Bruce Robbins

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.1.001 Vol.61(No.1) 3-18, 2015

In recent years, there has been a shift from cosmopolitanism in its most familiar form, which is spatial and normative putting.the welfare of those outside the borders of your nation on the same moral plane as the welfare of your fellow citizens.toward a sort of temporal cosmopolitanism: an expansion of the time-scale to make room for the more distant past, including the distant past of distant places. An expansion of timescale, or temporal cosmopolitanism, is an inevitable result of the spatial or geographical cosmopolitanism with which we are more familiar. What effect does this “cosmopolitanism in time” have on ethical judgment? What effect might it tend to have on now unacceptable divisions between “civilization” and “barbarism”? This essay takes up these questions by examining Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence and how it is treated in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. I argue that Milan Kundera, Nietzsche, Margaret Atwood, and David Mitchell illustrate their thesis about temporal cosmopolitanism, and conclude that the “cynical permissiveness” that Kundera deduces from linear, irreversible time might also be detected in the standard operating procedures of the humanities.

cosmopotanism, eternal return, Nietzsche, Milan Kundera, David Mitchell,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Regenia Gagnier

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.1.002 Vol.61(No.1) 19-39, 2015

This article considers implications for Victorian Studies suggested by recent developments in the fields of world literatures and globalization. It considers the global scope of Victorian literature as an actant in world affairs, as in processes of liberalization, democratization, and trade, but also the specificity of each local environment and moment of transculturation. It makes a methodological intervention on behalf of interdisciplinary and intercultural studies by providing a framework to address two current problems. First, how may we, in language and literature studies, best study global processes of modernisation, democratization, and liberalization without losing the specificity of the local? Second, how may we best study the uniqueness of distinct locales where the forces of tradition and modernization meet? If the first problem requires translators and transculturalists who know literary history and history of genres, the second requires the disciplines relating to environment: nature (natural sciences), culture (the humanities), and technology (social sciences, engineering, and medicine). The actants include Victorian geopolitical ideologies geopolitical institutions and state apparatuses and geopolitical commodities and technologies. Case studies come from modern Chinese, Indian, and Vietnamese literatures.

global, liberalism, liberalization, individualism, transcultura-tion,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Sue Ellen Case

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.1.003 Vol.61(No.1) 41-50, 2015

This essay explores the way in which codes of gender and sexuality are staged in the work of three female playwrights, offering a means to nuance the humanist, liberal connotations of the term “cosmopolitan.” Contemporary uses of the term focus on the emotional register of diasporic and globalized relationships. This new use of cosmopolitan indicates a subjective acceptance of diversity or difference across nations and cultures rather than the cultural universalism associated with its former uses. These revised notions of cosmopolitanism serve as optimistic alternatives to the dark side of globalized/transnational processes that are perceived as political and economic, without affect or emotion. When pushed, the term suggests a familiar positing of the universalist category of the human, which, seemingly, was left behind with liberal humanism. This essay argues that this new interest in subjective relations is gender blind and ignorant of the role sexual practices play in organizing relationships. Rather than positing a universalist subject, this essay offers three theatrical examples by women playwrights that create a “cosmopolitan imaginary” that takes into account the codes of gender and sexuality: Sarah Kane’s Blasted, Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns: A Post Electric Play, and Jiehae Park’s Hannah and the Dread Gazebo.

cosmopolitanism, affect, gender and sexuality, theatre and performance studies, alobalization,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Noel B Salazar

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.1.004 Vol.61(No.1) 51-67, 2015

