There is not only an existential poignancy but also an intellectual piquancy to the 1950 suicide note of F. O. Matthiessen, one of the founders of American studies: “I am depressed over world conditions. I am a Christian and a Socialist. I am against any order which interferes with that objective” (“F. O. Matthiessen”). Matthiessen attributed his fateful decision to a situation—the Cold War—in which it increasingly seemed difficult to assert credibly and pursue effectively a socialist agenda without being presumed or pressured to hold commitments to materialism, atheism, and secularism. The dominant narrative of American studies is that the Cold War gave the field its life—the ideological impetus and institutional infrastructure to produce and peddle a sophisticated version of American exceptionalism (Radway 47-49; Wise 308-12). But Matthiessen's tragic case suggests instead that the Cold War may have killed American studies, at least a possible version of it. Matthiessen's fatal dilemma, I want respectfully to suggest, might instruct us how to reconstruct the history and future of a field whose “bread-and-butter concerns” have always included religion (Stein and Murison 1; cf. Modern). Matthiessen's political credentials as a socialist were bona fide, and his intellectual inclinations were toward deep historicist analysis, but he couldn't commit to Marxism, despite his frank acknowledgment of its indispensable contribution not only to intellectual culture but also to his own thinking. Clearly, personal religious reasons played a role—“I am a Christian, not through upbringing but by conviction, and I find any materialism inadequate” (Matthiessen, “Education” 180). But I want to underscore Matthiessen's intellectual objections, which arose from the evidence of his historical inquiry into American literature and culture. That is to say, I want to distinguish between how his theological convictions may have prejudiced him against Marxism's secularist teleology and how his scholarly investigation of American literature and culture raised legitimate questions about Marxism's implicit secularization narrative. In reviews of the Marxist literary histories of his Americanist colleagues V. F. Calverton and Granville Hicks, Matthiessen complained of their inability to comprehend what he called “the main development of religious idealism from Edwards through the transcendental movement” and “the strain of affirmation of the ideal that runs from the seventeenth century to the twentieth” (Responsibilities 187, 195). The secularist premises of Marxist analysis—at least in the crude form espoused by Calverton and Hicks—seemed to Matthiessen blunt instruments with which to accomplish deep understanding of the pronounced “religious idealism” of American literature and culture.

A conventional definition of cosmopolitanism stresses

In the foundation of comparative literature as a distinctive discipline, cosmopolitanism was valued for its “exoticism”—namely, the feeling of being “a citizen ‘of every nation,’ not to belong to one's ‘native country’” (Texte 79), which in (French) literature translated as the openness toward other (northern European) literatures (xi).

Defining cosmopolitanism in relation to national loyalties, multilingualism, and mobility overlooks the fact that the cosmopolitan is much older than the nation and that not all multilingual abilities and mobilities are accepted as cosmopolitan, especially when they lack “sophistication.” Since I have partially discussed these issues elsewhere, I will not pursue them here but will restrict myself to Hannah Arendt's future-oriented concept of cosmopolitanism as global citizenship. My aim is to stress the elitism in many theories of cosmopolitanism and to show how comparative literature can challenge this elitism by looking at “hidden traditions.” To do so, I will draw on two essays by Arendt—“The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition” and “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?” As for the first essay, I will introduce Gypsy next to Jew, the latter being Arendt's exclusive interest despite the implications of her use of the concept of the pariah. In the second essay, Arendt discusses acting qua human, the rights granted by membership in a (cosmo)polis, and what “citizen of the world” (cosmopolitan?) means in relation to the public space, and she stresses the value of communication, with the living and the dead. Furthermore, Arendt differentiates between cosmopolitan and European. I argue that postwar European integration challenges in unexpected ways Arendt's view both on rights as linked to nationality and on citizenship in a cosmopolitan polity.

Translators are Typically invisible, noticed only when they blunder. how might one interpret, then, a book translated by a now very visible Nobel laureate, especially when the underlying text confronts controversial subjects that the laureate's own works avoid? Such is the case of the Portuguese writer José Saramago (1922-2010), who in 1981 translated Ferdinand Oyono's 1956 Une vie de boy. In its press release announcing the 1998 Nobel for literature, the Swedish Academy called him a writer “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality” (“Nobel Prize”). It is this ability to communicate what refuses fixed meaning that Walter Benjamin famously restored to the art of translation, endowing it with a philosophical and artistic distinction: “Even when all the surface content can be extracted and transmitted, the primary concern of the genuine translator remains elusive” (19). “Escrever é traduzir” (“To write is to translate”), Saramago would state years after he gained world visibility thanks to the translations of his works. In both cases, he argues, the objective is to pursue what lies beyond language, but the translator strives to communicate what may have been beyond not only the language of the original but also that of the translation (“Traduzir”). Saramago's translation of Oyono's Une vie de boy, a text that readers of Saramago's oeuvre generally overlook along with his other translations, invites a consideration of how the elusive as an artistic value with broad appeal may relate to the local cultural contingencies informing the translator's language choices.

