European Languages and Societies Commons^™

Print Culture, Digital Culture, Poetics And Hermeneutics: Discussion With J. Hillis Miller, Liyuan Zhu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper is a response to Hillis Miller’s query on the author’s essay “Hillis Miller on the End of Literature.” The author basically agrees with Miller’s view on the shift from print culture to digital culture, explaining the special cultural context under which Chinese scholars emphasize the visual turn. Based on the rapid development of Chinese online literature, the author points out that print culture does not rival but coexists with digital culture. On the other hand, drawing on Aristotle’s Poetics and insights of several leading figures of contemporary hermeneutics, the author contends that Miller’s dichotomy of poetics (form) and …

China Question Of Us-American Imagism, Qingben Li

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper investigates first the influences of ancient Chinese culture on Ezra Pound, and then Pound’s influence on the New Culture Movement of modern China (1917). It is a kind of circular journey of literary texts and theories from ancient China to the West and then back to China. This journey, or “circle model,” involves textual appropriation, variation, transformation and misunderstanding in every stage.

Western Theory And Historical Studies Of Chinese Literary Criticism, Zhirong Zhu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper examines the formation of modern historical studies of classical Chinese literary criticism in terms of its interaction with and transformation of western theory. The discipline emerged during the eastward movement of Western ideas in the early twentieth century, promoting the “scientific study” of classical Chinese learning, and instituting curriculum and textbooks in Chinese universities. The reception of Western concepts of “literature” and “literary criticism” in the early twentieth century, largely through Japan, laid the very foundation of historical studies of classical Chinese literary criticism as an independent subject of study. This paper argues that when adopting Western methods …

The Chuanyue (Traversing) Of Western Cultural Industry Theories In China, Hui Li, Naihai Zhai

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper discusses the reception and transformation of western theories of Culture Industry in China during the Reform Era (1978-present). It proposes the term 穿越 (chuanyue, traverse), rather than communication or traveling theory, in order to probe into the complexity of the interaction, modification and transformation of western theories of Culture Industry and creative industries in China. The paper focuses on 1) issues of time lag or disjunction, in that it took more than half a century for the critique of Culture Industry to enter China; 2) divergent interpretations of Culture Industry with a strong critical edge of …

Cinematic Representation Of Ethnic Minorities In Prc And Postcolonialism, Xinyu Lu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper explores the notions of “Sinophone” and “Chinese-language cinema” under the rubrics of postcolonialism in Chinese film studies both in China and elsewhere around the world. The paper argues that these postcolonial-inspired notions misconstrue Chinese national identity building as imperialist/colonialist endeavours, and dichotomize Han and Chinese ethnic minorities. The paper offers its counterargument by examining cinematic practices of people’s cinema, minority nationality films and native-language films in the PRC.

“Western Marxism” In Mao’S China, Jun Zeng, Yichen Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

China’s reception of “Western Marxism” is a critical part of the global history of Marxism. This paper examines three aspects of the reception of Western Marxism in literary and art criticism during the early years of Mao’s China (1949-65): the Western Marxist critique of surrealism, debates over Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, and Sartrean existentialism and Western Marxism. The impacts of Western Marxist literary thought upon Chinese literary studies during the early years of the PRC are discussed, along with the extensive influx of Western Marxism that began in the reform era of post-Mao China (1978- ) …

Late Postmodernism, Nicholas Brown

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Sedimented Forms: Coming Back To Autonomy, Marina Vishmidt

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The Minimal Politics Of Autonomy, Myka Tucker-Abramson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Immanuel Kant’S Manifesto For Dad Rock, Christian Thorne

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Genre’S Autonomy, Autonomy’S Genre, Tim Lanzendörfer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Admiring Autonomy, Fabio Akcelrud Durão

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

When ‘Interplay Is The Content Of The Work’—A Response To Nicholas Brown’S Autonomy, Elise Archias

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Aesthetics Today, Fredric Jameson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Corruption As Shared Culpability: Religion, Family, And Society In Andrey Zvyagintsev's Leviathan (2014), Maria Hristova

Journal of Religion & Film

This article engages in close analysis of how Andrey Zvyagintsev depicts corruption and its various manifestations: moral, familial, societal, and institutional, in Leviathan (Leviafan, 2014). While other post-Soviet films address the problem of prevalent corruption in Russia, Zvyagintsev’s work is the first to provoke strong public reactions, not only from government and Russian Orthodox Church officials, but also from Orthodox and political activist groups. The film demonstrates that the instances of legal and moral failings in one aspect of existence are a sign of a much deeper and wider-ranging problem that affects all other spheres of human experience. …

Foreword, Georgiana Donavin, Eve Salisbury

Accessus

Foreword for Accessus volume 6, issue 1.

10 Theses On Feminist Economics (Or The Antagonism Between The Strike And Finance), Luci Cavallero, Verónica Gago

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article, “10 Theses on Feminist Economics (or the antagonism between the strike and finance),” Luci Cavallero and Verónica Gago are interested in a feminist economics that is able to redefine, based on the bodies and territories in conflict, labor and exploitation, communal and feminized modes of doing and resisting, and popular innovation in moments of crisis. They write from the position of having formed part of the organizing for the feminist strike that, since 2016, has driven what they characterize as a massive, radical, and transnational movement. They root the theses that they synthesize here in that dynamic …

Readymade Or Made [To Be] Ready, Replicant Or Surplus: Social Reproduction And The Biopolitics Of Abstraction Prefigured In Contemporary Art, Jaleh Mansoor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The artist may be one of the last subject-positions within capitalism to determine their own labour under the sign of “creativity,” and to be held at an oblique angle to value productive labour; they are dialectically “free” to be creative (Adorno, Vishmidt, Stakemeir, Beech). But since 1973 if not 1915, artists mark this creative capacity as a process whereby reification has migrated from that of the object to that of the subject, to the artist-subject, now heightened in a post-industrial era of “feminized” and immaterial labour where service eclipses production. Artists in the “post medium condition” elaborate practices that track …

