Comparative literature (affectionately known as COLT) is a discipline that encourages students to challenge traditional definitions and boundaries. Global literature is the domain of COLT students, as they compare the assumptions, values and literary standards evidenced in different genres (novels, short stories, film, even advertising), languages, historical periods and cultures.
Featured here are three graduate students in the COLT program (and their special areas of study):
Max Rayneard Literature — An Everyday Experience
Erin Senning Redefining a Genre
Monica McLellan Bringing Poetry Back
LITERATURE — AN EVERYDAY EXPERIENCE
What is literature? asks Max Rayneard. And what should legitimately be included in literary studies?
Rayneard, a South African native, is a fifth-year graduate student in comparative literature. His dissertation will challenge what he sees as the academy’s traditional, but limited, definition of literature by analyzing “literary performances” that occur in places like the undergraduate literature classroom.
“We make literature something abstract that happens in books. It stands outside the everyday experience,” he said, adding that, in fact, the nature of our everyday discourse embodies literary qualities.
“From any subject matter under discussion to rhetorical and polemical gestures, to the qualities of form that are evident in the language used in the discussion, it is clear that what happens in the classroom has aesthetic qualities that are — like literature — historically and ideologically situated. In other words, there is literariness to the immediate performances that happen in the classroom.”
This is further evidenced outside the classroom, in cases such as dance or theater, where performances often develop from texts — and literature, in the form of writings and reviews, results from those performances — but the performances themselves aren’t considered literary.
Over the past two years, Rayneard has developed the “performance as literature” facet of his argument through his involvement with Telling: Eugene, a play he co-authored with Jonathan Wei, a former student advisor at the UO. The script for Telling is based on the real-life experiences of American veterans and family members whom Rayneard and Wei interviewed on video.
Nine veterans, an ROTC recruit and a veteran’s wife, as well as members of the University of Oregon Veterans and Family Student Association, formed the original cast and UO theatre arts department head John Schmor came on board to give performance training and direct the production.
For three nights in February 2008, Telling: Eugene was performed for enthusiastic crowds at the Veterans Memorial Association in Eugene. The group gave a second set of performances at the UO that November and performed one show in Seattle in March 2009.
Rayneard also co-authored and co-produced Telling: Portland during the first half of 2009, based on the stories of a group of veterans from Portland State University. The production was held May 15-17 at the First Congregational United Church of Christ in Portland with an encore performance June 9 on the PSU campus.
Rayneard is also the editor of Nomad, the journal for undergraduate comparative literature. Read more about the latest edition of Nomad: The Undead.
REDEFINING A GENRE
Erin Senning is fluent in German and Spanish and is a student of both German and Latino/Chicano culture and literature. She is also an avid reader of “life writing” (autobiography, memoir and diaries). As eclectic as these interests may seem, they merge together in Senning’s doctoral research.
Senning, a graduate student in comparative literature, is examining how German and Chicana female writers are reshaping genres and history, often through the lens of bilingual and bicultural/multicultural perspectives.
The crux of Senning’s argument is that the works of her selected authors are revisionist writings — they redefine literary boundaries and history in a number of ways. Some provide a feminine point of view on historical events that have primarily been recounted by males. Some use conventions not typically associated with their particular genre to present new viewpoints.
Cassandra, by German writer Christa Wolf, offers a salient example of genre-blending. The work centers on the Trojan princess/prophetess who foretold the fall of Troy. Cassandra gets a raw deal in ancient Greek mythology and writings: She is (supposedly) raped and dragged off during the Greek invasion by Ajax, taken as a concubine by the king Agamemnon and eventually killed by Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus. To add insult to injury (or death, in this case), no one ever listens to Cassandra’s prophecies, even though she’s always accurate.
Wolf gives the oft-maligned Cassandra a voice, offering fresh insight into that series of events. She rewrites the epic entirely from Cassandra’s perspective using stream-of-consciousness first-person narrative, an unconventional form for novels and epics alike — which also redefines the character of Cassandra in the process.
Senning also argues that certain authors produce revisionist works by writing about history as they have experienced it themselves, thereby drawing attention to underrepresented viewpoints. She uses the example of the “autohistoria,” a form akin to autobiography, but one in which the author, in addition to writing about her own life, also includes cultural history. The autohistoria provides a vehicle for women to claim their personal experiences as history, Senning said. One work she is examining to support that argument is Caramelo, written by Sandra Cisneros, a Chicana author perhaps best known for The House on Mango Street.
Caramelo is primarily told from the perspective of Celaya Reyes, who bounces between Chicago, San Antonio and Mexico City with her six siblings and parents while growing up. She recounts the stories and history of her family through three generations.
Caramelo, although a novel, is semi-autobiographical in nature. For example, Cisneros had six brothers, her family frequently traveled between Chicago and Mexico City during her childhood and Cisneros’ father was an upholsterer, as is Celaya’s father.
