Comparative Literature

Rather than simply reflecting, in static form, a society’s mores and conventions, great novels of manners give dynamic play to the tension that exists between the appearances a person cultivates and the reality underpinning them. Sociability is Janus-faced; it involves a negotiation between, on the one hand, the truth of who we take ourselves to be and, on the other, how we want others to take us; appearing publicly is no simple matter of self-presentation but rather an inducement to engage in arts of representation, through which we accommodate ourselves to the eyes of others. Consequently, there arise occasions when we must press people’s appearances to unearth the work of representation they have performed. The novels of manners this dissertation studies are exceptionally attuned to the activity that takes place beneath surfaces of explicit discourse—to an implicit “discourse” that functions through indirection, by virtue of people taking each other’s words and deeds as ambiguous objects of interpretation. Taking a cue from these novels, I suggest that manners have heretofore been theorized too narrowly (as social convention, as etiquette, as politeness, as decorousness, etc.). I propose to understand manners simply, and more broadly, as acts of indirect communication, which not only is not limited to the conventional usage with which manners are normally associated but whose dependence on thought for its comprehension also runs counter to the automatism with which conventionally wrought meaning springs, unambiguously, from a given signifier. Given this conception of manners, understanding their moral value becomes a matter of interrogating the ethics of indirect communication itself. The novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton I consider in Chapters One and Two suggest that manners are morally ambiguous and that this ambiguity stems from a person’s dual standing as both a subject (interested in freedom of action) and an object (interested in keeping up appearances before others). In Chapter Three, I turn to Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt to argue that manners’ most unequivocal contribution to moral life is that they move us to think about the thinking processes of others, thereby realizing a sort of intersubjective recognition.

Torn // and new: Literary Address and the Reinvention of Ambiguity is a comparative study of literary address in poetry and fiction from twentieth and twenty-first century South Asia, the Caribbean, Britain, and the United States. Reading across transnational and multilingual literary archives, it develops an original theory of linguistic ambiguity as a special kind of literary address. Existing accounts of address in lyric theory, structural linguistics, and narratology have tended to focus on address that is marked by explicit rhetorical devices such as apostrophe and the vocative. Torn // and new argues that this emphasis underestimates the operations of address, which is connected to the sociality of literature more broadly, and therefore appears in unexpected places: outside lyric poetry, for example, and despite the absence of locatable “I” and “thou” subject positions. Torn // and new draws on existing scholarship that explores ambiguity, social exposure, literary pragmatics, and intersubjectivity to show that techniques of ambiguity are frequently mobilized as address in literary works that contest situations of social coercion. In contexts where social certainties of all kinds—racial, caste, sexual, religious, communal, etc.—presage violence, it argues that performative ambiguity can be used to produce a concealed form of literary address that establishes intersubjective bonds based on assent, rather than knowledge or certainty. Through fresh readings of classic works of poetry and fiction by Aimé Césaire, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Sa’adat Hasan Manto, Khushwant Singh, Gayl Jones, Jean Rhys, Michelle Cliff, Indra Sinha, and Mahasweta Devi, Torn // and new suggests that this special type of address disrupts habits of knowledge, exposure, and social certainty to transmit an enhanced interpretive burden to an addressee. Because this transmission is based in ambiguity, its interpretive burden is non-reproductive and becomes an end in itself. It is this, the dissertation shows, that constitutes the surprising ethical and political dimension of ambiguity as address. Torn // and new is the first sustained account of the social operations of literary address. It is also a timely illustration of the value of ambiguity as a technique of ethical and political intervention in situations of social coercion and upheaval.

