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Comparative Literature

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2008

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A Postmodern Look At Modernism: A Review Article Of Books By Pera And López On Modernista Writers In Hispanic Literature, Richard A. Cardwell Dec 2008

A Postmodern Look At Modernism: A Review Article Of Books By Pera And López On Modernista Writers In Hispanic Literature, Richard A. Cardwell

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Why Fantasy Matters Too Much, Jack Zipes Dec 2008

Why Fantasy Matters Too Much, Jack Zipes

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Why Fantasy Matters Too Much" Jack Zipes proposes that fantasy in contemporary culture functions as a celebrity and money-making machine. Fantasy mobilizes and instrumentalizes the fantastic to form and celebrates spectacles as illusions of social relations based on power. Thus, spectacles violate and drain our imagination by glorifying social relations of power made spectacular and involve the magic of fetishism. Generally, the results bring about delusion and acclamation of particular sets of social relations that are commodified, sold, and consumed. We acclaim commodities that we do not know and products not of our own making we consume …


Selected Bibliography Of Studies On The Fantastic In Literature, Terri Ochiagha Dec 2008

Selected Bibliography Of Studies On The Fantastic In Literature, Terri Ochiagha

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


The Literary Fantastic In African And English Literature, Terri Ochiagha Dec 2008

The Literary Fantastic In African And English Literature, Terri Ochiagha

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Literary Fantastic in African and English Literature," Terri Ochiagha begins with pointing out that in his Introduction á la literature fantastique, Tzvetan Todorov proposed the theoretical frameworks he believed should be the basis of the identification and analysis of a literary work as fantastic. While Todorov's text is only one of the many treatises on the fantastic in literary scholarship, in most of these African prose is seldom a subject of exemplification or analysis. In the rare instances in which such texts are mentioned, they are often and hastily classified as magic realism. Ochiagha posits whether …


Entropy And The Fantastic In Pynchon's Narratives, María Rosa Burillo Gadea Dec 2008

Entropy And The Fantastic In Pynchon's Narratives, María Rosa Burillo Gadea

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Entropy and the Fantastic in Pynchon's Narratives" María Rosa Burillo Gadea postulates that dealing with Pynchon's fiction one is not sure if paranoia is presented as an alternative way of grasping other possible spheres, a more comprehensive vision of the world, or merely a joke. Pynchon's stories try to reproduce reality in different fictional grounds. He uses the notion of entropy, the level of molecular disorder of a thermodynamic system when heated as a metaphor for a disorderly and chaotic universe, necessary, however, in order to avoid the fatality of system exhaustion or death. A kind of …


Cultural Scenarios Of The Fantastic, Asunción López-Varela Dec 2008

Cultural Scenarios Of The Fantastic, Asunción López-Varela

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Cultural Scenarios of the Fantastic," Asunción López-Varela Azcárate explores the relationship between technological development, the materiality of objects, the concept of ontological presence, and the emergence of abstract and fantastic models. López-Varela Azcárate argues that since the early twentieth century there has been a return to the fantastic in literature and that this is related to neo-baroque attitudes whose foundations are a systemic way of knowing that unveils a world understandable from an epistemology of complexity and ambiguity. In postmodern neo-baroque aesthetics, with its focus on technological re-mediating, that is, transferring information across different media, originality is …


Cinema's Doubles, Their Meaning, And Literary Intertexts, Pilar Andrade Dec 2008

Cinema's Doubles, Their Meaning, And Literary Intertexts, Pilar Andrade

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "Cinema's Doubles, Their Meaning, and Literary Intertexts" Pilar Andrade analyzes the figure of the double as an element of cinema. Andrade does not take under consideration films in which the double is considered merely as a clinical case with no mystery (for example as in David Fincher's Fight Club or Brad Anderson's The Machinist) or in which it is used as a useful piece to make the plot without referring to the fantasy world (as in Joel Schumacher's Bad Company); instead, Andrade focuses on films that make a clear connection between the alter ego and fantasy, including …


A:Muse : A Bilingual Student Magazine, 2008-2009 Publication Workshop, Department Of Translation, Lingnan University Dec 2008

A:Muse : A Bilingual Student Magazine, 2008-2009 Publication Workshop, Department Of Translation, Lingnan University

Bilingual Publication Workshop 雙語出版工作坊

This bilingual student magazine is the result of the hard work, creativity and energy of the 62 students in this year's Publication Workshop, a course offered by the Department of Translation. This is a very hands-on, practical course in which students learn by doing. Each student must take responsibility, both as an individual and as part of a team, to ensure that the quality of the publication is high and that the entire production process goes smoothly and according to schedule, just like in a real-life professional setting. Every aspect of this publication - from writing, editing and design, to …


