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Recent Articles in Reading and Language
Estok Simon C. Curriculum Vitae, Simon C. Estok 
Purdue University
Cross-Cultural Storytelling: Translation Into Swahili, Heidi Nafis 
Olin College of Engineering
Cross-Cultural Storytelling: Translation Into Swahili, Heidi Nafis
2013 AHS Capstone Projects
I grew up reading folk tales from all over the world. Storytelling is a fundamental component of many societies, especially in Africa, and because so many of the stories told have been translated into English, I’ve been exposed to these societies and their cultures. In my project, I returned the favor, translating two short folk tales from English into Swahili. I presented the stories in parallel so that a reader of either tongue might experience the other and enjoy the stories.
Metropolitan (Im)Migrants In The "Lettered City", Stacey Balkan Purdue University
Metropolitan (Im)Migrants In The "Lettered City", Stacey Balkan
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Metropolitan (Im)migrants in the 'Lettered City'" Stacey Balkan employs Ángel Rama's discussion of audience as a means of analyzing a Latin American diaspora that exists beyond the "rational periphery" of the state. Herein, the term diaspora is redefined as a translocal phenomenon wherein the metropolitan (im)migrant moves from rural margin to urban center. Normative definitions of exile — persons displaced from autonomous nation-states — are likewise scrutinized in the context of what the Rama terms a post-contemporary "city of letters." This post-contemporary city is the subject of what Mabel Moraña refers to as a "subaltern boom ...
Nádas's A Book Of Memories And Central European Journeys, Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek Purdue University
Nádas's A Book Of Memories And Central European Journeys, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Nádas's A Book of Memories and Central European Journeys" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek discusses theoretical, literary, political, social, etc., aspects of travel in Péter Nádas's novel. "Travel" in the novel represents both a conceptual and lived experience at a time when travel between the East and the West in Europe was restricted and when a person hailing from the "East" considered a journey to the West a complex and ideological matter. Further, the aspect of urbanity, that is, cultural and social spaces and the journey and what such entails in terms of ideology, points of ...
Negra D'America Remond And Her Journeys, Sirpa A. Salenius Purdue University
Negra D'America Remond And Her Journeys, Sirpa A. Salenius
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "negra d'America Remond and Her Journeys" Sirpa A. Salenius analyzes Sarah P. Remond's travels to Europe. Remond, an African American born free in Salem, Massachusetts in 1826 into an abolitionist family, was a successful lecturer on abolitionism in the United States before traveling to England in 1859. During her anti-slavery lecture tour there, she also became involved in promoting women's rights thus enlarging the scope of her social and political agenda to embrace both racial and gender oppression. Subsequently, she studied in London, graduating as a nurse from London University College before moving to ...
Power And Representation In Anglo-American Travel Blogs And Travel Books About China, Stefano Calzati Purdue University
Power And Representation In Anglo-American Travel Blogs And Travel Books About China, Stefano Calzati
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Power and Representation in Anglo-American Travel Blogs and Travel Books about China" Stefano Calzati presents a comparative analysis between two travel books and two travel blogs written by Anglo-American travellers about China. The assumption is that travel books and travel blogs, being two differently mediated forms of travel writing, share some similarities: they are "autodiegetic narratives" and they bear a (cross)cultural potential. Through a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis I investigate how Anglo-American travel writers represent themselves and Chinese people as to what extent the definition of travel writing is medially affected; 2) to what extent the ...
Travel And Empire In Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, Yi-chin Shih Purdue University
Travel And Empire In Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, Yi-Chin Shih
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Travel and Empire in Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good" Yi-chin Shih analyzes Our Country's Good from the perspective of travel in order to explore the exercise of empire and the practice of resistance. Considered as one of the luminaries in British theater, Timberlake Wertenbaker (1951-) has produced several successful works, especially Our Country's Good (1988), which won her a Laurence Olivier Award for the Best Play and solidified her reputation as an important playwright in world theater. Our Country's Good is based on real historical facts about the First Fleet's transportation of ...
Mental Travel And Memory Mapping In Sebald's Work, Jonathan White Purdue University
Mental Travel And Memory Mapping In Sebald's Work, Jonathan White
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Mental Travel and Memory Mapping in Sebald's Narratives" Jonathan White analyses several of the journeys — real and by means of the mind — by which W.G. Sebald follows what he once called "invisible connections that determine our lives." These connections are often although not always between the living and the dead "on the far side of time." In reaction against what Sebald interpreted as a conspiracy of silence in his youth over the destruction that Germany had caused and that which had been done in turn to it, Sebald attempted to reconstruct worlds and people destroyed ...
