Television Commons^™

Resistance To Neocolonialism In Contemporary Chinese Literary Theory, Zeng Jun

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Resistance to Neocolonialism in Contemporary Chinese Literary Theory" Jun ZENG claims that the introduction of Western Literary Theory in the past forty years of China's reform and opening up was carried out under the background of neo-colonialism. "Western imagination" in the discourse of contemporary Chinese literary theory was an important aspect of the strategy of cultural resistance under the overwhelming influence of Western neocolonialism. Contemporary Chinese literary theory no longer simply regards Western literary theory in the twentieth century as a bourgeois literary ideology; instead, it adopts a "de-ideological" attitude to return to the issues of ...

Restaging World Literature In The Age Of Neoliberalism/Neocolonialism, Shaobo Xie

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Restaging World Literature in the Age of Neoliberal­ism/Neocolonia­­lism" Shaobo Xie argues that Goethe's notion of world literature spells a genuine universalism that contributes to resistance to neoliberal imperialism. In the age of neocolonial­ism/ne­oliberalism all conduct, and all spheres of human life are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics and neoliberalism both as a govern­ing rationality and as an economic policy is penetrating into every part of the world. The politics that is really heter­ogeneous or external to the rule of neoliberal capitalism in the neocolonial global ...

The End Of The Nobel Era And The Reconstruction Of The World Republic Of Letters, Guohua Zhu, Yonghua Tang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "The End of the Nobel Era and the Reconstruction of the World Republic of Letters" Guohua Zhu and Yonghua Tang critically examine mechanisms of cultural hegemony associated with the Nobel Prize in Literature from a neocolonial lens. Borrowing from Casanova's idea of the "World Republic of Letters" and its attentiveness to geopolitics, the essay proceeds to reconstruct the dialectical relations between the nation and the world. It does so, in the first place, by documenting and analyzing the process of negotiation and bargaining entailed in the construction of global cultural hegemony and thereby examine the functions ...

Mo Yan’S Reception In China And A Reflection On The Postcolonial Discourse, Binghui Song

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Mo Yan's Reception in China and a Reflection on the Postcolonial Discourse" Binghui Song argue that the controversial style and themes of Mo Yan's works are necessitated by the interconnected yet different contexts of China and the rest of the world, only by means of which Mo Yan can let his voice be heard. As one of the most excellent and unique contemporary Chinese writers, Mo Yan has exerted extensive influence on Chinese readers, and his works have also caused various controversies over the past 30 years. His winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature ...

Personal Geography, Floating Identities And Inter-Asian Migration In Stories By Migrant Workers In Taiwan, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Personal Geography, floating Identities and Inter-Asian Migration in Stories by Migrant Workers in Taiwan," I-Chun Wang discusses narratives by migrant workers with the purpose of looking into their personal geographies, their possibilities of integration, their floating identities and their dreams of settlement and possible success. This paper stresses the stories of migration show not only common human values, shared across cultures and creolization, but also sad stories of human-rights violations, injustices, discrimination, and even human trafficking. In these fictional stories or witness literature, cross-cultural conflicts, cultural in-betweenness and cultural hybridity are intertwined with the migrants’ ways to ...

Fake Or Visual Trickery? Understanding The Quantitative Visual Rhetoric In The News, Rohit Mehta, Lynette Deaun Guzmán

Journal of Media Literacy Education

In online and video/television spaces, news media discourses incorporate multimodal design as a discursive move capable of steering meaning toward desirable implications. Around the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, while polarized news outlets made their positionality on the candidates obvious, more neutral or central news outlets revealed their preferences through subtle multimodal design choices. One of these design choices is using a quantitative visual rhetoric: persuasive multimodal moves that draw on quantification through visual, spatial, and textual manipulation—involving the choice of data representation, visual images, and illustrations, (im)balance between numeric and alphabetic texts, and general quantitative narrative ...

Mao's "On Contradiction," Mao-Hegel/Mao-Deleuze, Kenneth Surin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Mao Tse-Tung's famous 1937 essay "On Contradiction" is regarded as a significant attempt to redefine and reapply Marx's notion of a "dialectical contradiction" to the Chinese revolutionary conjuncture of Mao's time. I set out the principles outlined in Mao's essay, before arguing that the revolutionary conjuncture of his time no longer exists in the era of globalization and neoliberalism. I conclude that a new conception of "antagonism" is needed, and revise Mao's position with the aid of the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.

Mapping Out Chinese Modernity And Alternative Modernity, Song Li

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, “Mapping Out Chinese Modernity and Alternative Modernity,” Song Li reviews the writings of Kang Liu, particularly his Aesthetics and Marxism. Kang Liu studies the intellectual trajectory of Chinese Marxism from its inception to its post-Mao phases of transformation by comparing it with the cultural and aesthetic thinking of Western Marxism. It provides not only a new perspective for the study of Marxism in general and Chinese Marxism in particular, but also opens up a new space for mapping out Chinese modernity and alternative modernity. Its 2012 Chinese translation makes it more accessible in China, and it will ...

Introduction: Rethinking Critical Theory And Maoism, Kang Liu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Rethinking Critical Theory and Maoism," Kang Liu reviews the existing literature in English on the relationship of Critical Theory and Maoism and discusses the need to explore and reconstruct a genealogy of Critical Theory and Maoism within the global context of political, ideological, and intellectual currents and trends. The special issue will focus on three clusters of issues: first, the western invention of Maoism as a universal theory of revolution; second, the reception of Critical Theory in China and its relationship to Maoism; and third, the relevance of Maoism and Critical Theory today. Liu raises the question ...