Introduction To New Studies On The Fantastic In Literature, Asunción López-Varela Dec 2008

Introduction To New Studies On The Fantastic In Literature, Asunción López-Varela

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


The Posthuman Ethos In Cyberpunk Science Fiction, María Goicoechea Dec 2008

The Posthuman Ethos In Cyberpunk Science Fiction, María Goicoechea

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Posthuman Ethos in Cyberpunk Science Fiction" María Goicoechea explores the posthuman tendencies of Anglo-American popular culture as they are manifested in the representations of the cyborgs, clones, and artificial intelligences that populate cyberpunk science fiction. Choosing the figure of the cyborg as the central myth of cyberculture, Goicoechea exposes the underlying tensions and contradictions present in cyberpunk prescient visions of humanity's evolution. Goicoechea reviews the variety of contradictory meanings that have been sedimented over this hybrid creature, using as ideological framework the digital narratives of "Technoromanticism" and "Cybergothic," respectively the dominant and the countercultural trend inside …


Fantasy Literature And The Misanthrope: A Review Article Of New Work By Cottom And Zipes, Terri Ochiagha Dec 2008

Fantasy Literature And The Misanthrope: A Review Article Of New Work By Cottom And Zipes, Terri Ochiagha

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Death And Love In Poe's And Schwob's Readings Of The Classics, Ana González-Rivas Fernández, Francisco García Jurado Dec 2008

Death And Love In Poe's And Schwob's Readings Of The Classics, Ana González-Rivas Fernández, Francisco García Jurado

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Death and Love in Poe's and Schwob's Readings of the Classics," Ana González-Rivas Fernández and Francisco García Jurado propose that although Gothic literature usually relegates the theme of love to the background, devoting most of its attention to the supernatural and to darkness, there are also literary texts in which love is mixed with life beyond the grave. This is the case, for example, of Théophile Gautier's La Morte amoureuse (1836), the story of a vampire who comes back to life in her "undead" condition in order to seduce a priest. The theme of love and death …


Metamorphosing Worlds In The Cinema Of The Fantastic, Juan González Etxeberria Dec 2008

Metamorphosing Worlds In The Cinema Of The Fantastic, Juan González Etxeberria

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Metamorphosing Worlds in the Cinema of the Fantastic" Juan González Etxeberria reads fantastic films as appealing products of both unconscious psychological and institutionalized sociological anxieties. A result of the binary opposition of rhetorical strategies that shaped modern culture, the genre is an open door to other worlds where to dream of uncertainties and to indulge in our traumas. Its transgressive indeterminacy against the Cartesian system is traced from the origin of creative filmic language to postmodern disturbing fantasies about the unknown, having social control and individual free will as the only limits of its imaginary trips across …


International Terrorism:Role ,Responsibility And Operation Of Media Channles, Ratnesh Dwivedi Mr Nov 2008

International Terrorism:Role ,Responsibility And Operation Of Media Channles, Ratnesh Dwivedi Mr

Ratnesh Dwivedi

"Terrorism" is a term that cannot be given a stable defintion. Or rather, it can, but to do so forstalls any attempt to examine the major feature of its relation to television in the contemporary world. As the central public arena for organising ways of picturing and talking about social and political life, TV plays a pivotal role in the contest between competing defintions, accounts and explanations of terrorism. Which term is used in any particular context is inextricably tied to judgemements about the legitimacy of the action in question and of the political system against which it is directed. …


Blurring The Lines: The Intermingling Of Garden And Theater In Seventeenth Century France, Abbie Elizabeth Rufener Nov 2008

Blurring The Lines: The Intermingling Of Garden And Theater In Seventeenth Century France, Abbie Elizabeth Rufener

Theses and Dissertations

Seventeenth century French society was a time in which the arts flourished and were used to create an eminence of power and absolutism. The gardens of Vaux-le-Vicomte were commissioned by Nicolas Fouquet and designed by André Le Nôtre. The gardens created a political and social space through the characteristics of design and standards of order which together conveyed power and absolutism. Louis XIV, newly crowned king, recognized at Vaux the perfect vehicle for the portrayal of power. French theater at the same time was gaining popularity and establishing itself as a great art form. Similar to the gardens at Vaux …


Demographics In World History—Population Explosion And Implosion, Laina Farhat-Holzman Oct 2008

Demographics In World History—Population Explosion And Implosion, Laina Farhat-Holzman

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.