Detroit’S Water Wars: Race, Failing Social Reproduction, And Infrastructure, Brian Whitener

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this essay, I theorize an emergent urban power dynamic of infrastructural resource grabs or the use of state power to transfer infrastructural resources away from marginalized, racialized, and/or precariously documented populations. As a transfer, rather than a set of cuts or privatizations, I argue this dynamic is distinct from those of neoliberal or “shrinking” states and is a direct attack on the social reproduction capacity of communities and individuals. Focusing on the case of Detroit, where predominantly white suburban elites succeeded under the cover of Detroit’s 2013-14 bankruptcy proceedings to pry the possession of the water and sewage infrastructure …

Why I Write In Yiddish, Karen Alkalay-Gut

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Poetry In Response To The “Disengagement Plan”: Identity, Poetics And Politics, Tamar Wolf-Monzon

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article will examine the corpus of poems written in the years 2004-2005, in response to the Israeli government’s Disengagement plan that unilaterally evacuated all Israeli communities from Gush Katif in the southern Gaza Strip. These poems are explored as a political speech act, whose purpose is to bring about an extra-linguistic outcome: to impact upon the feelings and thoughts of the addressees, as well as to influence them in relation to issues of identity and social affiliation. Indeed, these poems are part of a long and complex tradition of Hebrew political poetry, characterized not only by a response to …

Gower As Data: Exploring The Application Of Machine Learning To Gower’S Middle English Corpus, Kara L. Mcshane, Alvin Grissom Ii

Accessus

Distant reading, a digital humanities method in wide use, involves processing and analyzing a large amount of text through computer programs. In treating texts as data, these methods can highlight trends in diction, themes, and linguistic patterns that individual readers may miss or critical traditions may obscure. Though several scholars have undertaken projects using topic models and text mining on Middle English texts, the nonstandard orthography of Middle English makes this process more challenging than for our counterparts in later literature.

This collaborative project uses Gower’s Confessio Amantis as a small, fixed corpus for analysis. We employ natural language processing …

Standing In The Dark: Sloth And Stability, Paralysis And Perseverance In Book Iv Of The Confessio Amantis, Andrea Schutz

Accessus

In Book IV of the Confessio, things happen in the dark – the dark of night, of dreams, of despair, of secrecy, of treachery, of death. The medieval sin of accidia sets the pace for this beautifully constructed book, whose tales link and cross, as in a dance. Dido, Phyllis, the bad, the forgetful, and the obsessive lovers swing like slowing pendulums back to their starting points, and stop still. On the whole, their dance with Amans is a slow and stately pavane of the dead and desperate. This is Gower’s darkest book, though not the most bloody: Sloth is …

Narcissus In Queer Time, Lacey M. Wolfer

Accessus

Queer temporality has been studied in relation to the Middle Ages as a means of questioning the prevailing historiography for other modes of connection to the past, such as embodied or affective. Conversely, the other branch of queer temporality has been primarily interested in how queer lifestyles today disrupt the heteronormative plan laid out by society. Joining these modes, Gower’s revision of Narcissus questions our notions of historiography through showing us an example of a queer, transgender character and his struggles with heteronormative expectations—demonstrating that the medieval is not so disconnected from the modern.

One Voice, Ancient And Resigned, Will Rogers

Accessus

While we know, or at least can imagine, what Gower looked like in his old age, it is hard to imagine or hear his voice. And yet, given what we know about his old age and visual impairments, his voice necessarily was important to his old age and continuing revisions of his texts. In this article, I attempt to reconstruct from some of his later poetry what that voice might have sounded like, at least in-text, and piece together how later authors heard that voice of old age.

Dark Money: Gower, Echo, And 'Blinde Avarice', Craig E. Bertolet

Accessus

Gower’s poetic works show a consistent concern with the darkness and deceit associated with Avarice, the sin mostly associated with commercial transactions. In the Confessio, he calls Avarice blind. This blindness seems to work both ways. Avarice blinds humans to their humanity because it causes them to cheat and steal from others. Avarice also blinds the victims of the greedy since the greedy resort to deception in order to gain what they want. In the Confessio, Genius tells the tale of Echo as an example of the practices that he calls usury but who works as an amalgam …

Introduction: Consumer Contexts And Divine Presences In Hungarian Catholicism, Marc Roscoe Loustau

Journal of Global Catholicism

Introduction to Hungarian Catholicism: Living Faith Across Diverse Social and Intellectual Contexts, highlighting both the specific contributions of the articles to the study of Hungarian Catholicism and situating them within the broad sweep of Hungarian and Catholic Studies.

Overview And Acknowledgements, Mathew Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

Overview of Hungarian Catholicism: Living Faith Across Diverse Social and Intellectual Context, highlighting the articles' contribution to the study of Global Catholicism.

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 …

Monstrous Accumulation: Topographies Of Fear In An Era Of Globalization, Robert T. Tally Jr.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The predominance of the horror genre, broadly conceived, in recent years attests to the profound sense of anxiety and dread permeating late capitalist societies. As the processes and effects of globalization become more viscerally experienced, they are also often rendered invisible or unknowable, and individuals and groups find themselves subject to an immense array of forces beyond their control. The contemporary scene is crowded with monsters, from alien invaders to the zombie apocalypse, set against the backdrop of darkly fantastic landscapes and dystopian visions. Drawing upon a variety of Marxist cultural theory, Robert T. Tally Jr. explores the topographies of …