistance in making the transition a smooth one. My involvement with the SCLA began in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1999. I was a Princeton university graduate student and this was one of my first conferences. Encouraged by the audience's generous feedback, I submitted my conference paper for the newly established Rutledge prize. To my delight, I became the recipient of the first Rutledge award and my essay on Sartre's novel La nausée appeared the following year in The Comparatist. Needless to say, this was truly a formative event in my academic trajectory and I feel privileged now to be in a position where I can work closely with scholars to promote comparative study and robust debate.

Building on the hard work of prior editors, I am committed to sustaining the journal's mission to provide a forum for literary comparatists, one that encourages interplay of intertextual and comparative methods, of theoretical-historical analysis, and of critical interpretation. I am also introducing a new format to The Comparatist. Each volume will include a substantial section devoted to a special topic as well as a section for articles of general interest. The focus of the 2012 volume is "Sovereignty and Aesthetics."

Examining the complex relation between sovereignty and aesthetics, this volume asks: Where does one locate sovereignty in a discussion of aesthetics? Is it on the side of the reader, the work, or the institution/field in question? Is an affirmation of the sovereignty of literature—that is, an emphasis on literature's resistance to definition, reason and/or comprehension, on its irreducibility to moral philosophy, politics, anthropology, etc.—irredeemably at odds with the reader's will to interpret or desire for hermeneutic mastery? How have recent theoretical debates on and around postcolonial studies, globalization and transnationalism altered any received notion(s) of sovereignty in literary studies? Is a concern for the literary work as such necessarily a dubious abstraction from the material world? That is to say, is a care for aesthetic form always tainted by ideology, inculcating in its interpreters not only a love for high culture but also a sense of cultural superiority? Can we imagine the literary subject (the author, the critic/reader), after Derrida, as a "sovereign without sovereignty" (191n.14)?

The volume opens with C. Namwali Serpell's "Of Being Bridge," in which the [End Page 1] author investigates what it means to do justice to Kafka's short story, Die Brücke—an artwork that fosters and thwarts interpretive desire. The following three essays put Derrida in dialogue with different interlocutors, engaging his reflections on sovereignty from an array of perspectives. In "Traveling Sovereignty: Counter-crossing Bolaño with Derrida," Tram Nguyen explores the challenges and limits of Derridean sovereignty in relation to Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666. Jonathan Murphy's "The Other Heading of America: Derrida and Emerson on the Future of an Illusion" addresses the question of America as an aporetic ideal in the writings of Emerson and Derrida. Katie Chenoweth, in "The Force of a Law: Derrida, Montaigne, and the Edict of Villers-Cotterêts (1539)," pairs Derrida's musings on language with those of his French Renaissance counterpart, Michel de Montaigne. Continuing the theorization of sovereignty, Richard A. Garner turns to Foucault's perplexing thoughts on aesthetics in "From Sovereignty to Ethopoiesis: Literature, Aesthetics, and New Forms of Life." While Brian O'Keeffe, in "Responding to the Sovereign Work: Gadamer and Mallarmé," considers the type of ethical hermeneutics that a sovereign artwork might entail or demand from the reader, Jeffrey Di Leo frames his inquiry concerning the ethics of reading around the reader's—and especially the editor's—duties to the departed and the ambivalent status of the unfinished work in "Sovereignty of the Dead: Authors, Editors, and the Aesthetic Text." The final articles in this section tackle aesthetic representations or stagings of politics more explicitly. In "A Post-National Spanish Imaginary. A Case-Study: Pan's Labyrinth," Francisco J. Sánchez analyzes the...

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