Dakota Land In 1862, A Genocide Forgotten: How Civilizational Transformation Can Get Lost In The Fading Rate Of History, Michael Andregg Oct 2008

Dakota Land In 1862, A Genocide Forgotten: How Civilizational Transformation Can Get Lost In The Fading Rate Of History, Michael Andregg

Comparative Civilizations Review

The year of 1862 was critical in a process by which a land larger than many nations was transformed from one civilization to another. But the process was not a classic conquest easily recorded in history books. Rather, it was a slow "digestion" of over 20 million hectares of territory by one civilization, accompanied by moments of true genocide or "ethnic cleansing" during long periods of high death rates for one group and high birth rates and immigration rates for the other group. But this was sufficiently gradual that most historians did not record it on their lists of wars …


Translating And (Re)Creating (Cultural) Identities: A Review Article Of New Work By López Sáenz And Penas Ibáñez And Vidal Claramonte, Nuria Brufau Alvira Sep 2008

Translating And (Re)Creating (Cultural) Identities: A Review Article Of New Work By López Sáenz And Penas Ibáñez And Vidal Claramonte, Nuria Brufau Alvira

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Towards A History Of Intertextuality In Literary And Culture Studies, Marko Juvan Sep 2008

Towards A History Of Intertextuality In Literary And Culture Studies, Marko Juvan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "Towards a History of Intertextuality in Literary and Culture Studies" Marko Juvan argues that the theory of intertextuality reshaped fundamentally the understanding of influence in literature. It showed that supposedly primary sources are themselves but intertextual transformations dependent on cultural "encyclopedia." Intertextuality as a framework offers a refined terminology of forms and functions of both domestic and foreign literatures' creative reception while respecting specific linguistic and cultural spaces, traditions, and literary systems. It deconstructed the postulates of influence; for example, the concepts of author, the logic of cause and effect, and boundaries between texts. It revealed the …


Transnational Book Markets And Literary Reception In The Americas, Molly Metherd Sep 2008

Transnational Book Markets And Literary Reception In The Americas, Molly Metherd

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "Transnational Book Markets and Literary Reception in the Americas," Molly Metherd argues that the most diffuse products of transnational cultural production in the Americas come from mass media productions packaged for transnational audiences -- i.e., Hollywood films, television shows, popular magazines, product advertisements -- and that tend to homogenize messages, promote stereotypes, and simplify complex issues. However, another effort to make sense of shifting relationships in the Americas is coming from a group of US-American and Spanish American literary figures. In their fiction, criticism, journalistic work, and public statements, such authors have been responding to the covalence …


About The Literatures Of The Americas: A Review Article Of New Work By Castillo And Mcclennen, Deborah N. Cohn Sep 2008

About The Literatures Of The Americas: A Review Article Of New Work By Castillo And Mcclennen, Deborah N. Cohn

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Geographies Of Nation And Region In Modern European And American Fiction, Thomas O. Beebee Sep 2008

Geographies Of Nation And Region In Modern European And American Fiction, Thomas O. Beebee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Geographies of Nation and Region in Modern European and American Fiction" Thomas O. Beebee proposes that beyond using character, plot, and style, modern fiction also has entertained its readers with mental maps of heterotopias. A mental map is an imaginative representation of place derived from experience or story. Following Michel Foucault, heterotopia is defined as an "other space" both familiar as and different from the real. The "imagined communities" (Anderson) of nation and region are themselves heterotopias that receive confirmation and/or contestation through the discursive territoriality of literary prose. The mental maps of literature participate in the …


Myth And Power Structures In Sartre's Les Mouches And La Putain Respectueuse, Martha Evans Smith Sep 2008

Myth And Power Structures In Sartre's Les Mouches And La Putain Respectueuse, Martha Evans Smith

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "Myth and Power Structures in Sartre's Les Mouches and La Putain respectueuse," Martha Evans Smith analyses Sartre's plays with regard to the relationship of the individual with the collective, the purportedly self-determinate part of an apparently universalizing whole. Seeming to illustrate an enactment of freedom and an absence thereof, the disparate outcomes of the hierarchies in the plays impose a success/failure paradigm on the concomitant reading of the two plays. Evans Smith argues that these issues in the plays read with regard to structures of classical mythology and racism in the US-American South demonstrate the close relationship …


A Moral Reading Of Mahfouz's Fountain And Tomb (Hekayat Haretna), Amal Al-Leithy Sep 2008

A Moral Reading Of Mahfouz's Fountain And Tomb (Hekayat Haretna), Amal Al-Leithy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "A Moral Reading of Mahfouz's Fountain and Tomb (Hekayat Haretna)," Amal Al-Leithy analyses Naguib Mahfouz's Fountain and Tomb. In Al-Leithy's reading, Mahfouz delineates a gloomy picture of modern humanity still living in a struggle against destitution, ignorance, squalor, and the power of superstition. Society is portrayed as seeped in hopelessness as Mahfouz stresses the physical and moral degradation of his protagonists. He draws a dismal picture of life as swinging between two poles: the fountain of life and the tomb of death. In a symbolic alley in 1920s Cairo, Mahfouz describes humanity's predicament swaying between meaningfulness and …


