The Department of Comparative Literature provides a broad range of courses in European and non-European literatures, offering a full, rich, global view of world literature and cultures. In cooperation with related departments in the humanities, the departmental offerings reflect current interdisciplinary approaches to literary study, such as hermeneutics, semiotics, deconstruction, cultural criticism, Marxism, reception aesthetics, feminism and psychoanalysis.

The department benefits from close ties with Cornell's Society for the Humanities, a center of teaching, research and lectures that provides a unique, historic catalyst for critical and theoretical reflection on campus. The department also has vital connections to the School of Criticism and Theory, a six-week summer program based at Cornell that features leading figures in critical thought, as well as to the Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM), a Cornell research institute dedicated to reflection on the global and plural nature of modernities.

Department website

Sophie Pinkham

Professor of the Practice

Publications

  • “Fireball Over Siberia,” on Andy Bruno’s new history of the Tunguska Event of 1908, June 2023
  • “Lost in a Dark Wood”: reported feature on migrants crossing the forest on the Belarusian-Polish border, The Economist 1843 Magazine, March 2023
  • “Immune to Despair”: on Ukrainian writer and activist Serhiy Zhadan, New York Review of Books, September 2022
  • “The Thorny Politics of Translating a Belarusian Novel,” on Alhierd Bacharevic’s Alindarka’s Children and linguistic imperialism, New York Times, June 2022
  • “A Hotter Russia,” on Thane Gustafson’s Klimat, New York Review of Books, June 2022
  • “’They’re Willing to Risk Ruining Their Lives’: Putin’s War is Driving Russians Out,” reported guest essay, The New York Times, March 2022
  • “What Young Ukrainians Have Lost Overnight,” The New Yorker, March 2022
  • “Unlucky Stars: Portents of War in Ukraine,” on Yevgenia Belorusets’ Lucky Breaks, The Baffler, March 2022
  • “Can Volodymyr Zelensky Save Ukraine?” Analysis, New York Magazine, February 2022
  • “The Freedom of Historical Fiction,” on Russian Formalist critic Yury Tynianov’s novels Young Pushkin, Kuchlya, and The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, New York Review of Books, March 2022
  • “Searching for Freedom After the Cold War,” on Lea Ypi’s Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History, The New Republic, February 2022
  • Review of Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Just the Plague, Times Literary Supplement, December 2021
  • “Designs for Living,” on Yugoslav architect Svetlana Kana Radević, New York Review of Books, September 2021
  • “Yesterday Never Existed,” on Osip Mandelstam, Poetry, July 2021
  • HIV in Russia, dir. Yuri Dud’ (review), Slavic Review 80, Issue 2, Summer 2021.
  • “Ghosts of Borodino,” on Maria Stepanova, Harper’s, June 2021
  • “No More Mother-Saviors,” on Russian feminist poetry by Galina Rymbu, Lida Yusupova, and others, New York Review of Books, April 2021
  • “Something Resembling Normal Life,” on North Korean writer Park Nam-nyong’s novel Friend and the North Korean version of socialist realism, New York Review of Books, December 2020
  • “Funeral Rites,” on Sergei Loznitsa’s State Funeral, New Left Review/Sidecar, December 2020
  • “Nihilism for Oligarchs,” New Left Review 125, Sept-Oct 2020.
  • “A Beginner’s Guide to End Times,” on Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens’s How Everything Can Collapse, Bookforum, Sept/Oct/Nov 2020
  • “Normal is Over for Russia’s Hinterland,” Foreign Policy, August 2020
  • “Living by Lies,” on Joshua Yaffa’s Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia, New York Review of Books, August 2020
  • “Doing a Coup: The Many Lives of Catherine the Great,” The Nation, July 2020
  • “Realists of the Soviet Fantasy,” on Aleksandr Deineka and Aleksandr Samokhvalov, NYRB, May 2020
  • “The Playful Propaganda of ‘The History of Ukraine,’” The New Yorker online, February 2020
  • “Blood on the Ice,” on Bathsheba Demuth’s Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, NYRB, December 2019
  • “Ukraine’s New Leading Man,” on Volodymyr Zelensky, NYRB, June 2019
  • “The Chernobyl Syndrome,” on books by Kate Brown, Adam Higginbotham, and Serhii Plokhy, NYRB, April 2019
  • “The Collective Body,” on Anya Bernstein’s The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia, in The Nation, March 2020
  • “Vasily Grossman’s Lost Epic,” on Stalingrad, in The New Republic, Aug. 2019
  • “No Direction Home,” on post-Soviet nostalgia, The New Republic, May 2018
  • “Timothy Snyder’s Bleak Vision,” The Nation, May 2018
  • “The Candle of Memory,” on Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine, Dec. 2017
  • “Understanding Russia’s War Stories,” The New Republic, September 2017
  • “How a Russian Street Art Museum Defies Kremlin Censors,” The New Republic, July 2017
  • “What Caused the Russian Revolution?” The Nation, June 2017
  • “Ukraine’s Underground AIDS-Treatment Railroad,” Foreign Policy, Mar 2017
  • “Listening to Ordinary Russians by Drawing Them One by One,” on Victoria Lomasko’s Other Russias, The New Yorker online, February 2017
  • “Pure Imagination,” on Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Bookforum, Feb/Mar 2017
  • “When were you thinking of shooting yourself?” on Mayakovsky, London Review of Books, February 2017
  • Zdesizdat and Discursive Rebellion: The Metropol Affair,” Ulbandus Review Vol. 17,  2016.
  • “Witness Tampering,” on Svetlana Alexievich, The New Republic, August 2016
  • “Teffi’s Memories and the Women of the Russian Revolution,” The New Yorker online, May 2016
  • “Letter from Belgorod,” on Victory Day, The Nation, August 2015
  • “Prattletraps,” on Sergei Dovlatov’s Pushkin Hills, London Review of Books, May 2015
  • “Watching the Ukrainian Oligarchs,” The New Yorker online, April 2015
  • “Eastern Promises,” on Emmanuel Carrère’s Limonov, Bookforum, Dec/Jan 2015
  • “Making Deals in the Paradise of Thieves: Leonid Utesov, Arkadii Severnyi, and Blatnaia Pesnia,” Ulbandus Review Vol. 16, 2014.
  • “Soviet Animation and the Thaw of the 1960s: Not Only for Children” (book review), The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture, November 2014.
  • “Sofiya Tolstoy’s Defense,” The New Yorker online, October 2014
  • “Pussy Riot in Translation,” Dissent, Summer 2014
  • “Waiting for the Unexpected,” on Gaito Gazdanov, LRB, March 2014
  • “The Museum of the Revolution,” on Victor Serge, The Nation, November 2013
  • “Oligarchs and Graphomaniacs,” on Russia’s Debut Prize, The Nation, April 2013
  • Additional publications in 1843 Magazine, BOMB, Dissent, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, The New York Times, n+1, The Paris Review Daily, and the Times Literary Supplement.

