Comparative Literature

This course is designed to explore the diverse range of Asian literatures and cultures, with a transpacific focus on fiction and films written and produced mainly in China, Japan, and Taiwan. Appreciating and analyzing literature through historical and social contexts, we will pay attention to the ways in which writers engage in depicting and imagining geographic particularities. We will ask questions of how literature can be intertwined with issues of national identity, race, ethnicity, colonization, war, memory, trauma, gender, sexuality, to name a few. By doing so, this course will put literature into broader comparative and intercultural perspectives that will reveal both the possibilities and limits of literary readings.

Engaging in the issues of trauma and memory, this paper focuses on how memory functions as a theatrical device in director, Stan Lai's play, A Dream Like a Dream (2001), and considers memory as a dynamic narrating experience in theatre. A Dream Like a Dream presents to spectators an art of storytelling: memories are related by characters, and the past is interpolated and performed on stage like a sequence of dreams. Drawing on theorists of trauma and memory, especially Cathy Caruth and Lawrance Langer, this paper argues a kind of cathartic subjectivity is formulated through the process of self/other change. Characters perform comprehension of the suffering of their life, and the audience learns to appreciate the repetition of the uncertainty of life and the plastic power it exerts on us. Ultimately, A Dream Like a Dream is about the reconciliation between remembrance and oblivion through the action of storytelling.

Deeply entangled with the storm of political transformation, modern theatre in Taiwan reached its peak late 1980s and early 1990s under the international label of the "little theatre movement." This paper revisits experimental director and playwright Tian Chi Yuan and his work, White Water [Bai Shui], focusing on Tian's mimicry of traditional bodily gestures through which the constructedness of national identities is revealed and questioned. I argue for an angle of "conscious constructivism," to borrow a term from the visual avant-garde, and I consider the practice of integrating cultural traditions as a crucial characteristic of the little theatre movement.

Due to Taiwan’s colonial past, modern Taiwanese theatre has never been purely aesthetic, but is largely sociopolitical, providing an alternative space that indirectly transforms local people’s identity struggles on stage, where practitioners reimagine or even reinvent concepts of local subjectivity. Taking Taiwan as an intersection of transnational forces, this paper will analyze intercultural performance in Taiwan. Particularly, I will examine two ‘flagship’ productions of the Taiwan International Festival of Art, Orlando (2009), directed by Robert Wilson (1941 -), and La Dame aux Camélias (2011) by Suzuki Tadashi (1939 -). With these two productions, I explore the subtle ways modern Taiwanese theatre embodies both culturally cosmopolitan identities and also postcolonial traumas and struggles in Taiwanese contexts. Engaging in the discussions on intercultural performance, I argue that the real problem of intercultural performance lies in the dichotomy between the immediacy of theatrical spectatorship and the accumulation of historical experience. Given that intercultural performance fundamentally implies a bodily practice of haunted, identity-burdened space, critical practice is struggling to renew itself in order to negotiate multi-layered temporal and transnational contexts. Ultimately, Intercultural practice in Taiwan reveals the violence of modernity and uncovers the tensions of reconfiguring Taiwaneseness.

This paper presents the argument that the practice of modern theatre constitutes a crucial method for reorienting the particular traumas of the Chinese diaspora in contemporary Taiwan. In particular, it offers a close reading of Far Away from Home (西出陽關, Xichu yangguan, 1988) by Taiwanese playwright Lee Kuohsiu (李國修, 1955‒2013) and its performance archive of 2004. Lee deploys theatre as a negotiating space in which to reflect the social formations, identities, and history of Taiwan in the late 1980s—a period that saw Taiwan’s complicated relationship with China become the subject of intense scrutiny as the Cold War came to an end and the pressures of rapid globalisation mounted.