Artaud's Journey To Mexico And His Portrayals Of The Land, Tsu-Chung Su Purdue University
Artaud's Journey To Mexico And His Portrayals Of The Land, Tsu-Chung Su
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Artaud's Journey to Mexico and His Portrayals of the Land" Tsu-Chung Su examines Artaud's visions, visualizations, descriptions, and conceptualizations of Mexico. Su argues that Artaud's writings about Mexico were his textual appropriations and cartographical remappings of the land. They embodied both the geographic wandering of his itinerary and the bodily spasms of his thought. At once geographical and psycho-physiological embodiments, they were not only texts of a questing spirit but also words of a schizophrenic mind. While tracing and mapping Artaud's deterritorialized wanderings in cultures, religions, and rituals of Mexico, Su aims to ...
Miłosz's Quest For Affirmation And His Reflections On Us-American Culture, Joel J. Janicki Purdue University
Miłosz's Quest For Affirmation And His Reflections On Us-American Culture, Joel J. Janicki
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Miłosz's Quest for Affirmation and His Reflections on US-American Culture" Joel J. Janicki discusses Czeslaw Miłosz's writings in exile devoted to his home in California. Miłosz, a Polish Lithuanian poet, essayist, and historian of literature, after experiencing five years of the nazi regime in Warsaw and six years of Stalinized rule in post-World War II Poland, threw himself "into the abyss" of exile. Miłosz's writings and translations have served as a bridge between the Polish and Anglo-Saxon cultures seldom encountered on such a scale. At the same time, his ability to look at a ...
Makine's Postmodern Writing About Exile, Memory, And Connection, Mary Theis Purdue University
Makine's Postmodern Writing About Exile, Memory, And Connection, Mary Theis
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Makine's Postmodern Writing about Exile, Memory, and Connection" Mary Theis explores the implications of some of the many literary epiphanous moments that Andreï Makine shares with his readers in his neo-Romantic metaphysical literary quest to transcend lyrically the limitations imposed by our human condition. The analysis of this theme in Makin's literary career features several of his most important novels, his one play, and his subsequent meta-utopian reflections in Alternaissance, written under the pen name Gabriel Osmonde.
On Naipaul's Cultural Positions In The Middle Passage, Shizen Ozawa Purdue University
On Naipaul's Cultural Positions In The Middle Passage, Shizen Ozawa
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "On Naipaul's Cultural Positions in The Middle Passage" Shizen Ozawa discusses V.S. Naipaul's first travel writing. An account of his "returning" journey to the five Caribbean "colonial societies," The Middle Passage constitutes a major turning point in Naipaul's long literary career. Whereas his earlier novels depict his homeland of Trinidad ironically, although with a certain warmth and sympathy, from The Middle Passage on the world depicted both in his fictions and non-fictions turns bleaker. Correspondingly, his authorial persona changes from that of a West Indian writer to a controversial chronicler of chaotic postcolonial ...
Horizontality And Impossibility In Kafka's Parabolic Quests, Frank W. Stevenson Purdue University
Horizontality And Impossibility In Kafka's Parabolic Quests, Frank W. Stevenson
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Horizontality and Impossibility in Kafka's Parabolic Quests" Frank W. Stevenson explores a horizontal-parabolic interpretation of several Kafka narratives. The key idea is that the meaning/truth of a parable is being thrown-beside-itself "on the horizontal": thus it is impossible not only to vertically reach any higher meaning/truth but even to "cross-over" to a truth which has now been horizontally "displaced." Noting that Derrida's and Agamben's reading of "Before the Law" — the narrator cannot "enter into the Law" because the latter "prescribes nothing," is nothing but an "opening" — not only excludes any vertical-hierarchical dimension ...
Reimagining "Tense And Tender Ties" In García's Monkey Hunting, Yu-Fang Cho Purdue University
Reimagining "Tense And Tender Ties" In García's Monkey Hunting, Yu-Fang Cho
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Reimagining 'Tense and Tender Ties' in Garcia's Monkey Hunting" Yu-Fang Cho analyses Cristina García's re-narration of transnational histories of the multi-racial, multi-generational Chinese Cuban family in Monkey Hunting (2003) as a critical project that recasts developmental immigrant narratives primarily set in the United States as part of the emerging cultural archive of global migrations. Drawing on recent scholarship on comparative racialization, especially Ann Laura Stoler's formulation of "tense and tender ties" as a method, Cho examines how García's family saga unsettles the temporal and spatial logics of Euro-American modernity through the deployment of ...