 

Gavin Walker

Professor

Publications

Books:

The Rarity of Politics: Passages from Structure to Subject (London: Verso, forthcoming).

Marx et la politique du dehors (Montréal: Lux Éditeur, 2022).

The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2016). 

Foucault’s Late Politics, edited by Gavin Walker, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 121, no. 4 (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2022).

Ronsô no buntai: Nihon shihonshugi to tôchi sôchi [Styles of the 'Debate': Japanese Capitalism and the Apparatuses of Governance], edited by Yutaka Nagahara and Gavin Walker (Tokyo: Hôsei University Press, Ohara Institute for Social Research, 2023).

The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68, edited by Gavin Walker (Verso, 2020).

Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility by Kojin Karatani, translated, edited and with an introduction by Gavin Walker (Verso, 2020).

The End of Area: Biopolitics, Geopolitics, History, a special issue of positions: asia critique, edited by Gavin Walker and Naoki Sakai, vol. 27, no. 1 (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2019).

Articles and chapters:

“The Relapses of the Universal: Translation and the Language of the Political” in Universality and Translation: Sites of Struggle in Philosophy and Politics, edited by Gavin Arnall and Katie Chenoweth (New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming 2024).

“Lenin, Partisan of the Conjuncture” in LENIN: The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce, ed. Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichhorn and Patrick Anderson (Ottawa: Daraja Press, 2024), 120-123.