This dissertation focuses on the early modern reception of a number of medieval texts–Decameron 4.1, the Historia de duobus and La Celestina– that initially circulated in manuscript form before becoming bestsellers in the early era of print. Translated into many different vernacular languages and frequently reprinted during the fifteenth- to the seventeenth centuries, these stories not only feature lovesick female protagonists but were also often addressed to a female audience in translation. Grounded in a more capacious early modern understanding of contagion, which encompassed the transmission of both diseases and affects, the dissertation traces how these narratives implicate their readers in the experiences of their characters. Framed by their authors and translators as cures for lovesickness yet criticized by detractors as poisons capable of infecting readers with love, the stories embody the very problem they portray: they stage lovesickness for readers who are addressed as potentially lovesick themselves, while simultaneously problematizing the role of reading in either exacerbating or alleviating the condition. Through an analysis of paratexts, translations, and adaptations, the dissertation examines how these texts were reshaped to reflect the anxieties surrounding textual transmission exacerbated by the printing press, often through moralizing paratextual frameworks designed to temper their perceived dangers. All three stories are included by Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy, where they serve as case studies for love melancholy. Burton frames love melancholy as a condition that implicates not only the fictional characters but also the reader and the act of reading itself. His text underscores a central tension explored in this dissertation: the uneasy relationship between fiction and reality, and the potential for one to shape, infect, or transform the other.

Labors of Formation is a study of the contested status and multiple figurations of pedagogy in modernity. I take up pedagogy as a site of conceptual, formal, and political invention, a problem-space investigated by writers and intellectuals in the modernist conjuncture. Pedagogy thus understood includes, but is not limited to, the encounter between teacher and student in a classroom. Through readings of texts by Bertolt Brecht, Wilfred Bion, and an array of Soviet educational thinkers, I put forward an expansive conception of pedagogy as the organization and production of habits of thought, behavior, and desire. The dissertation makes the case for pedagogy as a framework for examining the formation of collectives, arguing against depictions of collectives as incapable of thinking and learning and demonstrating the irreducible role of epistemic processes in collective organization. This dissertation is composed of three chapters, each of which examines the nexus of pedagogy and collectivity at a moment of crisis, rupture, and transition. Chapter One, set in interwar Germany, analyzes Brecht’s theory of eingreifendes Denken, thought that intervenes in the world or has an effect. Chapter Two investigates the contested role of labor in the educative process by considering the post-revolutionary vision for Soviet education known as the United Labor School alongside the theoretical writings of the Proletarian Culture (Proletkult) movement. Finally, Chapter Three turns to the psychic dimensions of pedagogy; the chapter links Bion’s earlier work on group dynamics, starting with his experimental treatment of soldiers during World War II, to his later psychoanalytic theories of thinking and learning. Across these chapters, pedagogy appears not only as an ensemble of educative practices but as a problematic terrain, marked by conceptual opacity and ambiguity. Accordingly, Labors of Formation is not primarily an intellectual history of pedagogical method but a literary and philosophical study of pedagogical thinking, of pedagogy’s animating tensions and conditions of possibility. The dissertation explores pedagogy’s open-ended and indeterminate character, its resistance to mechanization, and its ambivalent relationship to coercion and authority. Pedagogy, refracted through the modernist frame, appears at once as a kind of binding and a liberation, at once the imposition of order and its dissolution.

‘Insisting on Life: Unfolding Zapotec Multiplicity Multiplicity Through Bene Xhon, Benza,Binnizá Artistic Creation’ focuses on Zapotec artistic production committed to issues of Indigenous language vitality and the revitalization of environmentally devastated sites, engaging artists Javier Castellanos and the collective Tlacolulokos, among others working from the last decade of the 20th century to the present day; it offers a methodology to approach issues of Indigenous language loss and the devastation of the environment as intertwined processes, while highlighting articulations and modes of life present in the language and physical spaces that have been deemed dead. The dissertation includes four chapters: 1) “Language as Territory: Emergent Language and Environmental Vitalities”, introducing Pineda’s transindigenous framework, along with a theorization of community-based projects, 2) “Embodied Pluritemporality: Monolingualism and monocropping in Cantares de los vientos primerizos/ Wila che be ze lhao” centering on the Bene Xhon in the highlands of Oaxaca through the analysis of a Zapotec novel; 3) “Arriving at the River of Otters: Guigu Bi’cu’nisa and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec” discussing extinction and pollution in the Isthmus through the lens of photography focusing on the River of Otters; and 4) “Traveling Indigenous Textualities: Zapotec Diaspora through Street Art” exploring displaced populations’ connection to language and land (as guests on Native American territory) focusing on urban art found in the streets of Los Angeles.

