http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification 720 https://escholarship.org/uc/ucb_complit/rss Recent eScholarship items from Department of Comparative Literature Tue, 22 Sep 2026 03:12:03 +0000 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/72c055gs This volume seeks to give a more multi-faceted picture of the topic, investigating the representation of gender in Yiddish literary works, the gendered self-representation of Yiddish authors, and the (implied) expectations with respect to ... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/72c055gs Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Masel, Roni https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3jh3f56x This is the first collection to cover Gothic literature from the Middle East and North Africa, surveying each of the major Middle Eastern languages--Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3jh3f56x Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Masel, Roni https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3885p1gd Who is a Yid? Reading the journal Der Yid beyond the Hebraist – Yiddishist binary https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3885p1gd Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Masel, Roni https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0448-2695 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2w15n2mp Abstract: Departing from the premise that novelistic details particularize and locate characters in a sociocultural matrix, this essay examines what happens to the detail in texts that refuse certain norms of specification. The essay focuses on the French writer Anne F. Garréta’s novel Sphinx (1986), which avoids all linguistic markers of gender for its central pair of lovers, and Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” (1983), which never reveals the racial identities of its two protagonists, one of whom is white and one Black. Drawing on Georg Lukács’s discussion of realism and typicality, the essay considers how these unmarked texts mediate between individual and type, as well as their approaches to the representation of difference. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2w15n2mp Wed, 13 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Zhang, Dora https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sp7x9m6 Skeletons in the Hebrew Closet: Yiddish Translations of “In the City of Killing” by Y. L. Peretz and H. N. Bialik and the Conflict over Revival https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sp7x9m6 Thu, 8 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Masel, Roni https://escholarship.org/uc/item/98f383v0 Does art – literature – have a place in the ethical life? Can it practice moral formation? Moral philosophers from the nineteenth century through the modern era have answered both questions in the affirmative. In this paper, I argue that several of the former, such as G. E. Moore and Arthur Schopenhauer, inspired the modernist writers Virginia Woolf and Thomas Mann to use distinctively modern narrative strategies to morally form their readers. To establish a vocabulary useful in explaining how and to what end they did so, a brief exposition of contemporary virtue theorists opens the paper. Analyses of each writer follow; first, Mann relies on irony, emotional and deliberative narration, and the sublime to provoke the reader into confronting their biases on ethical-aesthetic problems throughout Death in Venice. Woolf creates ordinary “common meeting-places” and uses stream-of-consciousness narration to engender readers’ sympathy in “The Mark on the Wall” and “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/98f383v0 Sun, 22 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Thomas, Ben https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2c33x22k Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) is frequently credited as the first English detective novel. The novel grips the reader into the mystery by infecting them with what is described as a “detective fever.” That is, readerly pleasure is contingent on uncovering the mystery. The pathology of “detective fever” is thus central to understanding the novel’s affective sensationalism. This paper situates Collins’ work in a Freudian and Focauldian model and argues that the desire to unveil feminine privacy underlies the detective aim. Thus, the gendered valence of detection is the primary characteristic of “detective fever.” The detective’s aim, then, closely aligns with what Foucault describes as the Victorian “incitement to discourse” of private sexual desire. The importance of confession to the novel’s conception of detection produces a cursory model for the Freudian psychoanalyst. Ultimately, the gendered anxiety underlying Collins’ detective novel problematizes the genre’s conceit... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2c33x22k Sun, 22 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Yen, Connor E https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1pc602bp Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) was an Italian architect, artist, and classist. His views of Rome have been known globally for their artistic quality, photorealism, and their imaginary perspectives of ancient monuments. Piranesi influenced many neoclassical artists and experimented with the usage of space and vastness in a way that preempted the Impressionist exploration of light. His “Imaginary Prisons” influenced many Romantic and Gothic authors and have become the topic of much scholarship in modernity. This essay explores how Piranesi’s choice of aesthetics and content were influenced and influenced Enlightenment thought surrounding punishment, pain, and democratic imaginations of identity. Throughout, Michel Foucault’s history and theorical approach to the development and use of torture in the west is explored through the lens of Piranesi and contemporaneous thought. Piranesi’s influence continues in subtle remarks in various canonical texts and authors, such as De... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1pc602bp Sun, 22 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Pach, Walter https://escholarship.org/uc/item/55w079x8 The Sonic Turn https://escholarship.org/uc/item/55w079x8 Sun, 12 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000 McEnaney, Tom https://escholarship.org/uc/item/12m2s61g This article develops a linguistic media theory that brings together Peircean materialist indexicality from Barthes, Bazin, Doane, Krauss, and others with linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein’s nonreferential (social) indexicality. Following Argentine sound artist Eduardo Costa’s practice with tape recording, the article challenges critical theory to account for the sonic meaning at play in pragmatic (nonsemantic) communication related to gender, race, and diasporic community. More than a mere supplement or limit, material sonic media expand aesthetic representation, and media archaeology opens new possibilities to intervene in language politics. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/12m2s61g Sun, 12 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000 McEnaney, Tom https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0dq0h1c2 This article examines the use of the personal voice recorder in David Lynch's Twin Peaks, its connections to noir film, and its use to manage narrative space between characters and audience. