Comparing Literatures

Authorship: Barthes, Death of the Author; Foucault, What is an Author?

Formalism: Eichenbaum, The Theory of the “Formal Method”;  Brooks, from The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry

Structuralism: Saussure, Course in General Linguistics ; Barthes, from Mythologies

Psychoanalysis: Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; Lacan, The Mirror Stage & The Significance of the Phallus

Ideology: Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses; Foucault, Truth and Power

Feminism & Queer: Sedgwick, from Between Men; Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa; Wittig, One Is Not Born a Woman; Butler, Gender Trouble

Deconstruction: Derrida, from Of Grammatology;

Postcolonial: Fanon, from The Wretched of the Earth; Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?

Cultural Materialism: Adorno & Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception; Williams, Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory  

my intro to theory course featured

Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

Barthes, Mythologies; selections from Critical Essays

Benjamin, selections from Illuminations

de Man, selections from Allegories of Writing and Blindness and Insight

Derrida, selections from Dissemination

Foucault, sections of The Order of Things

Butler, Gender Trouble 

as you can see, my professor really only cared about deconstructionism; I'm jealous of this syllabus.

Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading, Virginia Jackson 

This is a version of the cricket poem mentioned, Dickinson attached a dead cricket to the letter when she send these lines (in a slightly different form) to Mabel Loomis Todd in 1883 (she sent different versions of these to several other people as well). Jackson’s book is really amazing, it’s a bit hard to read if you’re not familiar with Dickinson or lyric poetry, especially the history of the reception of lyric poetry, but it’s been really great at making me rethink the way I think about lyric poems as “written” as opposed to “voiced”, as well as about other issues I’ve been turning around in my head connected to lyric poetry like to what extent lyric poetry is always self-referential, how is lyric poetry staged, how can we make better ‘feminist’ readings (which rely less on normative assumptions about universal female existences) etc 

(via poesizing)

‘The Politics of Translation’, Gayatri Chakaravorty Spivak (from the Translation Studies Reader ed Lawrence Venuti)

people always complain about Spivak being ‘obtuse’ but this essay is so lovely, I need to get Outside in the Teaching Machine from the library  

So did about nine other majors with the word “engineering” in the title. And I was so sure we had them this year. 

Jonathan Culler, “Identity, Identification, and the Subject,” Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction

I really wish I’d remembered I had this and had thought to read it during Introduction to Theory of Literature; it would have helped the course a) make much more sense and b) be much more enjoyable.

(via fralusans-ana-marein)

Northrop Frye, “Polemical Introduction”, Anatomy of Criticism

You lost me at “Good taste”.

Seriously though, can you teach me your strange, dissociative ways that allow you to split your “social, moral, religious, [and] personal anxieties” off from you while you experience literature and form opinions about it? How does this strange magic work? What is “the experience of literature” if not a thing that is shaped by our life experiences?

(via fralusans-ana-marein)

It has been a very long time since I did anything with this blog — more than a year now. I started this blog with a very naïve understanding of comparative literature; three years later I feel rather more informed, but also painfully aware of how little I actually know. I’m also conscious of how obnoxious claiming this url was and feel kind of bad about still having it considering I never use this.

That said, I’ve just cleared off some of the messier older posts and if people would be interested, I’d love to make this blog an actual comp lit blog where we talk about comp lit things, a sort of FY Comp Lit, but also with actual discussion of comp lit-related topics. I’d really like collaborators if I’m going to do that, though — as always, the ask box is open, so please let me know if you’d like to help out (or if you have questions).

I’m going to repost a question I posted back in the day before the giant influx of followers (i.e. before the year-long leave of absence).

Also, for what it’s worth, I’ll introduce myself: I’m just finishing up my third year of undergrad as a comp lit major. I’m almost done with the major, just one core seminar and my senior essay left to go. I’m using French and ancient Greek for the language requirement for the major, but I’m pretty much definitely going to abandon Greek after this semester. I’m interested in grad school in folklore, Celtic studies (with a focus in Scottish Gaelic), Canadian studies, or any of a number of other things. My senior essay is going to be on Franco-American literature in New England and Gaelic literature in Nova Scotia. This blog will likely be a sort of free-association game of languages (hopefully even more than just the ones I know, if other people submit!).

I feel like the comp lit version of “favorite ice cream flavor” is probably “favorite theorist”, but I don’t know that I have an answer; it’s more that there are individual theoretical works I like (and frankly not actually that many of those) than that there are theorists I like. Recently I enjoyed Thomas King’s essay “Godzilla vs. post-colonial”. I also enjoyed Barthes’s Mythologies when I read it for Intro to Theory of Literature and Derrida’s Le monolinguisme de l’autre when I read it for class last semester.

I’ve just finished my 3rd year of an English Lit / Comp Lit 4 year MA - Glasgow only offers Comp Lit as a joint honours and despite initial hesitation between doing Eng Lit or a modern foreign language, I’m glad I went with Eng Lit although it’s made me drifting away from comp lit a bit lately and I feel kind of guilty about it - well, next year I’m only taking one Eng Lit course so I’ll have more time to focus on comp lit. I’m doing my dissertation in Eng Lit on “gender non-conforming” poetic voices in 19th century women’s poetry (I need to decide on a couple of specific poets to look at). There are so many comp lit things I wish I had the time to focus on - especially I wish I could take another language (Czech or Polish since GU specializes in Slavonic languages / literatures) and do period papers in French / Spanish / Slavonic literatures, but there’s just no time… (I keep telling myself that I will have a long ~career~ so I’ll have plenty of time to explore all my interests). Things I’m interested in right now are a) pre-1900s women’s poetry, esp “lyrical voice” in women’s poetry and developing (new) ways to read women’s poetry as women’s poetry without making recourse to biographical readings, b) translation studies, esp translation as critical practice / critical “space”, c) (re)writings of history in post-89 C/EE, esp how history became institutionalized, but also how people (esp women) coped with collective traumas (I wish I could do oral history projects at home), d) “history” more generally, I guess, in the context of queer historiography - there’s a lot of interesting work on things like “queer temporality” which would be interesting to apply to C/EE - for example, how can we understand the perpetual “transition” from communism to capitalism we’re stuck in in “queer” terms? - but also less theoretically, I’m interested in gathering information on queer people who lived in Romania, e) education and finding ways to make “academic knowledge” more accessible to people outside of academia and (hopefully?) trying to find alternatives to acquiring / sharing knowledge through academia. Poetry by queer women also remains a constant side-interest, although I don’t get to bring it up in school work that often.

in more detailed terms, if I had to list interests besides the super-broad ones above, here would be some:

minority language communities and literatures

Canadian literature

modernism (esp. Canadian modernisms)

speculative fiction

postcolonialism (esp. as relevant to speculative fiction and minority literatures)

fandom studies (particularly on my mind recently is the relationship between fan criticism, i.e. meta and close readings, and academic criticism)

broadly I guess I'm interested in the relationship between literature of whatever kind and communities — thus my senior essay. wow. have never actually articulated that before, but that definitely underlies a good portion of my interests

also Indo-European linguistics, whoops too bad the one professor who taught that didn't get tenure and will be gone next year

I read a lot of poetry and think a lot about it, but I'm still not very good at approaching it critically, mostly I think for want of practice doing so. the vast majority of critical things I read are focused on prose, so that's what I know best how to talk about, but I'm going to need to change that for my senior essay.

queer readings of texts (e.g. Germaine Guèvremont's Le Survenant, which I just was working on for a final paper for class) are also always in my head but have never yet made it out of my mouth in class or onto paper for an essay.