Comparative Literature Commons^™

Adoption, Cynical Detachment, And New Age Beliefs In Juno And Kung Fu Panda, Fu-Jen Chen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Adoption, Cynical Detachment, and New Age Beliefs in Juno and Kung Fu Panda" Fu-Jen Chen situates his study within today's prevailing climate of global consumption to argue that the 2007 film Juno—featuring an unconventional portrayal of the adoption triad and a cynical detachment from public values—not only trivializes and depoliticizes the practice of adoption but also serves as an ideological supplement to today's global capitalism. Furthermore, Kung Fu Panda 1 & 2 (2008; 2011) provide two ideological messages of contemporary New Age spirituality—"the belief in nothing" in part I, and "the attitude of inner peace" …

The Representation Of Instinctive Homosexuality And Immoral Narcissism In Gide’S The Immoralist (1902) And Mann’S Death In Venice (1912), Louise Willis

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Representation of Instinctive Homosexuality and Immoral Narcissism in Gide’s The Immoralist (1902) and Mann’s Death in Venice (1912)" Louise Willis examines two early literary representations of homosexuality in André Gide's The Immoralist (1902) and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (1912). She reads them with fin-de-siècle sexological theory, mainly Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). Willis argues that the texts reflect the reconception of homosexuality as a latent instinct with pathological expression, rather than a sinful act of free will. The article explains that visual imagery conveys homoerotic desire, by incorporating Nietzsche's concept of …

A Comparative History Of Resurrection Plants, John Charles Ryan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "A Comparative Literary History of Resurrection Plants" John Charles Ryan assembles a comparative history of resurrection plants through textual analysis of early botanical commentaries, herbal references, prose, poetry, and other sources. Resurrection plants include a diverse range of botanical species, typically of arid regions, that appear to come back to life after complete desiccation. Historical and contemporary observers—from sixteenth-century herbalist John Gerard to contemporary Australian poet John Kinsella—have expressed an abiding fascination for resurrection plants' capacity to survive harsh environmental conditions. The plants court their own deaths by paring down—then restoring—physiological processes in relation to shifting ecological …

The Indian Empire And Its Colonial Practices In South Asia, Yubraj Aryal

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The India, Empire and its Colonial Practices in South Asia" Yubraj Aryal claims that Bharatiya discourse supports colonization in South Asia. This discourse justifies oppression of institutions, practices, of the non-Bharatiya colonized. The article examines Indian Empire's colonialism toward the weaker, smaller nations along its border and the Bharatiya ideology at the heart of the repressive empire, which is taken to represent the South Asian subcontinent. The article looks at the way in which Bharatiya is perhaps a more oppressive ideology than Orientalism and gives a glimpse into how society, culture, history, and textuality work around power …

Memory And Identity-Focused Narratives In Tănase's 'Lived Book', Nicoleta D. Ifrim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Memory and identity-focused narratives in Tănase's 'lived book'" Nicoleta Ifrim analyses România mea (My Romania), Virgil Tănase's first book published after the fall of Ceausescu's regime, a collection of interviews in which personal history is fictionalized according to the narrative rules of a "spoken book." The text is representative for the Eastern intellectual travelling to the West, carrying out his own personal post-totalitarian traumas now mirrored in a self-oriented narrative.

Conceptualizing Nature: New England Nature Writers, Robert Pinkham

Honors Theses

This thesis examines five New England nature writers and their works from three distinct historical literary periods―William Cullen Bryant’s poetry from the era before industrialism (up to 1830); Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays (1841-1844) and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) from the Industrial Revolution (1830-1860); and finally Robert Frost’s poetry and Henry Beston’s The Outermost House (1929) from the modernist period (1920-1950). These writers are connected by a shared and intense love of nature; however, because they write during different moments in history, their approaches to and definitions of “nature” vary. This thesis engages with these writers and their times in …

Visionary "Staycations": Meeting God At Home In Medieval Women’S Vision Literature, Jessica Barr

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Medieval vision literature frequently features descriptions of supernatural travel: to Hell, Heaven, and Purgatory, or to locations that allow the visionary to receive knowledge to which she would not normally be privy. A less explored trope of this literature, however, is the travel-without-travel that occurs when the visionary’s physical location is overlaid with a transcendent mode of perception. This essay will analyze such moments of spatial transformation in late medieval visionary and hagiographic narratives. In the vitae of many medieval holy women, visions that transform the domestic sphere figure as evidence of their sanctity; in first-person visionary accounts, on the …

