Comparative Literature Commons^™

An Escape From Language Into Language: The Internal Exile Of Louis Wolfson, Antoine N. Rideau

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper aims to show how the life and work of American francophone author Louis Wolfson - who suffered from schizophrenia and underwent a self-imposed exile from his own mother tongue - might serve to illuminate European émigré writers' relationships to multilingualism.

On The Appearance Of The Comedy Lp, 1957–1973, David Michael Mccarthy

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Many observers of contemporary comedy in the United States during the 1960s referred to musical aspects of extra-musical performances. Comedy LP records furnish important artifacts for the study of the musical appearances these observers produced for themselves. Where contemporaries described appearances characterized by printable words and polemics as “satirical,” the musical appearances discussed in this dissertation can instead be described as “comic”: instead of mocking persons or ideas, they show people and things becoming involved with one another in absurdly triumphant ways. These two different sorts of appearances correspond to two different uses for comedy in a class society, one ...

Falling Forward: Continuity And Change In The Poetics Of Eden, Julie L. Gafney

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation suggests that late fourteenth century vernacular poetry in Middle English takes up the idea of a secular Eden by which various non-normative theorizations of time and self are made possible. The invocation of a rich and multifarious Eden may be effectively understood through its relationship to the psychoanalytic theorization of origins by which Eden’s powerful potentiality for therapeutic or at least revelatory growth is inherent in its availability for processes of cyclical return. The present study will attempt to redress the tendency to treat Eden only as a fall and thereby gain a better understanding of the ...

Un “Viage”, Publicado En México, En 1835, Como Corolario Del Gran Fraude Lunar, Miguel A. Fernández Delgado Mafd

Alambique: Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasia / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

El Gran Fraude Lunar (Great Moon Hoax), orquestado en los Estados Unidos, tuvo varias versiones en diferentes países e idiomas. El presente documento, es el reflejo de cómo fue recibido en México, en donde se celebró con otro cuento, aunque esta vez anónimo sin intentar hacerlo pasar por verídico.

Science Fiction In The Spanish University: The Boundaries That Need To Be Broken, Sara Martín

Alambique: Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasia / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

The aim of this article is to trace what Rosi Braidotti calls an ‘accurate cartography’ as regards the limited space that science-fiction occupies in the Spanish university. SF has not yet overcome in Spain what Brian Baker has called its ‘crisis of legitimation’. Teaching this genre and doing research on it is, hence, still conditioned within our national borders by boundaries broken in the Anglo-American university many decades ago. Here I examine these boundaries, paying special attention to the institutional limitations preventing scholars from introducing innovations in teaching and research. Another main barrier, as I argue here, is the lack ...

The Moon Festival And The Stories Behind, Haiwang Yuan

DLPS Faculty Publications

A presentation that traces the evolution of the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, or the Moon Festival with regard to the elements that were added to the myth of the moon fairy and other elements needed for the celebration of the festival such as the moon cake and examines the differences between the Western and Chinese view of and attitude toward the Moon in history through English and Chinese literature.

Questions For Amara Lakhous: A Translated Interview, Simone Puleo, Fabiana Viglione

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

Novelist and professor Amara Lakhous lives in the United States, where he has begun his third life—a new phase after his Algerian beginnings and subsequent Italian “adoption,” as he says. After having completed a degree in philosophy from the University of Algiers, Lakhous immigrated to Italy as a political refugee. In Italy, Lakhous would earn a doctorate in anthropology from La Sapienza, Rome. These days, Amara Lakhous lives in New York City and has been a visiting professor at the University of Connecticut. He is often invited by prestigious universities in the United States to discuss social and political ...

"The Effort To Translate": Fan Film Culture And The Works Of J.R.R. Tolkien, Maria Alberto

Journal of Tolkien Research

In his 1940 preface “On Translating Beowulf,” J.R.R. Tolkien contends that “The effort to translate, or to improve a translation, is valuable, not so much for the version it produces, as for the understanding of the original which it awakes” (53). Though made with a specific literary tradition in mind, Tolkien’s assertion about the value of translation bears re-visitation in light of circumstances where the terminology has shifted. Specifically, Tolkien’s own work has since become the myth undergoing translation, and in popular parlance, translation itself has changed from simply describing the transference of a text between ...

Educating The Imagination: Northrop Frye Past, Present, And Future Edited By Alan Bewell, Neil Ten Kortenaar, And Germaine Warkentin, David Carruthers

The Goose

Review of Alan Bewell, Neil ten Kortenaar, and Germaine Warkentin's Educating the Imagination: Northrop Frye Past, Present, and Future.

The Entelechial Thinker In Space: ‘Worlds Within Worlds’ In Durrell, Flaubert, And Carroll, Sheena M. Jary

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis argues that the interior space of each individual mind has infinite potentiality to do or create x new reality in one’s life via possible worlds. I use Lawrence Durrell’s short story “Zero” (1939), Gustave Flaubert’s “Un coeur simple” (1877), and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) as literary representations of how readers outside of the literary text share an unbreakable bond with universal space. I discuss the infinite potentiality of the finite being, and the experiential data in the process of entelechy, or epistemological maturation of the mind. I bring Leibniz’s ...

Duvakin's Oral History And Bakhtin In His Own Voice, Slav N. Gratchev, Tatevik Gyulamiryan

Slav Gratchev

In their article "Duvakin's Oral History and Bakhtin in His Own Voice" Slav N. Gratchev and Tatevik Gyulamiryan examine Mikhail Bakhtin's notions of literary theory based on interviews recorded by Victor Duvakin in 1973. The collection is now held in the library of Moscow State University. As it so often happened in the Soviet Union, these unique interviews only became known many years later and Gratchev's and Gyulamiryan's analysis of the interviews sheds light on Bakhtin's thought not available when reading his published work.

