Project MUSE®: The Yearbook of Comparative Literature - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/447
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The Yearbook of Comparative Literature.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 54 (2008) through vol. 65 (2019)Latest Articles: The Yearbook of Comparative LiteratureTWOProject MUSE®The Yearbook of Comparative Literature1925-57721925-5764Latest articles in The Yearbook of Comparative Literature. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Turnstile, Rupture, Salamander: Critique’s Changing Energetics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/915482
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Has critique run out of steam, as Bruno Latour famously proclaims (225)? Or has critique, like all historical practices, simply evolved? These are obviously not questions that can be answered to any degree of precision or satisfaction. Latour’s mention of steam, however, suggests that critique may actually be regarded as a form of energetics, perhaps a kind of machine, or an apparatus with its specific modes of productivity, movement, dysfunction, and even exhaustion. In this article, I follow this hint provided in Latour’s post-industrial, thermodynamic lexicon by turning to several key moments of critique, to reflect on the lessons—and the forms of energies—they bring that continue to mobilize many scholars’ work
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/447/image/coversmallTurnstile, Rupture, Salamander: Critique’s Changing Energetics2023-12-20text/htmlen-USTurnstile, Rupture, Salamander: Critique’s Changing Energetics2023-12-202023TWOProject MUSE®687172026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002023-12-20Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/915481
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Contemporary criticism seems torn between responding to intensifying and interrelated crises and questioning the value of critique as a response. The contestatory role of language as a “nonfinite category” of philology (to borrow a term from Werner Hamacher) has been repressed if not entirely dissolved. The linguistic turn is now associated with exhausted modes of poststructuralist textuality, whose rhetoric is outstripped by affect theory, post-humanism, object-oriented ontologies, actor–network theory, reparative reading, weak theory, surface reading, and postand eco-critique. While it would be false to suggest that these developments forget earlier critical impulses—which they often inherit and transform—they
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/447/image/coversmallIntroduction2023-12-20text/htmlen-USIntroduction2023-12-202023TWOProject MUSE®318732026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002023-12-20Foreign Poems
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/915483
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“To rediscover the traditions of our poetry and continue them [. . .] one had to go back to Leopardi, and to understand him.”In 1945–46, the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti devoted a yearlong lecture-series to just one poem, Leopardi’s “Alla Primavera, o delle favole antiche” (“To Spring, or About the Ancient Fables,” 1822). To dedicate so much time to one text was unusual, but so was the choice of poem. While Leopardi’s reputation as a poet was in the ascendant at this time, the Canzoni still struck many as overly rhetorical; as Francesco de Sanctis had famously complained, these early poems seemed to express “the soul of a scholar” rather than that of a poet (qtd in Bigi 98). Ungaretti, however, was not deterred by the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/447/image/coversmallForeign Poems2023-12-20text/htmlen-USForeign Poems2023-12-202023TWOProject MUSE®1345472026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002023-12-20Not Feeling It: Hazlitt, Affect, and Critique
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/915484
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A self-tormentor is never satisfied [. . .] I know an instance. Perhaps it is myself. —Hazlitt, The Plain SpeakerThe British romantic-era essayist William Hazlitt was a crank, and I am going to think for a few pages here about why his crankiness counts as criticism, keeping in mind that both crankiness and criticism stem from his being what Jane Collier had—long before Hazlitt—called a “self-tormentor” (96). In fact I doubt it’s a coincidence that Collier’s 1753 An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, a satire of moral instruction handbooks as well as being itself a sharp lesson in criticism, went through a spate of reprintings early in Hazlitt’s career: like Jane Austen and other contemporaries, he seems
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/447/image/coversmallNot Feeling It: Hazlitt, Affect, and Critique2023-12-20text/htmlen-USNot Feeling It: Hazlitt, Affect, and Critique2023-12-202023TWOProject MUSE®889022026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002023-12-20Félix Fénéon: The Man Who Erased Himself
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/915485
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Jean Paulhan, who became friends with Fénéon near the end of Fénéon’s life and eventually wrote a remarkable book about him, said that all his high-profile activities in Paris—from the time he arrived there in 1881 at the age of twenty until well into the next century—served to mask far more than to reveal him (Paulhan 63).Before the grand exhibition about him, organized in 2019 in Paris by the Musée de l’Orangerie in collaboration with the Musée du Quai Branly, I must say I knew practically nothing about him. The exhibit attracted a lot of attention, but before that, he was not very widely remembered. I wish I could suggest what may have motivated museum curators in Paris and New York—where the exhibit traveled
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/447/image/coversmallFélix Fénéon: The Man Who Erased Himself2023-12-20text/htmlen-USFélix Fénéon: The Man Who Erased Himself2023-12-202023TWOProject MUSE®739442026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002023-12-20“At Home in Distorted Life”: On Kafka’s Monster Jargon
