Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 30 of 32
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Female Bonding And Marginality In Shang Wanyun’S Novella “Xialihe” (1978), Antonio Paoliello
Female Bonding And Marginality In Shang Wanyun’S Novella “Xialihe” (1978), Antonio Paoliello
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This article explores the representation of homosociality between two marginalized female characters in “Xialihe” (夏麗赫) (1978), a novella by Sinophone Malaysian writer Shang Wanyun (商晚) (1952-1995). Although some scholars have suggested that the writer’s preoccupation with the intimate world of women started only in the 1980s, I argue that “Xialihe” already highlights issues such as female intimacy and women’s social marginalization. The text represents, therefore, a link between her earlier nativist production and her later more feminist approach. Additionally, I contend that, writing from a marginal position at the periphery of Malaysia’s national literary system and from a doubly-conservative environment …
Tituba, “Dark Eve” In The Origins Of The American Myth: The Subject Of History And Writing About Salem, Junghyun Hwang
Tituba, “Dark Eve” In The Origins Of The American Myth: The Subject Of History And Writing About Salem, Junghyun Hwang
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Recasting the Salem witchcraft trials in light of Walter Benjamin’s theses on historiography, this paper revisits the question of history by examining ways in which Tituba is dis/con-figured as the subject of American history in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. Both stories of persecution revolve around the figure of Tituba, a slave from the Caribbean to whom the beginning of the witch trials is attributed, as the nodal point of different modes of representing the Salem history. The telos in Miller’s drama coincides with the subject-formation of Proctor as the legitimate …
“The Poem Is What Lies Between A Between”: Mahmoud Darwish And The Prosody Of Displacement, Ayelet Even-Nur
“The Poem Is What Lies Between A Between”: Mahmoud Darwish And The Prosody Of Displacement, Ayelet Even-Nur
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish grew up in Israel as an internal refugee living under Israeli military rule, legally classified as a “present-absentee alien.” This article focuses on his 1995 volume of poetry, Limādhā tarakta al-ḥiṣān waḥīdan? (Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?), to study the manner in which Darwish’s cultivation of the musical and aural aspects of poetry serves as a means of poetically attending to the effects of dispossession and displacement. Through a discussion of the poems in the collection’s fourth section, Ghurfa l’il kalām maʿ al-nafs (A Room to Talk to Oneself …
Introduction To The Monstrous Global: The Effects Of Globalization On Cultures, Ju Young Jin, Jae Roe
Introduction To The Monstrous Global: The Effects Of Globalization On Cultures, Ju Young Jin, Jae Roe
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This special issue on “The Monstrous Global: The Effects of Globalization on Cultures” explores representations of the monstrous effects and products of globalization. The monstrous (as in The Monstrous Feminine by Barbara Creed) in this sense alludes to the ways in which local or national displays of fear and anxiety about the Other are embedded in struggles and tensions of global scale; the inability to cognitively map the effect of such global forces on local/national problems produces monstrous representations of the global. Global forces such as neoliberalism and reactionary nationalism, technology, climate change, migration and displacement lead to accelerating instability …
Writing, Rewriting, And Miswriting: Eileen Chang’S Late Style Against The Grain, Lina Qu
Writing, Rewriting, And Miswriting: Eileen Chang’S Late Style Against The Grain, Lina Qu
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article “Writing, Rewriting, and Miswriting: Eileen Chang’s Late Style Against the Grain,” Lina Qu reconstructs Eileen Chang as a Saidian late figure and formulates the poetics and politics of lateness immanent in her late self-writing. Drawing from Said’s theorization, Qu argues that Chang’s late style emerges and matures in rewriting her memories into numerous autobiographical accounts. The exposé of her dysfunctional family and turbulent life metonymically constitutes a counter narrative that disenchants Chinese modernity. In contrast to the dominant modalities of evolution and revolution, her involutionary discourse embodies a Deleuzian paradigm of artistic creativity and historical development. Qu …