Cisneros employs various techniques in combination to create an atypical novel that melds together autobiography and history: She often uses short vignettes to tell the story and shifts back and forth between English and Spanish, weaving the two languages together. She also includes lengthy footnotes that inform the reader of Mexican culture and history. All of these elements come together to create an unconventional novel that educates the reader about the evolution of a particular culture through one family’s history, as witnessed from a female perspective.
BRINGING POETRY BACK
If Monica McLellan’s research could be turned into a recipe, it might look something like this: Start with large amounts of Chinese language and poetry, add a little Marxist literary criticism, then mix in some Japanese scholarship. Blend well. Her desired outcome: understanding poems in their original contexts while discovering present-day meaning.
McLellan is a second-year graduate student in comparative literature, with an emphasis on classical Chinese literature. She learned Mandarin while living in China after finishing her undergraduate degree at New York University. During her two years abroad, she also started cultivating an interest in poetics — the study of poetry — which examines the aesthetics, literary devices and structures found in poems.
As a graduate student, McLellan has already written two papers on the Shi Jing, or the Classic of Poetry (the name has also been translated as the Book of Songs or the Book of Odes). The Shi Jing contains 305 poems and is the oldest known collection of Chinese poetry. It has played an integral role in Chinese society for hundreds of years, and was considered one of the “Five Classics,” a set of books that formed the Chinese educational canon and were supposedly edited or compiled by Confucius.
Traditionally, poetry has maintained a much more influential role in Chinese education and social life than in the West. Furthermore, Chinese expectations and Western expectations differ fundamentally on what a poem does: Western readers tend to assume that poems ultimately have an abstract, spiritual, humanist meaning, McLellan said. But the Chinese assume that poems have specific meanings and refer to the specific moments in history in which they were written.
In the Chinese approach, “If I read the poem the right way, I can kind of reconstruct or reclaim that moment in history,” McLellan said. This is where Marxist philosophy comes in — to analyze poems in terms of the historical circumstances in which they were created.
In addition to trying to understand poems in their original context, McLellan seeks to determine poetry’s modern-day social role and function by asking questions like, “How does this poem reflect on my own historical position?” and “What kind of responsibilities do I have as a person in this historical moment reading this poem?”
McLellan is also studying Japanese because proficiency in the language will help her access the work of Japanese scholars, who have esteemed and studied Chinese poetry for many years.
One of her goals, she said, is to demonstrate that poetry — even ancient poetry from far away countries with different cultures — has modern-day relevancy in the Western world.
Read about Nomad, the COLT literary journal, for which McLellan was last year's mentorship coordinator.
Max Rayneard Literature — An Everyday Experience
Erin Senning Redefining a Genre
Monica McLellan Bringing Poetry Back
LITERATURE — AN EVERYDAY EXPERIENCE
What is literature? asks Max Rayneard. And what should legitimately be included in literary studies? Rayneard, a South African native, is a fifth-year graduate student in comparative literature. His dissertation will challenge what he sees as the academy’s traditional, but limited, definition of literature by analyzing “literary performances” that occur in places like the undergraduate literature classroom.
“We make literature something abstract that happens in books. It stands outside the everyday experience,” he said, adding that, in fact, the nature of our everyday discourse embodies literary qualities.
“From any subject matter under discussion to rhetorical and polemical gestures, to the qualities of form that are evident in the language used in the discussion, it is clear that what happens in the classroom has aesthetic qualities that are — like literature — historically and ideologically situated. In other words, there is literariness to the immediate performances that happen in the classroom.”
This is further evidenced outside the classroom, in cases such as dance or theater, where performances often develop from texts — and literature, in the form of writings and reviews, results from those performances — but the performances themselves aren’t considered literary.
Over the past two years, Rayneard has developed the “performance as literature” facet of his argument through his involvement with Telling: Eugene, a play he co-authored with Jonathan Wei, a former student advisor at the UO. The script for Telling is based on the real-life experiences of American veterans and family members whom Rayneard and Wei interviewed on video.
Nine veterans, an ROTC recruit and a veteran’s wife, as well as members of the University of Oregon Veterans and Family Student Association, formed the original cast and UO theatre arts department head John Schmor came on board to give performance training and direct the production.
For three nights in February 2008, Telling: Eugene was performed for enthusiastic crowds at the Veterans Memorial Association in Eugene. The group gave a second set of performances at the UO that November and performed one show in Seattle in March 2009.
Rayneard also co-authored and co-produced Telling: Portland during the first half of 2009, based on the stories of a group of veterans from Portland State University. The production was held May 15-17 at the First Congregational United Church of Christ in Portland with an encore performance June 9 on the PSU campus.
Rayneard is also the editor of Nomad, the journal for undergraduate comparative literature. Read more about the latest edition of Nomad: The Undead.
