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Articles 1 - 30 of 48
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
A Semiotic Paradox: Scientific Language In The Narrative Of Tv Advertisement-, Maria Jesus De Prada Vicente
A Semiotic Paradox: Scientific Language In The Narrative Of Tv Advertisement-, Maria Jesus De Prada Vicente
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
The narrative we find in TV advertisement especially abounds in scientific terms that the viewers hardly understand. The apparently ‘scientific’ language induces them to believe in the modern myth of science as absolute truth, which inevitably produces alienation from reality. The more such language triumphs, the more alienation they suffer without knowing it. Such is our situation today that reminds us of the time of Nazi in which alienating language was dominant. However, whether the use of scientific language on TV advertisement becomes alienating or not depends on the socio-cultural context of the viewers. For example, in Japan where the …
Amazon Web Services, The Lacanian Unconscious, And Digital Life, Marshall N. Armintor
Amazon Web Services, The Lacanian Unconscious, And Digital Life, Marshall N. Armintor
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In late 2011, ex-Amazon developer Steve Yegge’s rant about his former company described Amazon’s rapid transformation from an online bookstore to a web-services entity with a ruthlessly unified platform, all guided by the idea that the company’s effort to streamline its internal efficiency could be monetized, and the resultant software products sold through Amazon Web Services. The media consumerism that fed Amazon’s early years funded a surveilling behemoth, one that everyone feared Microsoft would become. As such, AWS has become a manifestation of the internet’s Lacanian unconscious (even providing the services and hosting for Reddit), structured around the optimization of …
“There Is No Pandemic”: On Memes, Algorithms And Other Interpassive Forms Of Right-Wing Disbelief, Scott Krzych
“There Is No Pandemic”: On Memes, Algorithms And Other Interpassive Forms Of Right-Wing Disbelief, Scott Krzych
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This essay examines several prominent memes that have circulated on Right-wing social media during the Covid-19 pandemic. The memes coordinate what I describe as a mode of interpassive humor, which positions those who “believe” in the crisis as naïve dupes, infantilizing those subjects who have fallen prey to the idea that they should take the pandemic seriously, and thereby delegating fearfulness to the other so that reactionary Covid-19 denialists may continue with their lives unaffected. The essay thereby seeks to draw suggestive lines of affiliation between studies of digital memes, evolutionary mimetics, and psychoanalytic theory, pointing to the algorithmic …
Poetics Of The Crystal-Image: Dreams In Mirror And Ashes Of Time Redux, Yuh-Yi Tan
Poetics Of The Crystal-Image: Dreams In Mirror And Ashes Of Time Redux, Yuh-Yi Tan
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This paper delves into recurrent dreams and related recollections in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror and Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time Redux. Gilles Deleuze has called Mirror a film of “turning crystal” because it reflects the two sides of the protagonist’s relationship with his mother and ex-wife by juxtaposing them in a mysterious labyrinth of past-present-future. The crystal imaging refracts four sides of two couples by showing the bonding of the parents along with the connection to his ex-wife and son. The same structure is apparent in Ashes of Time Redux where another set of two bilateral symmetries is initiated between …
Cooling Down Transmedia Storytelling, Jan Baetens, Domingo Sánchez-Mesa
Cooling Down Transmedia Storytelling, Jan Baetens, Domingo Sánchez-Mesa
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In this article we propose a reading of “Dead End Street”, one of the most successful songs of one of the most popular British pop groups of the 60s, The Kinks. However, we will not discuss the song as such, but its remediation as a music video (a practice that did not have to wait for MTV to make its appearance in mass media culture). The analysis will briefly contextualize the group, the song and the clip, but its major objective is to use the Kinks example to open a new question in the larger debate on intermediality and transmediality …
Extending The Frontiers Of The Detective Novel In Adaora Ulasi’S The Man From Sagamu, Onyeka Odoh
Extending The Frontiers Of The Detective Novel In Adaora Ulasi’S The Man From Sagamu, Onyeka Odoh