A rendition by nayif kharma of michael etherton's theatrical adaptation of john reed's english translation, the arabic version of Ferdinand Oyono's novel Une vie de boy is at three removes from the original French. Under the title Al-khādim (“The Servant”), the play appeared in 1982 in the series Min al-masrah al-'ālami (“From World Theater”), published by Kuwait's Ministry of Culture. Since to all effects and purposes Etherton's theatrical adaptation is Kharma's original, it is necessary to begin by describing how the Zambian-born British writer who taught drama at the University of Zambia in the 1960s adapted his source, Reed's Houseboy, before discussing how the play was later Arabized.

La Gracia Triunfante en la vida de catharina tegakovita (“Grace triumphant in the life of catherine tekakwitha”), an account of the miraculous life of Kateri Tekakwitha, an Iroquois Indian from New France, traversed language and space to be published in Mexico City, New Spain, in 1724. Juan de Urtassum, a Basque Navarran Jesuit who had spent many years in Mexico, translated his fellow Jesuit Pierre Cholonec's hagiographic text from its original French (first published in Paris in 1717). Two appendixes accompanied the translation. In the first, a learned theological apology, the Mexican cleric Juan Castorena y Urúsa extolled the piety of indigenous women whom he deemed fit to be nuns; the second consisted of short narratives detailing the exemplary lives of New Spanish indigenous women. Urtassum and Castorena compiled the volume in order to advocate for the foundation of convents for indigenous women, presenting Tekakwitha's piety as evidence of indigenous women's capacity for Christian virtue (Díaz, Indigenous Writings 56; Greer, “Iroquois Virgin” 237). While Tekakwitha's sanctity helped Urtassum's case, his knowledge of and indeed interest in her provenance were scant. He locates the Iroquois Nation (the “Provincia de los Iraqueses”) on the northern frontier of New Spain (today's New Mexico), where indigenous groups had resisted Spanish attempts at colonization and evangelization for centuries. He “domesticates” the distant Iroquois for the New Spanish reader, comparing them with the Araucanian Indians of Chile, whose bravery Alonso de Ercilla immortalized in his epic poem La Araucana and who, though geographically distant from Mexico, seemed familiar through the Spanish colonial condition they shared with Urtassum's readers. In a telling moment, in the dedication to his patron that precedes the translation, Urtassum refers to “todo este emispherio” (“this entire hemisphere”). It is clear, however, that this reference encompasses only Spanish imperial possessions, including the recently founded California missions. The distant Iroquois Nation, located in geographically indistinct New France, does not figure in this geopolitical economy, nor do other American territories in the possession of rival imperial powers.

Comparative literature has always pursued literary studies in a transnational framework. But for much of its history it has been a “modest intellectual enterprise, fundamentally limited to Western Europe, and mostly revolving around the river Rhine (German philologists working on French literature). Not much more,” as Franco Moretti pithily sums it up (54). The rise of postcolonial theory in the wake of Edward Said's and Gayatri Spivak's influential work vastly expanded comparatist horizons, as did the attention to minority literatures that spread outward from the study of American literature and culture in the 1990s. In 1993 Charles Bernheimer's report to the American Comparative Literature Association, “Comparative Literature at the Turn of the Century,” criticized the elitist and exclusionary tenor of earlier reports on the state of the discipline by Harry Levin (1965) and Tom Greene (1975). Instead, it emphasized “tendencies in literary studies, toward a multicultural, global, and interdisciplinary curriculum” and called for an expansion from comparative literature's traditional focus on a mostly western European and North American canon of works to a truly global conception of Goethean Weltliteratur, for inclusion of previously marginalized minority literatures from around the world, and for connections to media studies, other humanities disciplines, and the social sciences (47).