It is widely believed that a cosmopolitan outlook or disposition.a desirable contemporary form of cultural capital.is acquired largely through experience, especially transnational travel. Anthropologists, among others, have argued that travel is a fundamental aspect of cosmopolitanism. Travel-for-leisure or tourism around the globe could thus be seen as a prime example of cosmopolitanism-as-practice, allowing people to accumulate knowledge about ‘Other’ worlds (including foodways). Global tourism marketing indeed encourages tourists to think that the very act of travel and encounter with cultural ‘Others’ guarantees a broadened cosmopolitan horizon.a fashionable commodity in and of itself.and greater intercultural understanding. This imaginary creates expectations that stimulate local differentiation and the resurgence of (ethnic) identities, but also leads to conflicting narratives of natural and cultural heritage. Tourism discourse often shrewdly exaggerates the power of difference while neglecting and obfuscating the power of commonality. This paper addresses the question whether travelling is really a necessary condition to become cosmopolitan. Travel signifies not only a geographical movement across landscapes and cultures, but also an imaginative journey in which wonderment about those who live, think, eat, and behave differently makes it possible to see the world in a different light. This involves sustained efforts towards nurturing open-mindedness.

Anthropology, travel, tourism, tour guiding, gastronomy,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Roald Maliangkay

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.1.005 Vol.61(No.1) 69-84, 2015

Since the late 19th century, the number of foreign settlers in Korea increased fast. The photographs they took and collected bear witness not only to the daily life of Koreans at the time, but also to the visitors’ own backgrounds. They reveal their status as outsiders, who used photography as a form of visual documentation for the organization that funded their travel, and in part to make up for a feeling of exclusion by imagining the home or peer audience. This study examines whether photographic records of foreign encounters shed light on the notion of cosmopolitanism. It argues that cosmopolitanism associates an imaginary global realm where people actively play down national, local conditions in pursuit of symbolic capital, which, ironically, is likely to have the highest value back home. It concludes that while the collections of photos by Korea’s early settlers comprised elements of conformity, much like the majority of travel diaries today, their physicality made them more personal and thus more convincing potential symbols of cosmopolitanism.

cosmopolitan, photography, missionary, colonial, Japanese colonial rule,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

H Christian Blood

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.1.006 Vol.61(No.1) 85-107, 2015

There are two immediate implications for Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764): first, a revised sense of the category of Gothic; and second, a revised sense of Menippean satire in eighteenth-century England. The Castle of Otranto is not a Gothic novel as we understand that category to be constituted, precisely because the Gothic coalesced as a category after, and only because of, Otranto’s initial publication. So rather than being the beginning of the Gothic tradition, Otranto is the culmination of another Menippean satire. Building on the work of M.M. Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics and Rosemary Jackson’s Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, I argue that The Castle of Otranto is menippean not because of what it cites, but rather because of the way in which it cites. Most approaches to Gothic literature concern themselves with the problems of subjectivity, with the ways in which the subject and its psyche are fissured. A menippean reading of The Castle of Otranto likewise privileges fissures, but it looks for them in the gaps between generic systems. As a mode that infects literature from numerous different genres, menippea allows us to get away from questions of where texts belong, and allows us to ask questions of where a text has been and where it is going. An examination of Otranto’s Greco-Roman origins paradoxically reveals an increasingly determined relationship with tradition and also the text’s significantly liberated stance from tradition.

Apocolocyntosis, The Castle of Otranto, Gothic, Horace Walpole, Menippean Satire,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Dong Shin Yi

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.1.007 Vol.61(No.1) 109-129, 2015

Drawing upon John Lennard``s proposition that the parenthesis in poetry negotiates the "ontological disjuncture" between a text and its "proper relative context," a disjuncture that, in sociological terms, exists between privacy and external forces, this essay begins by questioning if his proposition is also valid for the novel, a quintessential modern genre where the "ontological disjuncture" is arguably as deep, if not deeper. The essay raises this question in part because it is, as with Franco Moretti, aware of the demand that whatever "disjuncture" the novel deals with be negotiated so as to leave its opposite sides intact. The questioning is also reflective of the fact that the essay understands as a significant diagnosis of modern society Karl Marx``s explanation that the "contradictions" resulting from the two.use and exchange.values of commodity are dealt with in a way that "does not abolish these contradictions, but rather provide the form within which they have room to move." Examining peculiar examples of the parenthesis from George Eliot``s Daniel Deronda, Virginia Woolf``s Mrs. Dalloway, and J.G. Ballard``s Crash, the essay thus purports to show how the parenthesis has been offered as a subtle yet effective means by which the characters in the novel manage to live with the "ontological disjuncture" of their respective time, that is, to lead their parenthesized lives.

