Comparative Literature

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The Origins of Chinese Literary Hermeneutics

Explores how China’s oldest poetry collection was interpreted in a Confucian exegetical text—the Mao Commentary—in the mid-second century BCE.

The Other Synaesthesia

Reconsiders the figure of synaesthesia, understood as the combination of the senses and of the arts, in philosophy and literature.

A Latin American Existentialist Ethos

Examines twentieth-century Mexican literature and philosophy within the broad panorama of Latin American and European existentialisms.

Passive Voices (On the Subject of Phenomenology and Other Figures of Speech)

Addresses the question of how language affects the subject of speech through readings of confessional, philosophical, and fictional writings.

The Space of the Transnational

Challenges and reimagines transnational feminism by analyzing the concept of ummah, or community, in Muslim women's writing.

The Writing of Innocence

An original reading of Blanchot's thought with far-reaching philosophical and literary implications.

Poetics of Breathing

A comparative study of breath and breathing as a core poetic and compositional principle in modern literature.

Luchino Visconti and the Alchemy of Adaptation

Examines the place of book-to-film adaptations by one of Italy's most famous postwar film directors.

Shadows in the City of Light

Examines the place of Paris in French Jewish literary memory, a memory that, of necessity, grapples with the aftermath of the Holocaust.

The Anonymity of a Commentator

A close study of one of the most prolific commentary writers in Islamic history.

Many Mahābhāratas

A major contribution to the study of South Asian literature, offering a landmark view of Mahābhārata studies.

Continental Theory Buffalo

Revisits, reassesses, and reclaims the legacy of May '68 in light of our present cultural and historical emergency.

Creative Transformations

Explores the role of travel and translation in Brazilian literature and culture from the 1870s to the present.

The Blossom Which We Are

Charts the vicissitudes of a distinctly modern and peculiarly human vulnerability—our intimate dependence on the fragile, time-bound cultural framework that we inhabit—in the history of the realist novel.

Bastard Politics

Argues that we need to reinvent sovereignty as a motive for democratic political action while remaining alert to its dangers, specifically its relationship to violence.

Buddhist Literature as Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy as Literature

Explores the relationship between literature and philosophy in classical and contemporary Buddhist texts.

Hu Feng

A study of Hu Feng as a literary critic and case study on how intellectual work can respond to political pressure.

The Aesthetic Clinic

Examines experimental art and literature by women alongside psychoanalysis and philosophy to develop a new understanding of sublimation and aesthetic experience.

The Voice of Misery

A systematic study of testimony rooted in contemporary continental philosophy and drawing on literary case studies.

Modernity as Exception and Miracle

Proposes "the extraordinary" as a defining characteristic of modernity.

Time in Exile

Proposes a theoretically rich treatment of temporality within exile as "gerundive" time.

The World after the End of the World

Examines themes of loss and mourning in the late work of Derrida.

Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism

Argues that symbolism is an important and unique element of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology.

Global Origins of the Modern Self, from Montaigne to Suzuki

By Avram Alpert
Subjects: History

Explores how writers across five continents and four centuries have debated ideas about what it means to be an individual, and shows that the modern self is an ongoing project of global history.

Figures of Time

Focuses on how nuances of poetic form alter how we have come to understand cultural aspects of time.

New Forms of Revolt

Essays explore the significance of Julia Kristeva’s concept of intimate revolt for social and political philosophy.

Failing Desire

Draws on theology and queer theory to argue for the power of humiliating pleasures in a culture oriented very strongly to denying any enjoyment that is not about success.

Toward a Non-humanist Humanism

Assesses the limits and possibilities of humanism for engaging with issues of pressing political and cultural concern.

The Tragedy of Philosophy

Reframes philosophical understanding of, and engagement with, tragedy.

Ahmad al-Ghazālī, Remembrance, and the Metaphysics of Love

Discusses the work of a central, but poorly understood, figure in the development of Persian Sufism, Aḥmad al-Ghazālī.

On Nietzsche

By Georges Bataille
Translated by Stuart Kendall
Introduction by Stuart Kendall
Subjects: Philosophy

A poetic, philosophical, and political account of Nietzsche’s importance to Bataille, and of Bataille’s experience in Nazi-occupied France.

Fetishizing Tradition

Describes how religious tradition is established as available within a text, free from ritual and observance, in Buddhism and Christianity.

Two Confessions

First English translation of these important works by two of Spain’s most gifted writers and intellectuals.

From Comparison to World Literature

Reintroduces the concept of “world literature” in a truly global context, transcending past Eurocentrism.

