This paper will discuss the challenges to comparative literature as a discipline brought about by the globalization of economies and universities, the decline of the nation-state, the new regime of telecommunications, and the rise of cultural Studies. In particular the question will be how comparative lit- erature can avoid the Scylla of becoming “world literature” or “world cultural studies,” on the one hand, and on the other hand the Charybdis of remaining blithely Eurocentric. The argument will be that the key to an answer to this question lies in main- taining linguistic, literary and cultural expertise as the center of the discipline. The difficulty, of course, will be to train teachers and scholars adept both in European languages and East Asian, subcontinental Indian or African languages. The danger, as always, is that comparative literature, with the best will in the world, will continue in spite of itself to perpetuate and extend the cultural imperialism of the United States and Europe. It has to become a two-way comparative discipline in which neither side is hegemonic. This is by no means easy to accomplish.

This essay looks at the way the conventional notion of history is disturbed when infected with trauma. The idea of history could point to more useful notions of experience, practice, language, and thought when it is thought through with trauma. First, the belatedness of trauma defies the lineal historical time scheme that shapes the temporal flow from past to present. Second, the traumatic experiences of the 20th century compel a shift from the notion of individual-centered trauma to a broad social and cultural phenomenon. Trauma shatters or strains at the limit of symbolic resources and hence puts culturally coherent history writing in jeopardy. The failure to assimilate and understand trauma reflects a radical rupture in the continuity of culture, and indicates an impoverishment and crisis whose symptom is the inability to write history. The second part of the essay argues against the impossibility of representation and suggests that new forms of history are still being and must be written through re-categorization and through evolving new forms of representation. Cultural reproduction of trauma in America and China suggests that it is in the retelling and especially in visual representation that traces of trauma can be preserved and transmitted. Finally, the film Hiroshima mon amour opens up the possibilities of a new representation through psychoanalytical dialogue. The film proves that it is precisely in an alternative form of talk that one can have access to the painful reality of a trauma. In the film, history, as a traumatic “patient,” is placed under analysis. Through verbal articulation, something in the way of “talking revelation” if not “talking cure,” what is buried in the unconscious can be made conscious, what was not registered as unutterable experience can be re-experienced belatedly, yielding benefits of affect, anxiety and understanding.

In 1978, Susan Sontag wrote Illiness as Metaphor, the celebrated essay on the metaphorical and often derogatory uses of illness in Western culture. Sontag’s aim was to remove the symbolic stigma attached to cancer and other diseases. In 1989, Sontag wrote a sequel, AIDS and Its Metaphors, that attacked the almost universal labeling of AIDS as a plague. Both works aimed to free both patients and panicked population from the tyranny of a set of metaphors. In this paper, the focused “dis-ease,” hysteria, is a very common and imprecise term for a variety of symptoms. Chameleon-like in its manifestations, hysteria, unlike those illnesses addressed by Sontag, is yet not a fully identified illness. Rather, itis a “dis-ease,” a disease ill at ease, fluctuating between psychotic geneses and somatic manifestations, between illness and its metaphors, or between so-called “real hysterics,” who still present themselves as patients in clinics and waiting rooms, and the wide repertoire of metaphors that has been attached to the condition. Being a “dis-ease” as metaphor, hysteria is culturally and socially defined. Medically it is not an exclusively female disease, but culturally and socially it is a form of madness which has been particularly associated with women. Indeed, hysteria is metaphorically gendered. It is manifested in the form of the “speaking” feminine body. The feminine body speaks, acts out, consumes, tortures, and even mutilates itself. Being a hysterical woman means exhibiting symptoms emblematic of helplessness, enfeeblement, and immobilization, acting out thereby, through sickness pantomime, the sufferer’s actual social condition. The purpose of this paper is to read hysteria as an expression of the inscription of gender relations within medical discourse. Also, to read hysteria through its metaphors is to deem hysteria as the chief site of debate over matters related to sex and gender relations. I will apply feminist methods and insights to read hysteria and its metaphors, and to explore the impact of this gendered “dis-ease” on the image of woman since the main gist of this paper is to formulate a feminist-informed reading of hysteria at the fin de siècle.