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/915486
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In a diary entry dated 20 April 1916, Franz Kafka included a fragment, which he had later crossed out, depicting a rabbi working on a clay figure. “Naturally, it soon became known that the rabbi was working on a clay figure,” the first sentence declares.1 This open secret, the seemingly unknown that soon becomes known, is found to be even more open than expected, as the rabbi’s house, we are told, “in which every door of every room stood open day and night, contained nothing visible that did not immediately become known to everyone” (Dekel and Gurely 536). The extreme openness and knowability of the rabbi’s house, however, is contrasted not only with the double negative but also with the voyeuristic gesture of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/447/image/coversmall“At Home in Distorted Life”: On Kafka’s Monster Jargon2023-12-20text/htmlen-US“At Home in Distorted Life”: On Kafka’s Monster Jargon2023-12-202023TWOProject MUSE®818182026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002023-12-20Critical Listening: Boris Vian’s play Les Bâtisseurs d’empire ou Le Schmürz
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/915487
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How do literary critics deal with sound? In an inaugural lecture for the 2006 MLA Presidential Forum titled “The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound,” Marjorie Perloff noted that “however central the sound dimension is to any and all poetry, no other poetic feature is currently as neglected” (749). Worse still, she continues, sound is seen “as little more than a peripheral issue, a kind of sideline” (750). While Perloff’s comments relate specifically to the study of poetry, they also pertain to literary criticism more broadly, as they raise the pressing question of how scholars talk about sound in relation to literary works. This is especially relevant because, Perloff notes, quoting the poet Yoko Tawada, “‘the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/447/image/coversmallCritical Listening: Boris Vian’s play Les Bâtisseurs d’empire ou Le Schmürz2023-12-20text/htmlen-USCritical Listening: Boris Vian’s play Les Bâtisseurs d’empire ou Le Schmürz2023-12-202023TWOProject MUSE®829452026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002023-12-20“A Stratagem for Self-Oblivion”: Rosselli, Real Talk, and the Abolition of the “I”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/915488
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One morning in the late aughts, I went to a friend’s apartment for an event that its planners called a “real talk potluck brunch.” It was early fall in San Francisco, and already at that time, I remember finding the phrase arresting. I thought about its rhythm, its scansion, even, on the way to the party: “real talk potluck brunch.” What did you call a poetic line with two spondees followed by a single stressed syllable? The premise of the potluck, held on my friend’s birthday, was that for the duration of the event, everyone in attendance would stop being polite and get real. Friends would work through hidden resentments, which they would bring into the open; difficult questions would be confronted; secret
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/447/image/coversmall“A Stratagem for Self-Oblivion”: Rosselli, Real Talk, and the Abolition of the “I”2023-12-20text/htmlen-US“A Stratagem for Self-Oblivion”: Rosselli, Real Talk, and the Abolition of the “I”2023-12-202023TWOProject MUSE®1328232026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002023-12-20“ni ne ne ni ne na ni ná”: Linguistic Dissidence in Queer and Trans Caribbean Poetry
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/915489
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“In this, our language, / there exists no plural that doesn’t deny me” (“en este, nuestro idioma, / no existe un plural que no me niegue”), writes Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, an award-winning, queer trans poet and translator from Puerto Rico (“They,” 20–21). The lack of inclusive forms leads the speaker to experience alienation from Spanish (a language that is “nuestro, pero no exactamente el mío,” “ours, but never quite mine”). This sense of estrangement, along with the desire to write in inclusive language, is propelling contemporary poets to devise a range of linguistic inventions. “In Spanish we have to invent the plural Ellx / Elle / a bastard singular / a box of crackers / duct tape / soda decomposed / in glue
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/447/image/coversmall“ni ne ne ni ne na ni ná”: Linguistic Dissidence in Queer and Trans Caribbean Poetry2023-12-20text/htmlen-US“ni ne ne ni ne na ni ná”: Linguistic Dissidence in Queer and Trans Caribbean Poetry2023-12-202023TWOProject MUSE®1574622026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002023-12-20You Shall Speak My Language: In Defense of Linguistic Specificity and Rigorous Comparativism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/915490
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The title of this article is a reference to Abdelfattah Kilito’s much-cited book Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, in which he explores the alterities inherent in a language that make up the core of one’s cultural essence, “the principle of our existence, what we consider to be our identity, our refuge, ourselves” (91). The provocative message of the essay is, in fact, a philosophical inquiry into the complex question of untranslatability. In this article, I propose approaching the concept of untranslatability in a dialectical framework, recognizing both its benefits and constraints, particularly in the cultural and political contexts. After introducing the idea of rhetorical irony in translation in Kilito’s text
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/447/image/coversmallYou Shall Speak My Language: In Defense of Linguistic Specificity and Rigorous Comparativism2023-12-20text/htmlen-USYou Shall Speak My Language: In Defense of Linguistic Specificity and Rigorous Comparativism2023-12-202023TWOProject MUSE®891282026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002023-12-20