Project MUSE®: The Comparatist - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The Comparatist.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 16 (1992); Vol. 19-21 (1995-1997); Vol. 23 (1999) through current issueLatest Articles: The ComparatistTWOProject MUSE®The Comparatist1559-08870195-7678Latest articles in The Comparatist. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editor's Column: Justice in Times of Genocide
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972418
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Scenes of injustice surround us today. The belief that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice is losing credibility by the minute. Might makes right appears to be returning with a vengeance. Or perhaps it never left. How do we mobilize the idea of justice in the face of atrocities and abuses of power? What is justice? Who enacts it? Who can claim it? And who/what is or has been excluded from its appeal? When we evoke "social justice," "economic justice," or "racial justice," for instance, are we really talking about the same thing? And, finally, which forms or deployments of justice do existing systems find less or more threatening? With an eye for justice's multiple meanings, and the divergent
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallEditor's Column: Justice in Times of Genocide2025-10-28text/htmlen-USEditor's Column: Justice in Times of Genocide2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®146672026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28"'Être juste avec Freud': Proud Boys on Campus"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972419
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In 1991 on the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Michel Foucault's Histoire de la folie, Derrida gave a lecture entitled, " 'Être juste avec Freud': the History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis." The title, which is a quotation from Foucault's Histoire de la folie, is susceptible to at least three translations, "to do justice to Freud," "to be exact or accurate with Freud," and "to be just along with or in the company of Freud." While the first two senses predominate within Foucault's work, as Derrida charts Foucault's complex struggle to situate Freud both within the history of madness, medicine, and sexuality and as constitutive of those very histories, it is the third sense that will be my
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmall"'Être juste avec Freud': Proud Boys on Campus"2025-10-28text/htmlen-US"'Être juste avec Freud': Proud Boys on Campus"2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®631332026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Trickster Justice: Socrates, Odysseus, Prometheus, and "The Myth of Er"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972420
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"Uh, is this a game of chance?""Not the way I play it, no."What rare integrity, cheating no one, not even the person who is being cheated would stake his eternal happiness.While it is a veritable cliché to call Socrates a trickster, such a characterization quickly gives way amid discussions of Socratic intelligence [nous], knowledge [episteme], wisdom [sophia], and virtue [arête]. Nevertheless considering Socrates in terms of classic tricksters such as the West African Ananse the Spider or Hare, the Native American Coyote or Raven, the western Reynard the Fox, the Tibetian Uncle Tomba, or the Chinese Sun Wukong rewards serious examination.1 Focusing on the theme of justice in the "Myth of Er" at the end of Plato's
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallTrickster Justice: Socrates, Odysseus, Prometheus, and "The Myth of Er"2025-10-28text/htmlen-USTrickster Justice: Socrates, Odysseus, Prometheus, and "The Myth of Er"2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®1017492026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Just Translation
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972421
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Injustice, Jacques Rancière reminds us in many of his texts, is the outcome of unequal distributions of time, activity, and feeling. The time for labor and leisure, the opportunity to have emotions, the chance to activate and articulate a voice. Some have a greater share or part in respect of that distribution, some less so, some hardly at all. I stress the unequal sharing of voices. Voices to express a political opinion, for example, or voices to express indignation at injustices. What we might look for, in order to lessen injustice and that unequal distribution, are strategies that enhance people's abilities to speak up and speak out, as well as to be properly heard.One strategy might be translation. For it's
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallJust Translation2025-10-28text/htmlen-USJust Translation2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®808782026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Justice for Ourika: Claire de Duras, Madame de Beauvau, and the Myth of the Grateful Slave
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972422