Social Contract, Masochist Contract

By Fayçal Falaky
Subjects: Literature

Provocative reading of the role masochism plays in structuring the aesthetics and political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Poems of Wine and Tavern Romance

By Hafiz & Martin Bidney
Translated by Martin Bidney
Subjects: General Interest

A selection of poems by one of Islam’s greatest poetic voices.

Dramatic Experiments

A major new interpretation of the philosophical significance of the oeuvre of Denis Diderot.

Derrida and Joyce

All of Derrida’s texts on Joyce together under one cover in fresh, new translations, along with key essays covering the range of Derrida’s engagement with Joyce’s works.

The Teller's Tale

Edited by Sophie Raynard
Subjects: Literature

Intriguing, updated portraits of classic fairy tale authors.

Passion Before Me, My Fate Behind

Explores the work of beloved Sufi poet Umar Ibn al-Farid and its context. Provides many translations of Ibn al-Farid’s poetry.

Kāma's Flowers

Explores the transformation of Hindi poetry as it reflects a changing society during the period from 1885 to 1925.

The Unconcept

Explores the conceptualization of the Freudian uncanny in various late-twentieth-century theoretical and critical discourses (literary studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, art history, trauma studies, architecture, etc.).

Figures of Simplicity

A fascinating comparison of the work of Heinrich von Kleist and Herman Melville.

Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Beyond of Language

Explores why American Romantic writers and contemporary continental thinkers turn to art when writing about ethics.

Other Others

Looks at literary works from outside the Judeo-Christian tradition to test Levinas's notion of "the Other. "

Guilty

A searing personal record of spiritual and communal crisis, wherein the death of god announces the beginning of friendship.

The Medusa Effect

Examines images of horror in Victorian fiction, criticism, and philosophy.

Birth and Death of the Housewife

First English translation of Paola Masino’s Nascita e morte della massaia, her most controversial novel that provoked Fascist censorship for its critical portrayal of marriage and motherhood.

The Wound and the Witness

Explores the rhetorical functions of torture and the witnessing of torture in both classical texts and contemporary contexts.

Sense and Finitude

Takes Heidegger’s later thought as a point of departure for exploring the boundaries of post-conceptual thinking.

The Obsessions of Georges Bataille

Considers Bataille’s work from an explicitly philosophical perspective.

The Gita within Walden

Looks at the connections between Thoreau’s Walden and the work that influenced it, the Bhagavad-Gita.

Jacques Derrida's Ghost

A spirited reading of Derrida’s view of ethics as transcendental and performative.

Otherwise Occupied

Questions whether current theories and pedagogies of alterity have allowed us truly to engage the Other.

Disciplining the Holocaust

Explores the relationship between disciplinarity and contemporary ethics of scholarship about the Holocaust.

Bergson-Deleuze Encounters

Explores the continuities and discontinuities in the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze.

Fairy Tales

Overturns traditional views of the origins of fairy tales and documents their actual origins and transmission.

Singing Krishna

Introduces Paramānand, one of India’s poet-saints, his work, and this work’s use in ritual.

Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State

By Nikos Kazantzakis
Translated by Odysseus Makridis
Introduction by Odysseus Makridis
Notes by Odysseus Makridis
Subjects: Literature

First English translation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1909 doctoral dissertation on Nietzsche.

Rhine Crossings

Explores the unique and volatile relationship of these two nations and cultures over the past two centuries, as expressed in literature, film, and philosophy.

Chinese Theories of Reading and Writing

A groundbreaking work that uncovers an implicit system of hermeneutics in traditional Chinese thought and aesthetics.

Worldwide Pre-Raphaelitism

Examines the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement on art and literature around the world.

Paradoxes of Postcolonial Culture

Explores postcolonial discourse from the standpoint of feminism and writers in minority languages.

The Face of Immortality

Argues for a new kind of criticism, one that mediates between literal and allegorical modes of interpretation.

Idealism without Absolutes

Extends the boundaries of Romantic culture from its pre-Kantian past to contemporary theory and beyond.

Idioms of Distress

Traces portrayals of psychosomatic disorders in medical and imaginative literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

At Millennium's End

Edited by Kevin Alexander Boon
Foreword by Kurt Vonnegut
Subjects: Literature

Collected essays by noted scholars covering the breadth and influence of Kurt Vonnegut's literature.

Writing Prejudices

Examines the manifestations of racism, sexism, and homophobia in the literary works of Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, and Toni Morrison.

Selfish Gifts

By Lisa McNee
Subjects: Literature

Investigates the politics and poetics of women's gendered identity in West Africa.

The Kinneavy Papers

Award-winning essays in the field of rhetoric and composition.

The Wounded Body

Explores the wounded body in literature from Homer to Toni Morrison, examining how it functions archetypally as both a cultural metaphor and a poetic image.

