Project MUSE®: Comparative Literature Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/33
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Comparative Literature Studies.daily12024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 36, no. 3 (1999);
Vol. 37 (2000) through current issueLatest Articles: Comparative Literature StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Comparative Literature Studies1528-42120010-4132Latest articles in Comparative Literature Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction: Literature Beyond Bars
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/920737
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Combining the efforts of critics working in a variety of research domains and primary languages, the goal of this cluster is to situate the work of imprisoned Kurdish human rights lawyer and politician Selahattin Demirtaş in comparative literary studies, broadly understood. Demirtaş, who had no prior literary career, has published five works in Turkish since his incarceration in 2016 in an F-type maximum-security prison in Edirne in northwestern Turkey. These are the short story collections Seher, Devran, and DAD1, and the novels Leylan and Efsun2—all of these titles being formed from the names of their protagonists. While thus far only Seher is available in translation, twelve translations of this work are
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/33/image/coversmallIntroduction: Literature Beyond Bars2024-03-06text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Literature Beyond Bars2024-03-062024TWOProject MUSE®874242024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-06Exploring the Kurdish Literary Tradition in Selahattіn Demіrtaş's Works
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/920738
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The two collections of short stories (Seher [2017] and Devran [2019]) and two novels (Leylan [2020] and Efsun [2021]) that Selahattin Demirtaş, former cochair of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), who has been behind bars since 2016 in the maximum-security F-type prison in Edirne, has authored during his imprisonment both reflect the Kurdish literary tradition and depart from it. His literary works are inspired by the Kurdish oral literary tradition and prominent Kurdish epic themes appear in them, as they do in other Kurdish writing. His works also fit into a line of Kurdish prison writing and Kurdish historical writing that use fiction as a way of creating collective memory and heritage-making. In this regard
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/33/image/coversmallExploring the Kurdish Literary Tradition in Selahattіn Demіrtaş's Works2024-03-06text/htmlen-USExploring the Kurdish Literary Tradition in Selahattіn Demіrtaş's Works2024-03-062024TWOProject MUSE®733982024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-06From Silvio Pellico to Selahattіn Demirtaş: Prison Literature and Literary Polemics in Turkey
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/920739
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In an article published in the socialist daily Evrensel (Universal) on February 18, 2020, the poet Hakan Keysan noted that "the history of Turkish literature is also the history of intellectuals and writers who were formed in prison. Selahattin Demirtaş, too, has gained the status of a writer with [his] works, having leaped into the field of literature from prison." Keysan wrote this piece titled "Politik bir Figür Olarak Yazan Siyasetçiler ve Selahattin Demirtaş Kitaplığı" (Politicians Who Write as Literary Figures and the Selahattin Demirtaş Corpus) upon the publication of Demirtaş's first novel Leylan (2019) and reviewed the novel as well as his two earlier short story collections Seher (2017) and Devran (2019).
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/33/image/coversmallFrom Silvio Pellico to Selahattіn Demirtaş: Prison Literature and Literary Polemics in Turkey2024-03-06text/htmlen-USFrom Silvio Pellico to Selahattіn Demirtaş: Prison Literature and Literary Polemics in Turkey2024-03-062024TWOProject MUSE®781282024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-06Metamorphosis from Behind the Bars: Selahattın Demırtaş's Leylan
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/920740
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Selahattin Demirtaş, coleader of the HDP (Halkların Demokratik Partisi/Peoples' Democratic Party), has been a political prisoner since 2016, during which time he has written two novels and two short story collections. Leylan, published in 2019, is a novel within a novel: the first part is a realistic story structured as a bildungsroman set in Diyarbakır, a center of culture in the Kurdish region, that serves as a prologue to the embedded narrative, while the embedded story is a quasi-science fiction narrative set in Istanbul, Zurich, and Nusaybin about a left-wing Kurdish academic and activist named Bedirhan.1The first part focuses on the fortunes and misfortunes of a young Kurdish boy named Kudret (power), which
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/33/image/coversmallMetamorphosis from Behind the Bars: Selahattın Demırtaş's Leylan2024-03-06text/htmlen-USMetamorphosis from Behind the Bars: Selahattın Demırtaş's Leylan2024-03-062024TWOProject MUSE®478372024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-06The Mūthoi of Selahattin Demirtaş
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/920741
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The story [μῦθος (mūthos)] is the mimesis of action [μίμησιςπράξεως (mímēsis práxeōs)]—for I use "story" to denote the compositional arrangement [σύνθεσιν (sínthesin)] of eventful things [πραγμάτων (pragmáton)] … Tragedy is mimesis not of persons [ἀνθρώπων (ẚnthrópon)] but of action [πράξεων (práxeon)] and life [βίου (bíou)] … and the aim is a certain kind of action [πρᾶξίς (prāxís)], not a qualitative state: it is in accord with character that persons are what they are, but it is through their action that they are happy [εὐδαίμονες (eủdaímones)] or the contrary.Of all the activities necessary and present in human communities, only two were deemed to be political and to constitute what Aristotle called the bios
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/33/image/coversmallThe Mūthoi of Selahattin Demirtaş2024-03-06text/htmlen-USThe Mūthoi of Selahattin Demirtaş2024-03-062024TWOProject MUSE®1262532024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-06On the Aesthetics and Politics of Neoconservatism in Postwar Japan and America
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/920742
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It is the ethos of capitalism that is in gross disrepair, not the economics of capitalism—which is, indeed, its saving grace. But salvation through this grace alone will not suffice.Irving Kristol, "The Adversary Culture of Intellectuals" (1979)1In "The Adversary Culture and the New Class" (1979), the literary intellectual Norman Podhoretz took up a question that had come to characterize the neoconservative line in postwar American cultural criticism: why do so many artists, writers, intellectuals, and professors living comfortable middle-class lives in an affluent liberal society come to view themselves as alienated rebels fighting the good fight against capitalism?2 He was astonished at how the countercultures
