Abstract
Chapter 1 frames the study by highlighting the contemporary challenges of comparative literature to respond to expanding and diversifying transnational readerships. Kaakinen argues that the analytical approach of twentieth-century reception aesthetics should be updated to account for readers who cannot engage with a given text in an unimpeded relationship of dialogue; this is especially the case when literary texts revolve around transnational histories of violence. Drawing on analyses of postcolonial untimeliness and historical trauma, the book’s readings of Weiss, Conrad and Sebald identify implied, unimplied and unwelcome reading positions and differentiate between various ways in which situated readers engage with gaps in literary texts. The study demonstrates in practice how to take into account the noncontemporaneity of reading contexts without resorting to mere relativism.
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Notes
- 1.
The actual full name is Józef Teodor Konrad Nałęcz Korzeniowski. Sebald uses several versions of this Polish name, also the form Teodor Josef Konrad.
- 2.
“For if, from the point of view of an aesthetics of production, literature that appears contemporaneously breaks down into a heterogeneous multiplicity of the noncontemporaneous, that is, of works informed by the various moments of ‘shaped time’ of their genre (as the seemingly present heavenly constellations move apart astronomically into points of the most different temporal distance), this multiplicity of literary phenomena nonetheless, when seen from the point of view of an aesthetics of reception, coalesces again for the audience that perceives them and relates them to one another as works of its present, in the unity of a common horizon of literary expectations, memories, and anticipations that establishes their significance.” (Jauss 1982, 38.)
- 3.
My approach to the problem of incommensurability has been inspired by Natalie Melas’s comprehensive study All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison (2007). Melas proposes that while incommensurability is more familiar in a maximal epistemological sense, making comparison seem an impossible or violent affair, we might think of a “minimal” form of incommensurability, which “produces a generative dislocation without silencing discourse or marking the limit of knowledge” (Melas 2007, 31).
- 4.
As Brian Richardson pointed out in 1997, after the heyday of reception aesthetics and reader-response criticism, this “exciting development in literary theory and criticism” reached an “impasse” in the 1980s (Richardson 1997, 31). He criticized reader-response theory for having produced two problematic alternatives, formalist monism and subjectivist relativism, which were both unable to grasp the growing research, particularly in gender studies and postcolonial studies, focusing on oppositional reading positions. This criticism was part of a larger analytical tendency to rethink narratological and stylistic categories from the point of view of situated reading and context-specific effects of literary style. The question of situated reading has been raised especially in feminist narratology as well as in relatively scattered narratological analyses with a postcolonial perspective, which have sought to make postcolonial questions of hierarchy as important for narratological analysis as classical questions of focalization, perspective and self-consciousness (see Prince 2005, 377). Postclassical narratology has also opened narratological inquiry to contextual aspects of reading narratives, but as Hanna Meretoja points out, it tends to operate in a narratological tradition that is fundamentally unhistorical (Meretoja 2015, 31n2).
- 5.
Sommer refers here to readers belonging to a majority culture and reading minority texts. She studies textual strategies in minority writing in the Americas that urge readers to “proceed with caution” and refuse facile intimacy with the text. (Sommer 1999.)
- 6.
Oxford English Dictionary: “Contemporary: Belonging to the same time, age, or period; living, existing, or occurring together in time” (accessed athttp://www.oed.com.ezproxy.utu.fi:2048/view/Entry/40115?redirectedFrom=contemporary#eid; October 5, 2015).
- 7.
Assmann’s concept of the cultural regime of time refers to the manner in which a culture understands the relationship between the past, the present and the future, to a “complex of cultural presuppositions, values and decisions, which steer human will, action, emotion and interpretation…,” a foundation of thought, experience, action and imagination that individuals may not reflect upon consciously (Assmann 2013, 19). In her view, this shift – which she studies first and foremost in the German context and in relation to her focus on cultural memory studies – concerned the status of the future and the past in the present, as the visions of future linked to paradigms of modernization faded and the past and memory underwent a surprising rise in cultural status.
- 8.
In dictionaries, the word ‘untimely’ most often means an event happening at a premature or unsuitable moment. (See “unˈtimely, adj.”. OED Online. March 2013. Oxford University Press. 30 April 2013, <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/218944?rskey=sTGq59&result=1&isAdvanced=false>.) Melas approaches untimeliness as a disjunctive and uncertain relation between times, which complicates simplistic notions of historicism that “presume an exact coincidence between a poem, a poet, or an event and a punctual moment in time” (Melas 2009, 565). In broader terms, Melas uses the notion of untimeliness to articulate new paradigms for comparative literary studies beyond the developmental temporality that has traditionally operated as a basis for equivalence posited by the field between literary works and national literatures. Drawing on her research into postcolonial literature, Melas argues that literary works often articulate a disjointed relationship to time that gives expression to forgotten or unaccomplished dimensions of history as well as to alternative modernities that do not adhere to developmental time.
- 9.
Melas’s analysis of untimeliness draws from Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994), in which the specific historical situation of the status of communism as a “spectre” in the post-1989 context serves as the point of departure for the analysis of untimeliness as a general temporal condition and an ethical stance. For Derrida, an openness to the “non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present” is a precondition for a responsibility for those who are not there in the present – both to those who have been and to those who come after (Derrida 1994, xix). Thus, untimeliness gets linked in Derrida’s analysis both to the act of remembering and to imagining the future.
- 10.
Throughout Dimock’s essay, aurality and, more specifically, noise, function as a metaphor or analogy for the way in which specific, impure and unpredictable aspects of a given interpetative context are crucial in allowing the text to mean. For Dimock, the noise of the reader’s present is not a disturbance of what the text “really” says but a generative force that has not been given enough importance in traditional literary history. In her book Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time, which studies how American literature relates to literatures written in other times and continents, Dimock notes in passing that her concerns resemble those of Hans Robert Jauss but move away from Jauss’s focus on collective horizons of expectation: “I follow Hans Robert Jauss in seeing literary history as a ‘dialectic’ between text and reader, but whereas Jauss explores that dialectic as a history of changing ‘horizons of expectation,’ I explore it as a history of incomplete domestication” (Dimock 2006, 225).
- 11.
Entry “parataxis, n.: The placing of propositions or clauses one after another, without indicating by connecting words the relation (of coordination or subordination) between them, as in Tell me, how are you?”. In OED Online. March 2013. Oxford University Press. 24 April 2013 <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/137669?redirectedFrom=parataxis>.)
- 12.
I pay attention to paratactic sentences in the analysis of the form of a list, for instance, employed by both Sebald and Weiss, or in my remarks on Conrad’s condensed paratactic passages employed to evoke overhearing. In Weiss paratactic sentences are also at times employed as a hyperrealistic mode that illustrates the overflow of sensory stimuli.
- 13.
Comparatist Gisela Ecker has also recently employed the term parataxis in an analysis that connects the level of syntax to larger questions of relation, in her case, those posed by German-language literatures of migration and their reconfiguration of the concept of Heimat. Ecker shows that “parataxes of things,” such as lists of objects that migrants bring to their new home, are often employed in literary texts that deal with migration. These passages that connect things stemming from different contexts into spatial proximity use material objects to highlight affective processes that question static models of belonging based on an understanding of Heimat as a container-like space from which migrants are perpetually excluded. Ecker argues that a rereading of these passages, which are frequently overlooked in readings of these texts, could move analysis away from a fixation on origin and towards relational models better able to grasp construction of transnational spaces (See Ecker 2012, 222–225).
- 14.
Theodor W. Adorno argues in his essay on parataxis in the poetry of Hölderlin that parataxis may be employed as a stylistic mode that works against teleological notions of time (see Adorno 1974, 475–477).
- 15.
Conrad’s famous statement in the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus is often remembered as a statement about seeing, although it also refers to other senses: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see!” (Conrad 1933, xiv; see Fogel 1985, 48–49).
- 16.
For an insightful study of this problematic in the context of postwar German literature, see Langston 2008.
- 17.
See also Walter Benjamin’s notions of constellation and shock, in which creation of juxtapositions is linked to historical imagination, as two seemingly remote elements create a spark that mobilizes a reader into assuming a new historical perspective (see Benjamin 1977, 190–196; 260).
- 18.
My employment of the term contact narrative draws from Liesbeth Minnaard’s articulation of the term as well as Mary Louise Pratt’s much earlier notion of “contact zone” (Pratt 1991). Minnaard, who has analyzed literature of the Low Countries from postcolonial perspectives, points out that scholarly work on imperialism has to take into account work done on postimperial reading in several contexts because of the “transnational, global character of the imperialist project and postimperial responses to it” (Minnaard 2012, 124). In her own analytical work on contact narratives, Minnaard searches for “ways that so-called meta-narratives of the Holocaust, (de)colonization and labour migration co-constitute and mutually influence each other, in literature as well as in other discourses” (Minnaard 2012, 124).
- 19.
Halliwell distinguishes between two main tendencies in the conceptual articulation of how an artistic work relates to the outside world. In a world-reflecting model of mimesis, on the one hand, the work of art depicts extratextual reality in one way or another and can be judged at least partly through comparison to this reality. It therefore enhances a better understanding of the world outside the text. In a world-creating model of mimesis, by contrast, art becomes an independent and coherent heterocosm that refers to itself and should be judged as an autonomous entity. (Halliwell 2002, 1–33.)
- 20.
I would like to note that I find Melas’s nuanced approach to incommensurability important in this context, because an emphasis on distance alone might lead one to construe an unfruitful binary between absolute incommensurability and totalizing equivalence. (See footnote 3 and Melas 2007, 31.)
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Kaakinen, K. (2017). Introduction: Comparative Readings in the Twenty-First Century. In: Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51820-6_1
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