Urhobo Folklore And Udje Aesthetics In Tanure Ojaide's In The House Of Words And Songs Of Myself, Mathias I. Orhero

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Urhobo Folklore and Udje Aesthetics in Ojaide's In the House of Words and Songs of Myself" Mathias Orhero argues that Ojaide's poetry incorporates Urhobo folkloric contents and Udje style. Using African New Criticism as its theoretical anchor, this paper reveals that Ojaide amply deploys Urhobo folkloric contents and Udje aesthetics in both the form and contents of his poetry and thus, he continues as a modern Urhobo Udje maestro of the hybrid tradition. This paper also brings Ojaide's recent collections to critical lenses, especially as masterpieces of his Urhobo folkloric and Udje adaptations. Orhero concludes by …

Review Of The Gift Of Active Empathy: Scheler, Bakhtin, And Dostoevsky, By Alina Wyman, Slav N. Gratchev

Dr. Slav N. Gratchev

There are certain writers that literary scholars of all times will study again and again, and there are certain literary works that are too important to be examined only once. Reading Dostoevsky is always an “excruciatingly visceral experience” not only for us, the readers, but also for scholars like Max Scheler and Mikhail Bakhtin (p. 230). Alina Wyman’s book makes a major contribution to this experience. Wyman’s argument is both original and elegantly simple: for Bakhtin and Scheler the concept of loving empathy is fundamental in both their respective models of being and in the particular structure of their careers. …

Political Wishful Thinking Versus The Shape Of Things To Come: Manuel De Pedrolo’S "Mecanoscrit" And “Los Últimos Días” By Àlex And David Pastor, Pere Gallardo Torrano

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

Despite almost forty years separating Manuel de Pedrolo’s novel Mecanoscrit del segon orígen (1974, trad. Typescript of the Second Origin) and the brothers Àlex and David Pastor’s film “Los últimos días” (2013, US tit. “The Last Days”), it is not difficult to find several socio-political areas of intersection which converge on a biological issue at the end of both works: the pregnancy of one of the characters at the end of each story.

Yet, such an interpretation would be rather limited as it ignores the socio-political landscape from which each work originated. Published in the aftermath of the first …

Chinese Wines And Foreign Urns: Making Objects Of Lyric, Ryan Matthew Hintzman

Student Work

A 2016-2017 William Prize for best essay in East Asian Studies was awarded to Ryan Matthew Hintzman (Silliman College '17) for his essay submitted to the Department of Comparative Literature, "Chinese Wines and Foreign Urns: Making Objects of Lyric.” (Edward Kamens, Sumitomo Professor of Japanese Studies, advisor.)

Ryan Hintzman’s essay, Chinese Wines and Foreign Urns: Making Objects of Lyric is a work of awe-inspiring erudition, vision, and ambition. Ranging far and wide among traditional and more recent theories of the lyric and moving boldly from 8th century poems in Japanese to 19th and 20th century poems in English, Hintzman …

Rites And Rituals Of The Yaxhilan Queens: Analysis Of The Iconography Of The Yaxchilan Lintels 24, 25, And 26, Jillian Bentley, Allen Christianson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The ruins of Yaxchilan on the shores of the Usumacinta River, Mexico have some of the only occurrences of iconography that contain women performing sacred bloodletting rites. Most scholars seem to agree that at the end of the 8th century and beginning of the 9th century C.E., the Classic Maya were on the brink of collapse in the southern lowlands. This Great collapse has many arguable factors: disease, drought, famine, starvation, natural disasters, etc. Though no exact cause for the Great collapse has been identified, one thing that scholars seem to agree on is the desperation one can sense in …

From Imposition To Integration: Teotihuacan Influence On Maya Culture, As Evidence By Stela 7 At Piedras Negras, Catherine Nuckols, Allen J. Christenson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