parenthesis, Bildungsroman, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, J. G. Ballard,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Hee Bon Park

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.1.008 Vol.61(No.1) 131-148, 2015

This paper discusses Terry Johnson``s 1982 stage play, Insignificance. Commenting on Britain in the 1980s through a nostalgic look at the 1950s, the play was written at a time when Thatcherism was making extensive cuts in funding for the arts and the stationing of American Cruise missiles in the south of England was reviving fears of nuclear confrontation. Insignificance addresses these and other personal and public issues in an indirect manner, defusing the seriousness of its content by placing its characters in a semi-farcical, imagined-meeting setting. In this way, the playwright depicts a culture that distracts its citizens through sport and cinema, while political dogmatism stifles social comment and scientific progress threatens the survival of the species. As the myths of fame and infamy are exposed and the vulnerability of individual citizens in society is revealed, the ironic title of the play comments on the triviality of the iconic status attributed to the representatives of a society that refuses to be accountable for its actions. Such insignificance also contains its antithesis, however, as the climactic denouement provides a timeless commentary on the state of human consciousness.

Terry Johnson, Insignificance, 1980s British stage, farce, imagined meeting,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Hyun Sook Oh

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.1.009 Vol.61(No.1) 149-167, 2015

This paper explores ways of rethinking difference, in particular racial difference, in Hanif Kureishi’s novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, with particular reference to Gilles Deleuze’s conceptions of difference itself and dramatization. In the novel, the protagonist Karim, as a mixed-race of Pakistani father and English mother, is forced to recognize his racial identity as a negativity in London, where mass immigration has left hybridizing marks everywhere. On a quest for his identity, Karim remarks, “I am an English man born and bred, almost.” His self-recognition of identity implies an incompletion of identity, as suggested by the nuance of the word “almost.” However, from Deleuze’s perspective of difference itself and dramatization, Karim, as a theatre actor, repeats his identity differently and comes to affirm his difference as a plethora of differences rather than as the negativity of identity as a non-whiteness. Throughout this paper, I argue that Deleuze’s approach offers more potentialities for the study of difference than Homi Bhabha’s “difference within” and “hybridity,” which is still trapped in difference between black and white. It is my contention here that we need to look beyond identity as a centralised or organisational force, and rather to the creative process of affirmation through difference.

difference itself, repetition, dramatization, hybridity, faciality,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Svend Erik Larsen

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.1.010 Vol.61(No.1) 169-171, 2015