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Claire de Duras's 1823 novel Ourika, based on an actual person kept in the home of the Maréchale Princesse de Beauvau, recounts an African nun's confession to a visiting doctor of her plight of being taken from a slave ship and raised in an 18th century aristocratic French household. At the end of the novel, Ourika dies in a convent of melancholy and loneliness. Although her upbringing has given her elevated station and education, she can never marry any of her social peers because of her race. As a work of fiction based on a true story, Duras's novel can be read as a commentary on the practice of enslaving Africans in such circumstances as Ourika. While Duras's novel purports to depict the aristocracy as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallJustice for Ourika: Claire de Duras, Madame de Beauvau, and the Myth of the Grateful Slave2025-10-28text/htmlen-USJustice for Ourika: Claire de Duras, Madame de Beauvau, and the Myth of the Grateful Slave2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®527882026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Magnetic Justice: Lenin and the Cellist
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972423
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When did you first conceive of your instrument?The idea first came to me right after our Revolution, at the beginning of the Bolshevik state. I wanted to invent some kind of an instrument that would not operate mechanically, as does the piano, or the cello and the violin, whose bow movements can be compared to those of a saw. I conceived of an instrument that would create sound without using any mechanical energy, like the conductor of an orchestra. The orchestra plays mechanically, using mechanical energy; the conductor just moves his hands, and his movements have an effect on the music …What did Lenin think of it, and why did you show it to him?1The theremin is a bizarrely wonderful instrument, one which works
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallMagnetic Justice: Lenin and the Cellist2025-10-28text/htmlen-USMagnetic Justice: Lenin and the Cellist2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®530732026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Justice, Extinction, and the University
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972424
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One of the darkest questions of our time asks what it might mean to begin again after extinction. For biopolitical theorists, this question asks us to imagine an end to the civilized society that has brought us "accelerating climate change, ecological catastrophe, endless war, untold economic misery, and a deliberate destruction of the social bond" (Ware 133), and ponder the meaning of life after its extinction.For critical education theorists, such as myself, the question here is a bit different and more limited one. Namely, it asks us to imagine an end to the neoliberal university that has brought us a vision of education that is nothing but the handmaiden of late capitalism. I call this vision "dark academe"
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallJustice, Extinction, and the University2025-10-28text/htmlen-USJustice, Extinction, and the University2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®514532026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28"What Species is Multispecies Justice?"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972425
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In what follows, I will discuss two international initiatives in multispecies justice that I'm involved in at the moment—one based largely in the UK, and one in the US. And while I don't have the space to make the argument here, I want to suggest that both initiatives and the issues they raise may be fruitfully explored within the larger context of what Roberto Esposito has characterized as the urgent need to think an "affirmative" biopolitics (194). The core question for the environmental and animal rights examples at hand is the fundamental one for biopolitical thought generally: the disjunction between "natural" and juridico-political personhood and, more broadly, between "law" and "life." I took up these issues
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmall"What Species is Multispecies Justice?"2025-10-28text/htmlen-US"What Species is Multispecies Justice?"2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®720032026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28The (Bio)Political Animal: Aristotelian Organicism and Agamben's Homo Sacer
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972426
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Since its publication in 1998, Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer has occasioned an enormous amount of commentary. While much of this commentary seeks to extend or apply Agamben's insights to diverse theoretical domains or academic fields, numerous critics have also sought to limit or qualify the appeal of Agamben's formulations and now well-known terminology by calling attention to his work's oversights or shortcomings. Chief among these critiques have been assertions, sometimes strenuous, that the work is overly reductive in its application of concepts found in ancient political and legal texts to the operations of modern-day sovereign states.2 In line with these claims, numerous critics have also contended that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallThe (Bio)Political Animal: Aristotelian Organicism and Agamben's Homo Sacer2025-10-28text/htmlen-USThe (Bio)Political Animal: Aristotelian Organicism and Agamben's Homo Sacer2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®1088552026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Katherine Mansfield's "The Fly"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972427
