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CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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2020

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Articles 1 - 30 of 33

Full-Text Articles in European Languages and Societies

Print Culture, Digital Culture, Poetics And Hermeneutics: Discussion With J. Hillis Miller, Liyuan Zhu Dec 2020

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 Dec 2020

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 Dec 2020

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 Dec 2020

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 Dec 2020

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 Dec 2020

“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 Nov 2020

Late Postmodernism, Nicholas Brown

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Sedimented Forms: Coming Back To Autonomy, Marina Vishmidt Nov 2020

Sedimented Forms: Coming Back To Autonomy, Marina Vishmidt

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


The Minimal Politics Of Autonomy, Myka Tucker-Abramson Nov 2020

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 Nov 2020

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 Nov 2020

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

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Admiring Autonomy, Fabio Akcelrud Durão Nov 2020

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 Nov 2020

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 Nov 2020

Aesthetics Today, Fredric Jameson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


10 Theses On Feminist Economics (Or The Antagonism Between The Strike And Finance), Luci Cavallero, Verónica Gago Aug 2020

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 Aug 2020

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 Aug 2020

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 …


No Estamos Todas, Faltan Las Presas! Contemporary Feminist Practices Building Paths Toward Prison Abolition, Susana Draper Aug 2020

No Estamos Todas, Faltan Las Presas! Contemporary Feminist Practices Building Paths Toward Prison Abolition, Susana Draper

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article focuses on a small but crucial aspect of the question of gendered violence and the multiple injustices that feminist mobilizations have once again brought into mainstream discussion: how do we find ways out of women’s imprisonment and stop the abusive violence that permeates institutional and domestic spheres without relying on those same forms of violence as a solution to the problems we face? This is a question that comes from a long history of knowledge-praxis created by groups of radical Black feminist women, and women of color, trans, and queer people, working together on the problematization of gendered …


Toward An Ecology Of Life-Making: The Re-Membering Of Meridel Le Sueur, Rosemary Hennessy Aug 2020

Toward An Ecology Of Life-Making: The Re-Membering Of Meridel Le Sueur, Rosemary Hennessy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay advances Marxist feminism’s attention to social reproduction in order to account more fully for the relations that support life-making. The ecology of life-making is, I argue, an under-developed facet of social reproduction theory and an extension of its reach. I begin by clarifying social reproduction theory’s explanations of the value of reproductive labor time to life-making. I then turn to feminist political ecology’s attention to capital’s deregulation of life and to Native feminist onto-epistemologies as they expand the material history of capital’s theft of time and imposition of embodied debt. In the essay’s final section, I consider the …


Fourier, Marx, And Social Reproduction, Blanca Missé Aug 2020

Fourier, Marx, And Social Reproduction, Blanca Missé

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article establishes a conversation between the work of materialist socialist Charles Fourier and Marxist social reproduction theory (SRT). SRT has laid the ground to explore who produces the producer, in order to analyze and integrate the role of reproductive labor into a comprehensive Marxist view of the capitalist economy. In the context of the critical re-appraisal of the labor of social reproduction, Fourier offers a key materialist perspective which is also present in Marx: the identity between labor and desire in the socialist project. Fourier's materialism, I show, greatly influenced both Marx and Engels, for whom labor was also …


Labor Valorization And Social Reproduction: What Is Valuable About The Labor Theory Of Value?, Kate Doyle Griffiths Aug 2020

Labor Valorization And Social Reproduction: What Is Valuable About The Labor Theory Of Value?, Kate Doyle Griffiths

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article argues that Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) is the trend best positioned for further developing classical Marxist accounts of the labor theory of value, through a concrete historical account of the family as a capitalist institution. To do so, it traces debates about value within and beyond the range of Marxist-feminist accounts of labor, of the strike tactic and of circulation. These debates include the revival of demands for “wages for housework” and the call for a politics of the commons by Silvia Federici and David Harvey. In particular, Amy D’Aths articulation of a social reproduction account of value …


Social Reproduction Theory And The Form Of Labor Power, Aaron Jaffe Aug 2020

Social Reproduction Theory And The Form Of Labor Power, Aaron Jaffe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) centers the production and reproduction of labor power under capitalism. This power to labor is determined individually, socially, and in relation to the totality of capital. These powers are produced and reproduced in and through social relations that, while capitalist, have tremendously diverse local conditions and histories. SRT provides a framework to think through the oppressive logics shaping the production, reproduction, and potencies of labor powers understood as diversely constituted. It argues that SRT is committed to the diversity of these labor powers over and against conditions that constrain both these powers and their actualizations in …


Social Reproduction In The Making: Recentering The Margins, Expanding The Directions, Zhivka Valiavicharska Aug 2020

Social Reproduction In The Making: Recentering The Margins, Expanding The Directions, Zhivka Valiavicharska

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay aims to broaden existing historical narratives of social reproduction by revisiting Black-feminist, postcolonial feminist, and migrant diasporic writings on social reproduction from the 1970s onwards. Centering on the historical experience of women of color, migrant communities, and women in postcolonial contexts and other parts of the world, these writings develop much-needed critiques of dominant social reproduction themes developed in the capitalist contexts in Western Europe and North America. These alternative feminist methodologies and historical accounts add important correctives to what is becoming the main corpus of social reproduction theory and its historiography today. They contain political potentials that …


The Politics Of Social Reproduction. An Introduction, Cinzia Arruzza, Kelly Gawel Aug 2020

The Politics Of Social Reproduction. An Introduction, Cinzia Arruzza, Kelly Gawel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This introduction speaks to political struggle and transformation on the terrain of social reproduction, as presented by the contributors to this special edition of CLCWeb. The concerns of this special issue include critical analysis of international, national and local policies contributing to the gendered, class and racialized dimensions of social reproduction; the articulation of mass movements around social reproductive needs and demands; insurgent forms of care, commoning and autonomous life-making from below and from the margins; the imbrication of immigration, racialization and social reproduction; coalition building between labor and reproductive struggles; ecological and human life between and beyond capitalist forms, …


Why I Write In Yiddish, Karen Alkalay-Gut Apr 2020

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 Apr 2020

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 …


Rethinking The Monstrous: Gender, Otherness, And Space In The Cinematic Storytelling Of Arrival And The Shape Of Water, Edward Chamberlain Feb 2020

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. Feb 2020

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 …


Introduction To The Monstrous Global: The Effects Of Globalization On Cultures, Ju Young Jin, Jae Roe Feb 2020

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 …


A Deconstructive Reading Of Taoist Influenced Chinese And American Poetry, Hong Zeng Feb 2020

A Deconstructive Reading Of Taoist Influenced Chinese And American Poetry, Hong Zeng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “A Deconstructive Reading of Taoist Influenced Chinese and American Poetry” Hong Zeng attempts to deconstruct the logos status of "Nature" in Chinese natural philosophy and explore the tragic potentiality of such philosophy and poetry under its influence. It also analyzes its aesthetic strategies used to overcome historical tragedy, and how such tragic potentiality in classical Chinese philosophy and poetry break out into the imagery of death and fragmentation in modern Chinese and American poetry under its influence, including poetry by such poets as Hai Zi, Gu Cheng, Robert Bly and Wallace Stevens, and how it sometimes leads …