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Full-Text Articles in European Languages and Societies

Sinologism, The Western World View, And The Chinese Perspective, Ming Dong Gu Jun 2013

Sinologism, The Western World View, And The Chinese Perspective, Ming Dong Gu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Sinologism, the Western World View, and the Chinese Perspective" Ming Dong Gu discusses how the West formulated its ways of observing China and how the rest of the world and the Chinese themselves view Chinese culture through the Western lens. Gu discusses the thought of selected scholars in Western history who have contributed to the formation of Sinologism and explores the motivation, logic, rationale, epistemology, methodology, and characteristics of the West's long-term endeavor to incorporate China into the Western-centered world system.


Virtuality, Nationalism, And Globalization In Zhang's Hero, Ping Zhu Jun 2013

Virtuality, Nationalism, And Globalization In Zhang's Hero, Ping Zhu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Virtuality, Nationalism, and Globalization in Zhang's Hero" Ping Zhu examines how Yimou Zhang's martial arts film dislodges the historical tale from its spatiotemporal context by creating virtual images, characters, narratives, and ideologies, and presents the virtual idea of tianxia (天下) (all under heaven) as an active mode of participation in the virtual global. Amidst the surge of virtuality in its cinematic space, with Hero Zhang aims to eclipse the national by a higher order: a homogenizing and harmonizing order that originates in traditional Chinese culture and that is compatible with the post-9/11 world order. However, Zhu …


Rethinking Theatrical Images Of The New Woman In China's Republican Era, Li Guo Jun 2013

Rethinking Theatrical Images Of The New Woman In China's Republican Era, Li Guo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Rethinking Theatrical Images of the New Woman in China's Republican Era" Li Guo analyses the multivalent representations of the New Woman and posits that they encompass a broad array of blended feminine identities following the introduction of Western literary and cultural trends into Chinese culture. The tensions between ideological discourses about nation, gender, and politics as revealed in the plays of the republican period reveal the many underlying cultural paradigms and the processes in which dramatists Sinicized foreign models of the New Woman to appeal to their domestic audiences. Guo explores how the playwrights' gendered viewpoints contribute …


Eng And The Entertainment Film In The People's Republic Of China, Munib Rezaie Jun 2013

Eng And The Entertainment Film In The People's Republic Of China, Munib Rezaie

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Eng and the Entertainment Film in the People's Republic of China" Munib Rezaie discusses the rise of film as entertainment in the People's Republic of China with a focus on the accomplishments director Dayyan Eng, known in China as Shixian Wu. Rezaie briefly reviews the changing definitions and views towards film as entertainment in the PRC as well as some relevant changes in regulation and policy within the industry itself that largely stem from the ongoing process of globalization and China's accession to the World Trade Organization. Within this new cinematic landscape, Rezaie argues that Eng should …


Ambanasom's Son Of The Native Soil And The Western Concept Of The Tragic Hero, Denis Fonge Tembong Mar 2013

Ambanasom's Son Of The Native Soil And The Western Concept Of The Tragic Hero, Denis Fonge Tembong

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Ambanasom's Son of the Native Soil and the Western Concept of the Tragic Hero" Denis Fonge Tembong discusses the view that although African and Western literatures are fundamentally different as they exhibit or represent distinct cultural values, they nevertheless share some common notions. The concept of a tragic hero is one of those convergent loci where the two literatures meet. With this in mind, Tembong examines in Aristotle's and Shakespeare's concepts of the tragic hero and demonstrates how the ideas exploited in Macbeth are similarly used in Shadrach A. Ambanasom's Son of the Native Soil against the …


The Dilemma Of Western Education In Aidoo's Changes: A Love Story, Naylor's The Women Of Brewster Place, And Morrison's Beloved, Solomon Omatsola Azumurana Mar 2013

The Dilemma Of Western Education In Aidoo's Changes: A Love Story, Naylor's The Women Of Brewster Place, And Morrison's Beloved, Solomon Omatsola Azumurana

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Dilemma of Western Education in Aidoo's Changes: A Love Story, Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, and Morrison's Beloved" Solomon Omatsola Azumurana examines the problematics of Western education with regard to Black Africans and African Americans through the creative lens of three prose fictions written by African and African American women. While Ama Ata Aidoo is a West African writer from Ghana, Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison are African American writers. Azumurana argues that Western education poses issues whether for African Americans of Black Africans and whether educated and literate or not, there …


