Category Archives: Comparative Literature
The Power of Prediction
Guest post by Kevin Mills This year will see elections being fought for political control of both the USA and the UK. Campaigns are in full swing in both countries, and the pollsters are busy making their numerological predictions. Even though such supposed foresight is rarely accurate, it is said that politicians use the results… Read More »
Humanism, Anti-Authoritarianism, and Literary Aesthetics: Pragmatist Stories of Progress
Humanism is back! This resurgence of humanism is a multilayered phenomenon. Pragmatists such as William James, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty have developed a particularly stimulating understanding of humanism. At the center of a pragmatist version of humanism is the suggestion that there is no nonhuman authority whose commands human beings have to obey and… Read More »
The Ego Made Manifest: Max Stirner, Egoism, and the Modern Manifesto
Max Stirner produced only a single book in his lifetime. Since the publication of this book, The Ego and its Own, in 1844, he has been portrayed as a founding figure in every radically dangerous ideology to haunt the modern mind. As a principal influence in the history of egoism—a branch of radical philosophy that… Read More »
The Marrano Uncanny: The Last and the First of Jews
Look, look, he’s a marrano, lower than dust. Juan de Lucena, De Vita Beata [1] I once said, perhaps rightly: The earlier culture will become a heap of rubble, and finally a heap of ashes, but spirit will hover over the ashes. Ludwig Wittgenstein [2] This book is the first monograph wholly devoted to the… Read More »
Language Smugglers: Postlingual Literatures and Translation within the Canadian Context
In 2014, prominent Québécois columnist Christian Rioux published a fearmongering opinion piece on the use of “Franglais” (or Frenglish) in one of Quebec’s most prominent newspapers, Le Devoir, and sparked a province-wide controversy. In his piece, Rioux deplores the degraded quality of the French language he supposedly observes in Quebec and, most importantly, points a… Read More »
Biofiction’s Antidotes to Post-Truth Contagions
A Life-Changing Encounter with Bulgarian Literature
Guest post by Dimitar Kambourov I embarked on the project of compiling and editing Bulgarian Literature as World Literature for various reasons. Some of them – like increasing the visibility of Bulgarian literature and provoking curiosity about it worldwide – were uninspiringly important. Others happened to be a continuation of my life-long endeavor to read… Read More »
Thinking Elsewhere: A Response to Sonita Sarker by Way of Some Notes on Universality
The first thing to note about Sonita Sarker’s essay is that it offers a necessary challenge to and reorientation of the various definitions of responsible reading that appear throughout this volume. Responsible reading can and should take on any number of meanings, even contradictory meanings, in the chapters that appear here. But what responsible reading should never suggest is a “mandatory curriculum” that becomes a burden that the reader “does not ask to carry but becomes hers to bear.”
