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.

Resonances against Fascism

Makes a case for the power of music and sound in the face of fascistic forces, from modernism to the present.

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.

Many Mahābhāratas

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

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.

Poetics of Breathing

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

The Anonymity of a Commentator

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

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.

Continental Theory Buffalo

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

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.

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 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.

Hu Feng

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

Buddhist Literature as Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy as Literature

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

Creative Transformations

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

Modernity as Exception and Miracle

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

The World after the End of the World

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

Time in Exile

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

The Voice of Misery

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

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.

Two Confessions

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

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.

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.

Dramatic Experiments

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

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.

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.

Sense and Finitude

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

The Wound and the Witness

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

The Obsessions of Georges Bataille

Considers Bataille’s work from an explicitly philosophical perspective.

Disciplining the Holocaust

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

The Gita within Walden

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

Otherwise Occupied

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

Jacques Derrida's Ghost

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

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.

Historical-critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology

Appearing in English for the first time, Schelling’s 1842 lectures develop the idea that many philosophical concepts are born of religious-mythological notions.

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.

The Conspiracy of Life

Puts Schelling in conversation with twentieth-century continental philosophy.

Ninochka

A Russian émigré living in New York travels to Paris to try to reconstruct the secret life of another Russian woman who was murdered there on the eve of World War II.

Idioms of Distress

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

Voice-Overs

Writers, translators, and critics explore the cultural politics and transnational impact of Latin American literature.

Writing Prejudices

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

Words and Witness

Connects Holocaust literature and film to other works of "historical horror" in order to examine the limits that trauma imposes upon literary and artistic expression.

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.

Onetti and Others

Explores the connections between Onetti, a foundational figure of the 1960s "Boom" in Latin American literature, and other relevant writers and texts from Latin America and beyond.

Re-reading Jose Martí (1853-1895)

Re-evaluates Jose Marti's contribution to Latin America's literature and political evolution.

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.

Don Juan East/West

An essential guide for those who seek to reconsider the theoretical problems of (trans-civilizational) comparative literature, those who are interested in the literary and cultural history of modern East Asian countries, and those with a general interest in issues of sexuality.

Tradition and Fantasy in the Tales of Reb Nahman of Bratslav

Considers the tales of Reb Nahman of Bratslav within a broad cultural milieu, including the romanticism of Reb Nahman's time, contemporary feminist hermeneutics, and the fantastic in various contexts.

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.

Fragments of the Feminine Sublime in Friedrich Schlegel and James Joyce

Traces the early German Romantic origins of Joyce's modern and postmodern innovation of the novel.

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.

Lacan and Literature

This book of literary criticsm uses Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to explicate Roland Barthes, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

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.

Structures of Power

Explores the many faces of power as revealed in twentieth-century Spanish-American fiction.

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, ...

The Meaning of Irony

Genuinely interdisciplinary in approach, The Meaning of Irony brings together literary analysis and, from psychoanalysis, both theory and case studies. Its investigation ranges from everyday examples ...

A Walking Fire

"Here comes a walking fire," the Fool says to Lear as he sees Gloucester walking across a heath carrying a torch. This novel opens in fall, 1988, as Cora, an anti-war activist, returns to the U.S. from ...

The Gothic Sublime

This book reads the Gothic corpus with a thoroughly postmodern critical apparatus, pointing out that the Gothic Sublime anticipates our own doomed desire to pass beyond the hyperreal. A highly sophisticated ...

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 ...

Manners of Interpretation

Philosophy and literary theory have devoted a great deal of their analysis to the problem of the origin and modalities of argumentation, but there has been an almost total lack of interest in the question ...

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 ...

Contextual Authority and Aesthetic Truth

This book explores the relationship between authority and context and attempts to establish the ways in which authority is a function of a particular agent or set of agents, and the degree to which it ...