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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Duke University Press and Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Poetics Today. Poetics and Comparative Literature, Tel Aviv "The sash is not like a same thing that has stripes" Abstract This article challenges the status of simile in some central contributions to the canonical tradition of metaphor theory, including those of Paul Henle, Winifred Nowottny, and Max Black. It claims that a trajectory leading to the defiguration of simile characterizes these theoretical interventions, since the privileging of metaphor as the "figure of figures, the figure for figurality" (Culler 1981: 189) is best served by the literalization of simile. I explore the manner in which simile is defigured through its subordination to theories of metaphor, as well as the critical and theoretical consequences of this process of defiguration for both metaphor and simile. Of central importance is the dynamic whereby the prima facie structural difference between metaphor and simile (the absence of connectives of similitude in the former, their presence in the latter) is made to bear the burden of simile's literality. The connective becomes the literal surplus which apparently devalues simile, according to the view that permeates modern rhetoric. A revisionist reading of the connective, anchored in an alternative theorization of the figurality of simile, is presented here. In addition, a sample corpus of figurative similes-in my reading-is analyzed in support of this alternative. This article is based on my master's thesis, prepared under the supervision of Meir Sternberg in the Department of Poetics and Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University in 1991. I would like to express my deepest thanks to Professor Sternberg for his acute insights, incisive criticism, and unstinting assistance at every turn, both during the writing of the thesis and its adaptation in the present form. Thanks are also due to Brian McHale for his astute editorial interventions, and to Yeshayahu Shen for our long and stimulating conversations on simile which provoked a rethinking and rewriting of some of my existing material. Simile occupies an increasingly marginal position in the field of rhetoric. The classical view of metaphor as elliptical simile, current since Aristotle and Quintilian, might seem to indicate a valorization of simile to the extent that simile enjoys an anterior status, and metaphor a derivative one. According to Paul Ricoeur, ancient rhetoric views simile as "the canonical form of which metaphor [is] the abbreviation" (1986 [1978]: 248). And the practice of using simile to explicate metaphor, the so-called "comparison view" of metaph...

This special issue considers networked cultural responses loosely figured as "cultural solidarities" in the Global South, on the understanding that mid-twentieth century struggles to end colonialism were addressed within a transnational domain. It takes apartheid South Africa as its point of departure, positioning literature from South Africa within a broadly anti-colonial commons. As they consider works by Alex La Guma, Nazim Hikmet Ran, Athol Fugard, and Todd Matshikiza, among others, our contributors-Christopher J. Lee, Gül Bilge Han, Ashleigh Harris and Andrea Thorpe-question the role of aesthetic forms in constructing long-distance solidarities in a Cold War setting. Mohammad Shabangu's assertion of the necessity of "opacity" as a counter to the recuperation of the African writer brings such questions into the present, intersecting contemporary debates on world literature. Finally, solidarity is framed in temporal rather than geographical terms in Andrew van der Vlies and Julia Willén's dialogue on "reading for hope" in the aftermath of failed revolutionary projects.

This article reads South African science-fiction writer Lauren Beukes's first novel, Moxyland (2008) set in a futuristic Cape Town, from the perspective of Lindsay Bremner's notion of "citiness"-or how cities produce the modernity of the subjects who inhabit them. The novel is remarkable for its dependence on the social geography of the South African city. This article charts Beukes's resolutely mobile focalizers as they negotiate the spatial itineraries and technologies of governance in which they are embedded. It explores how Beukes's futuristic urban setting fuses punitive forms of digital technology with the biopolitical regulation of social relations in an unsettling reprise of the apartheid groundplan. My reading positions Moxyand in relation to discussions of African city textualities-a critical rubric introduced by Ranka Primorac in this journal-the better to explore how the novel makes history of dystopia.