Towards A Cultural Framework Of Audience Response And Television Violence, Lajos Császi Sep 2008

Towards A Cultural Framework Of Audience Response And Television Violence, Lajos Császi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "Towards a Cultural Framework of Audience Response and Television Violence" Lajos Császi argues that media violence is not a reification of social violence; rather, a popular ritual allowing contemporary societies to sublimate, to substitute, and to discuss aggression in the public sphere. Császi reviews the central questions of contemporary debates about television violence including Stuart Hall's thought on this topic and introduces the ideas of Elias, Geertz, Turner, Bettelheim, Benjamin, Girard, and others in order to locate the representation of violence in an interdisciplinary context. Using the genre of the horror film as an example, Császi suggests …


Audience, Sentimental Postmodernism, And Kiss Of The Spider Woman, Kimberly Chabot Davis Sep 2008

Audience, Sentimental Postmodernism, And Kiss Of The Spider Woman, Kimberly Chabot Davis

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Audience, Sentimental Postmodernism, and Kiss of the Spider Woman" Kimberly Chabot Davis analyzes the three media forms of Kiss of the Spider Woman -- novel, film, and musical -- and their reception by gay, bisexual, and heterosexual fans: Davis reads Kiss as a key example of a hybrid contemporary genre she designates as "sentimental postmodernism." Chabot Davis positions the text's dialogic negotiation between the popular and the postmodern in relation to the critical discourse of camp, as a form of sentimentality-cum-irony. Manuel Puig's novel offers a powerful rebuttal to the Frankfurt School's dismissal of sentimental mass culture …


Patriarchy In Post-1989 Poland And Tokarczuk's Dom Dzienny, Dom Nocny (The Day House, The Night House), Justyna Sempruch Sep 2008

Patriarchy In Post-1989 Poland And Tokarczuk's Dom Dzienny, Dom Nocny (The Day House, The Night House), Justyna Sempruch

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "Patriarchy in Post-1989 Poland and Tokarczuk's Dom Dzienny, Dom Nocny (The Day House, the Night House)" Justyna Sempruch analyzes Tokarczuk's 1998 narrative in the context of the post-communist revival of patriarchy in Poland as well as the parallel Western feminist impact on women's writing in Poland. These two distinct socio-cultural developments, as reflected in Tokarczuk's novel, expand the concept of a subversive household into a transnational dis/order that abolishes borders between domestic (national) and foreign structures: an increasing masculinization of the power structures (political arena and "scientific" practices) impacts the management of the social and the most …


About The Gospel Of John: Considering P66: A Literary History, Or A Categorical Hermeneutic, Christopher Ryan Haney Jul 2008

About The Gospel Of John: Considering P66: A Literary History, Or A Categorical Hermeneutic, Christopher Ryan Haney

Theses and Dissertations

New Testament text critics are fueled by a search for origins. But in the absence of an autograph, questions of origins are complicated at best. The fruit of that search for origins has resulted in the creation of hypothetical, eclectic texts—texts which have left us translating and interpreting the Bible in a form that no community in human history has before. Far from being failed projects, however, these eclectic versions aptly represent the problem of the One and the many, a problem not easily solved: When faced with hermeneutic duties, can we effectively speak of New Testament texts without speaking …


Nineteenth-Century Theatrical Adaptations Of Nineteenth-Century Literature, Kathryn Hartvigsen Jul 2008

Nineteenth-Century Theatrical Adaptations Of Nineteenth-Century Literature, Kathryn Hartvigsen

Theses and Dissertations

The theatre in the nineteenth century was a source of entertainment similar in popularity to today's film culture, but critics, of both that age and today, often look down on nineteenth-century theatre as lacking in aesthetic merit. Just as many of the films now being produced in Hollywood are adapted from popular or classic literature, many theatrical productions in the early 1800s were based on popular literary works, and it is in that practice of adaptation that value in nineteenth-century theatre can be discerned. The abundance of theatrical adaptations during the nineteenth century expanded the arena in which the public …


Political And Cultural Battles In A Postcolonial Picture Book From Wales, Petros Panaou Jun 2008

Political And Cultural Battles In A Postcolonial Picture Book From Wales, Petros Panaou

Petros Panaou

Nationalistic projects and bloody conflicts around the world testify to the nation's determination to fight the forces that threaten its sovereignty. The present discussion reads Cantre'r Gwaelod (1996) – a Welsh book from the European Picture Book Collection – as an attempt to defend the idea of national identity. The colonial and postcolonial cultural battles that have been taking place in Wales, and elsewhere, for the duration of centuries have not left children, or children's literature, unaffected. When the Welsh picture book is situated in its local environment, it becomes apparent that it advocates resistance to `foreign invasion'. The waves …