Memos from the Besieged City

by Kadir, Djelal

• ISBN13: 9780804770507
• ISBN10: 0804770506
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-09-13
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

This is a historical and critical reassessment of the field of comparative literature--the study of cultures and their literary posterity across national borders and historical frontiers--at a moment when notions of literacy and culture are under inordinate pressure by predatory globalization and militaristic realpolitik.

Author Biography

Djelal Kadir is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University and founding president of the International American Studies Association. His books include Columbus and the Ends of the Earth (1992) and The Other Writing (1993).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction
Comparative Touchstones of Literature	p. 1
Auerbach's Scar
Ancestral Antiphony: Autolycus/Abraham	p. 19
The Comparatist Mirror	p. 31
The Siege of Baghdad: Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Orhan Pamuk, and the Commissions of History
History's Rhyme	p. 41
Narrative's Edge	p. 46
Vanishing Point	p. 51
Rhyming History: The Baghdadization of America	p. 56
Frank Perspective	p. 60
Of Learned Ignorance: Nicholas of Cusa and Cardinal Spaces of Culture
Space-Time-Culture	p. 64
Concentric Deviations, Elliptic Orthodoxies	p. 70
Ignorance by Degrees: Identity and Equivalence	p. 74
Memories of the Future: Giordano Bruno Remembers Us
Remembering Mnemosyne	p. 84
Culture and Memory	p. 89
Memory, Countermemory	p. 100
A Carceral Archive and the Culture of Conspiracy: Fray José Servando Teresa de Mier Noriega y Guerra, Enlightenment's Contestant
Culture, Conspiracy, and the Value of X	p. 108
Divertimento: Since Time Immemorial	p. 119
Philology's Hearth, Conspiracy's Home	p. 121
Truth Mission as Reinscription, Narrative Plot as Cultural Conspiracy	p. 125
Compensatory Gestures: From Imperial Monarchy to Republican Anarchy	p. 127
Epistemania and the Cloak of Invisibility	p. 130
The Arts of Mitigation, the Garden in the Barbarian: Zbigniew Herbert
"Oracular Rockings"	p. 134
Unbridled Torrent	p. 141
The Poetics of Mitigation	p. 148
The Delicate Art of Political Assuagement	p. 152
The Trials of Poetry	p. 154
The Labors of Cassandra: Arendt in Jerusalem
The Trials of Posterity	p. 158
Cassandra and the Poets: Goodness Beyond Virtue, Wickedness Beyond Vice	p. 172
The People's Republic and the Republic of Letters: The Alarming Gao Xingjian
The State of the National Subject	p. 177
The Fugitive Pronoun: A Peripatetic Mirror	p. 184
Memo from the Next Millennium: A Coda for Calvino
On Perseus's Shield	p. 194
Consistency	p. 197
Epilogue: The Inventions of Comparative Literature: A Minute on Method
Defining Figures	p. 204
Trivium, Tradition, Translation: Survival	p. 209
Beyond Metanarrative: Conversation	p. 214
Memorandum of Understanding	p. 217
Notes	p. 221
Bibliography	p. 249
Index	p. 263
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