In 1907, Rabindranath Tagore delivered a lecture on world literature to an audience in Calcutta, the then capital of British India. Amid powerful and intersecting forces-colonialism and nationalism, industrial modernity and mass poverty-Tagore's position on literature was neither disengaged nor defensive, insofar as he related it to the human condition and the capacity for world-making. Far from staking a representational claim to world literature on behalf of Indian or Bengali literature, I argue in this article, Tagore reconceptualized the idea from its earlier canonical formulation by Goethe. He departed from dominant nineteenth-century philosophies that conceived the world as a spatial-and thereby stable-category, and instead recast it as the radical act of opening up to the outside and the other. Crucially, not poets and writers, but people in general constitute the subject of Tagore's reformulated conception of world literature. Theirs was not a deferred entry into the republic of letters based on acquired knowledge; rather, as I argue, Tagore's provocative claim was that literary excess already structured human subjectivity in an integral way. World literature, moreover, was identifiable by its world-making capacity to render ordinary lives possible through fiction, offering a vision of freedom. Speaking through historical and political urgency, Tagore's words may thus have something to say about the fraught place of literature in our own crisis-ridden times.
In 1999, Stephen Mitchell published The Frog Prince: A Fairy Tale for Consenting Adults, in which he added "a good deal of background materials" and "a certain number of necessary explanations" to the "six-and-a-half-minute" world-famous Grimms' fairy tale The Frog Prince, making it a psychological and philosophical novella. This paper illustrates how Daoist philosophy is entailed in Stephen Mitchell's Frog Prince by analyzing the protagonists' practice of Daoist philosophy: the Princess's pursuit of a Daoist natural, simple and carefree life; the Frog's transformation from an ugly frog to a handsome prince by practicing meditation; and the King's love of Daoism, and governance of both his kingdom and his royal family in accordance with Daoist philosophy. The authors argue that Stephen Mitchell is not simply expanding and deepening the fairy tale by adding Daoist elements, he is also expounding the Daoist philosophy by means of a fairy tale.
This essay argues for the significance of the legacy of Spain in Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters. Critical analyses have explored many aspects of the novel's portrayal of relations between the Philippines and the United States, a more recent colonizer whose influence on politics and culture is prominent in Dogeaters. The effects of Spanish colonization are more subtle in the novel, but pervade its representation of characters, language, and society. While highlighting the fragmentation of individual and national identities, Dogeaters depicts a Philippines in which many social and political problems have roots in the Spanish colonial era. Building on the work of Lisa Lowe, Gladys Nubla, and Vicente Rafael, among others, the essay traces continuities between the pre-1898 period and the 1950s-1980s Philippines as portrayed in Dogeaters. The privileged position of the narrator Rio is directly descended from that of the ilustrados, late nineteenth-century colonial elites who became nationalist icons. In the novel, the Spanish language serves both as a marker of status for families such as Rio's and as a component of colloquial Tagalog and Taglish. The differing attitudes towards Spanish ancestors in Rio's family underscore the heterogeneity of the Philippines as a whole in Dogeaters. The essay situates Hagedorn's statements about the inspiration she found in Latin American authors when she was writing Dogeaters in a transpacific context, focusing on historical connections between two Spanish colonies: the Philippines and New Spain (Mexico). The novel undermines totalizing conclusions by its narrative structure, which moves between time frames, points of view, and milieus. Throughout, Dogeaters shows the significance of Spanish legacies in the Philippines as both scars of past colonization and elements of present resilience.
As a renowned poet and representative of the Beat Generation, Allen Ginsberg was invited to be a member of the US Writers' Delegation to visit China in 1984. His China trip as well as his reading of traditional Chinese literature constitute his China experience, which is represented in Ginsberg's poetry. This essay examines Ginsberg's series of poems on China. It first shows that Ginsberg's introduction to the Beat Generation poets and their poetics provided the inspiration for his poetry writing. Then it discusses Ginsberg's observation of Chinese society during his visit and his reading of the Chinese poet Bai Juyi. The essay concludes that during his visit, Ginsberg composed his poetry based on his communication with China and her people and that the selected poems of Bai Juyi are a direct influence on Ginsberg's seven poems in "Reading Bai Juyi."
