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Arts and Humanities

Purdue University

2016

literary theory

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Bowles's Up Above The World As Beatnik Murder Mystery, Greg Bevan Dec 2016

Bowles's Up Above The World As Beatnik Murder Mystery, Greg Bevan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Bowles's Up Above the World as Beatnik Murder Mystery" Greg Bevan discusses Paul Bowles's fourth and final novel, which at the time of its publication was met with mixed reactions from reviewers and its creator alike, and has seen relatively scanty critical attention in the years since. Gena Dagel Caponi perceives in the novel a reflection of Bowles's struggle for control, during the time of its writing, in the face of his wife Jane's terminal illness. Building on this insight, the current essay notes the same tension in the writings of the Beats—a movement with which Bowles …


Politics Of Feminist Revision In Di Prima's Loba, Polina Mackay Dec 2016

Politics Of Feminist Revision In Di Prima's Loba, Polina Mackay

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Politics of Feminist Revision in di Prima's Loba" Polina Mackay explores Diane di Prima's two-volume epic Loba (1998) and, through a comparison of di Prima to the work of Adrienne Rich, argues that Loba practices a politics of feminist revision. Further, Mackay examines the ways in which di Prima starts to move away from the recovery project of female voices in patriarchal culture, associated with late twentieth-century Feminism, towards a women's literature which need not be defined entirely through its resistance to patriarchal narratives of gender in men's literature. Here it focuses on di Prima's revisionist …


Authorship In Burroughs's Red Night Trilogy And Bowles's Translation Of Moroccan Storytellers, Benjamin J. Heal Dec 2016

Authorship In Burroughs's Red Night Trilogy And Bowles's Translation Of Moroccan Storytellers, Benjamin J. Heal

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Authorship in Burroughs's Red Night Trilogy and Bowles's Translation of Moroccan Storytellers" Benjamin J. Heal discusses Paul Bowles's and William S. Burroughs's varying interrogation of the constructed nature of authorship. In his study Heal focuses on the publication history of Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night (1981), which was written with considerable collaborative influence and Bowles's translation of illiterate Moroccan storytellers, where his influence over the production and editing of the texts is blurred as are the roles of author and translator. Through an examination of Bowles's and Burroughs's authorship strategies in parallel with an explication of …


The Impact Of Burroughs's Naked Lunch On Chester's The Exquisite Corpse, Jaap Van Der Bent Dec 2016

The Impact Of Burroughs's Naked Lunch On Chester's The Exquisite Corpse, Jaap Van Der Bent

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Impact of Burroughs's Naked Lunch on Chester's The Exquisite Corpse" Jaap van der Bent posits that although Alfred Chester was critical of most Beat writing, in Tangier in the early 1960s he associated not only with Paul Bowles, but also with William S. Burroughs. Van der Bent argues that The Exquisite Corpse, the experimental novel Chester wrote in Tangier, shows the influence of the city's geography and especially the content and form of Burroughs's Naked Lunch.


Utopia In Progress In Di Prima's Revolutionary Letters, Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo Dec 2016

Utopia In Progress In Di Prima's Revolutionary Letters, Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Utopia in Progress in di Prima's Revolutionary Letters" Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo describes Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters (1971) within the context of social transformation and spatiality studies. In the context of the socio-political revolt and utopian revival of the 1970s, di Prima's utopia is grounded in reality and in progress; and it needs people's help and strength to be attained. In the first section of the article Pinedo analyzes a group of letters which serve as "tips" or a "how-to" guide to prepare for a revolution and in the second part she considers letters in which glimpses …


How Burroughs Plays With The Brain, Or Ritornellos As A Means To Produce Déjà-Vu, Antonio José Bonome Dec 2016

How Burroughs Plays With The Brain, Or Ritornellos As A Means To Produce Déjà-Vu, Antonio José Bonome

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "How Burroughs Plays with the Brain, or Ritornellos as a Means to Produce Déjà-Vu" Antonio José Bonome discusses how the recurrence and significance of one of William S. Burroughs's most potent refrains, "dim jerky faraway," was inspired by its source text, Paul Bowles's second novel Let It Come Down (1952), where Tangiers-Interzone fuels the unwholesome descent of a US-American expatriate not unlike Bowles or Burroughs himself. "Dim jerky faraway" was used by Burroughs during more than two decades in different contexts, and its textual variations have sparked a mélange of colors, sounds, smells, and feelings oscillating in …


Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke Dec 2016

Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided for the introduction.


Genre Categorization In Contemporary British And Us-American Novels, Carlos Ceia Sep 2016

Genre Categorization In Contemporary British And Us-American Novels, Carlos Ceia

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Genre Categorization in Contemporary British and US-American Novels" Carlos Ceia discusses a certain type of resistance to genre categorization in many novels in contemporary literature. Many British and US-American contemporary novels show patterns in narrative creativity where novel-writing techniques are sometimes more important than the traditional subject matter driven work of fiction. Ceia reviews experimental/metafictional novels which do not show intent to fulfil an aesthetic role pre-determined in a certain moment in history. Not having this kind of burden before them, many contemporary British and US-American novelists devote their artistic imagination more to the "potential" of the …


The Ecological Posthuman In Lee's Tarboy And Tan And Ruhemann's The Lost Thing, Başak Ağın Sep 2016

The Ecological Posthuman In Lee's Tarboy And Tan And Ruhemann's The Lost Thing, Başak Ağın