Salam Neighbor: Syrian Refugees Through The Camera Lens, Lava Asaad
Salam Neighbor: Syrian Refugees Through The Camera Lens, Lava Asaad
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This paper examines the documentary Salam Neighbor (2015), which celebrates the will of Syrian refugee women who are displaced in Jordan. The collective experience of the refugees portrayed in the documentary solicits a reaction from the Western viewer. To counteract the images of refugees in the media, documentaries can be a good alternative for mass media, which has been perpetuating a binary of the West and the Rest. The argument tackles the issue of this new representation of refugees in documentaries within a postcolonial paradigm of how we represent or speak to/with the Other in our technological age, as well …
Subverting Transnormativity: Rage And Resilience In Kim Fu’S For Today I Am A Boy, Andrea Ruthven
Subverting Transnormativity: Rage And Resilience In Kim Fu’S For Today I Am A Boy, Andrea Ruthven
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This article analyzes the affective politics of rage and resilience in the novel For Today I Am a Boy (2014) by Kim Fu. The novel explores the dis-identification (Muñoz 1999) of gender identity through the protagonist, focusing on the rage, sadness, fear, and secrecy that function as the glue holding the body together, but that also work to constrain the process of self-identification. The novel is not the celebration of self-realization, nor is it the lamentation of a traumatized protagonist. Instead, the narrative pays attention to the various ways in which non-binary, or non-normative gender identities are marginalized, and to …
Bibliography: Life, Illness And Disabilities In Life Writing And Medical Narratives, I-Chun Wang, Jonathan Hart, Cindy Chopoidalo, David Porter, Shu-Hua Chung
Bibliography: Life, Illness And Disabilities In Life Writing And Medical Narratives, I-Chun Wang, Jonathan Hart, Cindy Chopoidalo, David Porter, Shu-Hua Chung
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
More Migrants With Nowhere To Go?, Mary E. Theis
More Migrants With Nowhere To Go?, Mary E. Theis
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In "More Migrants with Nowhere to Go?” Mary Theis reframes the stories of the Tai Dam and discusses this group of people, who migrated from Vietnam and Laos to Thailand and then to Iowa in 1975 after the wars in Southeast Asia when they virtually had nowhere to go. It is based on interviews with some of the 1,200 Tai Dam who were invited by Governor Robert Ray to resettle in Des Moines, Iowa, and nearby cities. The stories are contextualized by research on U.S. policies on immigration and the current precarious fates of other migrants in the United States …
The Colonized Masculinity And Cultural Politics Of Seediq Bale, Chin-Ju Lin
The Colonized Masculinity And Cultural Politics Of Seediq Bale, Chin-Ju Lin
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, “The Colonized Masculinity and Cultural Politics of Seediq Bale,” Chin-ju Lin discusses a Taiwanese blockbuster movie, a postcolonial historiography and a form of life-writing, which delineates the last Indigenous insurrection against Japanese colonialism. This article explores the cultural representations in Seediq Bale. Fighting back as a colonized man for pride and dignity is portrayed as means to restore their masculine identity. The headhunting tradition is remembered, romanticized, praised highly as heroic and even strengthened in an inaccurate way to promote individualistic masculinity and to forge a new national identity in postcolonial Taiwan. Nevertheless, the stereotypical …
Introduction To The One Asia Foundation And Its Cooperation And Peace-Making Project, Asunción Lópezvarela Azcárate
Introduction To The One Asia Foundation And Its Cooperation And Peace-Making Project, Asunción Lópezvarela Azcárate
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
The Impact Of Burroughs's Naked Lunch On Chester's The Exquisite Corpse, Jaap Van Der Bent
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.
Bowles's Up Above The World As Beatnik Murder Mystery, Greg Bevan
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 …
Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke
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.
