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Priscilla Meyer, How the Russians Read the French: Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008, xiv + 277 pp. Lyudmila Parts, The Chekhovian Intertext: Dialogue with a Classic [...]

Early in our careers, I suspect, many comparatists have had to ask, 'What are we supposed to teach?' For me this issue first surfaced during a job interview with a [...]

Franco Moretti, ed., The Novel, Volume I: History, Geography, and Culture; Volume II: Forms and Themes Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, x + 916 and x + 950 pp. Weighing [...]

Alfred J. Lopez, ed., Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005, x + 261 pp. Michael K. Brown, Martin Carnoy, [...]

Christopher Prendergast, ed., Debating World Literature London and New York: Verso, 2004, xiii + 353 pp. Comparatists interested in issues involving world literature will recognize Christopher Prendergast as Mary Ann [...]

Back in the early days of postcolonial studies, critics of Eurocentrism would sometimes deplore the West's devaluation of 'alternative epistemologies' elsewhere in the world. Anyone aware of the polemics among [...]

Gene H. Bell-Villada, On Nabokov, Ayn Rand and the Libertarian Mind: What the Russian-American Odd Pair Can Tell Us about Some Values, Myths and Manias Widely Held Most Dear, with [...]

Saul Bellow commented in the early 1990s that he would read literature from third world countries if there was a 'Zulu Tolstoy.' This idea was widely circulated as colonial societies fell in Africa and Europe, and African-American literature was accepted.

The works of exiled Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov may not be fundamentally affiliated to a single national literature but incorporate international trends, such as postmodernism and modernism. Critic and Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson believes it is more important to demonstrate links between economic and cultural history than to separate postmodernist pastiche from modernist parody. However, Nabokov's position on the border of modernism and postmodernism is not clarified by Jameson's intertextual test for differentiating the two movements.

The contents of the two modern autobiographies, Saul Friedlander's 'When Memory Comes' and Isak Dinesen's 'Out of Africa' puts to picture the experiences of people who have had contacts with people of different cultures and traditions. Cultural multiplicity refers to the emotions of conflict, the sense of tension, the disclosure of attractions, or the feelings of glory which results from living among several cultural traditions and to some degree imbibing the diversity. Freidlander's work is set against the Jewish Holocaust, while Dinesen's recounts the sad aspects of African colonialism.

For more than 16 years, Elaine Viets has written columns for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. For the most part, they touched upon the quirky in St. Louis: ugly wedding-gown contests, [...]