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In this brief story there is a relatively lengthy account of the efforts of a fly to save itself after falling into an ink pot. Depicted minutely is its laborious toil in redistinguishing its body parts welded together, after being repeatedly doused with ink. This article picks up on a comment from 1961 by J Thomas: "Except for the office messenger M who counts so little in the human action that he always is presented under the image of a dog, Mr. Woodifield and the boss are the only characters of 'The Fly,' The one is a foil to the other" (262). Yet while Thomas argues that the boss is at the end saved from falling into the same "Slough of Despond" as Woodifield, a figure-of-death-in-life, the contention will be
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallKatherine Mansfield's "The Fly"2025-10-28text/htmlen-USKatherine Mansfield's "The Fly"2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®418982026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28By There I Mean Here All around Us: Layli Long Soldier's Whereas and Blind Spots of World Literature
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972428
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Poetry can do that.In an early moment of her collection Whereas poet Layli Long Soldier asks "are you looking at how I've become two?" ("Ȟe Sapá Five," 4, italics in original). The image is evocative in many senses: the scene depicts the poet become two in front of her reflection in a mirror, but the speech marked in italics is between the poet and her daughter, also in the scene, and the mother-daughter relation is another instance of having become two. As the poem ends the poet illustrates that her division is between two languages and two nations: "I plunge my ear into the hollow of a black horn, listen to it speak/Not one word sounds as before" (lines 11-12.). That black horn is the cosmological center of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallBy There I Mean Here All around Us: Layli Long Soldier's Whereas and Blind Spots of World Literature2025-10-28text/htmlen-USBy There I Mean Here All around Us: Layli Long Soldier's Whereas and Blind Spots of World Literature2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®647102026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Coming to Writing: Ernaux and Munro Reflect on Vocation
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972429
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A frequent scenario in Annie Ernaux and Alice Munro's works features a woman who leaves small-town or rural life behind in pursuit of education and career.1 One sees this phenomenon, and more specifically the experience of finding one's calling, in Ernaux's autobiographical Mémoire de fille, published in 2016, and Munro's "Family Furnishings," a fictional story inspired by life events, published in 2001.2 In both works, the protagonist becomes a writer, a vocational choice closely tied to her relationships with others. Interestingly, both authors present individuals, family and friends, who become collateral damage as the main characters embark on their chosen careers. On the one hand, Ernaux's autobiographical
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallComing to Writing: Ernaux and Munro Reflect on Vocation2025-10-28text/htmlen-USComing to Writing: Ernaux and Munro Reflect on Vocation2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®854162026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Practices of Power: Unfolding Political Theology in Richard II
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972430
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In the latter segments of Richard II (Acts 3∞5), the play's most evocative moments lead inevitably to the royal dethronement of Richard. The movement from Acts 1 to 3 reveals the depth of his tyranny, while the progression from Acts 3 to 5 generates a cascading effect, tracing the path "from divine kingship to kingship's 'Name' and from the name to the naked misery of man" (Kantorowicz 29). This, of course, resonates with Kantorowicz's seminal study, The King's Two Bodies, where he posits that the king's identity is bifurcated into two distinct yet intertwined entities: the "body natural," which is subject to the vicissitudes of mortality, and the "body politic," an abstract, transcendent embodiment of sovereign
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallPractices of Power: Unfolding Political Theology in Richard II2025-10-28text/htmlen-USPractices of Power: Unfolding Political Theology in Richard II2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®748252026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Babbling and Beyond: Rousseau and the Nurse as Supplement
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972431
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Among the copious bibliography of canonical work produced by Rousseau, one text, while being widely celebrated, has remained relatively understudied—Emile ou De l'éducation (1762). But what can be made of Emile, a renowned treatise that has, thus far, mainly garnered attention from the perspective of the educational contribution of Rousseau's thought? It is well-known that this treatise has served as the basis of contemporary pedagogy—in particular, the inductive method advanced by Maria Montessori (Crétois). While Rousseau's writings are amply discussed in fields like philosophy, literary studies, linguistics, anthropology, and political science, he has never been studied through the question of "babbling" via
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallBabbling and Beyond: Rousseau and the Nurse as Supplement2025-10-28text/htmlen-USBabbling and Beyond: Rousseau and the Nurse as Supplement2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®621522026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28"To put an antic disposition on—": Pretense as Habituation and the Development of Vice in Hamlet
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972432
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In a pivotal scene of Hamlet (ca. 1600), we find Shakespeare's prince–having just slain Polonius and threatened Gertrude–seemingly in the paroxysms of madness.1 His apparently heedless behavior, alongside the fact that at this juncture in the play he alone perceives the 'ghost' of his father, are compositely sufficient to recommend to many that Hamlet has crossed the threshold of reasoned action.2 Much earlier, studying Hamlet's affectations, Polonius famously recognizes that "though this be madness, yet there is/ method in't" (2.2.205-206). While it is unclear the degree to which rational processing has been supplanted by bona fide psychosis, remnants of that methodical mind that Ophelia mourns manifest in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmall"To put an antic disposition on—": Pretense as Habituation and the Development of Vice in Hamlet2025-10-28text/htmlen-US"To put an antic disposition on—": Pretense as Habituation and the Development of Vice in Hamlet2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®654762026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Melancholic Hope: Futural Collaborations in Nia DaCosta's Candyman
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972433
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Hyposubjectivity, objectualization, and distributed agency are key components of post-anthropoetics, particularly for humans with documented histories of objectifi-cation or instrumentalization. With these elements in mind, this essay foregrounds collaborations between a Black male artist and his inspirations to examine the ways that social, biographical, economical, and ecological elements converge in the material realities of the present. In Nia DaCosta's 2021 film Candyman, these convergences and entanglements take the form of a literal ghost, a hyperobject beyond human comprehension, whose presence and actions highlight components of futural feminist-materialist praxis necessary for "stay[ing] with the trouble"
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallMelancholic Hope: Futural Collaborations in Nia DaCosta's Candyman2025-10-28text/htmlen-USMelancholic Hope: Futural Collaborations in Nia DaCosta's Candyman2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®585092026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Selling the Humanities by Jeffrey Di Leo (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972434
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Amid the rarified ecospheres of contemporary critical theory and Cultural Studies, Jeffrey Di Leo, a comparatist with a strong philosophical interest trained at Indiana University, is one of very few to have directed his critical "beat" toward the publishing industry. But also, particularly in his roles as editor-in-chief of the American Book Review and symplokē, a widely respected theory review, to have engaged in this process, from redaction to production—strategically, at that. In 1977, the American Book Review was launched as a tabloid, distributed in bookstores as well as by subscription, by a consortium of academic publishers in the hope of sparking public interest in their trend-setting new works. Under Di
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallSelling the Humanities by Jeffrey Di Leo (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USSelling the Humanities by Jeffrey Di Leo (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®338752026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Uncertain Times by Jacques Rancière (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972435
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"The times, they are a-changin'." When Dylan was singing that song, maybe so. These days, however, the times don't seem to have changed at all. Choose your event that seemingly made for a distinctive change: range back to the fall of the Soviet Union, forward to 9/11 or to the pandemic, and wonder what really changed. Uncertain times don't necessarily change the status quo. The events at issue—the Soviet Union's collapse, the pandemic—didn't, Rancière argues, effectuate radical readjustments to the extant configurations of geopolitics, economic frameworks, or social life. They instead enabled such configurations to remain the same—the same as before, the same as now. As for the future to which we forlornly look in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallUncertain Times by Jacques Rancière (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USUncertain Times by Jacques Rancière (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®687452026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28On Close Reading by John Guillory (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972436
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Much of the jargon in literary theory is highly specialized. Knowledge of this jargon is required in order both to understand literary theory, and to put it into practice as literary criticism. For example, if one does not know the meaning of "cardinal functions" or "functional catalyzers," then it will be impossible not only to understand narratology as a literary theory, particularly as developed by Roland Barthes, but also to utilize narratology in literary criticism.1 But can the same be said of the term "close reading," one that has recently become the darling of the antitheory crowd in literary studies?2 Is it a highly specialized term that requires an expert definition when used in literary criticism? Or is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallOn Close Reading by John Guillory (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USOn Close Reading by John Guillory (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®412962026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Beyond Alterity: Contemporary Indian Fiction and the Neoliberal Script by Shakti Jaising (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972437