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0dq0h1c2 Sun, 12 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000 McEnaney, Tom https://escholarship.org/uc/item/85s9j07m This article investigates the different affordances of magnetic tape and print as they are entextualized in various co(n)texts by writers, ethnographers, and musicians throughout the Americas in the late 1960s. I analyze printed books made from tape recordings—Cuban anthropologist Miguel Barnet and his interview subject Esteban Montejo’s Biografía de un cimarrón (Biography of a Runaway Slave, 1966), Rodolfo Walsh’s true-crime denunciation ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? (Who killed Rosendo?, 1968), and Andy Warhol’s experimental a: a novel (1968)—to ask why these writers transduced their recordings into print rather than release them as audiobooks, how or if listening to those tapes would alter the meaning of their printed entextualizations, and what musical interactions with the same media in the same contexts can tell us about the limits both of print and of symbolic musical notation. Tracing the intersection of musical and literary works, the article argues that a writerly ethics of... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/85s9j07m Tue, 10 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000 Mcenaney, Tom https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7px7g98f Realismo sonoro y fidelidad literaria: Las obras de cinta de Eduardo Costa https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7px7g98f Tue, 10 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000 McEnaney, Tom https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7g06j721 A review of Michael Allan's "In the Shadow of World Literature." https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7g06j721 Tue, 10 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000 McEnaney, Tom https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5wb7s5m0 “[LOS INDIOS SON] LOS VENCIDOS POR LA CONQUISTA ESPAÑOLA, LOS QUE SE EXPRESAN HOY EN LA VOZ DE RIGOBERTA-MENCHÚ” (“THE voice of Rigoberta Menchú allows the defeated to speak”; Burgos-Debray, Prólogo 8; Introduction xi). This statement introduces thetestimoniorecorded on cassette tapes and then edited into print by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray:Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y asi me nació la conciencia(My Name is Rigoberta Menchú and This Is How My Consciousness Was Born), published in English asI, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala.In order to hear that voice from January 1982, and to consider the important role of aurality in the text's production and later uptakes, one now has to visit the Hoover Institution, on the campus of Stanford University. Given that Menchú'stestimonio, a genre defined by the work of personal witnessing on behalf of a collective struggling against injustice, tells the story of her community's socialist fight against exploitative labor practices and... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5wb7s5m0 Tue, 10 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000 McEnaney, Tom https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2m19v015 Bringing together Frankfurt School poetics and the history of Argentina and Borges's ongoing alterations to his poetic archive, this essay studies his minor poem "El truco" to understand how Borges's poetics strive to reimagine Argentine politics and the project of writing history. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2m19v015 Tue, 10 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000 McEnaney, Tom https://escholarship.org/uc/item/15v12688 No Transmitter: Clandestine Radio Listening Communities in Ricardo Piglia's <em>The Absent City</em> https://escholarship.org/uc/item/15v12688 Tue, 10 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000 Tom McEnaney https://escholarship.org/uc/item/07p7s98p Over the past seventeen years This American Life has functioned, in part, as an investiga­ tion into, and representation and construction of an American voice. Alongside David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, Mike Birbiglia, and the panoply of other odd timbres on the show, Glass’s delivery, pitch, and tone have irked and attracted listeners. Yet what began as a voice on the margins of public radio has become a kind of exemplum for what new radio journalism in the United States sounds like. How did this happen? What can this voice and the other voices on the show tell us about contemporary US audio and radio culture? Can we hear the typicality of that American voice as representative of broader cultural shifts across the arts? And how might author Daniel Alarcón’s Radio Ambulante, which he describes as “This American Life, but in Spanish, and transnational,” alter the status of these American voices, possibly hearing how voices travel across borders to knit together an auditory culture... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/07p7s98p Tue, 10 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000 McEnaney, Tom https://escholarship.org/uc/item/188172zg Wireless materials: radio cultures in Ireland, Latin America, and the United States at the mid-century https://escholarship.org/uc/item/188172zg Mon, 9 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000 McEnaney, Tom https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0zg0d1jp This introduction offers an initial account of the usefulness of an interdisciplinary encounter between the fields of linguistic anthropology and literary/cultural studies and, in doing so, introduces a series of key terms from linguistic anthropology and its way of studying language-in-use as a locus in which culture happens: nonreferential (or social) indexicality, entextualization, and metapragmatics. It establishes a set of common attitudes toward language and cultural production found in work by Bourdieu, Bakhtin, and a number of linguistic anthropologists (Michael Silverstein in particular). It suggests three analytical levels on which such an interdisciplinary encounter might take place: analysis of (1) works that themselves show an interest in language-in-use (for example, novels by writers such as Proust, Eliot, or Dostoevsky); (2) the "interactive text," of which any given literary artifact could be said to be a precipitate (one construal of Bourdieu's approach to an... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0zg0d1jp Thu, 1 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000 Lucey, Michael McEnaney, Tom https://escholarship.org/uc/item/03d7j97v Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas https://escholarship.org/uc/item/03d7j97v Mon, 10 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 McEnaney, Tom https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4z54z97g <p> Excerpted from Beth H. Piatote, <em>Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature</em> (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). </p><p> Reprinted with permission from <a href="http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/">Yale University Press</a> . </p> https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4z54z97g Sun, 22 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Piatote, Beth H.