• Rebecca Ruth Gould deposited “Confessions of a Comparatist” (2019) on Humanities Commons 6 years, 9 months ago

    This essay offers an autobiographical account of reading across literatures and languages. I compare the selves that I have developed in each of three languages—Russian, Persian, and Georgian—over the course of many years of reading. Rejecting the tendency within scholarship and among the general public to make literary traditions coterminous with national identities, I reflect here on love through language and on language through love while narrating how I cultivated my multilingual reading habits.