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Shakti Jaising's Beyond Alterity argues that contemporary postcolonial cultural productions should not be read under the sign of difference, as essentially marking out a form of resistance to neoliberal or imperial norms. Instead, Jaising traces a history of neoliberal thought that has become hegemonic since the Mont Pèlerin conference of 1947 and analyses how an economic "narrative" of how postcolonial nations should develop was adopted by the Indian state in the 1990s. This book takes up the call by earlier critics such as Aijaz Ahmed's for a renewed attention to the material reality of developing postcolonial nations rather than cultural difference as a central feature of postcolonial writing.The book begins
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallBeyond Alterity: Contemporary Indian Fiction and the Neoliberal Script by Shakti Jaising (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USBeyond Alterity: Contemporary Indian Fiction and the Neoliberal Script by Shakti Jaising (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®106682026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Hunting for Justice: The Cosmology of Dikē in Aeschylus's Oresteia by Kalliopi Nikolopoulou (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972438
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Kalliopi Nikolopoulou's Hunting for Justice is a patient and unsettling encounter with the Oresteia. For many modern critics, the "unhewn" quality of Aeschylus's art—where words stand like lithic monuments—has been an invitation to sculpt and release from within it a variety of ideological forms, some so lifelike they appear to walk amongst us. What they have in common is a domestication of the Oresteia, and its wild conception of justice (dike), into an allegory of political progression from vendetta to rule of law. Nikolopoulou resists this reflex by repositioning dike where Aeschylus left it: within the structures of phusis, where predation and sacrifice sustain a world that is neither wholly human nor
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallHunting for Justice: The Cosmology of Dikē in Aeschylus's Oresteia by Kalliopi Nikolopoulou (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USHunting for Justice: The Cosmology of Dikē in Aeschylus's Oresteia by Kalliopi Nikolopoulou (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®92902026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972439
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Katherine McKittrick's Dear Science and Other Stories is concerned with black liberation and black stories, particularly regarding the labor of black academics and creatives and their methodological practices. Also the author of Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle(2006) and the editor of Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis(2014), McKittrick continues to engage with race, Black geography, and anticolonial studies through an interdisciplinary lens in Dear Science. In this recent publication, McKittrick critiques the limitations of existing methodologies that operate within the colonial matrix and foregrounds interdisciplinarity as both an alternative way of thinking and a method already
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallDear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USDear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®85652026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Romanticism, Realism and the Lines of Mimesis by Polly Dickson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972440
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"Mimetic fiction has, since Plato, referred to a portion of the world recognised in an artwork, as though reflected in a mirror or projected by a trick of the light. As a literary commonplace, mimesis is characterised by this inherent strangeness: that what might seem a flat reflection is in fact a shimmering mirage, liable to shatter at the slightest touch or shift in perspective" (1). This is how Polly Dickson begins Romanticism, Realism and the Lines of Mimesis, in an introduction laying out the stakes of its overall project, which are multiple. First, of course, is Dickson's reanimation or defense of mimesis "as an embodied act of mimicry, an impulse to become like, and not just to make a likeness" (2). This
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallRomanticism, Realism and the Lines of Mimesis by Polly Dickson (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USRomanticism, Realism and the Lines of Mimesis by Polly Dickson (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®96982026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Out of Print by Jeffrey R. Di Leo (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972441
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Honestly when I first saw the announcement for this book by Jeffrey Di Leo, the literary and cultural theorist and long-time editor of symplokē, the title, in my imagination, suggested a book about print culture, and addressed the supposed decline of interest in bound books much like Julia Panko's similarly titled, Out of Print: Mediating Information in the Novel and the Book (2020). When I noticed Michael Joyce, famous for important scholarly and creative work in electronic literature, had written the Afterword, I imagined that the book focused on visual poetry off the page and in electronic form. In our insta-age of shallow meme-knowledge, these signals were not completely wrong.Over the course of twenty-one