Nebraska's Wedding Crasher, Jannine Capó Crucet

Faculty Publications -- Department of English

My building thinks of itself as Lincoln's premier wedding venue. I was not told this when I signed the lease. A glitch of duct work sends the sounds of every single party straight through the exhaust fan of my apartment's bathroom, so loud and clear that I can hear the names of everyone in the wedding party as they are announced -- not just in the bathroom, but from the living room. I can hear when people are clapping, can hear the claps as individual sonic events: I can almost always make out the crisp echo of the last ...

From Professor-Student To Collaborators, Jesse E. Siegel

Blogging the Library

I had not met Michael Ritterson before he visited the Conservation Lab at Special Collections, where he was having a book mended, but I had certainly heard of him. A former faculty member of the German department, Mr. Ritterson is now a German translator, taking on projects from translating the work of a 17th German woman’s study of butterflies to the poetry of a Berlin leftist written during the 1968 Movement. And, by previous contact in the mail, he had heard of me. So after Mary Wooton showed him the fully repaired book, we were formally introduced and had ...

Norse "Loki" As Praxonym, William Sayers

Journal of Literary Onomastics

The still debated Old Norse theonym Loki is projected against the wide semantic field of the ON verb lúka "to close", not, as current scholarship would have it, as relevant to Ragnarǫk and the closing down of the divine world but in its judicial applications to successfull negotiated outcomes. The ingenious Loki, the bearer of a praxonym, would then be the inventive Fixer. While this aspect is well illustrated in tales of Loki's ruses and expedients, a more archaic figure emerges when Loki is associated with the reconstructed Indo-European verbal root *lok- "to accuse, blame, prohibit" (cf. Old Frisian ...

“The City Was Named After An Herb Called Mesas In Ancient Spanish”: Rabbi Yosef Mesas’ Testimony Concerning His Surname, Abraham Ofir Shemesh

Journal of Literary Onomastics

Yosef Mesas (1892–1974), a renowned Jewish Rabbi, claimed that the origin of his surname is the ancient city Mesas near Madrid, named for a medicinal herb common there. He assumes that "Mesas" became a common name in Morocco after the Jews were exiled from Spain in 1492. Mesas suggests that the herb is "Masasa" in Moroccan Arabic (Darija dialect). In the 12th century, Maimonides stated that Moroccans call the genus Plantago "Masasa". This fact refutes Mesas' assumption that the name was brought to Morocco after the Alhambra Decree.

"Mesas" apparently originates from the Spanish term "mesa", meaning "tableland" or ...

The Origin And Development Of Tigrinya Language Publications (1886 - 1991) Volume One, Abraham Negash

Abraham Negash

Tigrinya is a Semitic language spoken in Eritrea and in the Tigray Region of Northern Ethiopia. Tigrinya is one of the nine languages in Eritrea. It was one of Eritrea's official languages (along with Arabic) during its short-lived (1941-1952) federation with Ethiopia. When Eritrea was annexed by Ethiopia in 1958, Amharic replaced Tigrinya and Arabic and was established as the official language by the imperial government. In 1991, when Eritrea became an independent country, Tigrinya regained its status as a working language.

Tigrinya has its own alphabet of 32 letters adopted from Ge'ez, a language which exists with ...

Focusing The Village: Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali And Prafulla Mohanti's My Village, My Life, Geoffrey Kain

Geoffrey Kain

Gandhi insisted that the spirit of India lives in its villages, but the drift away from the village and toward urbanization in post- independence India continues. Questions arise regarding the ideological motivations driving artists’ treatments of the village in various notable works in the modern South Asian canon. A comparison is drawn between Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali [1955] and Orissan artist and author Prafulla Mohanti’s My Village, My Life [1973]. While at first glance the two may seem to have little to do with another, a close consideration reveals some striking similarities between them, providing some compelling insights ...

Palpable Hits: Popular Music Forms And Teaching Early Modern Poetry, Stephen M. Buhler

Faculty Publications -- Department of English

Recent pedagogical scholarship has engaged strenuously with the use of YouTube and other online platforms in the literature classroom. Stephen O’Neill, for one, champions video-sharing and similar media “in the interests of fostering various experiential, collaborative and peer-learning scenarios,” especially in tandem with the “array of Shakespeare content, which can potentially illuminate and deepen [learners’] understanding of the text and its diverse contexts” (190). In this essay, I discuss the advantages of sharing for this purpose online materials that have been developed by artists, instructors, students, and others—specifically, materials with a musical orientation. Along the way, I shall ...

The Ethics And Politics Of Love In Postwar France: The Case Of Beauvoir, Camus, And Sartre, Christian Wood

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The Ethics and Politics of Love focuses primarily upon Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre during the period 1935 to 1960, specifically the periods before and after the Second World War (1939 -- 1945), and the Franco-Algerian War (1954 -- 1962). I argue that inquiring into each thinker's theory of love yields crucial and hitherto unexplored insights into their ethical and political theories: "love" thus represents my particular Ariadne's thread to guide us into, and then back outside of their daunting oeuvres and singular lives. I use their documented thoughts on love as an analytical tool with which ...

The Cradle Of Democracy And The Longue Durée Of A Crisis Some Thoughts From The Perspective Of Historical Sociology, Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

The relationship between Modern Greece and the West has always been a complex and tortuous one. Greece as “the cradle of democracy” – a construct at the intersection of western modernity’s political imaginary and Greek national identity – a terribly familiar and powerful cliché which to a great extent, still today, informs our imagination and politics has been at the heart of this relationship. It is rather a truism to suggest that democracy lies at the political core of the civilization that the West insists offering to the rest of the world, yet we tend to forget that this is a ...