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Part of the beauty of detective literature is the mental engagement and psychological contest it stages between the author and the readers, as well as its fascinating probe into the nature and dynamism of crime. However, of greater import are the formulaic structural elements that define the genre—a crime, the detection of the crime, an omniscient detective who intelligently investigates the crime, and a justified resolution of all. Though the structure of Adaora Ulasi’s The Man from Sagamu does not exactly fit into the above model, it is still a detective novel. Therefore, this essay aims to propose a new …
Graphic Nonsense And Historical Trauma In Fred Chao’S Johnny Hiro, Jin Lee
Graphic Nonsense And Historical Trauma In Fred Chao’S Johnny Hiro, Jin Lee
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This article introduces the concept of “graphic nonsense” to explain nonsense in Fred Chao’s graphic narrative, Johnny Hiro, which features figures of monster (Godzilla and King Kong) as well as real U.S. political figures (Michael Bloomberg and John P. O’Brien). Focusing on transpacific trauma, this article articulates a counter-history using Fredric Jameson’s terms to expose the process of silencing the other and “retextualizing” history. Although puzzling at first, if not silly at best, the nonsensical elements in the graphic narrative can prompt the reader to find out historical allusions in Godzilla and King Kong to make sense out of …
Nationalist Allegories In The Post-Human Era, Siqi Zhang
Nationalist Allegories In The Post-Human Era, Siqi Zhang
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
As China’s expansion of influence now takes up the spotlight of the world stage, Chinese science fiction, a relatively little known genre, reaches a global audience. In 2015, Liu Cixin received the Hugo Award for Best Novel for his trilogy The Three-Body Problem, as the first Asian science fiction writer to receive the Hugo Award. A year later, Hao Jingfang’s Folding Beijing was awarded the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. The recent world-wide recognition of Chinese science fiction begins with English translation, U.S. publication and promotion. The New York Times cited The Three-Body Problem as having helped popularize Chinese …
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 …
Sewing Lives: Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein And The Global Garment Industry, Sarah Garland
Sewing Lives: Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein And The Global Garment Industry, Sarah Garland
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This paper takes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and uses it as an extended metaphor to investigate the points of destructive alienation and disassociation within the globalized consumption of clothing. The promise of new clothing is a set of garments that function like Victor’s dream of creation; materials are stitched together to give objects that match our closest-held ideals. And yet, because of our quick Victor-Frankenstein-like alienation from these ‘fast fashion’ objects when they no longer please us, clothing becomes, like the monster, an abjected figure for waste and shame, moving around the globe destructively, created from the bodies of the poor …
Making The Global Visible: Charting The Uneven Development Of Global Monsters In Bong Joon-Ho’S Okja And Nacho Vigalondo’S Colossal, Ju Young Jin
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her essay, “Making the Global Visible: Charting the Uneven Development of Global Monsters in Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja and Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal,” Ju Young Jin examines the entanglement of the global and the monstrous in two recent films that position Korea on the cusp between Cold War politics and global capitalism: Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja and Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal. The Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho and Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo offer viewers films that challenge conventional notions of monster by fusing it with a coming-of-age plot of the female protagonist that takes place on a global scale, which contests the …
A Thin Line Between Sovereign And Abject Agents: Global Action Thrillers With The Sci-Fi Mind-Game War On Terror, Seung-Hoon Jeong
A Thin Line Between Sovereign And Abject Agents: Global Action Thrillers With The Sci-Fi Mind-Game War On Terror, Seung-Hoon Jeong
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Seung-hoon Jeong discusses in his paper global action thrillers about the war on terror. He highlights the biopolitical abjection of counterterrorist agents from their state agencies. This abjection ends up either self-reaffirming in the manner of a sovereign agent (the Bond series) or terrorizing their sovereign system (the Bourne series), while both are trapped in the vicious cycle of terror and counterterror. More notable is the “mind-game” sci-fi genre. Source Code, among others, stages a loop of a traumatic counterterrorist mission with retroactive causality, a closed circuit of neoliberal productivity and pathological abjection in a video-game narrative. The time-travel …