“Singular Unverifiability” in CLS: Comparative Literature Studies, 60:2, ACLA Symposium on Gayatri Spivak’s Death of a Discipline after 20 years (Penn State: Penn State University Press, 2023).

“What Comes After ‘Area’? The Nomos of the Modern in Times of Crisis” in Knowledge Production and Epistemic Decolonization at the End of the Pax Americana, eds. Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button (London: Routledge, 2023), 173-198.

“‘Furuki mono’ to zanshi: Ronsô no ‘jiseigaku’teki saisotei” (“The Archaic and the Remnant: Chronopolitics of the Debate on Japanese Capitalism” in Ronsô’ no buntai: Nihon shihonshugi to tôchi sôchi [The Style of the ‘Debate’: On Japanese Capitalism and its Governing Apparatuses], co-edited by Yutaka Nagahara and Gavin Walker (Tokyo: Hôsei University Press, Ôhara Institute for Social Research, 2023), 243-285.

“Rekishiteki na koto no gûyu: Ronsô no kokusaiteki saisotei no tame ni”  (“Allegories of the Historical: The Debate on Japanese Capitalism in Global Perspective”) in Ronsô’ no buntai: Nihon shihonshugi to tôchi sôchi [The Style of the ‘Debate’: On Japanese Capitalism and its Governing Apparatuses], co-edited by Yutaka Nagahara and Gavin Walker (Tokyo: Hôsei University Press, Ôhara Institute for Social Research, 2023), 405-423.

“The Will to Strategy: Foucault’s Interregnum, 1976-79” in Foucault’s Late Politics, edited by Gavin Walker, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 121, no. 4 (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2022), 713-734.

“The Late Foucault and the Allegories of Theory” in Foucault’s Late Politics, edited by Gavin Walker, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 121, no. 4 (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2022), 645-653.

The Wager and the Wage: Reading Kawashima Reading Uno” in Uno Kozo’s Theory of Crisis: A Symposium, edited by Gavin Walker, a special issue of episteme, no. 9 (positions: politics) (2022).

“Non-Capital and the Torsion of the Subject” in Accumulation and Subjectivity: Rethinking Marx in Latin America, ed. Karen Benezra (New York: SUNY Press, 2022), 295-313.

“Nationalism and the National Question” in The SAGE Handbook of Marxism, eds. Farris, Skeggs, Toscano (London: SAGE, 2022), 366-386.

“Uno Kôzô’s Theory of Crisis Today,” co-written with Ken Kawashima, Introduction to Uno Kôzô, Theory of Crisis, trans. Ken Kawashima (Leiden: Brill, Historical Materialism book series, 2021; paperback forthcoming from Haymarket, 2022), 177-202.

"Le marxisme et les années rouges au Japon. Entretien avec Gavin Walker" in Contretemps, 12 July 2021.

“Rethinking Japan’s Red Years: An Interview with Gavin Walker” in Spectre, 9 July 2021. 

“The Theory and Practice of Marxism in Japan” in Jacobin, 3 July 2021. 

“Fascism and the Metapolitics of Imperialism” in Historical Materialism, 8 May 2021. 

“The Political Afterlives of Yukio Mishima” in Jacobin, 25 November 2020. 

“The Red Years: An Interview with Gavin Walker on Japan’s 1968,” Verso Books, 20 November 2020.

“The Post-’68 Conjuncture” in The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68, ed. Gavin Walker (London: Verso, 2020), 229-236.

“Revolution and Retrospection” in The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68, ed. Gavin Walker (London: Verso, 2020), 1-11.

“Marxist Theory in Japan: A Critical Overview,” Historical Materialism, November 15, 2020.

“The World of the Outside” in Marx, Asia, and the History of the Presentepisteme, no. 3 (positions: politics), edited by Gavin Walker, October 2020.

“The Discreet Charm of Coronavirus” in episteme, no. 2, positions: politics, May 2020.

“Karatani’s Marx” in Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility by Kôjin Karatani, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Gavin Walker (London: Verso, 2020), xi-xxvii.

“The Homeland(s) of Marxism: Labour Power, Race, and Nation after Capital in Capital in the East, eds. Anjan Chakrabarti et al (Springer Publishing, 2019), 47-67.