Reading Emptiness

Concludes that the closest thing in Western culture to the Middle Way of Buddhism is not any sort of theory or philosophy, but the practice of literature.

Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime

Combines Western theories of the sublime (from Longinus to Lyotard) with indigenous Indian modes of reading in order to construct a comprehensive theory of both the Indian sublime and Indian devotional verse.

Voicing Ourselves

Using Bakhtinian theory, this study reveals how and why readers routinely refer to the words and ideas of others to interpret the meanings and implications of the books they read.

Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age

Charts the interactive contours of European culture of the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, extending the chronological limits of Romanticism by identifying fresh links among works, authors, contexts, and institutions across national and linguistic borders.

Gombrowicz's Grimaces

Edited by Ewa Plonowska Ziarek
Subjects: Literature

Examines Gombrowicz’s modernist aesthetics in the context of his critique of nationalism, his exploration of queer eroticism, and his interest in hybrid and subaltern identities.

Narrating Postmodern Time and Space

Defines postmodern writing and distinguishes it from modern writing by citing examples from two modern and three postmodern writers: Italo Calvino, John Barth, Toni Morrison, E. L. Doctorow, and Antonio Tabucchi.

Representation and the Text

Focuses on authorial representations of contested reality in qualitative research.

Theories of Literary Realism

A comprehensive reexamination of the question of realism in literature, reviewing major critical approaches in Spanish, French, German, and Anglo-American literary tradition, and offering original reader-response-based theory and readings.

Suffering and the Remedy of Art

This wide-ranging, interdisciplinary study of suffering and literature examines how literature can give expression to the essentially wordless reality of suffering.

The Returns of History

Examines the influence of Nietzsche on Russian Formalists, Russian Modernism, and Mikhail Bakhtin, reinforcing the importance of the modernist theoreticians by reading them in the contemporary theoretical context.

Apollinaire and the International Avant-Garde

This literary history examines Guillaume Apollinaire's reception and influence in the Western hemisphere during the early twentieth century. It identifies and reconstructs major literary and art historical ...

The Poetics of Death

Discusses literary representations of death to explore the relation between writing and death--death understood as both the death of the individual and the death of meaning.

Interruptions

This untraditional text is a series of parables, allegories, and prose poems that reflect on the problem of the fragment. Studying the fragment lays the theoretical ground for the basic question of where a text begins and ends.

Reading Seminars I and II

In this collection of essays, Lacan's early work is first discussed systematically by focusing on his two earliest seminars: Freud's Papers on Technique and The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique ...

Signs of Change

This is a collection of essays focusing on conventions of change in the arts, philosophy, and literature.

On Bataille

Essays on the French writer and critic Georges Bataille, that examine his thought in relation to Hegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida.

The Site of Our Lives

This book addresses the question of human uniqueness at a time when academic discourse has all but abandoned its long-held commitment to the value of individuality. Through an appraisal of the works of ...

Intersections

This is a study of the relationship between postmodernism and post-enlightenment German thought reading the contemporary theoretical scene through its nineteenth-century counterpart and examining the intersections.

Reading Seminar XI

This book provides the first truly sustained commentary to appear in either French or English on Lacan's most important seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The 16 contributors unpack ...

Red Square, Black Square

This book builds a new vision of the development of Russian revolutionary culture, bringing together fiction, criticism, utopian projects, manifestos, performance and film theory, religious philosophy, ...

Chaosmos

This book shows how writers like James Joyce, James Merrill, and Doris Lessing; scientists like Gregory Bateson, Ilya Prigogine, and David Bohm; and theorists like Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and ...

Building a Profession

At a time when the study of literature and the literary canon itself are once again the focus of intense debate, Building a Profession offers a retrospective on the early days of Comparative Literature ...

Psyche and Text

Sussman here explores the relevance and value of object-relations theory to literature and literary studies. His study of character treats literature as a medium in which important relationships to conceptualized ...

Tradition and Innovation

This book studies the rich repository of Latin American Jewish literature, exploring the issues of vanishing traditions along with the subject of assimilation and acculturation. It places in sharp relief ...

Anxious Power

This book explains the conflicting feelings of anxiety and empowerment that women, historically excluded from masculine discourse, feel when they read and write, and it analyzes narrative strategies that ...

Speaking the Unspeakable

This book studies the literary and cinematic functions of the pornographic as a development from a poetics of obscenity. It focuses on the developments of French, British, and American artistic pornography ...

Play, Literature, Religion

By using the concept of play as a common denominator, this book outlines ways in which literary creativity can act as a free, open, and speculatively unburdened version of religious concerns. Contributors ...