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 …
The Goddess Of Love In Sadomasochistic Costume: Roman Polanski's Venus In Fur, Alan P. Barr
The Goddess Of Love In Sadomasochistic Costume: Roman Polanski's Venus In Fur, Alan P. Barr
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Throughout his career as a filmmaker, Roman Polanski has circled the subject of sex, its aberrations, its delights, and its risks. His twenty feature films are remarkably varied, yet characteristically probe the compelling, contradictory, and enchanting nature of human sexual behavior. He develops a cluster of images or tropes that appear across his films—from knives to claustrophobic settings—that advance his enquiry. Venus in Fur is Polanski’s most comprehensive portrayal of the intricacies of sexual conduct, employing a theatrical setting (rehearsing an adaptation of a notorious classic novel), amplified with cultural allusions and exploring the limits of role-playing. Normality and contentment, …
The Others (2001) By Alejandro Amenábar In The Light Of Valentinian Thought, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski
The Others (2001) By Alejandro Amenábar In The Light Of Valentinian Thought, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
The article offers a Valentinian interpretation of the Hollywood film The Others (2001). A particular attention is paid to the ways in which cinematic motifs and narrative elements of the film draw on myths, ideas and symbolic imagery present in Valentinian works, especially in the Gospel of Truth (NHC I, 3) and the Gospel of Philip (NHC II, 3). In the course of the heuristic analysis, the paper argues that although the film employs Valentinian ideas, it depicts different understanding of the world. This issue is addressed in the last part of the article by situating the film within broader …
Revisiting "Home" In Ghanaian Poetry: Awoonor, Anyidoho And Adzei, Gabriel Edzordzi Agbozo
Revisiting "Home" In Ghanaian Poetry: Awoonor, Anyidoho And Adzei, Gabriel Edzordzi Agbozo
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
The idea of “home” is a significant occurrence in postcolonial literature, as it connects to other ideas as identity, nationhood, and culture. This paper discusses “home” in Ghanaian poetry focusing on three well-regarded poets: Kofi Awoonor, Kofi Anyidoho, and Mawuli Adzei. These poets come from the Ewe ethnic group, and engage with the Pan-African project in both their scholarly and creative expressions. Drawing on John Berger, Sara Dessen, and Ewe thought on the afterlife, this paper suggests two major types of “home” in the works of these three poets: the physical, and the metaphysical. Physical “home” refer to the Wheta …
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 …
The Different Representation Of Suffering In The Two Versions Of The Vegetarian, Young-Hyun Lee
The Different Representation Of Suffering In The Two Versions Of The Vegetarian, Young-Hyun Lee
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article “The Different Representation of Suffering in the two versions of The Vegetarian” the author examines how different the representation of suffering in the original and translated versions of The Vegetarian and explores the reasons for this difference. The author in particular refers to representative episodes which the translator’s strategy distorts even the central concepts of suffering in the original work. Her translated version results in critical misrepresentation of suffering and violence in the original version.
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 …
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 …
Transnational Uses Of Mafia Imagery In Zadie Smith’S White Teeth, Andrea Ciribuco
Transnational Uses Of Mafia Imagery In Zadie Smith’S White Teeth, Andrea Ciribuco
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Transnational Uses of Mafia Imagery in Zadie Smith's White Teeth" Andrea Ciribuco discusses the literary representation of multiculturalism in Zadie Smith's first novel, White Teeth (2000). The novel focuses on multicultural encounters in Great Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. This article focuses on one site for these encounters: the character of Millat Iqbal, who joins a gang of teenagers and subsequently a radical Islamic group in his problematic search for identity and belonging. This search is characterized by Millat's tendency to define himself by reference to well-known pop-cultural Mafia figures, whom he …
The Suppression Of Satirizing Belgian Community Difficulties In Flemish Cinema And The Film Adaptation Of Will-O'-The Wisp, Gertjan Willems
The Suppression Of Satirizing Belgian Community Difficulties In Flemish Cinema And The Film Adaptation Of Will-O'-The Wisp, Gertjan Willems