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallOut of Print by Jeffrey R. Di Leo (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USOut of Print by Jeffrey R. Di Leo (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®110472026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Four Moments of Aesthetic Experience. Reading Huysmans, Proust, McCarthy, and Cusk by Bryan Counter (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972442
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Bryan Counter's new book is essentially, but crucially, a close reading of several novels across three centuries. Indeed, there is something appealingly old-fashioned about how Counter, a latter-day De Man (or at least a J. Hillis Miller), subjects his novels to the kinds of reading prominent in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. Because was this not a time when the critic attended to what might have been the secret, even hidden, nuance of a novel? When the critic allowed themselves to be guided by the torsions in texts produced precisely by those secrets, and if not secrets, then tensions?Counter's task, as he sets it for himself, is to attend to what he calls "lived experience" as it is represented aesthetically
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallFour Moments of Aesthetic Experience. Reading Huysmans, Proust, McCarthy, and Cusk by Bryan Counter (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USFour Moments of Aesthetic Experience. Reading Huysmans, Proust, McCarthy, and Cusk by Bryan Counter (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®86672026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Swallowing a World: Globalization and the Maximalist Novel by Benjamin Bergholtz (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972443
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The Wittgensteinian claim that "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world" gets intriguingly reversed in Swallowing a World, which argues that, under globalization's disorienting conditions, contemporary maximalist novels push, fragment, and overwhelm the boundaries of narrative in order to register a world that exceeds the limits of language. Rather than focusing on the maximalist novel as a fixed genre defined by encyclopedism or digression, Bergholtz reframes it not as the U.S.-centric, masculinist enterprise it has traditionally thought to have been, but as a global, politically self-critical aesthetic shaped as much by women as by men. He grounds his study in a method of immanent analysis rooted in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallSwallowing a World: Globalization and the Maximalist Novel by Benjamin Bergholtz (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USSwallowing a World: Globalization and the Maximalist Novel by Benjamin Bergholtz (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®91192026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Classical Reception: New Challenges in a Changing World by Anastasia Bakogianni (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972444
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For the past thirty years, there has been no greater growth industry in the field of Classics than reception studies. Journals have been founded. Book series are published by Oxford, Cambridge, Michigan, and Ohio State (which, full disclosure, I co-edit with Richard Armstrong). This development has been a boon to those of us who, while trained in Latin and Greek, are also practicing comparatists. While the languages of the ancient Mediterranean and the associated technical disciplines of epigraphy (the study of inscriptions), papyrology, and paleography (the study of the hands in which ancient manuscripts were written) struggle in most universities to find students, ancient mythology, history, drama, and even
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallClassical Reception: New Challenges in a Changing World by Anastasia Bakogianni (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USClassical Reception: New Challenges in a Changing World by Anastasia Bakogianni (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®134842026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28The Rutledge Prize 2025: For Graduate Students Giving Papers at the SCLA Conference
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972445
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Each year the SCLA offers a prize of $500 for the most promising work presented at its annual conference by a graduate student. The essay is also considered for publication in The Comparatist.You may submit a paper for consideration for this award by sending it as an email attachment to the SCLA vice president. The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2026 with the prizewinner to be announced in the 2026 issue of The Comparatist. Send to: Prof. Saba Razvi, RazviS@uhv.edu.Since conference papers are often shortened from longer projects, students are encouraged to submit an essay-length version of their work that would be suitable for journal publication (no longer than 7,500 words). If publishable, prize essays
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/342/image/coversmallThe Rutledge Prize 2025: For Graduate Students Giving Papers at the SCLA Conference2025-10-28text/htmlen-USThe Rutledge Prize 2025: For Graduate Students Giving Papers at the SCLA Conference2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®34972026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28