Given Taiwan’s colonial past, modern Taiwanese theatre has never been purely aesthetic. Instead, it is largely sociopolitical, providing an alternative space that indirectly transforms local people’s contestations of identity onstage, where practitioners reimagine or even reinvent Taiwan. Taking Taiwan as an intersection of transnational forces, I present an analysis of the ways in which power is negotiated in intercultural theatrical performance. In particular, I examine two ‘flagship’ productions of the Taiwan International Festival of Art: Orlando (2009) directed by Robert Wilson (1941–present), and La Dame aux Camélias (2011) directed by Suzuki Tadashi (1939–present). With these two productions, I explore the subtle ways in which modern Taiwanese theatre embodies both culturally universal identities and postcolonial struggles in Taiwanese contexts. By engaging with the most influential research on intercultural theatre and contextualizing these two flagship productions, I argue ...

s Amour bilangue (1983) mimes an eternalized moment of indecision between French and Arabic languages and cultures as it plays itself out in the mind of the Maghrebine protagonist/narrator. Of the several texts considered in this book, Khatibi's supplies the most explicit links between the act of translation and the situation of the "postcolonial subject." The fiction demonstrates, as James McGuire points out, that "the post-colonial bilingual writer is essentially a translator or, more precisely, a self-translator" (112). It may be read as a companion piece to Khatibi's critical work published in the same year, Maghreb pluriel. In that work, Khatibi characterizes Orientalism as an immense translation project that seeks to transfer univocality, and that therefore cannot tolerate the untranslatable. The untranslatable, in defiance, becomes the hero of Amour bilangue.

This essay applies the concept homo sacer, as put forth by Giorgio Agamben, to the social perception of translators and interpreters when they intervene in situations of violent conflict. Examples are drawn from history, from contemporary events (including the investigation of Guantánamo 'linguists'), from nonfictional writing (such as Daoud Hari's The Translator), and from fiction (for example, Mia Couto's Last Flight of the Flamingo). Real and fictional 'case studies' agree on the parlous status of the translator.

You are invited to read through the CFPs for panels at this small, experimental conference sponsored by the ACLA and Penn State, to be held this Fall. Submit by 30 June if you are interested. Besides submitting for one of the panels described here, you are also welcome to propose your own panel.

The Brazilian state of Bahia is roughly the size of France, while its climate and topography could not be more different from that of any European country. A thin, well-watered, heavily populated litoral zone contrasts with the arid, sparsely populated sertão (interior) where water is at a premium. Periods of torrential rains which make travel impossible contrast with long periods of drought which make agriculture impossible. Porto Seguro, on the coast, was the point where Cabral touched land in 1500 and currently a thriving tourist resort, as is Salvador, the Bahian capital and one of the oldest Brazilian cities. Few of the Italian and German tourists crowding buses and beaches in these areas make their way through the caatinga (scrub forest) to the points of attraction in the interior. A few religiously inclined Brazilians might make a pilgrimage to one of the many religious shrines which testify to the the endemic mysticism of the sertanejo: Bom Jesus da Lapa with its cavern chapel; Nossa Senhora da Pirapora; Monte Santo, where an enormous stairway leads to a mountaintop shrine; or Juazeiro do Norte, where the priest Padre Cicero ruled a theocracy and is now honored with the second-largest statue in Brazil. Along with the Nordeste, the Brazilian sertão (including parts of several states besides Bahia) is the region of Brazil which best preserves the roots of a national character. Its landscape and culture have consistently and continuously drawn the attention of Brazil's most important authors, and been woven into some of Brazil's most compelling prose narratives:

A vida de Antônio Vicente Maciel, o "Conselheiro," como a história da construção e destruição de sua comunidade messiânica, Canudos (1893-1897), tem sido uma fonte inesgotável para a literatura e o imaginário brasileiros. Na literatura sobre Canudos nota-se uma tendência para utilizar o gênero de "faction" — da história romantizada ou ficcionalizada. Este ensaio compara Os Jagunços (1898) de Afonso Arinos, O Rei dos Jagunços (1899) de Manoel Benício, e Accidentes da Guerra (1905) de Egmydio Dantas Barreto, que são os três primeiros "factions" a tratar o assunto de Canudos. Analisa, portanto, as razões pelas quais estes autores evitaram os gêneros (relativamente) "puros" da Reportagem e da História, recorrendo em compensação a um gênero misto que acrescenta à suposta veracidade a imaginação.