Staging Famine Irish Memories Of Migration And National Performance In Ireland And Québec, Jason King
Staging Famine Irish Memories Of Migration And National Performance In Ireland And Québec, Jason King
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In "Staging Famine Irish Memories of Migration and National Performance in Ireland and Québec" Jason King examines recent community theater productions about the Irish Famine migration to Québec in 1847. King explores community-based and national ideas of performance and the role of remembrance in shaping and transmitting the diasporic identities of Québec's Irish cultural minority. While most of the plays re-enact French-Canadian adoptions of Famine orphans as spectacles of Irish integration in Québec, David Fennario's Joe Beef: (A History of Pointe Saint Charles) (1984, published 1991) rehearses the history of the Canadian/Québec nation in terms of recurrent labor exploitation epitomized …
Minor Transnational Writing In Ireland, Borbála Faragó
Minor Transnational Writing In Ireland, Borbála Faragó
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Minor Transnational Writing in Ireland" Borbála Faragó investigates the poetic work of some of Ireland's migrant writers through the lens of minor transnationalism. Ireland's peculiar migration history where there are two quite distinct groups of inward migrants, requires careful rethinking of terminology. Faragó proposes to circumnavigate the binary approach of investigating center versus periphery and instead look for lateral connections between marginalized groups. Reading the works of Ireland's internal others brings to the fore issues of authenticity, ethics, and identity that can foreground some of the ambiguities inherent in transnational studies today. Interpreting the oeuvre of these …
Young People's Literature Of Algerian Immigration In France, Anne Schneider
Young People's Literature Of Algerian Immigration In France, Anne Schneider
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Young People's Literature of Algerian Immigration in France" Anne Schneider discusses questions of language, hybridity, and heritage in some works for young people published in France about Algeria and/or Algerian-French identity, by Leïla Sebbar, Jean-Paul Nozière, Azouz Begag, and Michel Piquemal. She argues for the need for an intercultural education at primary school that uses literature about immigration to highlight questions of place, belonging, exile and language. Schneider's focus is on Begag's Un train pour chez nous (2001) and Piquemal's Mon miel, ma douceur (2004). These texts use linguistic hybridity and an emphasis on common human experiences …
Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke
Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Cooking, Language, And Memory In Farhoud's Le Bonheur À La Queue Glissante And Thúy's Mãn, Simona Emilia Pruteanu
Cooking, Language, And Memory In Farhoud's Le Bonheur À La Queue Glissante And Thúy's Mãn, Simona Emilia Pruteanu
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Cooking, Language, and Memory in Farhoud's Le Bonheur à la queue glissante and Thúy's Mãn" Simona Emilia Pruteanu discusses two moments in the evolution of (im)migrant writing in Québec. Abla Farhoud's 1998 novel shows the struggle of Dounia, a Lebanese immigrant living in Montréal, who in her seventies finds a voice with the help of her daughter's writing and starts to reflect on her identity. Themes of language and cooking overlap and reinforce one another and offer a new perspective on memory and the act of remembering. Language, cooking, and memory also intertwine in Thúy's 2013 …
Narrative Ethics And Alterity In Adichie's Novel Americanah, Nora Berning
Narrative Ethics And Alterity In Adichie's Novel Americanah, Nora Berning
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Narrative Ethics and Alterity in Adichie's Novel Americanah" Nora Berning analyses Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel through the lens of a narrative ethics of alterity. Focusing on the notion of alterity, Berning argues that a specific turn-of-the-century ethics emerges in contemporary fictions of migration in general and in intercultural novels in particular. An ethical genre in its own right, such twenty-first century fictions as Americanah generate a particular kind of ethical knowledge that revolves around questions of identity and alterity and around individual and collective perceptions of self and other. By addressing the interplay of "the ethics …
Indigeneity, Diaspora, And Ethical Turn In Anzaldúa’S Borderlands/La Frontera, Hsinya Huang
Indigeneity, Diaspora, And Ethical Turn In Anzaldúa’S Borderlands/La Frontera, Hsinya Huang
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ethical Turn in Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera" Hsinya Huang discusses indigeneity vis-à-vis diaspora, two concepts often used as if they were necessarily antagonistic and antithetical to one another. While in diaspora studies Native people are marginalized, Huang resituates the figure of the Native to the core of diasporic discussion by tracing the movement, migration, or scattering of Native people from their established or ancestral homeland. Drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa's life narrative in Borderlands/La Frontera, Huang advances the concept of the ethical turn in diaspora studies by questioning the master narrative regarding …
Selected Bibliography For The Study Of Fiction And Ethics, Wenying Jiang
Selected Bibliography For The Study Of Fiction And Ethics, Wenying Jiang
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Introduction To And Bibliography For The Study Of Alimentary Life Writing And Recipe Writing As War Literature, Louise O. Vasvari
Introduction To And Bibliography For The Study Of Alimentary Life Writing And Recipe Writing As War Literature, Louise O. Vasvari
