Clark Ashton Smith—unlike the more famous H.P. Lovecraft—engaged with the medieval as a setting for his fiction. Lovecraft admired classical Roman civilization and the eighteenth century, but had little time for medieval themes. As Brantley Bryant has related, Lovecraft wrote contemptuously that the Middle Ages was a period that “snivel[ed] along…[Read more]

This article examines the panegyric across the literary traditions of West, South, and East Asia, concentrating on Arabo-Persian qaṣīda, the Sanskrit praśasti, and the Chinese fu. In radically different albeit analogous ways, each genre elaborated a political aesthetics of literary form. The West, South, and East Asian genres each cultivated a met…[Read more]

Building on the multivalent meanings of the Arabo- Persian tarjama (‘to interpret’, ‘to translate’, ‘to narrate’), this essay argues for the relevance of Qur’ānic inimitability (i’jāz) to contemporary translation theory. I examine how the translation of Arabic rhetorical theory (‘ilm al-balāgha) into Persian inaugurated new trends within the study…[Read more]

This discussion of Innovations and Turning Points: Toward a History of Kāvya Literature (2014), a magisterial contribution to South Asian literature edited by Yigal Bronner, David Shulman, and Gary Tubb, situates this work within broader trends within the discipline of comparative literature and cross-cultural poetics. I consider how this volume…[Read more]

Featuring work by: Will Alexander, Alexis Almeida, Maria Attanasio, Gennady Aygi, Omar Berrada, Carla Billitteri, Tanella Boni, Amal Dunqul, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Norman Fischer, Peter France, Todd Fredson, María José Giménez, Yāqūt Al-Ḥamawī, Ouyang Jianghe, Hajiwara Kyojiro, John High, Roberta Iannamico, Lucas Klein, David Larsen, Brian Lucas,…[Read more]

Aboriginal Song Poems (compiled by Robert Wood) André Breton (translated by Mark Polizzotti) René Char (translated by Stuart Kendall) Sergio Chejfec (translated by Margaret Carson) James Clifford Joseph Donahue Gyrðir Elíasson (translated by Meg Matich) Clayton Eshleman (interviewed by Irakli Qolbaia) Nazim Hikmet (translated by Murat Nem…[Read more]

Featuring work by: Eugénio de Andrade, Anonymous, A. James Arnold, Rito Ramón Aroche, Dawn-Michelle Baude, Susan Bernofsky, Aloysius Bertrand, Paul Blackburn, Daniel Borzutzky, André Breton, Garrett Caples, Valerie Mejer Caso, RosalÍa de Castro, Paul Celan, Aimé Césaire, René Char, Beatritz de Dia, Kristin Dykstra, Paul Éluard, Clayton Eshlema…[Read more]

Work by: Etel Adnan – Demosthenes Agrafiotis – Will Alexander – Rachel Tzvia Back – Dan Bellm – Aleksandr Blok – Pura López Colomé – Colin Dayan – René Depestre – Rachel Blau DuPlessis – Marcella Durand – Sarah Tuss Efrik – Elke Erb – Peter France – Johannes Göransson – David Hadbawnik – Larry Kearney – Alexis Levitin – Brian Lucas – Michèle Méta…[Read more]

This essay examines how translation theory can globalize contemporary literary comparison. Whereas Persian studies has historically been isolated from the latest developments within literary theory, world literature has similarly been isolated from the latest developments within the study of non-European literatures. The methodology of hard…[Read more]

The aim of this article is to study the complete poetry of Luis de Góngora using a contrastive analysis. To this end, the poems, which do not pose any attribution problem, published in digital format by the Observatoire de la vie littéraire (OBVIL) have been selected (with the exception of theatre) and divided into three parts on the basis of a c…[Read more]

Text of a talk I gave on March 1 at the Translation Symposium held in conjunction with the awards ceremony of the 3rd International JLPP International Translation Competition at Gakushi Kaikan, Tokyo.

Every code text is informed by stylistic decisions that impact how the text is interpreted and understood. While software developers have long discussed concerns of style in regards to writing code, scholars of computation would benefit from a rhetorical approach to style, an approach that links style to substance and sees style as situated and…[Read more]

The enthymeme, while serving as the central basis for heuristic invention, also works at the local or sentence level as a rhetorically oriented algorithmic procedure through which a rhetor determines the most probable success in persuading an audience to action.

Scholars of, or interested in, rhetoric have an opportunity to build upon the emerging body of work from the fields of software studies and critical code studies in order to explore the potential for meaning-making made possible through code and its expression(s). Over the last decade, rhetoric has significantly expanded to incorporate image,…[Read more]