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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 …
Beyond Victimhood: Female Agency In Nigerian Civil War Novels, Enajite E. Ojaruega
Beyond Victimhood: Female Agency In Nigerian Civil War Novels, Enajite E. Ojaruega
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Enajite E. Ojaruega discusses in her “Beyond Victimhood: Female Agency in Nigerian Civil War Novels” the agential roles women played during the Nigeria-Biafra war as reflected in selected fictional narratives. Female characters are generally impacted negatively by their individual and collective war-time experiences. However, there is another important aspect of women's war-time experiences that has largely been underplayed in most historical or literary accounts on war. Female agency recognizes this gender’s participatory roles during the conflict as they reconstruct their subjectivity in more beneficial ways in the unfolding circumstances of war. Women are depicted as being able to explore their …
Looking Back, Or Re-Visioning: Contemporary American Jewish Poets On “Lot’S Wife”, Anat Koplowitz-Breier
Looking Back, Or Re-Visioning: Contemporary American Jewish Poets On “Lot’S Wife”, Anat Koplowitz-Breier
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Although mentioned only twice in Genesis (19:17, 26), Lot’s wife has been a topic of much discussion amongst both traditional and modern commentators and exegetes. The traditional midrashim seek to explain why she chose to disregard the instructions she was given and the nature of her punishment. In doing so, they follow two principal directions, representing her a) negatively as a wicked sinner, a Sodomite who acted as such even before disobeying the divine decree not to look backwards—thus linking her disobedience with her intrinsic character (e.g., curious, greedy, inhospitable, faithless); or b) positively as a loving mother and daughter. …
Where Are The Women?: An Ecofeminist Reading Of William Golding’S Lord Of The Flies, Hawk Chang
Where Are The Women?: An Ecofeminist Reading Of William Golding’S Lord Of The Flies, Hawk Chang
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
The absence of female characters and their voices in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) has been previously examined. On the surface, this fiction focuses on the struggle and survival of a group of boys who are left alone on a Pacific island against the background of nuclear warfare. The only presence of women in the story seems to be the aunt via a boy’s narration. However, when approaching the fiction through the lens of ecofeminism, we can find a range of feminized entities which are metaphorically embodied in the natural surroundings of the secluded island. The boys’ interactions …
“No Roses, White Nor Red, Glow Here”: The Motif Of The Garden In Two Proserpine Poems By A. Swinburne And D. Greenwell, Cristina Salcedo González
“No Roses, White Nor Red, Glow Here”: The Motif Of The Garden In Two Proserpine Poems By A. Swinburne And D. Greenwell, Cristina Salcedo González
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In this article, I discuss Algernon Swinburne’s and Dora Greenwell’s engagement with the myth of Proserpine through an analysis of the motif of the garden, which takes central stage in both accounts. The examination will illustrate how the authors’ outlined images of the garden challenge the dominant representation of the motif within Western literary tradition, offering a re-interpretation of the myth as social commentary.