Food, Culture, And Identity In Vittorini's Conversation In Sicily And Kofman's Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Brangwen J. Stone Mar 2013

Food, Culture, And Identity In Vittorini's Conversation In Sicily And Kofman's Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Brangwen J. Stone

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Food, Culture, and Identity in Vittorini's Conversation in Sicily and Kofman's Rue Ordener, Rue Labat" Brangwen J. Stone discusses Elio Vittorini's novel about the protagonist's journey to his Sicilian hometown in fascist Italy and Sarah Kofman's memoir about her childhood memories of hiding in Paris during World War II. The prevalence of food in Conversations in Sicily and Rue Ordener is not surprising given the extreme shortage of food during wartime, but food goes beyond simply illustrating the everyday in both texts. Stone explores how food and collective identity are linked in the texts and how …


The Father's Power In Breitbach's Report On Bruno And Achebe's A Man Of The People, Amechi N. Akwanya Mar 2013

The Father's Power In Breitbach's Report On Bruno And Achebe's A Man Of The People, Amechi N. Akwanya

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Father's Power in Breitbach's Report on Bruno and Achebe's A Man of the People" Amechi N. Akwanya analyses Joseph Breitbach's Report on Bruno and Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease in order to lay bare the underlying processes of these texts. Undoubtedly the patterns of struggle in the two texts are political, but reading them in exclusively political terms has the consequence that the works are of no further interest once the putative political agenda is identified and described. Akwanya's analysis discloses shared features in the two texts published within two years of each other. …


Racism And Identity In Onwueme's Riot In Heaven, Onyeka F. Iwuchukwu Mar 2013

Racism And Identity In Onwueme's Riot In Heaven, Onyeka F. Iwuchukwu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Racism and Identity in Onwueme's Riot in Heaven" Onyeka Iwuchukwu explores Tess Osonye Onwueme's acclaimed play in the context of the Black diaspora in the U.S. Iwuchukwu posits that because of Onwueme's exploration of the theater of the absurd in the play, audience's attention is directed to the illogical presentation of dialogue and action. However, the technique with textual properties suggesting unmotivated and meaningless references in fact carries profound meaning. Further, the said "absurd" presentation and narration results in a strong ideological and political message akin to the practice of littérature engagée. Iwuchukwu's analysis of …


Towards A Framework Of A Semiotics Of Dance, Nikoleta Popa Blanariu Mar 2013

Towards A Framework Of A Semiotics Of Dance, Nikoleta Popa Blanariu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Towards a Framework of a Semiotics of Dance" Nicoleta Popa Blanariu constructs a framework of based on de Saussure's, Peirce's, and Barthes's thought. She applies Ferdinand de Saussure's concept of semiosis defined as a cultural system of conventions. In dance this occurs when choreographic signs are encoded, for example in magic, ritual, or religious expressions of movement. Further, Charles Sanders Peirce's concept of the role of "intelligent consciousness" is crucial for the engendering of signification and thus to dance. In dance, the choreographer "interprets" the world and by means of selection and interpretation, the choreographic sign …


Sound Semiotics Of Osundare's Poetry, Christopher Chukwudi Anyokwu Mar 2013

Sound Semiotics Of Osundare's Poetry, Christopher Chukwudi Anyokwu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Sound Semiotics of Osundare's Poetry" Christopher Anyokwu postulates that in our increasingly chirographically and typographically oriented culture and society, we often forget how tenacious and over-arching the oral continues to be. Semiotics, the science of signs, highlights among others how speech acts and speech sounds are deployed in everyday human interactions to convey meaning and communicate humanity's need for understanding and fulfillment. This meaning-signaling potential of the tonality of language is even more pronounced in most African languages which are, unlike English, syllable timed and tonal in nature. This tonal nature of African languages is appropriated by …


The Egyptian Enlightenment And Mann, Freud, And Freund, Rebecca C. Dolgoy Mar 2013

The Egyptian Enlightenment And Mann, Freud, And Freund, Rebecca C. Dolgoy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Egyptian Enlightenment and Mann, Freud, and Freund" Rebecca C. Dolgoy discusses various ways in which ancient Egypt is used in three works from the 1930s: Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism, and Karl Freund's film The Mummy. By showing the similarities and differences in how these works use Egypt, Dolgoy develops the concept that memory is the way in which the past is used. Dolgoy follows the structure of a cinematic shot casting: The Mummy as the long shot which both sets up the general Egyptomania characteristic of …