Where scholars of Arab studies have asserted that conversations of integration or assimilation in Arab American and Arab immigrant literature have shifted to notions of hybridity and multiculturalism, Alaa Al Aswany's Chicago: A Novel stresses that the question of assimilation remains relevant due to the power differentials that exist between "East" and "West." Chicago's Dr. Ra'fat Thabit who insists on replacing his Egyptian identity with an "American" one-and embracing highly problematic norms-offers an understanding of assimilation as an emotional process that occasions violence towards the other. This violence, in turn, brings about feelings of guilt and shame rechanneled as love and care. It is these feelings of guilt and shame that enable the Egyptian native and immigrant to cope with the other's norms and practices. By no means an act of approval, assimilation stands to signify co-existence with norms that one cannot embrace or relate to.
Since the publication of "The Laughing Man" in 1949, various ideas about "China" have emerged in J. D. Salinger's famously obscure works. This article aims to argue that Salinger's incorporation of elements related to China and ancient Chinese philosophy in his works illustrates an artistic response to American anxieties during the McCarthy Era. The article uses "The Laughing Man" and "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period" as case studies to demonstrate how Salinger's engagement with "China," including the concept of indiscrimination from Zen Buddhist ideas, as well as notions of naturalness and non-action from Taoist ideas, develops not only a mystical writing style but also conveys a gesture of disapproval toward McCarthyism in the early Cold War Era.
The article probes into the interrelationships among cyborg technology, sexual violence, and toxic colonialism represented in the Chinese SF novel Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan. It applies methodologies in posthumanism and ecofeminism and situates the text in the Chinese as well as a global context. It intends to provide a non-Western perspective to understand cyborg feminism by associating the Chinese historical reality with trans-species thinking. It argues that the SF author Chen Qiufan is critical about the anthropogenic body modifications which may challenge the process of female resistance and resilience in the face of gender and colonial oppression. By doing this, he criticizes the institutional oppression of the disadvantaged species as a cultural and historical product.
Currently acclaimed as the first Asian female author who won the Nobel Prize in literature, Korean writer Han Kang has persistently struggled with memoryscapes and traumascapes. Han's collection of poems Winter Beyond the Mirror delineates the poetic "I"'s experiences of visiting Argentina and describes how she senses the interconnectedness between Gwangju and Buenos Aires. Korean artist-filmmaker Im Heung-soon's recent film Good Light, Good Air addresses the same issue, and actually Im and Han have shared a mutual concern about it since Han's novel Human Acts. This essay defines Winter Beyond the Mirror and Good Light, Good Air, coupled with Im's group-guided workshop with young students from Gwangju and Bueno Aires, as a translocal project of counter/cultural mapping that contributes to the idea of a transnational memoryscape. This study reframes Han and Im's collaboration in terms of "virtual transnationalism" in order to describe the conjunction of transnationalism and virtuality in their practices. This study then argues that immersive affective experiences enabled by the digital technology of VR usher not only the participants but also the spectators into the networks of transnational and transgenerational remembrance. Therefore, it assesses Im's tele-workshop project as an eloquent case of (digital) cultural mapping in light of artistic practices and their pro-social potential for the pedagogy.
In her article, Minyoung Park examines how fashion in Quicksand by Nella Larsen and Pachinko by Min Jin Lee functions not simply as a visual strategy for passing but as a site where the wearers' conflicting feelings-shame, desire, and defiance-emerge and persist. Rather than evaluating the success or failure of passing, the article shifts focus to the process of dressing- selecting, maintaining, and reflecting on clothing-through which identity is negotiated and feelings are embodied. The protagonists, Helga and Sunja, often dismissed as failures, are reconsidered as figures whose attention to their inappropriate or excessive fashion reveals their emotional labor and strenuous efforts both to pass and not to pass. Drawing on affect theory and fashion studies, Park foregrounds shame as a key affect in passing narratives-an emotion that is at once protective and exposing. In this context, fashion is framed not as a mask but as an intimate and affective mode of expression. By placing Pachinko alongside Quicksand, the article expands the genealogy of American passing narratives beyond racial binaries to incorporate questions of nationality. Park argues that this comparative framework and a double-take at the protagonists' fashion choices enable a broader, transnational understanding of passing and self-fashioning, and calls for a reconsideration of American literature not from within fixed national boundaries but through the layered textures of global, embodied experience.