Maoism In Culture: A “Glocalized” Or “Sinicized” Marxist Literary Theory, Ning Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his essay "Maoism in Culture," Ning Wang discusses the importance to literature and art of Mao's famous "Yan'an Talks" as one of his most representative works. Maoism, or Mao Zedong Thought as is generally called in China, is a "glocalized" or "Sinicized" Marxism initiated and developed by Mao and his comrades in arms and successors in China. Wang argues that although Maoism is not a dogmatically "imported" Marxism from the West, it has indeed grasped some fundamental Marxist principles in combination with the concrete Chinese literary and critical practice. Thus a "glocalized" or "Sinicized" Marxist literary theory ...

The Political (Un)Conscious: Rethinking Aesthetics From A Cross-Cultural Perspective, Xiaohong Zhang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "The Political (Un)conscious: Rethinking Aesthetics from a Cross-Cultural Perspective," Xiaohong Zhang adopts a cross-cultural perspective, examining the cultural-specific nuances of critical terms like race, class and gender, all of which have bearings on our perception and conception of aesthetics. Drawing on Emory Elliot's groundbreaking book, Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age (2002), the paper probes into the aesthetic experience whose primary effect is to depragmatize. Along this line of thinking, the author draws attention to the aesthetic impetus of two Nobel laureates, Mo Yan and Gao Xingjian, whose rewriting of Western classics demonstrates Chinese authors' shared ...

Satirical Politics And Late-Night Television Ratings, Tanner Johnson

Honors College Theses

Since the 2016 Presidential election, it has become increasingly difficult to turn on the television or log onto social media without being informed of everything happening at The White House. This includes late-night television. What once was meant for humorous jokes and celebrity interviews suitable for any pop culture follower has not gotten less funny, but nowadays, the jokes are not always jokes. Satirical news has been around for a long time with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, but as of 2016, the line between fact and fiction cannot be as easily differentiated between as it used to ...

Casting A Wider Lasso: An Analysis Of The Cultural Dismissal Of Wonder Woman Through Her 1975-1979 Television Series, Ian Boucher

Faculty and Staff Publications By Year

“Every successful show has a multitude of fights, and that the shows are successful sometimes are because of those fights. And sometimes shows aren’t successful because those fights aren’t carried on long or hard enough.”
-Douglas S. Cramer

“And any civilization that does not recognize the female is doomed to destruction. Women are the wave of the future—and sisterhood is…stronger than anything.”
-Wonder Woman, The New Original Wonder Woman (7 Nov. 1975)

Live-action superhero films currently play a significant role at the box office, which means they also play a significant role in culture’s understandings ...

Won't You Be My Neighbor?, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018), directed by Morgan Neville.

Kathryn A. Kleppinger. Branding The 'Beur' Author: Minority Writing And The Media In France, 1983-2013. Liverpool: Liverpool Up, 2015., Christopher Ice

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Kathryn A. Kleppinger. Branding the 'Beur' Author: Minority Writing and the Media in France, 1983-2013. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2015. xi + 271 pp.

From Middlemarch To The Da Vinci Code: Portrayals Of Religious Studies In Popular Culture, Brian Collins, Kristen Tobey

2018 Faculty Bibliography

No abstract provided.

Nasty Women: Television Portrayals Of Societal Anxieties Toward Female Leaders, Emily Sullivan

Honors Theses

Historically, women have been excluded from leadership positions around the world, while instead men occupy the highest positions of power in society. The lack of female leadership is especially prevalent in the United States, where there has never been a female president, and the majority of high political offices are still held by men. In a similar manner, women have also been excluded from the sphere of comedy throughout history. Women have constantly had to deal with the assertion that women are not funny. This double exclusion from both leadership and comedy has led to the development of my concept ...

The Buffered Slayer: A Search For Meaning In A Secular Age, Kari Willinger

Masters Theses

Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, claims that over time, modernity has given way to a new secular age, and with this new era comes cultural shifts in our perception of ourselves and the world. Given Taylor’s notion of a world haunted by transcendence, we can notice this haunting throughout aspects of modernity, especially in literature and entertainment where we can see authors and creators deal with issues of identity and morality from a purely modern perspective. Specifically, Taylor’s concepts connect with Buffy the Vampire Slayer because the characters in Buffy align with Taylor’s understanding of the ...

Innovations In Self-Consciousness. Towards Oneness With The World, Soon-Ok Myong, Byong-Soon Chun

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Innovations in Self-Consciousness. Towards Oneness with the World" Soon-ok Myong and Byong-soon Chun examine the limitations and vulnerabilities of modern civilization. Asia is a multiethnic, multilingual and multicultural territory of over 40 countries and more than 4.4 billion people, that is, almost half of the population of the world. The One Asia community seeks to question a world made up of strong egos that make up businesses, organization and nations, and embrace communal goals, helping Asia and the world to become 'one community.' Thus, the paper suggests ways of self-innovation through forms of transitional consciousness. Although ...

On The Culturalization Of Ethnic Economy In China, Yi Liu, Jiayan Xiao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "On the Culturalization of Ethnic Economy in China" Liu Yiand Xiao Jia-Yan examine the cultural impact of autonomous minority regions on national economy. This study surveys the internal factors that include geography and history as well as external factor such as govermental policy. The findings suggest that cultural factors should be taken into greater consideration, as they are an important aspect in the inner motivation to push forward the economic development of ethnic areas at a faster pace. The paper argues that culture can afford the most efficient pathway for these ethnic areas in terms of economic ...