Forgács's Film And Installation Dunai Exodus (Danube Exodus), Zsófia Bán Purdue University
Forgács's Film And Installation Dunai Exodus (Danube Exodus), Zsófia Bán
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Forgács's Film and Installation Dunai exodus (Danube Exodus)" Zsófia Bán analyzes film maker and video artist Péter Forgács's film The Danube Exodus (1998) and compares it with the installation Dunai exodus. A folyó beszédes áramlatai (Rippling: Currents of the River) (2002). Combined with additional materials, the two works are based on footage by ship captain Nándor Andrásovits documenting two successive journeys of forced displacement aboard his vessel, the Queen Elizabeth. Bán's analysis includes the 1939 event of the Jewish exodus from Slovakia to the Black Sea with the eventual goal of reaching Palestine followed ...
The Life Writing Of Hart, Inspector-General Of The Imperial Maritime Customs Service, Henk Vynckier, Chihyun Chang Purdue University
The Life Writing Of Hart, Inspector-General Of The Imperial Maritime Customs Service, Henk Vynckier, Chihyun Chang
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In their article "The Life Writing of Hart, Inspector-General of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service" Henk Vynckier and Chihyun Chang analyze the life and writing of Sir Robert Hart (1835-1911). Hart arrived in China in 1854 and served as Inspector-General of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service 1863-1911. Although Hart disparaged his own role, Jonathan Spence views him as a key adviser to the Qing government. Despite of the historical importance of Hart's texts, of his seventy-seven volume diary only eight of the volumes have been published and the remaining volumes remain largely unexamined. Vynckier and Chang examine the complex ...
Reading Wordsworth With Hegel And Deleuze, Douglas Berman Purdue University
Reading Wordsworth With Hegel And Deleuze, Douglas Berman
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Reading Wordsworth with Hegel and Deleuze" Douglas Berman reexamines Wordsworth poem, The Ruined Cottage, in terms of the importance of the Pedlar, who serves as the witness and singular moral authority in the text. Berman focuses on the inherent tension between impermanence, as exemplified by the trope of wandering, and the redemptive vision which shapes the ending of the second version of the poem (1798). While recognizing the strength of earlier critics, particularly the New Historicists, who emphasized Wordsworth's displacement of social and material reality into nature, Berman argues that wandering, both in its physical form ...
The Slave Trade In The Work Of Fox, Johnson, And Spielberg, Ya-Huei Lin Purdue University
The Slave Trade In The Work Of Fox, Johnson, And Spielberg, Ya-Huei Lin
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "The Slave Trade in the Work of Fox, Johnson, and Spielberg" Ya-huei Lin analyzes Paula Fox's The Slave Dancer (1973), Charles R. Johnson's The Middle Passage (1990), and Amistad, the 1997 film directed by Steven Spielberg based on the true event of 1841. Lin's examination of these three texts is an attempt to clarify the event's narration in the context of Walter Benjamin's historical materialism. Further, Lin explores what Louis Althusser proposes in "A Letter on Art" as to how the texts at hand make one see the ideology from which they ...
Gulliver, Travel, And Empire, Claude Rawson Purdue University
Gulliver, Travel, And Empire, Claude Rawson
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Gulliver, Travel, and Empire" Claude Rawson analyzes Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels as a central document of European intellectual history. Rawson focuses on the relationship between ethnicity and human identity and asks what constitutes humanity and how individual groups qualify (or not) for human status. Posing teasingly as a "parody" of travel books, it is both a series of voyages and an ethnically widening arc of moral exploration as Book Four at once expresses an ambivalent perception of the Irish under English rule and extends to what Swift/Gulliver calls "all Savage Nations" and ultimately takes ...
Evans's And Cheevers's Quaker Missionary Travels, Hui-chu Yu Purdue University
Evans's And Cheevers's Quaker Missionary Travels, Hui-Chu Yu
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Evans's and Cheevers's Quaker Missionary Travels" Hui-chu Yu investigates Katharine Evans's and Sarah Cheevers's account of their experiences as Quaker missionaries in Malta between 1658-1662. For Evans and Cheevers traveling was a mission ordained by god and thus their journey is less a trip for the gratification of exploration than spiritual and physical trials. With a purpose to spread Quaker texts, Evans and Cheevers traveled to different lands such as Ireland and Malta. Although they perceived the hostility toward their belief, they still claimed to be god's handmaids with an aim to ...
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