“The Accumulation of Difference and the Logic of Area” in The End of Area: Biopolitics, Geopolitics, History, a special issue of positions: asia critique, vol. 27, no. 1, edited by Gavin Walker and Naoki Sakai (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2019), 67-98.

“The End of Area” (co-written with Naoki Sakai) in The End of Area: Biopolitics, Geopolitics, History, a special issue of positions: asia critique, vol. 27, no. 1, edited by Gavin Walker and Naoki Sakai (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2019), 1-31.

“Le marxisme au Japon : Guide de lecture” in Période: révue de théorie marxiste (January 2019).

“The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: History, Politics, and Repetition” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx, ed. Imre Szeman et al(London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

“Marx in Japan” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx, ed. Imre Szeman et al(London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

“The Schema of the West and the Apparatus of Capture: Variations on Deleuze and Guattari” in Deleuze Studies, vol. 12, no. 2 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 210-235.

“Surplus alongside Excess: Uno Kôzô, Imperialism, and the Theory of Crisis,” co-written with Ken Kawashima, in Viewpoint 6: Imperialism, February 2018.

“On the Politics of Postcoloniality: Return(s) of the National Question in Marxist Theory” in Viewpoint 6: Imperialism, February 2018.

Roundtable on “Art, Society/Text: A Few Remarks on the Current Relations of the Class Struggle in the Fields of Literary Production and Literary Ideologies” (with Karen Benezra, Bruno Bosteels, Tom Eyers, Sami Khatib, and Samo Tomšič) in ARTMargins, vol. 6, no. 3 (Boston: MIT Press, October 2017), 70-75.

“The Subjective Drive of Capital: Kakehashi Akihide’s Phenomenology of Matter” in Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy, ed. Murthy, Schaefer, and Ward (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 229-262.

“Tanigawa Gan and the Poetics of the Origin” in positions: asia critique, vol. 25, no. 2 (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2017), 351-387.

“The ‘Ideal Total Capitalist’: On the State-Form in the Critique of Political Economy” in Crisis & Critique, special issue on The Critique of Political Economy, November 2016, 434-455.

“Challenging Abe’s Japan” in Jacobin, 13 November 2015. 

“Žižek with Marx: Outside in the Critique of Political Economy” in Repeating Žižek (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 195-212.

“The Regime of Translation and the Figure of Politics” in Translation: A Transdisciplinary Journal, no. 4, special issue on “Politics” edited by Sandro Mezzadra and Naoki Sakai (Rimini: Raffaelli Editore, 2014), 30-52.

“Primitive Accumulation and the State-Form: National Debt as an Apparatus of Capture” in Viewpoint 4: The State, October 2014.

“The Reinvention of Communism: Politics, History, Globality” in South Atlantic Quarterly (113.4), special issue on Communist Currents, eds. Bruno Bosteels and Jodi Dean (Duke University Press, 2014), 671-685. 

“Filmic Materiality and Historical Materialism: Tosaka Jun and the Prosthetics of Sensation,” in Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader, eds. Ken Kawashima, Fabian Schaefer, and Robert Stolz (Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series, 2013), 218-254.

“The Absent Body of Labour Power: Uno Kôzô’s Logic of Capital” in Historical Materialism, vol. 21, no. 4, Autumn 2013 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 1-34. 

“Limits and Openings of the Party: A Reply to Jason E. Smith” in Theory and Event 16.4 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). 

“The Body of Politics: On the Concept of the Party” in Theory & Event 16.4 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

“Seijikeizai(gaku) hihan to kokka keitai: <Fukushi> to shihon no yokudô” (The Critique of Political Economy and the State-Form: ‘Welfare’ and the Drive of Capital) in Jôkyô, supplemental volume no. 2 (Tokyo: Jôkyô Shuppan, June 2013), 119-140.

“Citizen-Subject and the National Question: On the Logic of Capital in Balibar” in Postmodern Culture, (22.3) special issue on the work of Étienne Balibar (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, May 2013).

“On Marxism’s Field of Operation: Badiou and the Critique of Political Economy” in Historical Materialism, vol. 20, no. 2, Summer 2012 (Leiden: Brill), 39-74.

