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Mcsweeney's And The Challenges Of The Marketplace For Independent Publishing, Katrien Bollen, Stef Craps, Pieter Vermeulen Dec 2013

Mcsweeney's And The Challenges Of The Marketplace For Independent Publishing, Katrien Bollen, Stef Craps, Pieter Vermeulen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "McSweeney's and the Challenges of the Marketplace for Independent Publishing" Katrien Bollen, Stef Craps, and Pieter Vermeulen argue that the artistic projects of the US-American author, activist, and editor Dave Eggers are marked by a tension between the desire for independence and the demands of brand-building. The article offers a close analysis of the materiality and paratexts of one particular issue of McSweeney's, the literary magazine of which Eggers is the founding editor. Both the content and the apologetically aggressive tone of Eggers's editorial statements betray a deep unease with the inability to inhabit a …


Animals Speaking In The Fiction Of Jin And Malamud, Matt Prater Dec 2013

Animals Speaking In The Fiction Of Jin And Malamud, Matt Prater

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Animals Speaking in the Fiction of Jin and Malamud" Matt Prater discusses "The Jewbird" by Bernard Malamud and "A Composer and His Parakeets" by Ha Jin as transcultural texts which involve non-human animals as major characters. Jin and Malamud examine differing representations of animal language and how these representations connect to the politics of both interspecies and transnational relationships. By applying critical animal studies and transnational discourse and by charting the interlinking of other-ings by theorists such as Carol Adams and Susan Kappeler, Prater attempts to show that animals figure into transcultural and transnational discourses in ways …


Is First, They Killed My Father A Cambodian Testimonio?, John Maddox Dec 2013

Is First, They Killed My Father A Cambodian Testimonio?, John Maddox

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Is First, They Killed My Father a Cambodian testimonio" John T. Maddox discusses aspects of the testimonial. Dialoguing with leading Latin Americanists, Maddox argues that Cambodian writer Loung Ung's First, They Killed My Father (2000) challenges this uniqueness and opens studies on the testimonio to new possibilities for intellectual reflection and political activism. In Maddox's view, the continued use of the term testimonio would serve as a reference to this long-standing tradition of writing and thinking about political violence in Latin America. After a discussion of the debate of the definition and function of testimonio and …


Parallel Women Characters And Femininity In Durrell's And Kazantzakis's Work, Helena González-Vaquerizo Dec 2013

Parallel Women Characters And Femininity In Durrell's And Kazantzakis's Work, Helena González-Vaquerizo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Parallel Women Characters and Femininity in Durrell's and Kazantzakis's Work" Helena González-Vaquerizo discusses Nikos Kazantzakis's and Lawrence Durrell's fiction with regard their narration of women protagonists. Further, considering both writers' role in a modernist literature and issues of gender identity, González-Vaquerizo examines the special relationship women have with nature. For both writers, the female and the feminine seem to be the pagan descendant of a powerful goddess and women's carnality is seen as key to man's spiritual experience. González-Vaquerizo posits that a comparative approach to Durrell and Kazantzakis both with regard to their biographies and their novels …


Hearing The Cry In Black Diasporic And Latina/O Poetics, Rachel E. Ellis Neyra Dec 2013

Hearing The Cry In Black Diasporic And Latina/O Poetics, Rachel E. Ellis Neyra

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Hearing the Cry in Black Diasporic and Latina/o Poetics" Rachel Ellis Neyra expands upon Edouard Glissant's notion of "the cry of the Plantation" and shows how to listen for it in literary arrangement of Derek Walcott, Piri Thomas, Pedro Pietri, Ralph Ellison, Miguel Algarín, and James Baldwin. Ellis Neyra also reads musical lyrics by Oscar D'León and Billie Holiday and the melodic nuances of salsa, jazz, the blues, and bomba for how they sound out what she calls the New World Cry, a mnemonic figure of the Plantation of the Americas and a metaphor for how estrangement …


The Dilemma Of Western Education In Aidoo's Changes: A Love Story, Naylor's The Women Of Brewster Place, And Morrison's Beloved, Solomon Omatsola Azumurana Mar 2013

The Dilemma Of Western Education In Aidoo's Changes: A Love Story, Naylor's The Women Of Brewster Place, And Morrison's Beloved, Solomon Omatsola Azumurana

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Dilemma of Western Education in Aidoo's Changes: A Love Story, Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, and Morrison's Beloved" Solomon Omatsola Azumurana examines the problematics of Western education with regard to Black Africans and African Americans through the creative lens of three prose fictions written by African and African American women. While Ama Ata Aidoo is a West African writer from Ghana, Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison are African American writers. Azumurana argues that Western education poses issues whether for African Americans of Black Africans and whether educated and literate or not, there …


Food, Culture, And Identity In Vittorini's Conversation In Sicily And Kofman's Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Brangwen J. Stone Mar 2013

Food, Culture, And Identity In Vittorini's Conversation In Sicily And Kofman's Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Brangwen J. Stone

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Food, Culture, and Identity in Vittorini's Conversation in Sicily and Kofman's Rue Ordener, Rue Labat" Brangwen J. Stone discusses Elio Vittorini's novel about the protagonist's journey to his Sicilian hometown in fascist Italy and Sarah Kofman's memoir about her childhood memories of hiding in Paris during World War II. The prevalence of food in Conversations in Sicily and Rue Ordener is not surprising given the extreme shortage of food during wartime, but food goes beyond simply illustrating the everyday in both texts. Stone explores how food and collective identity are linked in the texts and how …