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Introduction to and Bibliography for the Study of Alimentary Life Writing and Recipe Writing as War Literature" Louise O. Vasvári defines the concept of "alimentary life writing" and locates it in the broader multidisciplinary context of alimentary history, the history of everyday life, gender studies, trauma, and war and holocaust studies. She also underlines and exemplifies the cultural and gendered significance of alimentary life writing in particular in grounding personal and collective identity formation in the female immigrant and ethnic and multicultural writing. Vasvári also compares and contrasts such life writing to wartime food memoirs, as well …
Negotiating War And Peace In Chân Không's Learning True Love And Kingston's The Fifth Book Of Peace, Christopher Kocela
Negotiating War And Peace In Chân Không's Learning True Love And Kingston's The Fifth Book Of Peace, Christopher Kocela
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Negotiating War and Peace in Chân Không's Learning True Love and Kingston's The Fifth Book of Peace," Christopher Kocela analyzes Sister Chân Không's autobiography and Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir as examples of women's transBuddhist life writing about cultural differences and transnational communities in the wake of war. Kocela argues that Chân Không's autobiography advocates a form of community building based on a nondiscriminatory practice of empathy that supersedes the need for forgiveness or vindication among participants in the Vietnam War. Kingston's memoir, by contrast, advocates Chân Không's teaching while raising questions about the political implications of …
African American Masculinity In The Wartime Diaries Of Two Vietnam Soldiers, Sharon D. Raynor
African American Masculinity In The Wartime Diaries Of Two Vietnam Soldiers, Sharon D. Raynor
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "African American Masculinity in the Wartime Diaries of Two Vietnam Soldiers" Sharon D. Raynor discusses an unpublished diary (1967-68) written by her father, Louis Raynor with the diary (1965-66) of David Parks that was revised and published as a memoir. By contextualizing the traditions of African American autographical writing and wartime diaries, Raynor analyzes how African American masculinity permeates the autobiographical structure in the Raynor and Parks diaries as each soldier interweaves a collective experience with a unique personal experience in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam experience challenged their ideologies about racial politics, but affirmed their masculine …
Mapping Chinese Literature As World Literature, Yingjin Zhang
Mapping Chinese Literature As World Literature, Yingjin Zhang
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Mapping Chinese Literature as World Literature" Yingjin Zhang revisits the challenge of mapping Chinese literature as world literature in three steps: 1) he delineates of positions of view as proposed by Western scholars who engaged in rethinking world literature(s) in the age of globalization, 2) evaluates consequences of such a new mapping for Chinese literature and tests a different set of "technologies of recognition" (Shih) in the context of Chinese versus Sinophone studies, and 3) returns to the notion of world literature(s) by considering issues of language and translation and entertains a new vision of mobility via …
How Toni Morrison's Facebook Page Re(Con)Figures Race And Gender, Beatriz Revelles-Benavente
How Toni Morrison's Facebook Page Re(Con)Figures Race And Gender, Beatriz Revelles-Benavente
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "How Toni Morrison's Facebook Page Re(con)figures Race and Gender" Beatriz Revelles-Benavente explores Morrison's Facebook page and comments on it. In 2010, Morrison opened a Facebook page where she received a large amount of comments and created debates and Revelles-Benavente analyses how these comments navigate questions of race and gender. Based on theoretical considerations about issues of race and gender in cyberculture and applied to the narratives posted on Morrison's Facebook page, Revelles-Benavente argues that the problematics of race and gender are relational and the question needs to be centered on the object of study as the relation …
History And Identity In Post-Totalitarian Memoir Writing In Romanian, Nicoleta D. Ifrim
History And Identity In Post-Totalitarian Memoir Writing In Romanian, Nicoleta D. Ifrim
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "History and Identity in Post-Totalitarian Memoir Writing in Romanian" Nicoleta D. Ifrim analyzes Virgil Tănase's confessional and ego-graphic writing in his 2011 Leapșa pe murite (Playing Fetch with Death). Tănase's text is about the individual caught in history and re-writes it post-traumatically from a double perspective: that of the collective memory of totalitarianism and the personal thus functioning as a filtering mechanism for the creation of meta-historical identity. For Tănase, the experience of exile and post-exile, as well as the confrontation with the West legitimizes identity dilemmas and the construction of the individual. The book is representative …
Modern African Verse And The Politics Of Authentication, Gabriel S. Bamgbose
Modern African Verse And The Politics Of Authentication, Gabriel S. Bamgbose
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Modern African Verse and the Politics of Authentication" Gabriel S. Bamgbose argues that the authenticity of modern African poetry is marked by the intricate tie between African verse and African life in its diversities and complexities. Bamgbose examines the "modern" nature of African poetry, its oral roots, its treatment of colonial, and cultural nationalist issues, its issues of négritude, language, radical consciousness, gender, and its "international" nature. Bamgbose draws on the poetry of Okot p'Bitek, Taban Lo Liyong, and Frank Chipasula of East Africa, Tchikaya U Tam'si, Tati Loutard, and Gahlia Gwangwa'a of Central Africa, and …
Is First, They Killed My Father A Cambodian Testimonio?, John Maddox
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 …