Across several of his influential anthologies of american literature, rufus griswold—nineteenth-century anthologist, poet, and erstwhile editor of Edgar Allan Poe—offers conflicting measures of what we now call early American literature. In The Prose Writers of America, for example, which first appeared in 1847 and later went into multiple editions, Griswold offers a familiar and currently derided set of parameters for this corpus of writing. In his prefatory remarks, dated May 1847, he explains that he has chosen not to include “the merely successful writers” who precede him. Although success might appear a high enough bar to warrant inclusion, he emphasizes that he has focused on writers who “have evinced unusual powers in controlling the national mind, or in forming the national character …” (5). This emphasis on what has been nationally consequential echoes other moments in Prose Writers, as well as paratextual material in his earlier The Poets and Poetry of America (1842) and his Female Poets of America (1848). In his several miniature screeds condemning the lack of international copyright, as well as the consequent flooding of the American market with cheap reprints, Griswold explains the “difficulties and dangers” this lack poses to “American literature”: “Injurious as it is to the foreign author, it is more so to the American [people,] whom it deprives of that nationality of feeling which is among the first and most powerful incentives to every feat of greatness” (Prose Writers 6). In The Poets and Poetry of America, he similarly complains that America's “national tastes and feelings are fashioned by the subject of kings; and they will continue so to be, until [there is] an honest and political system of reciprocalcopyright …” (v). Even in The Female Poets of America, the subject of which one might think would change the nature of this conversation, Griswold returns to the national project, examining the significance of women writers for it. He cites the fact that several of the poets included in this volume have written from lives that were “no holydays of leisure” but defined rather by everything from “practical duties” to the experience of slavery. He also responds to those carping “foreign critics” who propose that “our citizens are too much devoted to business and politics to feel interest in pursuits which adorn but do not profit”; these home-laboring women writers, he argues, may end up being the source of that which is most genuinely American and most correctly poetic: “Those who cherish a belief that the progress of society in this country is destined to develop a school of art, original and special, will perhaps find more decided indications of the infusion of our domestic spirit and temper in literature, in the poetry of our female authors, than in that of our men” (8). As it turns out, even women poets are held to the standard of national self-expression and national self-realization; the surprise lies only in the fact that they live up to this standard.

The comparative provides literary history with a margin of redemptive self-betrayal. by the comparative, we should understand certain practices of reading and inquiry that reveal actions and texts to be more than they appear and that expose narrative claims as other than they strictly claim to be. Historiography is likewise susceptible to this exposure. Narrative acts of literary history no less subject to such self-salvaging through comparative discernment, alert us to historiography's uncertain adequacy to the histories it narrates. The redeeming quotient of the comparative signaled here resides in its preemption of tautology. The comparative, that is, can forestall, if not preclude outright, the possibility of any phenomenon's becoming definitively self-identical. In affirming the comparability of its objects, textual or otherwise, the comparative uncovers and ratifies the difference within and among phenomena and the contingencies of their existence, a sanctioning of difference that could mitigate solipsism and self-delusion. For literary history, this means foreclosing, or at least hedging against, literary history's morphing into world history as tautologically plotted by certain master narratives of historiography that claim total explicatory power over the fortuities of history and historical life. These include narratives of imperial successions, providential history, world monarchies, epochal histories that plot human existence on the self-universalized grid of their own periodicity, and the history of Spirit commonly referred to as “Prussian universalisms.” In this regard, Hegelian Geistgeschichte, with its dialectical-materialist derivative known as Marxism and its liberal-democratic free-market remnants called capitalism, both plied under the flag of modernization theory, is exemplary (Pomper, Elphick, and Vann). These are among historiography's most salient master narratives, perennially dominant in historical discourse and in the hegemony of states that have ideologically abetted and politically deployed them (Fasolt 219-32; Guha 24-47). The comparative persistently troubles the structural coherence of these historiographical master plots and their self-validating systematicity.

To understand ferdinand oyono's 1956 cameroonian novel une vie de boy in its two chinese translations, first Understand that modern Chinese literature begins in translation. This is true with translation understood both narrowly and broadly. The first “modern” work of Chinese literature—that is, the first work of literary fiction published in modern vernacular Chinese—is the 1918 “Diary of a Madman” (), by Lu Xun (1881-1936), its title a reference to Nikolay Gogol's 1835 story, its narrative written in the vein of calls by Liang Qichao (1873-1929) for a “revolution in fiction” ( [“Foreword” and “On the Relationship”]), a revolution inspired by translation and the possibilities for fiction Liang was exposed to through translation. In the early twentieth century, fiction written in Chinese began to be foreignizing or, as James Holmes would put it, “mimetic” of foreign prose, “re-emphasizing, by its strangeness, the strangeness which for the target-language reader is inherent in the semantic message of the original,” fitting “a period when genre concepts are weak, literary norms are being called into question, and the target culture as a whole stands open to outside impulses” (27-28).