“Nonaligned Comparisons: Peripheral Realism and the Utopian Imagination” elaborates visions of decolonization and socialism in the 1950s and 1960s that imagined alternatives to the nation-state. It returns to the original meaning of the “Third World” as a project of nonalignment resisting the binary logic of the Cold War, emphasizing third-worldism’s formulation of various noncapitalist paths of development and alternatives to the political and cultural models of both Western and Eastern blocs (“First” and “Second” Worlds, respectively). Focusing my analysis on realist novels, I propose reading literature as an archive of political theory, where the aesthetic is both the site and the stake of utopian imagination. The dissertation begins with examining a set of international writers’ conferences in order to develop a materialist theory of peripheral aesthetics and reconstruct the cultural infrastructure that enabled its circulation. I argue that works of peripheral realism like Ousmane Sembène’s Les bouts de bois de Dieu (1960) and Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather (1968) produce aesthetic worlds theorizing new social forms. Attending to the dialectic of literary form and social process under the conditions of uneven and combined development, each chapter centers on a distinct figure of the commune as a social form and mode of political organizing inimical to the nation-state. Such “roads not taken”—West African federalism, agricultural cooperatives in Botswana, communal self-management in socialist Yugoslavia, and more—offer models of economic decentralization interested less in the questions of national sovereignty than in projects of social transformation. Taking nonalignment not only as an object of study but also as method, I advance a theory of politics based on a shared relational orientation rather than cultural identity. In so doing, “Nonaligned Comparisons” challenges the territorial and national framings of comparative cultural studies.

This dissertation focuses on the question of what the quilombo means in Black imaginative work, with a focus on Brazil. I show how, in Brazil’s redemocratization period (roughly the 1980s and 1990s), the quilombo became an imaginative geography that Black intellectuals theorized as the space of transmission of resistant narratives, language, and culture, against manipulations of national historical memory in the service of whitening and the cultural engulfment of blackness. I call the quilombo, as a space of cultural transmission, the “witnessing ground,” focusing on ways in which it fosters modes of evidence, justice, and remembering that resist engulfment by national memorialization. Drawing on deconstructive approaches to developmental time-space that focus on culture’s layered and convoluted emergence through heritage and memory, I track how a set of Black authors across the twentieth-century theorize the quilombo as a space that traverses time against the grain of progress, highlighting “new” language and poetics as an echo of the ancestral that embodiment and ritual language and writing carry forward. I study how, through intertextual citation and reworking the tropes of earlier innovators of Black literary resistance, authors during redemocratization theorized and fictionalized an ancestral cultural heritage of Black writing and collective subjectivity. My research highlights unpublished literary archives as sites where the Black Brazilian literary past continues to unfold in and disrupt the progress-oriented Western arrangement of time and temporality that hierarchized peoples and contributed to the racial spatialization of globality since the Enlightenment. The quilombo, as a space of resistance, disrupts the individualized subject, which it enfolds into a collective that encompasses past generations.

The dissertation, titled “Indigestible Bodies – Towards a Theory of Post-Socialist Performance,” examines global political performance practices with a focus on post-socialist contexts. The dissertation begins with a 1991 performance on the Red Square in Moscow by the Actionist collective Dvizhenie ETI. I analyze the performance, made at the cusp of the USSR, as a form of reenactment of the 1917 Revolution. The dissertation moves on to consider the work of repulsion as a negative aesthetic strategy in a 2000 performance by the Chinese artist Zhu Yu, who documented himself eating a human fetus during the height of appreciation of Chinese art in the global art market. The last chapter considers the 1994 performance in a morgue by the artists collective Sekta Absolutnoi Lubvi to articulate a post-human concept of death as a return to collective life and realization of communism. Apart from the primary case studies, the dissertation includes three “loop” chapters where “post-socialist performance” is considered more globally: through the relationship with decoloniality in the work of Dagestani artist Taus Makhacheva, with Brazilian Modernism and antropofagia (“cultural cannibalism”) in the artwork of Lygia Clark, and with “critical utopianism” in the artwork of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. I argue that these post-socialist artists’ work requires a re-thinking of the categories “political” and “resistance,” proposing the very means of incorporation into the post-Cold War “global” art world as an object of critique. This comparativist and interdisciplinary dissertation is theoretically grounded in feminist deconstruction, and brings together scholarship from East Asian Studies, Slavic Studies, Art History and Visual Studies, and Performance Studies. In thinking post-socialism through the frame of Performance Studies, this dissertation adds a new perspective to the critical and theoretical understanding of performance, expanding the archive and the repertoire of how resistance, politics, action, writing, temporality and the body can be thought and enacted in present-day scholarship.

This dissertation examines the theme of sensory delusion in early modern Western European comedy (1350-1675). It argues that comedy, in prose and for the stage, offered itself to writers during this period as a genre in which to think innovatively about the human sensorium. Transmitted from Ancient South Asia across the medieval Arabic and Mediterranean worlds to Italy, the comedic tale of sensory delusion provided a means for early modern western European writers to challenge the then-dominant Aristotelian theories of perception and knowledge. While these latter theories hold that the senses, under normal conditions, provide the intellect with truthful knowledge about the external world, the comedic tale of sensory delusion represents the senses as inherently subject to deception. Specifically, the comedy of sensory delusion, as it was adopted and adapted into literary forms from the fourteenth-century Italian novella to the seventeenth-century French theater, articulates a sensorial skepticism that appeals to the persuasive force of language. The senses do not necessarily provide truthful knowledge about the external world and our inner selves because of the power of the human word to misconstruct sensations. According to conventional scholarly narratives, early modern Europe witnessed the development of new ways of knowing the external world and the inner self, leading respectively to the Scientific Revolution and to philosophical and literary expressions of inner subjectivity. Yet at the same time, this dissertation shows, the comedic tale of sensory delusion allowed early modern writers to question the very possibility of discovering the world and the self. For if the sensory knowledge we have of ourselves and the world is mediated through the linguistic communities in which we participate, then, due to the ability of words to deceive, this knowledge is inherently subject to error. In this way, the early modern comedic tradition that this dissertation explores remains relevant to current ways of thinking about the relations between mind, body, and language.

Declinations: German Decadence and the Fall of Rome studies fictions of Roman imperial continuity and downfall in a range of fin-de-siècle poets (e.g. Stefan George and his Circle, Theodor Däubler) and early twentieth century intellectuals (e.g. Rudolf Borchardt, Alfred Schuler, Aby Warburg), whose work is read both with and against leading representatives of classical studies (e.g. Eduard Meyer, Eduard Norden, Wilamowitz and Alois Riegl). The dissertation studies the affective, erotic investments in Roman reception as part of an ongoing process of German national subject-formation both within the post-1871 development of Germany as an imperial power as well as the perceived interregnum of the Weimar Republic. Roman reception of this period is predicated on a late nineteenth century shift toward nonclassical, "late" antiquities, which I read as a a commentary on the increasingly polycentric, syncretistic worldview generated by European empire—and its discontents. Each chapter forms a case study in the various media through which the purported afterlife of Roman imperium was translated into the German present. The preface introduces terminology key for the ancient reception of this period, including "influence," "translatio," "afterlife," and "decadence." Chapter I studies the relation between the erotics of reception and the interest in the late Roman empire in both Wilhelmine culture and poetic works of the George-Circle. Chapter II studies the interest of German literary decadence and its French predecessors in the late antique genre of the hymn, with special attention paid to the subgenre of the hymn to Rome. Chapter III studies the construction of the opposition "Orient oder Rom" in the Weimar Republic and its manner of encoding contemporary political struggles through ancient referents. Chapter IV studies Weimar intellectuals' concerted interest in wax masks, which arose in light of the perceived loss of the figure of the "great man" under the new democratic polity. Chapter V studies Ernst Robert Curtius's work on the Latin Middle Ages and its attendant conception of Romanitas as a crisis-formation that emerged in response to the vicissitudes of German empire in the twentieth century.

This dissertation reads British common sense, understood as a kind of knowledge or practical know-how supposedly held in common by all members of a social body, as a form of anti-dialectical thought that seeks to do away with abstraction by submerging thought itself immediately in daily life. Common sense has had opposite trajectories in the German dialectical tradition that culminated in Critical Theory, and British philosophy and letters, respectively. From Kant to Adorno, Critical Theorists and their forebears critiqued common sense’s vulgar empiricism, atemporality, and social conservatism. Conversely, common sense became wildly popular in British culture starting in the eighteenth century. British appeals to common sense posited an opposition between a “common life” defined by uniform social practices—eating and drinking; buying and selling—and a socially deleterious tendency toward abstraction that they attributed to specialized thought. By identifying the kind of thinking that common sense supposedly was with the practices of “common life,” British thinkers effectively conflated thought with practice, attempting to circumvent the mediation on which dialectical thought insists. The twin trajectories of common sense converge in the mid-nineteenth century, when Marx and Engels begin to observe and theorize English industrial capitalism. Alongside the development of a mode of dialectical materialism that identifies British common sense as paradigmatic of bourgeois ideology, the mid-nineteenth century sees the transfer of British common sense from philosophy and literary criticism to the novel. There, common-sense orientations to facts, relations, and practices infuse new social-realist sensibilities. I analyze how several of what Raymond Williams called the “industrial novels” imagine a common British epistemological life that would naturalize the mid-nineteenth century’s heightened rates of inequality and exploitation. Common sense in these novels opposes history’s unfolding in the form of workers’ movements, and thought’s abstraction from life in the form of social critique. I show, however, that their narrative forms invariably register the contradiction inherent in the attempt to institute social stability at the level of mutual understanding. These forms, I suggest, record the same dialectical interplay between the categories of the political, the social, and the cultural that critical-theoretical observers of industrial-era struggle confronted.

Alkahest: Wit's Formations and Deformations in German Letters studies discourses about the German word Witz, meaning both wit and joke, between the end of the Enlightenment and the beginning of the 20th century. The project's title names a central problem: although Witz was commonly understood as a faculty that finds similarities between disparate things, it is, like an alkahest or universal solvent, often also conceived of as an agent that dissolves such associations. This is compounded by a second tension: Witz refers both to the joke, as a form of speech, and to the mental faculty similar to the one called wit in English. The dissertation tracks these two tensions across a variety of small forms, such as journal entries, articles, prefaces, fragments, and jokes. Across these small forms, the functions of Witz condense and multiply, blurring the lines between poetic productivity and the complete collapse of sense. Chapter 1 studies the fragmentary works of G. C. Lichtenberg, who explored Witz as a "tool for the intellectual world" with powers both creative and destructive. Chapter 2 concerns the fragments published within the early Romantic journal Athenäum, where Witz is described as both the "principal of affinities" and the "universal solvent." For the Romantics, this double nature of Witz becomes a central way for relating the role of the fragmentary to the project of progressive universal poetry. Chapter 3 examines the poetics of the novelist Jean Paul, for whom Witz represented a source of deep ambiguity about language's ability or inability to connect the world of the spirit and the world of the body. Chapter 4 offers an interpretation of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory of Witz, wherein the joke is understood as a way for the child's free play with language to be preserved into adult life. The dissertation argues from these examples that wit's dual function of creating sense and nonsense granted it an unexpected poetic potency that could only find expression in small forms. Through rediscovering these tensions, the dissertation offers an account of modern literature defined by the small and fragmentary. It also challenges our own relationship to speaking, writing, and thinking as activities in which synthesis and dissolution are closely intertwined.

The theological movements that culminated in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 seem to have had repercussions not only on religious life but also on writers’ conceptions of language’s potentialities and truthfulness. By rendering annual confession mandatory and reinforcing the importance of preaching, the Council placed an unprecedented significance on the signifying and effective functions of language, promoting oratorial and penitential speech acts that needed to be not only truthful but also sacramentally effective. Authors of literary texts were quick to pick up on these changes, and already the first years of the thirteenth century see false confessions and sermons being evoked in literary texts as ways of investigating the boundaries between truthfulness and falsehood, literature and reality, the profane and the sacred. This dissertation explores the notion of literary truth through the lens of false confessions between 1200 and 1400 in a wide range of literary works from the Old French Roman de Renart and Roman de la Rose through Dante Alighieri’s Commedia and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale. The reflections on truthfulness, falsity, and the role of literature that these texts stage through evocations of the sacrament of penance and the practice of preaching allow one to investigate the way in which medieval authors positioned themselves vis-à-vis the theological, philosophical, and ecclesiastical developments of their time in an attempt to create a space in which literature could function beyond the binary opposition of truth and falsehood.

How has the literary culture of Greece, globally perceived as the descendant of Europe's most exalted ancient monoculture, responded to contemporary multiculturalism, specifically the diversity of present-day Athens? And how can this response be brought to a global audience via translation from Greek to English? This dissertation is simultaneously a literary anthology, an exercise in translation, and an attempt to answer these two questions in a scholarly fashion. I have chosen to translate and compile fourteen short works by ten different authors, all originally published in Greece between 2007 and 2018. These works are often verisimilar, occasionally multilingual, and mostly set in Athens during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, a period that has witnessed actual demographic changes but also a reluctant acceptance of those changes even within the Greek literary sphere. I present these works here chronologically by date of publication, in order to highlight the rapid evolution of a national cultural consciousness, which has, apparently, evolved in tandem with the progress of recent historical developments. The collapse of Albania's economy in the 1990s, the advent of the Eurozone, and wars in Central Asia and the Middle East are all dealt with here, mostly from the perspective of a Greek author/narrator walking us readers through a newly multicultural cityscape. But is the experience being depicted here really translatable? The presumption of Greece's cultural uniqueness dominates both the scholarly discourse surrounding the Greek literature of migration as well as the narratives themselves. The tension between the age-old notion of a special, peninsular Greece and the newer but perhaps more pessimistic notion of a globally integrated, European Greece presents a unique challenge for me as a translator having to navigate the nuances of the original Greek text with respect to these issues of cultural history, linguistic asymmetry, and the dominance of English. Thus, the translations themselves are preceded by an introduction in which translation theory, contemporary literary scholarship, and the thematic and stylistic content of the original texts are discussed within the framework of the relevant critical conversation.

"Revolutionary Utopianism and Subjectivation: Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s and Lu Märten’s Queer Aesthetic Paradigms, 1860s-1920s" examines the utopianisms of the revolutionary socialist literary critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889) and the Marxist author and theorist Lu Märten (1879-1970). Both figures turned to utopianism to intervene in distinct, yet historically interconnected revolutionary moments: the radicalism of 1860s Russia and the Marxist cultural politics of the early Weimar Republic. Their revolutionary utopianisms present a counternarrative to the increasingly dominant modes of “scientific socialism” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which drew rigid distinctions between reform and revolution, gender and class, and fiction and nonfiction. In contrast, Chernyshevsky and Märten imagine queer aesthetic paradigms based on the transformation of labor processes, sensuality, and gendered subjectivity. Through an analysis of Chernyshevsky’s and Märten’s literary and theoretical texts, this dissertation defines utopianism as an ongoing intervention in processes of subjectivation aimed at collectively generating new aesthetic paradigms. These histories of revolutionary utopianism contribute to the contemporary field of queer Marxism by demonstrating the potential of literary forms and queer relationality to transform socialist projects from within.

This dissertation models an inter-traditional poetics by staging an encounter between English, Persianate, and French poetic traditions and their reading practices. By studying three extraordinarily distinctive poets – Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869), William Wordsworth (1770- 1850), and Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) – I conceptualize “poetic thinking” as a process persisting across these traditions, which, by virtue of the singularly delimited verbal construction of a poem, constitutes a unique relation to its outside, i.e., its “occasion.” Any attempt to identify the occasion of a poetic work in an object that is already known fails: Poetry's sky is “not the sky of earth” (Wordsworth), its flower is “absent from all bouquets” (Mallarmé), and the object of its discourse is forever missing (Ghalib). Sovereigns, places, ordinary things, strangers, even the friends who occasion poems seem absent in the very constructions that are meant to memorialize or praise them. At the same time, if one approaches poetry as an autonomous practice of thought, the external objects it takes as its occasions appear in the foreground of one’s consciousness, albeit rendered nonidentical with their own prior concepts. This relation between occasion and thought in poetry, which both invites reflection and creates the basis for an aesthetic experience of the poem, resists its own conceptualization, and gives to the poem an inexhaustible newness. Newness entails that every instance of reading the poem is an encounter with otherness that animates our capacity to recognize otherness by negating ossified forms of comprehension. Thus, poetic thinking, appearing first as the poet’s construction of the poem, and then as the process of reflective reading in which prior modes of comprehension are transformed, discloses the non-narcissistic capacity of thought, without whose defining relation to an external other neither critique nor comparison would be possible. I proffer this non-narcissism of thought as the basis for a practice of comparative poetics which, even as it thinks the universality of poetry, also presents a critique of the colonially engendered capitalist world that is the historical condition of possibility for notions like “world-literature.”

Material Latencies: Tracing the Management of Life in Alexander Kluge and French Post-Structuralism casts postwar intellectual history, film, and literature in an entirely new light by tracing thus far unexamined affinities between the oeuvre of Alexander Kluge and French post-structuralism. The dissertation recovers Kluge’s corpus as a major contribution to reimagining and representing emerging, latent, or repressed historical subjectivities and experiences characteristic of mid-twentieth century and postwar Germany. Organized around case studies of Kluge’s earlier works in film and literature, the project shows how Kluge’s reconstructions of German history anticipate and enrich seminal theories of contingency and event, abjection, biopower, and the surveillance state by such French thinkers as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Julia Kristeva. By inserting Kluge into this constellation of themes, the project reveals that Kluge’s oeuvre offers a unique analysis of the West German public sphere in works such as Schlachtbeschreibung (1964), Abschied von gestern (1966), Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratlos (1968), and Deutschland im Herbst (1978). Kluge detects new forms of microphysics of power subtending West German politics in a manner that parallels or predates post-structuralist approaches. Prefiguring the French thinkers’ later work, Kluge provides a Frankfurt-School inspired investigation into the causality and structure of events and contingency. He expands the examination of emerging forms of biopower by tracing the ways in which neoliberalism surreptitiously co-opts, molds, and extracts individual capacities and forms of intimacy and affect. Additionally, Kluge’s corpus draws on questions of epistemic justice and the critique of social marginalization by disclosing forms of gendered abjection in the 1960s FRG’s juridical apparatus. Furthermore, it documents West Germany’s shift toward societies of control and preventive technologies that circumvent the Rechtsstaat. The dissertation thus identifies Kluge’s work as a site for aesthetic and theoretical innovation of models for representing and conceptualizing history and new emergent forms of experience in the second half of the twentieth century that have long been reserved only for French post-structuralism. The project highlights the unique place of Kluge’s aesthetic, as it opens up the Critical Theory paradigm to investigations of embodied experience as a site of knowledge production.

This dissertation presents an articulation between the psychoanalytic concept of transference and what I propose to understand as the translation of concepts, drawing on Sigmund Freud’s and Jacques Lacan’s understanding of transference in neurosis and psychosis, as well as on the work of three different analysts that have addressed the translatability of psychoanalysis in different ways: Moustapha Safouan (Egypt-France, 1921-2020), Girindrasekhar Bose (India, 1887-1953), and Marie Langer (Austria-Argentina, 1920-1987). I argue that the concept of transference provides a novel perspective to understand the changes that concepts undergo in their transnational circulation and throughout historical periods. As the concept that defines the relationship between analyst and analysand in the psychoanalytic setting, transference is always situated in specific relationships but, at the same time, the formulation and understanding of the concept of transference requires a perception of how a relationship is being structured, which exceeds the contingent character of any given relationship. These structural aspects, while non-contingent themselves, can only be understood through the contingent relationship in which they are manifesting in the present.I analyze the relationship between transference and fiction in order to understand the characteristics of the knowledge that is formed in the analytic situation, and how it is the artificial character of transference that reveals its truth in analysis. Through an examination of transference in relation to psychosis, I argue that a form of transference is present in the process of reading and writing, and explore the limits of the Freudian understanding of transference. The Lacanian theory of psychosis and transference offers a different perspective on transference and fiction, and it is in this context that I argue for a conceptual kind of translation, in this case from neurosis to psychosis. This translation within European psychoanalysis opens up the question of translation across geographies and historical periods. The work of Moustapha Safouan presents a reflection on the universality of the Oedipus complex, and in this framework, I examine the particular kind of translation of this concept in the work of Girindrasekhar Bose. Finally, I explore the work of Marie Langer, who carried out several translations in her psychoanalytic practice and developed a critique of neutrality that emphasizes the fact that ideology always enters the analytic setting.

My dissertation examines themes closely related to psychological examination (Seelenprüfung) in the works of the French moralists and of Nietzsche. My two principal claims are that psychological examination is the most important philosophical method and the basic structure of life experience for Nietzsche, and that his hermeneutics of suspicion is grounded in psychological examination drawn from the French moralists. Their method of interpretation unmasked false consciousness and self-interested intention, and further detected disguised pleasure in the heroic virtues of honesty and Christian morality. For La Rochefoucauld and Pascal, the notion that magnanimity and other Stoic virtues were motivated by pleasure and by other postlapsarian self-interests served to persuade members of a worldly society to pursue Christian beatitude. Nietzsche, inspired more in this area by Montaigne, denies any other-worldly comfort. He advocates amor fati (love of fate) and this-worldly cheerfulness (Heiterkeit) and urges readers to pluck useful maxims from the thorniest stretches of their lives to alleviate the burden of living. Cheerfulness thus functions as an antidote for Nietzsche against the moralists’ austere search for other-worldly consolation. I focus on the notions and aphorisms related to symptoms, methods of therapy and remedies in the psychological observation. In investigating classical notions such as pleasure, Virgil’s belief that “everyone is driven by his pleasure,” the punning but crucial variant on Horace’s “saying something true with laughter,” as well as Heiterkeit (cheerfulness) and “mask” and “self-deception” in the dialogues among these authors. In sum, through these themes, I probe the concept of pleasure in the genealogy of (im)morality and (a)theism among the French moralists and Nietzsche.

This dissertation, titled “Wombs of Liberation: The Legislation of Black Maternity and Freedom of the Womb in Brazil,” traces the juridical history of enslaved women’s biological reproduction from the Roman era to the nineteenth century in Brazil. In five chapters, Rosario shows how the concept of partus sequitur ventrem (“the child follows the womb”) was applied throughout the early modern period to the nineteenth century in Brazil. In the first chapter, Rosario carries out a historical analysis of the Roman legal rulings on enslaved women’s children. In chapter two, Rosario analyzes early modern Portuguese rulings on the children of enslaved women, characterizing the early modern period as a time of experimentation, when partus sequitur ventrem was unevenly applied and the manumission of children based on patrilineal kinship was common. In chapter three, Rosario shows how abolitionist scholars used Roman Law to advocate for the freedom of children who had been born from a “conditionally manumitted” mother, leading them to argue these children had not been born of a ventre escravo (“enslaved womb”), but instead, they had been born of a ventre livre (“free womb”). In chapter four, Rosario reads cases from Brazil’s Supremo Tribunal and show how enslaved or formerly enslaved women in the late-nineteenth century instrumentalized the weight of conversations on the freedom of the womb to argue that they had been conditionally manumitted before giving birth to their child, making the child free. In chapter five, Rosario discusses how enslaved mothers appeared in literary texts from the abolitionist period, creating a mythology around concepts on kinship between enslaved women and seignorial children. Through this dissertation, Rosario expanded upon the historiography of Western Hemispheric slavery studies and Roman slavery studies to produce an inter-disciplinary feminist work on how hereditary slavery was contested in abolitionist Brazil, and how in the nineteenth century, a Roman principle was instrumentalized to free enslaved women’s children.