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Ecological Posthuman in Lee's [BA1] Tarboy and Tan and Ruhemann's The Lost Thing" Başak Ağın analyzes the posthumanist and ecological elements in two animated short films, James Lee's Tarboy (2009) and Shaun Tan's and Andrew Ruhemann's The Lost Thing (2010). Ağın posits that the two animated short films display a disanthropocentric worldview through the enmeshed relations between humans, techno-sentient beings, and naturalcultural hybrid bodies. The intermingled fusions of these biotic and abiotic forms are inherently characterized by a sense of posthuman ecocriticism. Basing her arguments on the notions of agential realism and new materialisms, Ağın …


About The Concept Of "Gnosticism" In Fiction Studies, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski Aug 2016

About The Concept Of "Gnosticism" In Fiction Studies, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

I In his article "About the Concept of 'Gnosticism' in Fiction Studies" Fryderyk Kwiatkowski notices that in the twentieth-century humanities the concept of Gnosticism has become a popular term for labelling tendencies in modernity and postmodernity. Kwiatkowski argues that the majority of scholars in fiction studies base their research on outdated methodologies. In consequence, Kwiatkowski presents an overview of contemporary approaches in Gnostic studies and discusses how they can be adapted in studies of literature, film, video games, comic books, etc. By outlining advantages and disadvantages of methodological approaches, Kwiatkowski posits that in studies of fiction with Gnostic components it …


Audience Response And From Film Adaptation To Reading Literature, Klaudia H.Y. Lee Jun 2016

Audience Response And From Film Adaptation To Reading Literature, Klaudia H.Y. Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Audience Response and from Film Adaptation to Reading Literature" Klaudia H.Y. Lee analyses results from 3000-plus interview conducted across university campuses in Hong Kong in order to investigate the roles of screen adaptations and their intertextual relationship for developing students' critical textual practice. Lee combines reader-response theory (Iser and Rosenblatt) with empirical data to explore students' actual encounters and experience with texts. While the data suggests an influence of screen adaptations on students' choice and motivation of reading, this interest can potentially be developed into a critical awareness of the various intertextual possibilities that exist in different …


A Mid-Range Episode Reading Of Odoevsky's The Cosmorama, Slobodan Sucur Jun 2016

A Mid-Range Episode Reading Of Odoevsky's The Cosmorama, Slobodan Sucur

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "A Mid-range Episode Reading of Odoevsky's The Cosmorama" Slobodan Sucur argues that a focus on David S. Miall's theories of foregrounding and the mid-range episode may help to minimize ambiguities and contradictions that often emerge in readings of Gothic literature. The example focused on in the article is Vladimir Odoevsky's 1839 novella The Cosmorama. Sucur elaborates on the idea that the fantastic and sublime are naturally reader-receptive and anticipate some aspects of Miall's theory. In relation to this Sucur also discusses the possibility that mid-range episode reading may help bridge the gap between some tenets …


Empirical Research And Practice-Oriented Physics For The Humanities And Sciences, István Berszán Jun 2016

Empirical Research And Practice-Oriented Physics For The Humanities And Sciences, István Berszán

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Empirical Research and Practice-oriented Physics for the Humanities and Sciences" István Berszán proposes an empirical approach for the humanities and sciences he designates as "practice-oriented physics." He bases his argumentation on Albert-László Barabási's network theory applied and question tenets of complexity, networks, and spaces. Further, Berszán elaborates on the affinity between the spaces of practical orientation and the spaciousness of parallel worlds as explicated in Brian Green's string theory. Berszán posits that because the universe as "symphony" of string oscillations leads to parallel rhythms of happenings and their different spaces of motion and argues that this kind …


The Indirect Path To The Literary Canon Exemplified By Shelley's Frankenstein, David Fishelov Jun 2016

The Indirect Path To The Literary Canon Exemplified By Shelley's Frankenstein, David Fishelov

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Indirect Path to the Literary Canon Exemplified by Shelley's Frankenstein" David Fishelov examines the indirect path of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to the literary canon. Fishelov offers a multi-dimensional model for describing the dynamic process of acquiring, maintaining, and changing canonical status. The model emphasizes the important role played by artistic dialogues and echoes that certain works initiate or inspire in other authors and artists in the form of allusion, homage, parody, and adaptation. The data introduced in the article suggest that the popular cinematic versions of Frankenstein probably not only played a mediating role but …


Humor In Us-American Literature: A Book Review Article About Su's (苏晖) Work, Longhai Zhang, Tianran Chen Mar 2016

Humor In Us-American Literature: A Book Review Article About Su's (苏晖) Work, Longhai Zhang, Tianran Chen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Said And The Mythmaking Of Auerbach's Mimesis, Hyeryung Hwang Mar 2016

Said And The Mythmaking Of Auerbach's Mimesis, Hyeryung Hwang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Said and the Mythmaking of Auerbach's Mimesis" Hyeryung Hwang revisits critical debates on Edward W. Said's unwitting participation in the mythmaking of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis and analyzes the degree to which critical discourse overlook what Said actually wanted to revive, namely the spirit of philological methodology. Hwang argues that before Said worked on Mimesis, the book already acquired a sort of myth. Hwang attempts to go beyond the commonly held understanding of philology and suggest it as a methodology for historical synthesis whose dialectical tension between texts and history amounts to the synthesis of "fact" …


Golding's The Spire As An Architectonic Novel, Stephan Schaffrath Mar 2016

Golding's The Spire As An Architectonic Novel, Stephan Schaffrath

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Golding's The Spire as an Architectonic Novel" Stephan Schaffrath analyzes William Golding's work as an excellent example of one of Mikhail Bakhtin's early critical concepts. In contrast to most literary entertainment which thrives on the readers' suspension of disbelief, The Spire challenges readers to actively and consciously interpret its text, thus raising readers' awareness as participants in the reading act. The Spire achieves this by presenting readers with a novelistic world seen more or less through the eyes of a pseudo narrator, a third-person narration style that consistently and regularly — yet subtly — delves into the …