In this essay we propose a critical reading of three politically-charged canonic texts of Puerto Rican literature that uphold and vindicate an African heritage for Puerto Rican culture, highlighting their role in moving discussions about blackness at the center stage of debates about national identity and culture, and assessing their contribution to the emergence and development of an Afro-Puerto Rican identity and literature. These texts are: Luis Pal & eacute;s Matos's Tom-Tom of Kinky Hair and Black Things, Jos & eacute; Luis Gonz & aacute;lez's La llegada; and Edgardo Rodriguez Juli & aacute;'s Cortijo's Wake. Moreover, a debate about the racial background of the authors of the three texts will serve to show the existence of a division between Black and White writers within the field of Afro-Puerto Rican literature, and to trace the formation and development of a long tradition of White writers writing about Afro-Puerto Rican topics that extends to the present-belonging to what Doris Sommer has called "negrista appropriations." The essay culminates with a review of the evolution of Afro-Puerto Rican literature into the twenty-first century, and a discussion of contemporary ideas and debates about the future of Afro-Puerto Rican literature.
This essay argues that absurdist humor, so often theorized as a challenge to metaphysical and identitarian claims, in fact supports such claims within the context of anticolonial nationalist melodrama. In his Trilogy of the Bells [2019], Palestinian writer Ibrahim Nasrallah uses the conventions of melodrama to make an epistemological claim specific to Palestinian experience. Confronting a regime that has been largely successful in determining the internationally accepted common sense about the conflict, Nasrallah aims to present the external world with a narrative of Palestinian history, experience, and aspirations. The Manichean distinctions, spectacular displays of pathos, and manifestations of suppressed secrets proper to melodrama constitute a dramaturgy of the truth amidst a situation in which such truth-claims often cannot be heard. Rather than undermining the totalizing claims about national identity and justice that melodrama stages, humor indexes and manages the tensions that emerge to trouble these understandings. In particular, humor here responds to two kinds of dangers, the collaborator and the seemingly invincible oppressor. By representing the collaborator as a guileless figure, more ridiculous than dangerous, Nasrallah affirms that national unity cannot be threatened by internal prevarications; conversely, by depicting an overbearing Israeli military commander as susceptible to humiliation by Palestinian cunning, he suggests that the barriers to the manifestation of Palestinian truth-claims in the international public sphere are not insuperable. Absurdist humor may thus corroborate melodramatic ends by satirizing colonial rule as unreasonable and by identifying the truths suppressed by such rule as a source of collective joy.
This article examines the narrative art of Aba 'l-Faraj al-Isbahani's Kitab al-Aghani through a close reading of the chapter on the poet Kuthayyir ibn Abd al-Raman (d. 723). Though Kuthayyir is mocked throughout for his short stature, unorthodox beliefs, and supposed insincerity, the chapter ends with a surprising scene: his death is mourned by the people of Medina in a large public funeral, suggesting a reevaluation of his character. I argue that this tonal shift is not incidental but the result of Isbahani's deliberate narrative arrangement. By analyzing the structure of the chapter-including the juxtaposition of genealogical accounts, the gradual reframing of critical reports, and the placement of poetic excerpts-I show how Isbahani invites his audience to question received judgments and consider Kuthayyir's legacy anew. Building on the work of scholars like Bilal Orfali and Julia Bray, this article contends that the Aghani exemplifies the literary sophistication of pre-modern Arabic anthologies. Isbahani's art lies not in direct narration but in his strategic compilation of voices, which transforms Kuthayyir from a comic foil into a figure of pathos and esteem. In doing so, the Aghani demonstrates how compilation can serve as a powerful vehicle for narrative artistry.
