Editor's Column: Changes and Continuities in The Comparatist

In introducing my first issue of The Comparatist, I am deeply aware of the growth and development of the journal under the guidance of my predecessors. From its beginnings as a vehicle primarily for the publication of papers delivered at the annual conference of the Southern Comparative Literature Association to its status as a nationally and internationally recognized publication in the field, The Comparatist has been enriched by the editorial wisdom and hard work of Jeanne Smoot, Mechthild Cranston, Marcel Cornis-Pope, and John Burt Foster. The current issue introduces not only a new editor but also a major change in the journal's publication status: it is the first to be published by the University of North Carolina Press at Chapel Hill. The journal's new look and streamlined distribution, among other changes, come from the press's professional oversight. In addition, the journal has in a sense come home, in that it is now sponsored again by North Carolina State University at Raleigh, where it began.

The contributions to this issue reflect certain traditions of the SCLA and of The Comparatist, together with innovative scholarship. From its inception, the SCLA conference offered sessions on literature and the other arts, as well as on East–West literary relations. The Comparatist has published a number of essays dealing with the relations of literature to visual arts and music and has been encouraging a more globalized approach to comparative literature. The essays here grouped under "Inter-Art Relations" and "East/West Intersections" offer fresh approaches as well as continuities in those fields. The question of comparative literature's relationship to cultural studies, which has preoccupied our discipline at least since the publication of the Bernheimer report ten years ago, has also been evident in the journal. The authors in the final grouping address that issue from divergent angles.

Ben Stoltzfus's essay on Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jasper Johns approaches the traditional inter-art subject of literature and painting through the lenses of meta-fiction, autopoesis, and chaos theory. Robbe-Grillet's text "La Cible" is unique in that it incorporates and reworks in verbal terms items from Johns's painting Target With Plaster Casts. The visual and the verbal artist each restructures the apparently random elements in his composition through the orderly disorder described in chaos theory. Working against the grain of established doxa, both painting and text deconstruct meaning, while attaining higher levels of insight. Stolzfus provides new perspectives on this vital relationship. The possibilities of visual–verbal artistic interactions are illuminated from a different perspective in Corinne Andersen's comparison of Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas with the photograph by Man Ray that serves as its frontispiece. Using the comparison to refute traditional criticisms of The Autobiography as exemplifying Stein's monumental egotism, Andersen demonstrates how the construction of the photograph calls attention to and complements Stein's critique of autobiography as a genre purporting to be referential or to "tell the truth." In Stoltzfus's and Andersen's esays, verbal and visual languages appear to refract each other while constructing their own realities.

The East–West comparative axis that seemed clearly delineated years ago has become more complex in our current understanding of global configurations, where the identity of the cardinal points is not always so clear and the interactions among cultures is more frequent. Two types of East–West intersections are emphasized in the essays under the second rubric, edited by John Burt Foster, Jr. Ling Chung also uses visuals to help illustrate the far-Western poet Gary Snyder's encounter with Eastern religions by way of perceived correspondences between Native-American and Asian shamanism. Moving between anthropology and literature, Chung demonstrates how experience with shamans not only influenced Snyder's personal life but also how shamanistic initiation rites are embedded in the deep structure of his poetry. In the case of Lidan Lin's comparison of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness with the sixteenth-century Chinese writer Wu Cheng-en's novel The Journey to the West, the Western reader finds that Indian Buddhism, the stereotypical cultural icon of the East, is in fact the goal of the journey westward. Lin's comparison between, on the one hand, Confucian and Taoist China's syncretic encounter with Buddhist scriptures and, on the other hand, the British imperialist encounter with Africa emphasizes the narrative ambiguities and undermining strategies in both texts. Like Snyder in Chung's essay, Wu is represented as achieving a rather advanced level of cultural and religious syncretism, but Conrad, ultimately, is not able to go as far in that direction. Although Lin modifies Achebe's famous criticism that Heart of Darkness is a racist statement, the Western "intersection" with another culture, in Conrad's case, does not—as in the cases of Snyder and Wu—lead to interaction. Like the authors of the essays to follow, Lin also stresses the impact of cultural studies on comparative literature.