“Gendai shihonshugi ni okeru ‘minzoku mondai’ no kaiki: Posutokoroniaru kenkyû no aratana seijiteki dôkô” (“The Return of the National Question in Contemporary Capitalism: New Political Directions in Postcolonial Studies”) in Shisô, no. 1059, July 2012 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten), 122-147.

“The World of Principle, or Pure Capitalism: Exteriority and Suspension in Uno Kôzô” in The Journal of International Economic Studies, no. 26 (Tokyo: Hôsei University, Institute for Comparative Economic Studies, 2012), 15-37.

“Shihon no sekai ni okeru ‘gaitô no jijitsu’: Kyôkô, kokka, kokusai”(“The ‘Facts of the Streets’ in the World of Capital: Crisis, State, and the National Debt”) in Gendai shisô: Revue de la pensée d’aujourd’hui, no. 40-2 (Tokyo: Seidosha, February 2012), 96-109.

“The Dignity of Communism: Badiou’s Communist Hypothesis,” in Socialism and Democracy, vol. 25, no. 3 (London: Routledge, 2011), 130-139.

“Primitive Accumulation and the Formation of Difference: On Marx and Schmitt,” in Rethinking Marxism, vol. 23, no. 3 (London: Taylor & Francis, 2011), 384-404.

“Postcoloniality and the National Question in Marxist Historiography: Elements of the Debate on Japanese Capitalism,” in Interventions, vol. 13, no. 1 (London: Taylor & Francis, 2011), 120-137.

“Shihon no puroretariateki reido: gaibu no seijiteki butsurigaku” (“Capital’s Proletarian Degree Zero: The Political Physics of the Outside”) in Seiji keizaigaku no seiji tetsugakuteki fukken: Riron no rironteki ‘rinkai-gaibu’ ni mukete (Political-Philosophical Resurrections of Political Economy: Towards the Theoretical Limit/Outside of Theory), ed. Nagahara Yutaka (Tokyo: Hôsei University Press, 2011), 351-390.

“Postcoloniality in Translation: Historicities of the Present,” in Postcolonial Studies, vol. 14, no. 1 (London: Taylor & Francis, 2011), 111-126.

“Kenryoku toshite no shihon: Seijiteki kake to kyô no kishôsei” (“Capital as Power: The Political Wager and the Rarity of the Commons”), Muri to iu iki to kyô no seisan (The Threshold of Excess [muri] and the Production of the Commons) Part 2, in Jôkyô, October 2010 (Tokyo: Jôkyô Shuppan, 2010), 185-203.

“Shihon no kigenteki iki: hida toshite no rôdôryoku” (“Capital’s Originary Threshold: Labor Power as Fold”), Muri to iu iki to kyô no seisan (The Threshold of Excess [muri] and the Production of the Commons) Part 1, in Jôkyô, May 2010 (Tokyo: Jôkyô Shuppan, 2010), 120-134.         

“The Double Scission of Mishima Yukio: Limits and Anxieties in the Autofictional Machine” in positions: east asia cultures critique 18: 1, Spring 2010 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 145-169.

------. “The Double Scission of Mishima Yukio: Limits and Anxieties in the Autofictional Machine,” reprinted in Perversion and Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture, eds. Nina Cornyetz and J. Keith Vincent (London: Routledge, 2010), 164-185.

“The Filmic Time of Coloniality" in Mechademia 4: War/Time (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 3-18.

“On ‘the End’: Mishima Yukio and the Double Dislocation of Literature,” in Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies, vol. 9: Literature and Literary Theory, eds. Atsuko Ueda and Richard H. Okada (Summer 2008), 240-246.

Yidan Wang

Graduate Student

Arash Shokrisaravi

Graduate Student

Nicole Suarez

Graduate student

Xinyu H. Zhang

Graduate Student

Rafael Rodriguez

Graduate Student

Connie Perez-Cruz

Graduate Student

Dror Birger

Graduate Student

Abel Song Han

Graduate Student

Publications

“‘Republic of Southern Sinophone Literature’ and Its Memorandum: A Uchronian Hong Kong-Mahua Literary Relation.” Journal of World Literature 4.4 (2019), 488-507. (with Yu Heidi Huang)

 

塑像 Factory Gods.” (Novella) INK Literary Monthly 印刻文學生活誌 149 (2016), 32-82. (Winner of the TSMC Literature Award)

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