Plague has been a popular subject for speculative fiction throughout the twentieth century, especially as a convention to depopulate the world and consider new social arrangements. At the turn of the present century, plague is a consistent component of the near future diegesis. Plague becomes part of the background to the post-holocaust world. It is perceived as an ongoing experience and occurrence and its metaphorical use is connected to visualisations of obsolescence, ecological anxiety, capitalist logic and spiritual concerns. In other genres such as historical romance in the 1980s, plague is a mechanism of social mobility. Here it is a natural, God-given, horrible, but transient experience. This account of plague sees it as survivable and the consequences of survival become the focus of the story. Plague is a way of achieving social change, especially social mobility. By the 1990s, the plague scenario was still attractive, but it had become mediated to encompass anxieties around highlevel conspiracies. Plague and fatal epidemic disease were consequences of scientific, military and political decision-making to which the victim of the plague had little access. It thus becomes a contingent event which must be averted either by collective or individual heroic effort. The narrative therefore becomes much more of a thriller, to uncover the crime which set the potential of fatal epidemic disease in motion. At this point, the plague is often displaced and narrative attention focuses upon the exposure of fictional medical, business or scientific malpractice. Plague can therefore become a fictional convention for ex-trapolating high level and commonplace corruption, ethical di- lemmas, exploitative practices and the formal/informal intricacies of international relations, economics and ecosystems. In the thriller, plague is an ambivalent entity often seen as a necessary evil. A first warning allows us to mend our ways. As well as the consequence of scientific advances, malpractice and corporate economics, plague is also seen in a variety of narratives as the logical, but unforeseen, consequence to a dependence on technology, e.g., Tepper’s A Plague of Angels, Piercey’s He, She & It, Longo’s film version of “Johnny Mnemonic” and Patrick Lynch’s novel Carriers. However, in rare instances it is humanity’s salvation and it becomes a metaphor for transition both physically and materially or in terms of attitude and worldview. This paper looks at the contemporary mythology of plague in popular fiction. It aims to explore the meaning of plague in its eschatological manifestation either as savior or destroyer.

Taking Marguerite Duras’s descriptions of “places” in The Lover as models of “place,” I will inquire into the entanglement between the essential simplicity of image of place in Duras’s writing and the special narrative mode that creates these images. I shall examine how Duras’s mode of narration and the images floating between attachment (inside) and detachment (outside) of positions constantly reshape the narrator’s problematic “identity” throughout her experience of “places.” This study intends to incorporate semiotic models of place into phenomenological-hermeneutic research. Place, here, is considered not as the architectural “space-object” defined only by its visual properties, but as “cognitive space,” which consists in investing with spatial properties (cf. “seeing,” “hearing,” “saying,” “touching,” etc.) the cognitive relations between subjects, as between subjects and objects. While examining the idea that semiotic models of places are products of cultural, political or economic “experiences,” I shall argue that the range of place extending beyond its role as strict container or simple locator is more than site-specific. As the site of resistance, or of difference, the lived body constantly generates organic heterotopic places.

This essay re-examines the persistent and perplexing question regarding the relationship between “literature” and “theory” at the end of the millennium as a result of the current looming uncertainty concerning the terms’ ever-shifting meanings. My intention then is to speculate on this uncertainty, by contrasting our situation with that of Brecht in his study of the Baroque world of Galileo and Shakespeare. Brecht’s work on these two authors is evidence of his own sense that the roots of modernity could be found and studied in the figure of Galileo, and the characterizations of Shakespeare. While many at the school for theory in the humanities (and elsewhere), might be concerned about the demise of literature at the end of the millennium, there is still equally a worry about where our modern sense of it all began and how it can possibly proceed. These concerns are at the base of Brecht’s glance back. The works resulting from his backwards glance, in particular to Galileo, reveal his own sense that we, like Galileo, can create catastrophic new worlds if we fail to speculate and act carefully. My focus, in this article, is Brecht’s Short Organum for the Theater, a theoretical work and The Life of Galileo, a play, both of which resulted from his study of the two Renaissance-Baroque authors. In this regard, Brecht’s work is both instructive and informative, and helps us to unravel the complex question regarding the relationship between literature, theory, and the humanities as we begin a new millennium.