This project was inspired by the Maya monument known as Stela 7, from Piedras Negras, Guatemala (shown at right). This stela, or upright stone carving, portrays a ruler of Piedras Negras wearing a war headdress. The headdress is Maya in style, but contains an element, the Trapeze and Ray motif, that appears to have been adapted from the Central Mexican culture of Teotihuacan, which by that point had ceased to exist. Teotihuacan was a very large city situated in Central Mexico. In AD 378, Teotihuacan invaded the nearunconquerable city state of Tikal and imposed a new ruling dynasty. From that …

Unveiling Poetic Patterns In El Titulo De Totonicapan, Karen Devictoria, Allen Christenson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

When the Spanish launched a conquest on the Maya empire in the 16th century, the Maya suffered devastating blows to their livelihood and culture. Perhaps the most injurious effect of this conquest was the loss of the Maya languages as the Maya were forced to converse and write only in Spanish and their written works were destroyed. It has been said, “When a language dies, a possible world dies with it.”1 After the Spanish conquest, it was only a few generations until the once highly advanced Maya language was transformed to a mere oral tradition spoken only by the elderly. …

Jerry-Rigged Salvation, John Sivils

English Class Publications

This paper examines the anagogical meaning of certain objects in three of Flannery O'Connor's stories, and then proposes how those meanings nuance narrative themes.

Race, Gender, And Exile In Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises And Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Abby E. Gould

Senior Theses

This senior thesis for the South Carolina Honors College conducts a literary analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Across these two texts, I focus on expatriates, examining the psychological trauma that ensues when they are forced to define their “self” not in terms of where they are, but in terms of who they really are. These challenges to one’s self, I argue, illuminate the complexity of gender and sexual identity as well as the social structures that assign values to certain forms or expressions of masculinity.

El Poder Y Sus Mecanismos En La Novela Cuatro Por Cuatro, De Sara Mesa: Una Interpretación Social En La España De La Crisis, Maria Ayete

Theses and Dissertations

En este trabajo se propone una interpretación en términos sociales de la novela Cuatro por cuatro (2012), de Sara Mesa, a partir del análisis del poder y sus relaciones en el texto. En primer lugar, se establecen los elementos teóricos base para el posterior estudio de la obra. Estos elementos se definen y desarrollan según las reflexiones sobre el poder realizadas por Michel Foucault. En segundo lugar, se analiza el espacio ficcional del colegio y las relaciones que en él se establecen según los presupuestos teóricos anteriores, para argumentar la comprensión de dicho espacio como espacio carcelario y de sus …

Weird Modernisms, Alison Nikki Sperling

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation theorizes “the Weird” as a pervasive theme across literary Modernism. Drawing from early versions of weirdness in the pulp magazine Weird Tales (1923-1954) and from the magazine’s most famous writer, H.P. Lovecraft, I demonstrate that the weird must not be limited to tentacular horrors present in supernatural fiction of the period. Instead, I argue weirdness is a category bound to non-normative experiences of material embodiment. Drawing from feminist materialisms, queer theory, disability studies, and nonhuman theories, this project develops a concept of the Weird that is more expansive and ultimately more ethically engaged with otherness and bodily difference. …

Caressing Radical Alterity: For A Queer Ethic Of Embodiment In Contemporary Films And Literature, Marc Demont

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation offers an analysis of the caress through the dual lens of phenomenology and psychoanalysis. I argue that the caress reveals the queerness and ambiguities of perception and that this gesture must be understood as an ethical gesture of opening toward otherness. I discuss different accounts of the caress (Levinas, Irigaray) and expose the misogynistic and/or homophobic bias at work in these theories of the caress. I suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of touch and other notions that he develops (Flesh, intertwinement, intercorporeality, encroachment, etc.) allow a redefinition of the caress that avoids Levinas and Irigaray’s pitfalls. In a reading …

I. In The Time Of The Others : A Novel ; Ii. Out Of East Pakistan : Postcolonial Colony Bangladesh As A Case Study Of Postcolonial State And Postcolonial Nation-State From East Pakistan To Independence Through The Liberation War Of 1971 : A Critical Analysis., Nadeem Zaman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a combined creative and critical project consisting a novel and a theoretical component. The novel entitled In the Time of the Others is a fictional account set during the true event of the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. Using the war as a backdrop, the novel tells the story of one man trying to manage his family, marriage, and financial situation by returning to an inheritance he never claimed. The journey brings him from his home in southern East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh) to the capital city Dhaka, to the home of his maternal uncle and aunt under …