Deconstructing Feminine And Feminist Fantastic Through The Study Of Living Dolls, Raquel Velázquez
Deconstructing Feminine And Feminist Fantastic Through The Study Of Living Dolls, Raquel Velázquez
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her "Deconstructing Feminine and Feminine Fantastic through the Study of Living Dolls," Raquel Velázquez analyzes the treatment of one idiosyncratic image within the fantastic genre, and one that also has a special impact on the configuration of the feminine: the doll. On the one hand, she examines the evolution of this fantastic motif in order to determine whether it involves a transformation of how the feminine fantastic is represented. On the other hand, she establishes some correlations between the image of the fantastic doll, and the development of processes such as the dollification of women or the humanization of …
The Inappropriate/D Fantastic: A Proposal Beyond Feminism, Teresa López-Pellisa
The Inappropriate/D Fantastic: A Proposal Beyond Feminism, Teresa López-Pellisa
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Teresa López-Pellisa’s article “The Inappropriate/d Fantastic: A Proposal Beyond Feminism” discusses a type of narration that goes beyond the feminist fantastic. These are fantastic texts permeated not only by a feminist discourse, but by intersectionality, transfeminism, ecofeminism, cyberfeminism, post-humanism, xenofeminism and/or necropolitics as well. Borrowing the term inappropriate/d others from Donna Haraway (The Promises of Monsters), who in turn takes it from the feminist theorist Trinh Minh-ha, we can analyze those fantastic stories that call into question the categories of gender, class, race and sexuality established by Western enlightened humanism. These types of non-mimetic narrations have …
A Geocritical Perspective On The Female Fantastic: Rethinking The Domestic, Patricia García
A Geocritical Perspective On The Female Fantastic: Rethinking The Domestic, Patricia García
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Patricia García’s article, “A Geocritical Perspective on the Female Fantastic: Rethinking the Domestic” approaches the question of the “female fantastic” from a spatial angle. Proponents of the female fantastic (for example E. Moers, S. Gilbert and S. Gubar and A. Richter) often coincide in a leitmotif that characterises this tradition: the haunted house. This leads to a great deal of studies centred on how female authors employ domestic spaces as a means to give voice to the lives of women invisibilised by patriarchy and, through the irruption of the supernatural, as a way to subvert domestic ideology. Whereas these studies …
Female Fantastic In Anthologies: Gendering The Genre And Its Discourse, Anna Boccuti
Female Fantastic In Anthologies: Gendering The Genre And Its Discourse, Anna Boccuti
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In the last decades, the fantastic literature written by women has been the subject of various studies, which, from different standpoints, have tried to investigate the characteristics of the female fantastic. In this essay, after a critical review of the most prominent theories about the so-called feminine fantastic and female writing, I will focus on the narrative strategies of the female fantastic. Through the close reading of the anthologies Tra due specchi. 18 racconti di scrittrici latinoamericane, and Insólitas. Narradoras de lo fantástico en Latinoamérica y España, I’ll try to draw a cartography of the Hispanic …
The Female Fantastic Vs. The Feminist Fantastic: Gender And The Transgression Of The Real, David Roas
The Female Fantastic Vs. The Feminist Fantastic: Gender And The Transgression Of The Real, David Roas
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Since Ann Richter coined the term “fantastique féminin” in 1977, many works in different languages have postulated a “female” way of writing fantastic texts, depending on the selection of themes, language, characters, supernatural elements, and the portrayal of the uncanny and the monstrous. This claim on the existence of a "female fantastic" reflects central issues in Feminist Literary Theory: on the one hand, the will to identify an aesthetic mode opposed to the dominant patriarchal discourse (female writing, the use of specific themes, etc.); on the other hand, the argument that there are marginal genres, forms and styles voluntarily removed …
Queering Identity Politics In Shimon Adaf’S Aviva-No, Yael Segalovitz
Queering Identity Politics In Shimon Adaf’S Aviva-No, Yael Segalovitz