The Father's Power In Breitbach's Report On Bruno And Achebe's A Man Of The People, Amechi N. Akwanya Mar 2013

The Father's Power In Breitbach's Report On Bruno And Achebe's A Man Of The People, Amechi N. Akwanya

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Father's Power in Breitbach's Report on Bruno and Achebe's A Man of the People" Amechi N. Akwanya analyses Joseph Breitbach's Report on Bruno and Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease in order to lay bare the underlying processes of these texts. Undoubtedly the patterns of struggle in the two texts are political, but reading them in exclusively political terms has the consequence that the works are of no further interest once the putative political agenda is identified and described. Akwanya's analysis discloses shared features in the two texts published within two years of each other. …


Racism And Identity In Onwueme's Riot In Heaven, Onyeka F. Iwuchukwu Mar 2013

Racism And Identity In Onwueme's Riot In Heaven, Onyeka F. Iwuchukwu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Racism and Identity in Onwueme's Riot in Heaven" Onyeka Iwuchukwu explores Tess Osonye Onwueme's acclaimed play in the context of the Black diaspora in the U.S. Iwuchukwu posits that because of Onwueme's exploration of the theater of the absurd in the play, audience's attention is directed to the illogical presentation of dialogue and action. However, the technique with textual properties suggesting unmotivated and meaningless references in fact carries profound meaning. Further, the said "absurd" presentation and narration results in a strong ideological and political message akin to the practice of littérature engagée. Iwuchukwu's analysis of …


Literature And The Study Of Intermediality: A Book Review Article On New Work By Grishakova And Ryan And Carvalho Homem, Ioan-Flaviu Patrunjel, Asunción López-Varela Mar 2013

Literature And The Study Of Intermediality: A Book Review Article On New Work By Grishakova And Ryan And Carvalho Homem, Ioan-Flaviu Patrunjel, Asunción López-Varela

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Sound Semiotics Of Osundare's Poetry, Christopher Chukwudi Anyokwu Mar 2013

Sound Semiotics Of Osundare's Poetry, Christopher Chukwudi Anyokwu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Sound Semiotics of Osundare's Poetry" Christopher Anyokwu postulates that in our increasingly chirographically and typographically oriented culture and society, we often forget how tenacious and over-arching the oral continues to be. Semiotics, the science of signs, highlights among others how speech acts and speech sounds are deployed in everyday human interactions to convey meaning and communicate humanity's need for understanding and fulfillment. This meaning-signaling potential of the tonality of language is even more pronounced in most African languages which are, unlike English, syllable timed and tonal in nature. This tonal nature of African languages is appropriated by …


Achebe's Work, Postcoloniality, And Human Rights, Eric Sipyinyu Njeng Mar 2013

Achebe's Work, Postcoloniality, And Human Rights, Eric Sipyinyu Njeng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Achebe's Work, Postcoloniality, and Human Rights" Eric Sipyinyu Njeng argues that Chinua Achebe exposes failings in the fabric of African society and engages with violations of human rights. Achebe is careful not to hurt the pride of Africans who in the Zeitgeist of the nationalist ferment of the 1950s were wary of European powers. Achebe does not "write back" to the empire: he writes the empire in and he lays bare the weaknesses in African culture grounded in the father-son-grandson trajectory he narrates. Achebe presents what may be termed a cultural dialectics: the thesis (flawed African customs …


Text, Textile, And The Body In Baudelaire's 'A Une Mendiante Rousse' And Devi's Indian Tango, Michelle C. Lee Mar 2013

Text, Textile, And The Body In Baudelaire's 'A Une Mendiante Rousse' And Devi's Indian Tango, Michelle C. Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Text, Textile, and the Body in Baudelaire's 'A une mendiante rousse' and Devi's Indian Tango," Michelle C. Lee aims to rethink the post-romantic division between aesthetics and politics through a reconsideration of the idea of complicity in Charles Baudelaire's poem and Ananda Devi's novel. Lee argues against the claim that aesthetics needs to remain autonomous in order to be able to radically critique bourgeois society. Through a reading of the trope of clothing in each of the texts, Lee re-evaluates the formation of autonomous modernist aesthetics and attempts to show that avant-garde self-reflexivity engages in the …


Frye's Thought And Its Implications For The Interpretation Of Nigerian Narratives, Ignatius Chukwumah Mar 2013

Frye's Thought And Its Implications For The Interpretation Of Nigerian Narratives, Ignatius Chukwumah

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Frye's Thought and Its Implications for the Interpretation of Nigerian Narratives" Ignatius Chukwumah applies Northrop Frye's theoretical work on archetypes, mythos, and modes for the analysis of Nigerian literature. Chukwumah's application in the interpretation of Nigerian literature results in the understanding that the hero as conceived by Frye is not exactly the same with Africa's or Nigeria's and requires that scholars and critics of African texts fill up the ellipses generated by Frye with an autochthonous, resistant, rewarding, African-related symbolic templates in order to make the sense of the hero in both traditional and postcolonial African/Nigerian literatures …