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/33/image/coversmallOn the Aesthetics and Politics of Neoconservatism in Postwar Japan and America2024-03-06text/htmlen-USOn the Aesthetics and Politics of Neoconservatism in Postwar Japan and America2024-03-062024TWOProject MUSE®1190212024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-06Losing the Center: The Emergent Metaphysics of Positive and Negative Distance in Troubadour and Flamenco Lyric
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/920743
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During a typical flamenco performance, musicians and audience members will yell out words of encouragement and approval when a performer has delivered a moment of particular intensity. It is routine to hear shouts of "¡olé!" or "¡vaya!" punctuate a live recording, and these same exhortations (or jaleos) are often to be found in tracks captured in a studio environment. In listening to such recordings, how might we situate our examination of the music? If, for example, we choose to undertake an analysis of a solo guitar performance, we might be tempted to focus on the musician, the guitar, the lone artist's interaction with the music, and how that individual chooses to channel it through the instrument. We might, in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/33/image/coversmallLosing the Center: The Emergent Metaphysics of Positive and Negative Distance in Troubadour and Flamenco Lyric2024-03-06text/htmlen-USLosing the Center: The Emergent Metaphysics of Positive and Negative Distance in Troubadour and Flamenco Lyric2024-03-062024TWOProject MUSE®1327832024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-06The Deceived: Lope de Rueda and Improvisation on the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Stage
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/920744
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Any reader of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (1602) will find the plot of Lope de Rueda's Los engañados1 (The Deceived, 1558?2) familiar: a young female protagonist (Lelia), her twin brother assumed dead, disguises herself as a man to enter the service of a gentleman (Lauro), on whose behalf she is required to court a lady (Clavela). The protagonist, in love with her lord, does so reluctantly, and a queered love triangle ensues as Clavela falls for cross-dressed Lelia. The convenient return of the twin (Fabricio), indistinguishable from his disguised sister, results in a hilarious imbroglio whose resolution allows for the restoration of heteronormativity and a series of marriages to confirm the fact. The similarities
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/33/image/coversmallThe Deceived: Lope de Rueda and Improvisation on the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Stage2024-03-06text/htmlen-USThe Deceived: Lope de Rueda and Improvisation on the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Stage2024-03-062024TWOProject MUSE®1304292024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-06Modernism, Empire, World Literature by Joe Cleary (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/920745
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"Ever westward the course of empire." Bishop George Berkeley's world-encompassing maxim has had its day—as has Berkeley himself—but it did for a spell help to define the contours of an idea that empire and power never rest, always searching for pastures and victims new. Yet Berkeley's shorthand for the course of human history has always been precisely wrong, since it gives no account of what forces drive that westward movement, from Greece to Rome to Britain, and so on.It is not Joe Cleary's job, in Modernism, Empire, World Literature, to fill in the gaps in Berkeley's blinkered vision, even as he at times invokes Berkeley. However, in Cleary's account of the westward-shifting centers of Anglophone literary and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/33/image/coversmallModernism, Empire, World Literature by Joe Cleary (review)2024-03-06text/htmlen-USModernism, Empire, World Literature by Joe Cleary (review)2024-03-062024TWOProject MUSE®122952024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-06The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China 1861–1906 by Shaoling Ma (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/920746
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Despite its rising popularity, media studies still confuses many literary scholars with regard to its scope. After all, there is no consensus on whether literature should be considered a form of media and, therefore, studied as such. As John Guillory once observed, this confusion may derive from a philosophical disagreement about how literature actually works—either through language as medium of thought or through writing as medium of speech. According to Shaoling Ma, the current state of media studies adds to this confusion by overemphasizing the latter, privileging technical apparatus over linguistic representation. In The Stone and the Wireless, Ma convincingly demonstrates how media studies, particularly those
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/33/image/coversmallThe Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China 1861–1906 by Shaoling Ma (review)2024-03-06text/htmlen-USThe Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China 1861–1906 by Shaoling Ma (review)2024-03-062024TWOProject MUSE®118002024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-06Minor Transpacific: Triangulating American, Japanese, and Korean Fictions by David S. Roh (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/920747
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Near the end of this pathbreaking book, we learn the origin story of Min Jin Lee's puzzlingly successful novel Pachinko (2017). As a Korean American undergraduate at Yale, accustomed to regarding Korean minorities as upwardly mobile, she was surprised to learn that the resident Koreans of Japan, known as the Zainichi (meaning "residing in Japan"), occupied the bottom rungs of that country's socioeconomic ladder. The gap between these two branches of the global Korean diaspora reveals how contingent identity can be, and the project of both Lee's novel and Roh's study is to make sense of this gap: in the case of Pachinko, through a melodramatic rendering of a fictional Zainichi family over four generations; in the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/33/image/coversmallMinor Transpacific: Triangulating American, Japanese, and Korean Fictions by David S. Roh (review)2024-03-06text/htmlen-USMinor Transpacific: Triangulating American, Japanese, and Korean Fictions by David S. Roh (review)2024-03-062024TWOProject MUSE®113152024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002024-03-06