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This article offers a queer reading of Shimon Adaf’s volume of poetry, Aviva-No (2009), analyzing it in conjunction with his recent collection of essays on identity formation, Ani aherim (I am others) (2018). Adaf’s oeuvre has been primarily studied through the lens of ethnicity and race. This article demonstrates that gender plays a key role in his body of work. Aviva-No, which is a lamentation for the poet’s sister, destabilizes the boundaries between the mourning brother and the absent sister. This ontological deconstruction stimulates in Aviva-No a broader undoing of gender as an embodied identity. The volume is replete …
"A Generation Of Wonderful Jews Will Grow From The Land": The Desire For Nativeness In Hebrew Israeli Poetry, Hamutal Tsamir
"A Generation Of Wonderful Jews Will Grow From The Land": The Desire For Nativeness In Hebrew Israeli Poetry, Hamutal Tsamir
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This article examines the ways in which the desire for nativeness is constructed in Israeli Hebrew poetry through several historical episodes: H. N. Bialik’s poem 1896 poem “In the Field”; the poets as pioneers/immigrants in the 1920s, in contrast to the “nativist” poet Esther Raab; and the “nativist” poets of the 1950s (Statehood Generation), focusing on Moshe Dor. The desire to be native—to belong to the land in a way that is natural, self-evident, and therefore absolute and unquestionable— is one of the constitutive desires of nationalism in general, and of Zionism in particular. In Bialik’s poem, written during the …
Rethinking The Monstrous: Gender, Otherness, And Space In The Cinematic Storytelling Of Arrival And The Shape Of Water, Edward Chamberlain
Rethinking The Monstrous: Gender, Otherness, And Space In The Cinematic Storytelling Of Arrival And The Shape Of Water, Edward Chamberlain
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Through comparing the Hollywood films Arrival and The Shape of Water, this article explicates the films’ similar portrayals of gender, social collaboration, and monstrosity. Although the mainstream media in the United States has linked the idea of the monstrous to larger global forces, the two films suggest that “the monster” exists much closer to home. Hence, this article makes the case that monstrosity occurs in a variety of formulations such as the actions of national authorities like governmental officials that oppress and endanger a myriad of American citizens as well as newcomers. Further, this article makes the case that …
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 …
Becoming As Suffering: A Genealogy Of Female Suffering In Chinese Myth And Literature, Peina Zhuang, Jiazhao Lin
Becoming As Suffering: A Genealogy Of Female Suffering In Chinese Myth And Literature, Peina Zhuang, Jiazhao Lin
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In their article “Suffering as Becoming: A Genealogy of Female Suffering in Chinese Myth and Literature,” Peina Zhuang and Jiazhao Lin undertake a comparative study of three Chinese mythical and literary novels: the Chinese myths of Chang’eh, Ding Ling’s Miss Sophie’s (1928), and Bi Feiyu’s novel The Moon Opera (1999). They focus on the point that the characterization of all three women (or female personae) is centered on their common act of taking some sort of medicine. However, they also historicize and politicize these three texts, setting them respectively in the contexts of the establishment of patriarchy in the Han …
Suffering And Climate Change Narratives, Simon C. Estok
Suffering And Climate Change Narratives, Simon C. Estok
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Suffering and Climate Change Narratives" Simon C. Estok begins with a brief survey of definitional issues involved with the term “suffering” and argues that there has been a relative lack of theoretical attention to suffering in climate change narratives, whether literary or within mainstream media. Estok shows that suffering, far from being singular, is a multivalent concept that is gendered, classed, raced, and, perhaps above all, pliable. It has social functions. One of the primary reasons for the failure of climate change narratives to effect real changes, Estok argues, is that they often carry the functions of …
Eating And Suffering In Han Kang’S The Vegetarian, Won-Chung Kim
Eating And Suffering In Han Kang’S The Vegetarian, Won-Chung Kim
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article “Eating and Suffering in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian” Won-Chung Kim examines how Han investigates suffering through the topic of food and eating. Kim shows that The Vegetarian is a work that thoroughly investigates both what constitutes suffering and what role carno-phallogocentric thinking can play in such suffering: suffering becomes in the novel a psychological, physical, and spiritual effect of dietary resistance to male-dominated Korean society. After offering a working definition of sufferings, Kim argues how the suffering caused by Yeong-hye’s refusal to follow the reigning norms of the meat eating, patriarchal society disintegrates the intactness of …