Behind the enticing title of German Literature as World Literature the reader may ask what to expect: a new type of literary history of German literature? A recapitulation of the history of the notion of world literature as it emerged in Germany between Christoph Wieland and Goethe? A model for presenting local or national literatures in a world literature perspective with German literature as an example? A set of selective readings of individual texts or writers? Well, we do not get a broad historical account.after all what can you do on 214 pages?.and we do not get a new presentation of the history of the concept of world literature, although it is referred to. We get some attempts to set up principles for presenting concrete local literatures in a world literature perspective, and we get detailed readings of a number of works and writers from modern German literature.here defined as literature after 1800.with a transnational perspective. The informative introduction by the editor Thomas Beebee discusses the principles for how to establish a world literature perspective, in particular, with regard to local literatures, and also presents five different possible approaches, a selection of what is used globally in the debate on world literature and literary history today. He also makes an argument for why German literature can be placed in this context and how the literary history of that literature will benefit from adapting the world literature perspective. The introduction and the nine individual chapters all subscribe to the same basic assumption, namely that all national literatures define themselves “over, against, and through their others” (4) and that one will always find “international, cross-cultural factors at work” (p. 8). Probably, this general idea will be accepted by all writers of literary his-tories today, whether they cover contemporary or past history. But Beebee also adds a temporal dimension: The focus is modern German literature, that is to say from Goethe and onwards. It would be difficult to avoid mentioning Goethe’s reflections on world literature to his conversations with Eckermann in 1827 (although he was not the first to use the term) and equally difficult to forget the reference to world literature (and the world market) in the Communist Manifesto from 1848. These references are not omitted here either. Thus, to begin with Goethe in the German case seems almost natural, that is the point when a new selfreflection of what German means and what world literature means emerges in one gesture, also with implications outside the German cultural space. Here, a “systematic” (2) preoccupation with this problem takes off. Apart from the brief overview of world literature initiatives over the last 20-30 years, David Damrosch not least, Beebee discusses five ways of looking at world literature, first of all concerned with what it takes for a text to be characterized as world literature. World literature may be seen as all literatures in the world, and thus nothing is excluded; it be taken to be based on a universal human capacity; it may mean inclusion in a transnational hypercanon, or participation in a global dissemination process, or.finally.that the text is written for a global readership. If we do not take into account that the very notions of ‘literature’ and also of ‘world’ have changed over time and space, then what is central to the five approaches is that they all focus on the status of the text itself.is it a case of world literature or not? But what Damrosch and others also have pointed to, and maybe more importantly, is that the main concern of world literature studies is to establish ways of a focused reading of any text or corpus of texts to place them in a world literature perspective. From this perspective, world literature is not about typologies or taxonomies of texts, but about reading methods and their theoretical underpinning. This approach is not on Beebee’s list, but is mentioned now and then in the introduction. However, it is the main drive behind the nine chapters on individual texts, writers and cases. They are all highly interesting and in many case innovative and inspiring for future work. But they almost never discuss the principles and concepts laid out in the introduction which reduces the potential of the volume to be a much needed model for how to see local literatures in a world literature perspective. Some of the chapters actually make their own discussion on their take on world literature. Here, a closer dialogue between the chapters themselves and in relation to the introduction would have made the book more valuable. Also, a discussion of the representativity of the chosen cases would have helped to see the volume as the result of a new concerted effort. If we leave this criticism behind and look at what we get in the chapters, we are well treated indeed. The chapters I find the most enriching are the first and the last and one in the middle of the book. The first one is a comparative reading of Goethe’s Elective Affinities with Hong Lou Meng’s The Story of Stone. The point is to establish a comparative reading which is not caught up in traditional notions of influence, but instead focuses on cultural parallels and differences that allows for a cross-cultural dialogue. The last chapter on hybrid literatures, mainly with regard to linguistic hybridity and not with regard to other media, deals instructively with literatures of migration and colonialism/postcolonialism in a German context. My third favourite chapter is the account of Alexander von Humboldt and Latin-America, integrating most of the aspects relevant for a world literature reading: history, the transnational material, the dialectical reciprocity between Germany, Europe and Latin-America combined with an astute use of the text material. Two chapters deal with more institutionalized aspects, one on the circulation of Chinese novels in the 18th and early 19th century, the other on German literature and the Nobel Prize. Here, the two cases in point are, surprisingly and very interestingly, two writers who are now completely forgotten by the readership outside the circles of specialists, Rudolf Eucken and Paul Heyse. Both chapter are reminders of the fundamentally historical and hence of regional dimension of criteria for the world literature status of texts and of the trajectories of translations and dissemination in general. The remaining chapters deal with individual cases of writers and texts and are more traditional in their approach, but rich in material and textual detail: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Marie Rilke, Bertolt Brecht, W.G. Sebald. The volume seems to be the first in a series of selective and focused presentations of national/local literatures in a world literature perspective. The beginning is promising, but also with potential for improvements in the future volumes.

영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory