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The comparative gesture performs both the act and the question of transition between the terms compared. Understood as an intercultural practice, comparative literature may thus also be understood as both a transitive and a transnational process, creating its own object and form of knowledge as it identifies and analyses lines of relation and exchange between literary cultures. When navigating between languages, the discipline becomes critically engaged with the possibility and methods of such navigation. Interdisciplinary and intermedial versions of comparative studies likewise centre around transitions that may themselves remain under-analysed.
This collection of essays, with contributions ranging from medieval literature to digital humanities, seeks to illuminate and interrogate the very diversity of comparative situations, with their attendant versions of comparative discourse. The volume as a whole thereby reflects, however fragmentedly, a field of study that is itself faced with the reality of transition. As both a thematic and formal concern in comparative work, transition emerges, within any historical period or other configuration in which it is charted and analysed, as key to the renewed relevance of comparative literary scholarship and study today.
List of contents
CONTENT: Michael G. Kelly: Introduction: Framing Transition(s) in Comparative Studies - Daragh O'Connell: 'Denti Alligator': The Dantification of Popular Culture - Gemma Pellissa Prades: Creating New Myths in the Fifteenth Century: From Ovid's Medea to a Lustful Nun from Barcelona - Jack Fennell: Looking for Lucian's Locale: The Case of «Cuairt ar an nGealaigh» - Emilia Di Rocco: Kissing the Earth and Defining Space: Transitions between Folklore, Religion and Literature - Manus O'Dwyer: The Language of Birds: Valente, Scholem, Benjamin - Kerstin Fest: Becoming Nonmodern: Transitory States in Gustav Meyrink's Der Golem (1915) - Cathy Roche-Liger: The Animal Metamorphoses of the Artist in Paul Durcan's Intermedial Poetry - Kenneth Keating: 'dude I have alts': Computer Technology and Poetic Innovation in John Redmond's MUDe and Geoffrey Squires' Two New Poems - Cathrin Bengesser: How to Play a Film: The Game-Like Pleasures of Digital Home Media - Dara Waldron: «Near Documentary» as Post-Bressonian Aesthetic: Cinematographic Dialoguing between Jeff Wall's Adrian Walker and Ben Rivers' Two Years at Sea - Michael G. Kelly: D'un château l'autre: Authorship, Individuation and Utopia in Pola X and De la guerre
About the author
Michael G. Kelly lectures in French and comparative literature at the University of Limerick.
Daragh O¿Connell is a lecturer in Italian Studies at University College Cork.