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 …
Chase Riboud’S Hottentot Venus (2003) And The Neo-Victorian: The Problematization Of South-Africa And The Vulnerability And Resistance Of The Black Other, Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz
Chase Riboud’S Hottentot Venus (2003) And The Neo-Victorian: The Problematization Of South-Africa And The Vulnerability And Resistance Of The Black Other, Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This article touches upon issues of captivity, suppression, misrepresentations and exclusion of black people from a historical and cultural point of view through the analysis of Chase-Riboud’s neo-Victorian novel Hottentot Venus (2003). It also focuses on the implications and consequences for contemporary South Africa of situations of slavery and exploitation of African descended peoples. Notions of identity and moral and legal inclusion of black women into past and contemporary societies and communities will be also discussed from the point of view of postcolonial and gender and sexuality studies. The complexities of blackness and the violation of human rights as a …
Sex Between Women And Indianness: Vulnerable Casted Bodies, Antonia Navarro-Tejero
Sex Between Women And Indianness: Vulnerable Casted Bodies, Antonia Navarro-Tejero
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her essay, "Sex Between Women and Indianness: Vulnerable Casted Bodies," Antonia Navarro-Tejero examines the lesbian experience, using two heterosexual voices representing the lesbian abject: Shobha Dé’s popular bestseller novel Strange Obsession (1992) and Karan Razdan’s Bollywood film Girlfriend (2004), as they espouse the dominant ideology of heteronormativity, rendering homosexuality as a western illness that taints the Indian culture. First, the author provides an overview of the history of lesbian desire in India, and how it is rendered by Hindu nationalists. Then, following the postulates of Michel Foucault, she analyzes both cultural texts with respect to how same-sex desire is …
The Commodified Body And Post/In Human Subjectivities In Frears’S Dirty Pretty Things And Romanek’S Never Let Me Go, Rocio Carrasco
The Commodified Body And Post/In Human Subjectivities In Frears’S Dirty Pretty Things And Romanek’S Never Let Me Go, Rocio Carrasco
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Following new materialist analysis, this article takes the body as the central locus of analysis, and relates it to broader questions such as ethics, ideology, power and/or technologies. Specifically, it revolves around the idea of embodied subjectivity as articulated by scholars Rosi Braidotti, Sherryl Vint or Cary Wolfe, whereby body and subjectivity are indissolubly and interestingly connected. Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (2010) exploit the idea of the commodified body, understood here as a vulnerable body, a disposable commodity at the service of powerful and/or wealthy people. Victims of the cruelties inflicted …
Trespassing Physical Boundaries: Transgression, Vulnerability And Resistance In Sarah Kane’S Blasted (1995), Paula Barba Guerrero, Ana Mª Manzanas Calvo
Trespassing Physical Boundaries: Transgression, Vulnerability And Resistance In Sarah Kane’S Blasted (1995), Paula Barba Guerrero, Ana Mª Manzanas Calvo
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Sarah Kane’s Blasted has been analyzed from various perspectives that address the layers of destruction it exposes. From the questioning of its title and meaning, to the unravelling of the protagonists’ abusive relationship, the analyses have emphasized the depiction of vulnerability as the defining human trait that Jean Ganteau observes in contemporary British literature. However, a key aspect has been overlooked in the critical response to the play: for Kane vulnerability does not equal helplessness, but rather stands in opposition to it. Hence, this article concentrates on how Blasted formulates a new understanding of vulnerability that fits Judith Butler’s later …
Resilience As Regeneration In Kate Atkinson’S Life After Life, Beatriz Domínguez García
Resilience As Regeneration In Kate Atkinson’S Life After Life, Beatriz Domínguez García
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In Life After Life (2013), British writer Kate Atkinson returns to the rewriting of History as her-story that characterized her early fiction. The protagonist’s lifespan overlaps with the major historical events of the twentieth century, allowing the writer to explore how those affected the individual lives of women and, at the same time, problematizing history, memory, and the past. Above all, Life After Life highlights the deep vulnerability of women to systemic gender violence, although it also emphasizes women’s resilience. The purpose of this paper is to examine Atkinson’s peculiar rendering of resilience, which interestingly she locates in the body, …