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "The Suppression of Satirizing Belgian Community Difficulties in Flemish Cinema and the Film Adaptation of Will-O'-the Wisp" Gertjan Willems analyzes two film projects of Frans Buyens. In 1970, Buyens received a positive funding recommendation for Top-Hit Girl, a satire about community difficulties in Belgium. However, Minister of Culture Frans van Mechelen refused to support the project because it conflicted with his pro-Flemish views. The minister successfully swept this controversial decision under the rug by offering Buyens the option to trade his socially critical project for a film adaptation of Willem Elsschot's novel Will-O'-the Wisp. …
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 …
The Maze Of Shanghai Memory In Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans, Biwu Shang
The Maze Of Shanghai Memory In Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans, Biwu Shang
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "The Maze of Shanghai Memory in Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans" Biwu Shang analyzes the memory writing of the novel by combining current memory studies with narratology. The paper pursues three major goals. First, it delves into the maze of Shanghai memory embedded in this novel, which is typically formulated by two contrasting aspects: Christopher Banks's naïve and beautiful childhood memory of Shanghai, and his unhappy adulthood memory of it. Second, it explores how memory plays a dual function of deception and decoration. That is to say, Christopher deliberately uses his memory to create positive …
Adoption, Cynical Detachment, And New Age Beliefs In Juno And Kung Fu Panda, Fu-Jen Chen
Adoption, Cynical Detachment, And New Age Beliefs In Juno And Kung Fu Panda, Fu-Jen Chen
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Adoption, Cynical Detachment, and New Age Beliefs in Juno and Kung Fu Panda" Fu-Jen Chen situates his study within today's prevailing climate of global consumption to argue that the 2007 film Juno—featuring an unconventional portrayal of the adoption triad and a cynical detachment from public values—not only trivializes and depoliticizes the practice of adoption but also serves as an ideological supplement to today's global capitalism. Furthermore, Kung Fu Panda 1 & 2 (2008; 2011) provide two ideological messages of contemporary New Age spirituality—"the belief in nothing" in part I, and "the attitude of inner peace" …
The Indian Empire And Its Colonial Practices In South Asia, Yubraj Aryal
The Indian Empire And Its Colonial Practices In South Asia, Yubraj Aryal
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "The India, Empire and its Colonial Practices in South Asia" Yubraj Aryal claims that Bharatiya discourse supports colonization in South Asia. This discourse justifies oppression of institutions, practices, of the non-Bharatiya colonized. The article examines Indian Empire's colonialism toward the weaker, smaller nations along its border and the Bharatiya ideology at the heart of the repressive empire, which is taken to represent the South Asian subcontinent. The article looks at the way in which Bharatiya is perhaps a more oppressive ideology than Orientalism and gives a glimpse into how society, culture, history, and textuality work around power …
Ted Talks As An Emergent Genre, Julia Ludewig
Ted Talks As An Emergent Genre, Julia Ludewig
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "TED Talks as an Emergent Genre" Julia Ludewig analyzes TED talks—short, informational, and entertaining presentations that are given during TED conferences in North America and abroad—as a hybrid and emerging genre. Based on a qualitative interpretation of 14 such talks, she offers a list of recurring thematic, argumentative, and rhetorical features, which she aligns with three parent genres—the sales pitch, the memoir, and the academic lecture. Comparing recent versions of TED talks with three older talks from the 1980s and 1990s, she suggests an historical trajectory, which emphasizes the professional performance character of recent talks and their …
Theories Of Opiate Addiction In The Early Works Of Burroughs And Trocchi, Richard English
Theories Of Opiate Addiction In The Early Works Of Burroughs And Trocchi, Richard English
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Theories of Opiate Addiction in the Early Works of Burroughs and Trocchi" Richard English discusses William S. Burroughs's and Alexander Trocchi's representations of opiate addiction with special reference to their early writings. English examines the concept of homo heroin that can be attributed to Burroughs and lists and expounds its qualities. Among these are: immorality, criminality, mono-objectuality, self- and other-indifference, and, most importantly, the radical physical transformation into a new species, which Burroughs extends in Naked Lunch. English shows how homo heroin relates to Trocchi's conception of a heroin addict, which serves to illustrate that homo …
How Burroughs Plays With The Brain, Or Ritornellos As A Means To Produce Déjà-Vu, Antonio José Bonome
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 …
Politics Of Feminist Revision In Di Prima's Loba, Polina Mackay
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 …