The three contributions in the final group all began as papers at the 2003 SCLA conference, held at the University of Texas at Austin, whose theme was "Going Global–The Futures of Comparative Literature." Dragan Kujundžić's "vEmpire, Glocalization, and the Melancholia of the Sovereign" is a revised keynote address from that conference. Erin Williams Hyman's "Theatrical Terror: Attentats and Symbolist Spectacle" is a revised and expanded version of her paper, winner of last year's Rutledge Prize for the best presentation by a graduate student at the SCLA conference. Katherine Arens's "When Comparative Literature Becomes Cultural Studies: Teaching Cultures through Genre" is also a revised and lengthened essay based on her paper. The three authors take different but overlapping approaches to the relationship between literature and culture: Kujundžić through theory, Hyman through analysis of specific texts and contexts, and Arens through pedagogy.

Dragan Kujundžić addresses the monumental cultural effects of globalization, while also considering its possible effects on comparative literature studies. His major question, "Who or what will come out of going global?" opens up multiple perspectives, dangers, and challenges. Drawing on theorists such as Derrida, Nancy, Negri, and Hardt, Kujundžić illustrates "the melancholic displacement of national sovreignty" with examples from films and from cultural phenomena such as the replacement of the former Soviet Union's Hotel Moscow with an advertisement for BMW announcing itself as the look of the future. Kujundžić's primary icon for what he takes to be globalization's shadow empire in the form of global capital comes from literature: Bram Stoker's Dracula, or the vampire as v-empire.

Erin Williams Hyman demonstrates how literary and cultural analyses can enrich each other. The French Symbolists' adoption of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, along with the revolutionary staging of Jarry's Ubu roi, both acquire new meanings when seen in the context of contemporary anarchist terrorism. A late-nineteenth-century crisis of language, a loss of faith in the ability of words to communicate, expressed itself both in political action and in the predominance of gesture on stage. Hyman's discussion of the political culture of the time, in particular the anarchist movement, enables us to understand the political content, through their very theatricality, of both Ibsen's and Jarry's plays. Focusing on the classroom, Katherine Arens argues that comparative literature can and must make use of the methodologies of cultural studies while maintaining its own identity. She outlines specific strategies for teaching students to read literature comparatively, while teaching them to do critical cultural and cross-cultural analyses. Along the way, she proposes a redefinition of genre, a redefinition that draws on both cultural and literary studies and that will serve as a pedagogical tool for helping novice readers to become culturally literate. The essays in this issue thus emphasize comparative literature's broadening horizons: its globalization in various senses, as well as its points of contact with the arts and with aspects of culture at every level. At the same time the essays recall the case for retaining a grounding for comparative literature in literature.

The book-review section, too, edited by Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, reflects comparative literature's increasing globalization, its ever-renewed crises of self-definition, and its intersections with other arts and other fields. A number of the books reviewed here deconstruct and reconfigure definitions of borders, gender, and ethnic identity, as well as definitions of our own academic field. East–West intersections and the relation between literature and the visual arts also receive attention from original perspectives.

I owe debts of gratitude to several people, without whom this issue of The Comparatist might not have seen the light. I am deeply grateful to Linda Brady, Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and Ruth Gross, Head of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, both at North Carolina State University, for their encouragement and financial support. John Burt Foster, who went far beyond the call of duty of a former editor in instructing me in editorial procedures and answering my numerous questions, deserves thanks and praise. The example of his high standards and success in editing the journal for the past six years is an inspiration. Thanks are due to associate editor Edward Donald Kennedy for his invaluable assistance in reaching an agreement with our publishers, the University of North Carolina Press. I am grateful to him as well as to associate editor Dorothy Figuera and book editor Elizabeth Richmond-Garza for their work and support. Many thanks to Robbie Dircks and Kim Bryant of the University of North Carolina Press for their interest in their journal and their excellent work in bringing it to publication and to Eric Brooks for creating the new design. The scrupulous and painstaking editorial work of managing editor Andrew Sparling has made a great difference in the quality of this issue, and I am very grateful to him. I want to thank the anonymous reviewers of the essays published here for their indispensable contributions. Finally, I want to express my gratitude to the staff at Villa I Tatti for providing me with the necessary means to edit this issue of The Comparatist long-distance from Italy.