REDEFINING A GENRE
Erin Senning is fluent in German and Spanish and is a student of both German and Latino/Chicano culture and literature. She is also an avid reader of “life writing” (autobiography, memoir and diaries). As eclectic as these interests may seem, they merge together in Senning’s doctoral research.
Senning, a graduate student in comparative literature, is examining how German and Chicana female writers are reshaping genres and history, often through the lens of bilingual and bicultural/multicultural perspectives.
The crux of Senning’s argument is that the works of her selected authors are revisionist writings — they redefine literary boundaries and history in a number of ways. Some provide a feminine point of view on historical events that have primarily been recounted by males. Some use conventions not typically associated with their particular genre to present new viewpoints.
Cassandra, by German writer Christa Wolf, offers a salient example of genre-blending. The work centers on the Trojan princess/prophetess who foretold the fall of Troy. Cassandra gets a raw deal in ancient Greek mythology and writings: She is (supposedly) raped and dragged off during the Greek invasion by Ajax, taken as a concubine by the king Agamemnon and eventually killed by Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus. To add insult to injury (or death, in this case), no one ever listens to Cassandra’s prophecies, even though she’s always accurate.
Wolf gives the oft-maligned Cassandra a voice, offering fresh insight into that series of events. She rewrites the epic entirely from Cassandra’s perspective using stream-of-consciousness first-person narrative, an unconventional form for novels and epics alike — which also redefines the character of Cassandra in the process.
Senning also argues that certain authors produce revisionist works by writing about history as they have experienced it themselves, thereby drawing attention to underrepresented viewpoints. She uses the example of the “autohistoria,” a form akin to autobiography, but one in which the author, in addition to writing about her own life, also includes cultural history. The autohistoria provides a vehicle for women to claim their personal experiences as history, Senning said. One work she is examining to support that argument is Caramelo, written by Sandra Cisneros, a Chicana author perhaps best known for The House on Mango Street.
Caramelo is primarily told from the perspective of Celaya Reyes, who bounces between Chicago, San Antonio and Mexico City with her six siblings and parents while growing up. She recounts the stories and history of her family through three generations.
Caramelo, although a novel, is semi-autobiographical in nature. For example, Cisneros had six brothers, her family frequently traveled between Chicago and Mexico City during her childhood and Cisneros’ father was an upholsterer, as is Celaya’s father.
Cisneros employs various techniques in combination to create an atypical novel that melds together autobiography and history: She often uses short vignettes to tell the story and shifts back and forth between English and Spanish, weaving the two languages together. She also includes lengthy footnotes that inform the reader of Mexican culture and history. All of these elements come together to create an unconventional novel that educates the reader about the evolution of a particular culture through one family’s history, as witnessed from a female perspective.
BRINGING POETRY BACK
If Monica McLellan’s research could be turned into a recipe, it might look something like this: Start with large amounts of Chinese language and poetry, add a little Marxist literary criticism, then mix in some Japanese scholarship. Blend well. Her desired outcome: understanding poems in their original contexts while discovering present-day meaning.
McLellan is a second-year graduate student in comparative literature, with an emphasis on classical Chinese literature. She learned Mandarin while living in China after finishing her undergraduate degree at New York University. During her two years abroad, she also started cultivating an interest in poetics — the study of poetry — which examines the aesthetics, literary devices and structures found in poems.
As a graduate student, McLellan has already written two papers on the Shi Jing, or the Classic of Poetry (the name has also been translated as the Book of Songs or the Book of Odes). The Shi Jing contains 305 poems and is the oldest known collection of Chinese poetry. It has played an integral role in Chinese society for hundreds of years, and was considered one of the “Five Classics,” a set of books that formed the Chinese educational canon and were supposedly edited or compiled by Confucius.
Traditionally, poetry has maintained a much more influential role in Chinese education and social life than in the West. Furthermore, Chinese expectations and Western expectations differ fundamentally on what a poem does: Western readers tend to assume that poems ultimately have an abstract, spiritual, humanist meaning, McLellan said. But the Chinese assume that poems have specific meanings and refer to the specific moments in history in which they were written.
In the Chinese approach, “If I read the poem the right way, I can kind of reconstruct or reclaim that moment in history,” McLellan said. This is where Marxist philosophy comes in — to analyze poems in terms of the historical circumstances in which they were created.
In addition to trying to understand poems in their original context, McLellan seeks to determine poetry’s modern-day social role and function by asking questions like, “How does this poem reflect on my own historical position?” and “What kind of responsibilities do I have as a person in this historical moment reading this poem?”
McLellan is also studying Japanese because proficiency in the language will help her access the work of Japanese scholars, who have esteemed and studied Chinese poetry for many years.
One of her goals, she said, is to demonstrate that poetry — even ancient poetry from far away countries with different cultures — has modern-day relevancy in the Western world.
Read about Nomad, the COLT literary journal, for which McLellan was last year's mentorship coordinator.