Kenneth W. Warren offers a salutary historicizing of the field of African American literary studies that reaffirms the historical and, hence, provisional nature of group identity. His book What Was African American Literature? views black literary studies through a skeptical lens that reveals the discipline's continuing investments in cultural “blackness” as nostalgic, transhistorical, and exceptionalist. In much the same way, scholars of United States history and literature have deconstructed—with little controversy—the transhistorical notion of America and exposed the Cold War origins of “American studies.” Yet responses to What Was African American Literature? have been at best lukewarm and at worst harshly critical. Why do the implications of Warren's argument seem so worrisome? Do they suggest we must choose between the field's historical and theoretical integrity and its institutional existence? Can the critical tradition of African American literature retain its institutional authority and its progressive political integrity without resorting to anachronistic concepts of black particularity, concepts through which “the limitations of the black condition get rewritten as a paradoxically fortunate turn” (19)?

Almost anyone who reads ferdinand oyono's une vie de boy (1956) in any language will conclude that the novel focuses on French colonialism. But is it only about colonialism by the French? An analysis of the many German resonances throughout the text—as well as an engagement with the German translation of Une vie de boy—suggests that it is about much more. Oyono's Une vie de boy enables the reader to reflect on Europan colonialism more broadly beyond the role of France. The novel offers a lens onto Germany's colonial history because Cameroon was a former colonial “protectorate” of the German empire. This historical context, therefore, places Une vie de boy in both national and transnational contexts. While my reading addresses possible connections or similarities between French and German colonialism, the publication in German itself adds an important layer to the understanding of Une vie de boy in Germany. In consideration of the political activism of the novel's German publisher, Johann (Hans) Fladung (1898-1982), the publication of Oyono's novel can be read as a criticism of German historiography in the 1950s, which frequently avoided Germany's colonial history, a history that has been linked with the crimes of the Holocaust (Zimmerer).

A survey of the journal early american literature from the mid-1980s to today reveals a curious phenomenon: religion disappears from the tables of contents during the 1990s. Beginning in 2000, religion returns with measured consistency, culminating with a special issue devoted to “methods for the study of religion” in 2010 (Stein and Murison). This resurgence of interest in religion, not only as a topic of inquiry but also as an analytic category, coincides with the “religious turn” that for the past decade has shaped literary studies and the disciplines intersecting with it. In the wake of 9/11 and the political revival of the religious right, Americanists were surprised at the intense and exceptionally religious nature of the United States. Given the religious and political inflections of the war on terror to follow, the academic study of religion could not remain the “invisible domain” that it had been in American and literary studies throughout the 1990s (Franchot). The context demanded a critical response, particularly because the largely liberal and secular academy could not understand the visible fervor of the religious right at the turn of the twenty-first century. Across disparate fields and disciplines, scholars and critics have revisited religion as a serious topic of intellectual inquiry. Over the past decade, work on religion has focused on how literary forms mediate between the human and the divine, the role of a transcendent belief system in relation to political or social formations, and the conjunction between spirit and matter, the supernatural and the natural. In reflecting on such connections between the secular and the sacred, scholars also elicited a concomitant revision of the narrative of secularization that had long impeded the study of religion by defining modernity through religion's absence, irrelevance, and inevitable replacement by competing paradigms.

Comparison was once supremely a matter of method. ernest renan in his pensées de 1848 called comparison “the great instrument of criticism” (296). Echoing the sentiment some two decades later, Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett asserted that “we may call consciously comparative thinking the great glory of our nineteenth century” (76). Comparison had been extensively deployed as an analytic tool before the nineteenth century—to produce, for instance, the massive taxonomies that lay the foundations for natural history and in the gathering of the concordances and chronologies of universal histories. What sharply distinguished the comparative method, what made it in effect a specific method, for nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century scholars, by their own account, was the principle of development. This underlying temporal unity allowed for the most disparate entities to be set into meaningful relation. In words from an 1871 lecture by an early and enthusiastic proponent of comparative literature: