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Depicting scenes of abject poverty and destruction, Hans Magnus Enzensberger reveals that the ‘Third-World’ places he described at the start of his famous essay ‘Europe in Ruins’ (1990) – Luanda, Beirut, El Salvador, Sri Lanka – were in fact European cities in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War: Rome, Frankfurt, Athens, Berlin. The double-take thus forced on the reader highlights how close we are to disaster, how short our memory. He quotes Martha Gellhorn, who reported that, according to those she interviewed in Germany, the Nazis had always been in the next village, never ‘here’. In a particularly strong image, in his 1995 Panfleto desde el planeta de los simios [Pamphlet from the Planet of the Apes], Manuel Vazquez Montalban compares the European project to a young woman repeatedly pregnant after being raped, for whom the fiction of the Immaculate Conception continues to be invoked. Europe, the Immaculate, reflecting herself in multiple distorting mirrors, ignores the barbarians in its midst, her own barbarians, and waits for the Golden Age. In ‘Cafe Europa’ (1996), Slavenka Drakulic remarks on the aspirational nature of the name ‘Europe’ in countries of the former Eastern bloc: it assumes that we know exactly what it means, it offers plenitude, belonging, comfort, choice; ‘a promised land, a new Utopia, a lollipop’; or perhaps, ‘the ability to just survive in impossible conditions’. In Tahar Ben Jelloun’s 2006 Partir [Leaving Tangier], young Moroccans in Tangier wait at dusk for the twinkling lights of Spain to appear, as a mirage, across the Strait of Gibraltar, and dream of leaving. In Amara Lakhous’s Scontro di civilta per un ascensore a piazza Vittorio (2006) Amedeo – polite, well-educated, who reads the broadsheets and speaks perfect Italian, the most integrated, the least despicable Italian of the myriad characters who hate foreigners but despise those that come from different parts of Italy just as much – turns out to be the Algerian Ahmed, holding a mirror up to Italy’s divided history and lack of national integration: ‘if Amedeo is not Italian, then who is the real Italian?’. The question would still apply if ‘’European’ replaced ‘Italian’. This paper, which will be by necessity fragmentary in nature, will draw upon essays, poetry and fiction from different parts of Europe or looking at Europe from outside its borders to reflect (on) the impossible definition of Europe, the shifting ideas, constructions, dreams and nightmares of a geologically, politically, culturally rock-solid or plastic, fluid or utterly imaginary Europe that repeatedly dissolves and re-forms elsewhere, ‘otherwhere’, differently.

Under true pretences\ud We know very little about the life of Ovid, and it is this absence of fact that has made him useful as the central figure of my narrative and allowed me the liberty of free invention, since what I wanted to write was neither historical novel nor biography, but a fiction with its roots in possible event. \ud Thus starts the Afterword of David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life, a novel in which the poet Ovid, exiled from Rome, narrates his experience in the border outpost of Tomis, near the delta of the Danube on the Black Sea. ‘Relegated’ among the Getae at the edges of the Empire and ‘expelled form the confines of [the] Latin tongue’ (IL 26), this glittering and cynical poet undergoes a series of changes or metamorphoses. Initially pining for Rome and its sophisticated, complex language, he learns to overcome his hostility towards the barbarous people and their language, but when he discovers a wild Child that had been raised by the wolves in the forest and captures him with the intention of teaching him to speak and to be human, he soon realises that he himself has to learn from the Child another language, based not on symbolization and arbitrary convention but on an intuitive identity with things, on becoming the things signified in silence. After the death of the village’s elderly chief, which the villagers blame on the child’s demonic powers, the poet and the Child escape north across the frozen river. Ovid’s death is the poet’s final transformation, perhaps a literal metamorphosis like the ones described in Ovid’s great poem. Malouf’s Afterword concludes: \ud My purpose was to make this glib fabulist of ‘the changes’ live out in reality what had been, in his previous existence, merely the occasion for dazzling literary display. (IL 154)\ud Is Malouf’s novel then a fantasy inspired by ‘mere’ literary dazzle or, as ‘a fiction with its roots in possible event’, is it a work that, while not claiming to the factual accuracy of biography or the broad reliability of the historical background of a historical novel, can however still claim to be rooted in verisimilitude, in events that, although not documented, are nevertheless possible, as would be the case with a realist novel, or in Aristotelian poetics? The Afterword thematizes a tension between the desire to anchor the novel to history and the desire to free Ovid from historical necessity. How can Ovid live out ‘in reality’ the metamorphoses to which he is subjected, if metamorphoses are but the occasion for ‘literary display’? \ud This tension also defines, more widely, the large number of novels written as if they were the autobiographies of historical personages, novels that gesture towards historical factuality and literary fictionality, towards ‘truth’ and invention, and exist under the sign of an essential structural displacement (the ‘autobiography’ is written by another) that brings to the foreground structural, narrative, and ethical issues also central to autobiography itself.\ud (First paragraphs of submitted version)

In her article "Comparative Literature, Ancient Rome, and the Crisis of Modern European History" Lucia Boldrini considers Edward Said's and Jacques Derrida's arguments about the centrality of romania to the European philological tradition and the contemporary understanding of literature and discusses in this light a selection of twentieth-century novels set at the time when literature, empire, Europe, Latinity, and Christianity were coming together: Broch's The Death of Virgil, Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, Horia's God Was Born in Exile, and Malouf's An Imaginary Life. Linking the Roman past to the present of historical destruction and colonialism, these novels also establish a relationship between the old protagonist and a child or youth, representative of absolute innocence and authenticity, who finally walks away, dissolves or dies. In their interrupted state, these youths cannot become the future and can only presage utopia. Having held up the image of a different future and a different historical time, the novels show that only in the acknowledgment of historical contingencies can one recognize a responsibility towards generations past and yet to come, and towards those who are not "us."

Introduction to CLCWeb Special Issue 15.7 (2013), New Work in Comparative Literature in Europe

This essay considers Levi's The Periodic Table in relation to two debates - that on 'The Two Cultures', as C. P. Snow's 1959 Rede lecture famously defined it, and that sparked by Sartre's position in What is Literature? on the role of the writer in post-war society, to which Adorno's responded, in 1962, with his essay on 'Commitment'. The essay concludes that despite Levi’s apparent demand for clarity, based on positions that echo those of Sartre within the debate on 'commitment' and those of Snow within the debate on the 'two cultures', his writing has much more complex and darker overtones, and continues to 'rattle', as Adorno would say, the 'cage' of a meaning that refuses to be simple.

13 This issue of Comparative Critical Studies will appear shortly before the publication of the ACLA’s decennial report on the state of the discipline in the United States.1 Haun Saussy’s 2003 draft report opened with the claim that ‘Comparative Literature has, in a sense, won its battles’, words that immediately recall, by contrast, Susan Bassnett’s assertion, ten years earlier, that ‘Today, comparative literature in one sense is dead’.3 Although apparently claiming opposite fates for comparative literature, these assertions in fact converge in that ‘one sense’ that qualifies them, and both turn out to suggest something quite different from what they appear to say. Bassnett’s death notice was for a discipline born out of the European nineteenth-century, with its emphasis on national literatures, its redefinition of the notion of literature itself, its focus on a direct relationship between literature and (national) identity, and which now would give way to a new, more open, lively, politically aware understanding of the discipline beyond its Eurocentric historical definition, and its relocation in the wider field of the study of intercultural processes, of which translation studies would furnish the principal model (to the point that comparative literature becomes for Bassnett a sub-section of translation studies).4 Similarly, Saussy’s declaration of victory is followed by considerations on the institutional low status, even anonymity, of comparative literature, whose successes (the development of literary theory, the opening up of the syllabus to books and authors from outside the national canon) have been assimilated by other disciplines and departments; this victory turns out to be, in effect, a kind of death by dispersion, and requires comparative literature to continue to fight for institutional recognition and survival: what risks extinction here is an academic discipline safe

Robert Crawford recently delivered an impassioned address on the monolingual assumptions that underpin ‘English’ literature. ‘English’, as a concept and as a discipline, has been historically constructed to appropriate within its canon other literatures written in English but not produced in England or even in Great Britain. At the same time, this ‘English’ excludes the literature produced in England or Great Britain in other languages: Anglo-Norman writings in French, early modern Latin poetry, Scottish and Welsh writing. Today’s pluralism does not extend to the past of English literature, from which ‘plurilingualism’ is erased in what Crawford called ‘English’s Alzheimer disease’. And this, Crawford argued, is symptomatic of a persistent imperialist construction of ‘English’.1 Crawford’s contention might well put us in mind of Lawrence Venuti’s argument on the translator’s invisibility. For Venuti, the historical privileging of a scientific, transparent version of the English language has worked to discourage ‘foreignness’: the best kind of translation is ‘fluent’, and reads as if we were experiencing the work in the original, without any mediation. The translation is expected to be transparent, the translator invisible, and English, implicitly, to remain solidly monolithic and easily recognizable.2 Crawford’s and Venuti’s concerns enable us to return to a question frequently discussed by commentators on modernism: its claimed elitism. The accusation ultimately stems from a traditional, and indeed canonical, requirement of ‘accessibility’ predicated on the use of transparent, plain, recognizable language and forms. This demand can be traced back to the ideal of linguistic simplicity and anti-metaphorical

The medieval theory of the four levels of meaning has often been quoted by critics as a relevant model for the study of the multi-layered language of Finnegans Wake. Dante’s versions of the theory in the Convivio and the “Letter to Can Grande della Scala” are particularly important in this context, insofar as Dante was the first modern European poet to claim for his own love poetry the same interpretative method traditionally used for the divine word. In this essay I discuss whether Dante’s theory can be “applied” to the Wake, or whether it is in fact already inscribed within Joyce’s text, made part of its self-referential interpretative system, and with what effects for the theory as well as for the text. I argue that Dante’s medieval exegetical model is transformed in the Wake through precise references that constantly evoke and confound Dante’s terms, thus showing its inadequacy for the modern polysemic work but also, at the same time, acknowledging its fundamental role in the elaboration of such modern radical polysemy.