In "'El Corregidor at the Crossroads: Desire, Law and Coloniality in Martel's Zama" Leisa Kauffmann discusses Lucrecia Martel's filmic adaptation of Antonio DiBenedetto's 1952 novel, Zama. Highlightingthe director's emphasis on the psychoanalytic(as opposed to the existentialist) dimensions of thenovel, the essay follows the titular characater's unravelling and showshowMartel's film allegorizes colonial(ist) subjectivity.In Kauffmann's essay, various psychoanalytic theories(such as the work of Bhabha, Fanon, and & Zcaron;i & zcaron;ek),and critiquescentering the notion of race in the Lacanian tradition are applied. In addition, differences between the novel and film, particularly regarding Zama's mutilation and its aftermath, are discussed. Although the film is the first of Martel's ouevreto center a male protagonist, Kauffmann points out that the issue of masculinity and the agency of women in a colonial context characterized by gender as well as racial and class oppression remain central to Martel's visual and auditory masterpiece.
In her article Dispositions and Dispossessions: Interwar Left-wing Literary Writing in Vienna and Zagreb, Ivana Perica examines how political fiction in Vienna and Zagreb during the interwar period reflected competing narratives of emancipation and liberation. She argues that while both cities engaged with left-wing political thought, their literary scenes diverged significantly due to differing socio-political contexts. The article juxtaposes the Austro-Marxist cultural project of Red Vienna, which sought to reconcile class divisions through socialist cultural policies, with the more fragmented leftist movements in Zagreb, where political fiction often expressed disillusionment with the failure of revolutionary change. Through a comparative reading of novels by Hugo Bettauer, Hermynia zur M & uuml;hlen, Jura Soyfer, Miroslav Krle & zcaron;a, and August Cesarec, Perica demonstrates that while Viennese writers engaged with optimistic visions of a new socialist subject, their Zagreb counterparts tended to depict the inescapability of class structures and the impossibility of true political liberation. The article challenges contemporary political theory by questioning whether "liberation" can truly transcend the limitations of "emancipation," highlighting how literature exposes the institutional and social conditions that shape political subjectivation.
The aim of this article is to compare Polish and Argentinian experience of democratic transitions of the 1980s and 1990s. Establishing new political and economic orders in both countries did not entail a change in their citizens' post-dependent mentality. In the first part of the paper, a connection is drawn between Polish and Argentinian collective memories in line with the methodology of transcultural memory studies (Erll, Rothberg). The post-dependent condition is articulated twofold: through the remembrance of the disappearance (of the Jews, the victims of the Argentina's state terrorism, the indigenous peoples), and through the confusion in grasping the sense of the past, present and future (never having been critically reviewed, the past keeps haunting the present). The second part of the paper proposes a comparative interpretation of Igor Ostachowicz's novel titled Night of the Living Jews (2013) and Mariana Enr & iacute;quez' short story "Kids Who Come Back" (2009). Both texts focus on the return of the disappeared, which triggers the deconstruction of unifying national narratives. The disgust inspired by ghosts who returned from the past appears to be a new narrative consolidating the social order.
This article analyzes the use of classical Chinese poems in Gustav Mahler's song cycle The Song of the Earth, which is almost unanimously deemed as a musical work with a number of Chinese motifs. After elaborating on these texts, especially the original poem in the second and third movement, the author examines the background to Mahler's adaptation. This includes his personal physical and mental crisis, the context of the prevailing Chinese cultural influences in Europe, especially the utilization of Taoism in light of the epistemology of death, and the social context of anti-Semitism in fin-de-si & egrave;cle Vienna.
Cuneiform writing has a small but privileged position in Derrida's Of Grammatology-providing the text with its first two epigraphs. By elucidating the source and import of these inscriptions and evaluating Derrida's understanding of the cuneiform writing system in reference to more recent grammatological studies, this paper explains the significance of these references to the ancient Near East for Derrida's arguments regarding the origins of Western metaphysics and logocentrism. In the first part, I analyze Derrida's brief paragraph on cuneiform writing in Of Grammatology as evincing a "fundamental synaesthesia" of phonetic and non-phonetic elements that problematizes the phonocentric definition of writing as a transcription of speech. I then expand the comparative mythology that Derrida briefly notes in "Plato's Pharmacy" to show how writing was thought of in cuneiform cultures in contrast to Plato's Egyptian myth of Theuth. In parts three and four, I show how the first cuneiform epigraph hails an early science of writing-a grammatology, in other words-and how the second epigraph hails a written science.
