The French romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine traveled to the East—namely, Syria, Palestine, and parts of the Balkans—in 1832–33, with his wife and daughter. His account of these travels, the Voyage en Orient, was published in 1835 and went on to become one of the major Eastern travel-narratives of the nineteenth century. Edward Said was scathing about it in Orientalism: “What remains of the Orient in Lamartine's prose is not very substantial at all … the sites he has visited, the people he has met, the experiences he has had, are reduced to a few echoes in his pompous generalizations” (179). I would not dissent from this assessment. But Said was not the first to remark on the nature of Lamartine's representations of the Orient. In 1859, twenty-four years after the French poet's visit to the East, a young Beiruti poet and journalist, Khalīl al-Khūrī, made an Arabic translation and commentary, with some sharp criticisms, of one of the poems included in Voyage en Orient.

First of all, thanks to wai chee dimock, the editor of PMLA, and to all contributors for having put this feature together. Devoting time and energy to someone else's work is a very generous thing to do, and I'm grateful to all of you for your attention. Really.

Since Dimock made clear from the start that the discussion would be “on Distant Reading the book,” I will not address Johanna Drucker's and Catherine Nicholson's essays, which, though very interesting, concern methodological and historical issues rather than the book itself. Otherwise, my reply will proceed as follows: a prologue on my relationship to distance; some retrospective thoughts on Distant Reading; a few responses on “facts,” interpretations, “reading,” and “readers”; some reflections on modeling; and a conclusion on what Lisa Marie Rhody calls the “dehumanizing” nature of “scientific discourse.”

From its earliest literary representations in english, Cyprus has been associated with intersecting anxieties toward race, religion, and sexuality. Inaugurating this theme, Shakespeare's Othello appropriates the culturally hybrid setting among Africa, Asia, and Europe as a space of uneasy female autonomy and as a locus of dangerous political and sexual activity orchestrated by men: Venus's island is, for European Venice, a “business of some heat” (211; 1.2.47), a commercial hub degrading into a deathbed of intercultural, interfaith, interracial sex. On the cultural frontiers among Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam, staged temporally between Western Europe's waning crusading past and the rise of the Ottoman Empire, the island is an exoticized and effeminized space treated axiomatically as requiring the protection of Western paternalism. These themes pervade subsequent textual depictions of the space, a de facto British colony from 1878 to 1960, in works that venerate a reclaiming of the Ottoman possession by neo-Crusaders in the Orient. While academic scrutiny has addressed narratives such as Lawrence Durrell's Bitter Lemons (1957), there has been little focus on the patriarchal structuring of empire in this oeuvre of colonial travel writing or on the “persistent gendering of the imperial unknown” during this period (McClintock 24).

At the end of 1922, after years of revolution and civil war, the Soviet Union was formally incorporated, bringing areas of the former Russian Empire into an ostensibly unified conglomerate. Though conflicts continued to smolder, Spenglerian discourse from the area touted a flourishing Slavic East in opposition to a declining European West. For the thousands of Russians and other émigrés from the former Russian Empire living abroad in Europe, this opposition presented a conundrum: should their sympathies lie with their cultural home or with the West, where they experienced daily life?

The capacious first issue of ho! (), a prominent Israeli literary journal that debuted in 2005, included a seven-page questionnaire titled “Goldberg Variations” (), a pun on Bach's Goldberg Variations, a composition for the harpsichord. The purpose of the questionnaire was—and still is, if you choose to do it—to answer the question “Are you Leah Goldberg?” (), Goldberg being one of the major Hebrew poets of the twentieth century. The short epigraph that followed this question was two lines from the opening poem of her debut collection Smoke Rings (1935; ):

From Comparative Literature to Cultural Renewal: Georg Brandes's 1872 Introduction to Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature

“The only literature that is alive today is one that provokes debate.” These words ring out in the first published version of a lecture Georg Brandes gave at the University of Copenhagen on 3 November 1871. The lecture was the introduction to a series that changed the course not only of his life but also of Scandinavian and European cultural history. Born in Copenhagen in 1842 to assimilated Jewish parents, Brandes had recently completed a dissertation on French aesthetics and literary criticism and hoped that his lecture series would allow him to replace Carsten Hauch as professor of aesthetics at the university. Brilliant and iconoclastic, the lectures also responded to the Danish defeat in the 1864 war with Prussia, portraying Danish literature and culture as morbidly inward and insular. Brandes urged his countrymen to look abroad, to traditions such as the French, whose literature included many notable writers who grappled with social and political issues, especially those who came of age during the revolutions of 1789 and 1830.

In 2002, the author of Katerina Brac (1985), Christopher Reid, commented on the reception of his book, concluding, “it has been translated only once—into Polish, to my intense pleasure, by Leszek Engelking and Jerzy Jarniewicz. A Polish friend tells me their version reads extremely well” (“Katerina and Her Kind” 93). This laconic statement, aimed to round off the discussion about the success in the world of Reid's collection of poems, in fact does not end the discussion but raises questions about how and why we should approach a pseudo-translation from the standpoint of its fictitious original. In this essay I argue that reclaiming one's exoticized identity through translation can constitute an act of critical autoexoticism.

That culture, diet, and epistemology are intertwined and formulate one another is a truism. But to see them as one living body inhabiting shifting perspectives that can be shed easily, like snakeskins, is an exotic view that invites further investigation. Such intriguing ideas are precisely what we find in the remarkable avant-garde writer Antonin Artaud (1896–1948). This essay traces the surprising connections between Artaud's idea of culture, the body, diet, and knowledge, arguing that Artaud outlines a notion of autoexoticism as throwing open the boundaries of one's subjectivity and culture to change and rupture.