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 …
Decolonizing Adoption Narratives For Transnational Reproductive Justice, Sung Hee Yook, Hosu Kim
Decolonizing Adoption Narratives For Transnational Reproductive Justice, Sung Hee Yook, Hosu Kim
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In their article “Decolonizing Adoption Narratives for Transnational Reproductive Justice,” Sung Hee Yook and Hosu Kim examine narratives emerging from transnational adoption practices, focusing on how birth mothers’ narratives—in which a victim-mother makes choices to give a child for adoption in hopes of a better life for the child, and awaits that child’s return—develop alongside and deviate from the normative orders of motherhood. While birth mothers’ self-transformative narrative illuminates their subjectivities—apart from victimhood, simmering in the latent form of agency—Yook and Kim argue that a compelling narrative of self-mastery produces another discursive trap which renders the numerous less-masterful birth mothers …
The Rise Of The Neoliberal Chinese Female Subject In Go Lala Go, Su-Lin Yu
The Rise Of The Neoliberal Chinese Female Subject In Go Lala Go, Su-Lin Yu
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Built upon feminist critique of neoliberalism, this paper will examine a prominent medium through which neoliberal feminist ideology is disseminated: Go Lala Go. By analyzing the film, I will show how it co-opts the discourse of neoliberalism, and reworks it to construct neoliberal female subjects. First, I will explore what kind of role neoliberalism has enacted in the formation of an emergent type of female subject in China. Then, I will demonstrate how the contentious process of neoliberal feminism affects young career women’s identities. More than career guides promoting different techniques for making women more successful at their workplaces, …
Differences And Similarities In The Discourse Of Equality In Cross Cultural Academic Dialogues Europe-China, Xiana Sotelo
Differences And Similarities In The Discourse Of Equality In Cross Cultural Academic Dialogues Europe-China, Xiana Sotelo
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her paper "Differences and Similarities in the Discourse of Equality in Cross Cultural Academic Dialogues Europe-China" Xiana Sotelo provides an overall summary of the historical, political and socioeconomic context of Chinese women and their understanding of equality. The paper also embraces commonalities and nodal points between Chinese and European gender academics. In particular, it highlights the realization that cross-cultural misunderstandings are not triggered by essential differences among us, but by the ignorance of our particularities and specific contexts. The willingness to be open to the diversity of each other´s realities, and to reject hegemonic discourses of sameness, paves the …
Feminism In The Works Of Fawziyya Abū Khālid, Muneerah Badr Almahasheer
Feminism In The Works Of Fawziyya Abū Khālid, Muneerah Badr Almahasheer
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Feminism in the Works of Fawziyya Abū Khālid" Muneerah Badr Almahasheer examines how the Saudi poet Fawziyya Abū Khālid (1955–present) addresses feminism in her poems. Although distinct, Islam is frequently conflated with Arabic culture; consequently, women's role in Islam is commonly misunderstood. Therefore, following Western feminists, Muslim feminists have called for readings and understandings of the Qur'an, wherein the authority of the historically patriarchal interpretations is not assumed, and the sanctity of the text is valued. Through this lens, Abū Khālid's poems critically interrogate Arabic Muslim identity, particularly with regard to gender. A selected reading of Abū …
The Sin Of Pride In Dressing Bodies In Spanish And Anglo-American Ballads, Ana Belén Martínez García
The Sin Of Pride In Dressing Bodies In Spanish And Anglo-American Ballads, Ana Belén Martínez García
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "The Sin of Pride in Dressing Bodies in Spanish and Anglo-American Ballads" Ana Belén Martínez García argues that trying to decipher the reasons for characters to dress in a certain way may help discover the underlying sociocultural mechanisms that prevail. The author aims to reveal the gender divide associated to clothing through a comparative approach towards popular literature in Spanish and English. She uses Judith Butler's theory of performative acts in order to conduct the text analysis. Clothes-related acts feature prominently in the case of popular balladry. Spanish "romances" and Anglo-American ballads are poems that were and …