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Volume 135 - Issue 5 - October 2020

PMLA Volume 135 - Issue 5 -
Contents

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Other

Editor's Column

  • Languages in the Time of Corona
  • Wai Chee Dimock
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 January 2021, pp. 841-846
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Presidential Address 2020

Research Article

  • Reading Distance: Port Louis, Cairo, Beijing
  • Michael Gibbs Hill
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 January 2021, pp. 859-876
  • View abstract

    This essay uses a case study of Lin Shu (1852-1924) and (1876-1924) to argue for an approach to world literature called “reading distance.” Through a close reading of Lin Shu's and translations of Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie (Paul and Virginia) into Chinese and Arabic and a consideration of their work as translators and intellectuals, the essay reads between peripheries—places like Cairo and Beijing—to understand how intellectuals in those places grappled with difficult questions concerning translation, language reform, and changes in reading publics. By thinking with models of distant reading but also engaging with materials that are usually excluded from those models, the essay examines an important point of overlap in the intellectual and cultural histories of the Arab and Chinese enlightenments of the early twentieth century.

  • “You Do It!”: Going-to-Bed Books and the Scripts of Children's Literature
  • Robin Bernstein
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 January 2021, pp. 877-894
  • View abstract

    This essay uses performance theory to intervene in a decades-long debate about a characteristic of children's literature: it is the only major category of literature written by one group (adults) for another (children). According to a contested but tenacious school of thought, this difference between writers and readers embeds top-down power, or adult domination of children, in children's literature. I identify a popular subcategory of children's literature, the “going-to-bed book” (exemplified by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd's Goodnight Moon), which appears to epitomize and therefore shore up this top-down model. I then read going-to-bed books through function—that is, the ritualistic actions or performances that these books prompt, or script, among child and adult readers. This mode of analysis initially produces seemingly powerful evidence in support of the top-down model of children's literature; but that evidence, as I show by examining two recent best sellers, ultimately unravels.

  • Between Fiction and Physiology: Brain Fever in The Brothers Karamazov and Its English Afterlife
  • Jacob Emery, Elizabeth F. Geballe
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 January 2021, pp. 895-913
  • View abstract

    Working at the intersection of translation theory and medical humanities, this article interrogates the term brain fever, which Constance Garnett, adhering to clichés of English sentimental fiction, uses in reference to a wide variety of medical conditions in the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Garnett's choice has become useful shorthand for the narrative function of delirium in Dostoevsky's works, but it obscures the sensitivity to medical terminology that informs the Russian texts. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky stages the conflict between Enlightenment rationality and religious mysticism by satirizing the terminology of medical authorities and contrasting it with the language of faith, which posits its own etiology for mental diseases. Garnett's abundance of interpolated brain fevers can be read not as a simple mistranslation but as marking the roles of translation and diagnosis in mediating the various cultural paradigms produced in fictional worlds.

  • Notes on Vegan Camp
  • Emelia Quinn
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 January 2021, pp. 914-930
  • View abstract

    By examining a kitsch piece of nineteenth-century scrimshaw on display at the Hull Maritime Museum, Lady Gaga's infamous meat dress, and a range of mock meat products, this essay expands the scope of camp representation to theorize how vegans can, and do, draw both sustenance and pleasure from what has previously only caused pain. Appropriating products of exploitation as “vegan camp” constitutes a refusal to experience horror or disgust and instead to enjoy a surface performance of human exceptionalism, an enjoyment that parodies earnestness and exposes the desperate drive to assert human dominance over the nonhuman animal to farce. Vegan camp thus provides a mode of reading that broadens vegan-oriented scholarship beyond its current associations with the serious and sincere.

Little-Known Documents

Cultures of Argument

Theories and Methodologies

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