Cross-Cultural Interpretation And Chinese Literature: A Book Review Article On Owen's Work In Sinology, Qingben Li, Jinghua Guo Mar 2013

Cross-Cultural Interpretation And Chinese Literature: A Book Review Article On Owen's Work In Sinology, Qingben Li, Jinghua Guo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Achebe's Work, Postcoloniality, And Human Rights, Eric Sipyinyu Njeng Mar 2013

Achebe's Work, Postcoloniality, And Human Rights, Eric Sipyinyu Njeng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Achebe's Work, Postcoloniality, and Human Rights" Eric Sipyinyu Njeng argues that Chinua Achebe exposes failings in the fabric of African society and engages with violations of human rights. Achebe is careful not to hurt the pride of Africans who in the Zeitgeist of the nationalist ferment of the 1950s were wary of European powers. Achebe does not "write back" to the empire: he writes the empire in and he lays bare the weaknesses in African culture grounded in the father-son-grandson trajectory he narrates. Achebe presents what may be termed a cultural dialectics: the thesis (flawed African customs …


Ecocriticism In An Age Of Terror, Simon C. Estok Mar 2013

Ecocriticism In An Age Of Terror, Simon C. Estok

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Ecocriticism in an Age of Terror" Simon C. Estok argues that we cannot ignore the context of terror in and through which ecocriticism works and that the relationships between the imagining of terror on the one hand and the conceptualizing of hostile environments on the other is in very serious need of critical analysis. Changes in how we think about nature are also long overdue, as are changes in how we think about doing ecocriticism. Working toward these changes now in our scholarship will take us leaps and bounds closer to the activist intervention about which ecocriticism …


An Argument For Gender Equality In Africa, Cyril-Mary P. Olatunji Mar 2013

An Argument For Gender Equality In Africa, Cyril-Mary P. Olatunji

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "An Argument for Gender Equality in Africa" Cyril-Mary P. Olatunji addresses the problematics of gender inequality in Black African society. Many scholars working on African Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures have had something to say about the treatment of women and the topic of gender inequality in Africa. Some suggest(ed) that the roots of women's oppression are to be sought in customs and traditions and so despite of a legal system that guarantees women rights in Africa. Olatunji's objective is to advance the current discussion on the issue using the method of simple philosophical analysis, an argument from …


Recognizing A Collective Inheritance Through The History Of Women In Computing, Erika E. Smith Mar 2013

Recognizing A Collective Inheritance Through The History Of Women In Computing, Erika E. Smith

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Recognizing a Collective Inheritance through the History of Women in Computing" Erika E. Smith engages with the following question: how might we create the space for women in the history of computing that is deserved? Even with the proliferation of social, political, and historical engagement with feminist theory and computing technology, there remains a lack of scholarship on the topic of women in the history of computing. Given the dearth of historical accounts on the role of women in computing, the task of delving into such history becomes necessary, although difficult. Smith's objective is to examine a …


Text, Textile, And The Body In Baudelaire's 'A Une Mendiante Rousse' And Devi's Indian Tango, Michelle C. Lee Mar 2013

Text, Textile, And The Body In Baudelaire's 'A Une Mendiante Rousse' And Devi's Indian Tango, Michelle C. Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Text, Textile, and the Body in Baudelaire's 'A une mendiante rousse' and Devi's Indian Tango," Michelle C. Lee aims to rethink the post-romantic division between aesthetics and politics through a reconsideration of the idea of complicity in Charles Baudelaire's poem and Ananda Devi's novel. Lee argues against the claim that aesthetics needs to remain autonomous in order to be able to radically critique bourgeois society. Through a reading of the trope of clothing in each of the texts, Lee re-evaluates the formation of autonomous modernist aesthetics and attempts to show that avant-garde self-reflexivity engages in the …


Frye's Thought And Its Implications For The Interpretation Of Nigerian Narratives, Ignatius Chukwumah Mar 2013

Frye's Thought And Its Implications For The Interpretation Of Nigerian Narratives, Ignatius Chukwumah

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Frye's Thought and Its Implications for the Interpretation of Nigerian Narratives" Ignatius Chukwumah applies Northrop Frye's theoretical work on archetypes, mythos, and modes for the analysis of Nigerian literature. Chukwumah's application in the interpretation of Nigerian literature results in the understanding that the hero as conceived by Frye is not exactly the same with Africa's or Nigeria's and requires that scholars and critics of African texts fill up the ellipses generated by Frye with an autochthonous, resistant, rewarding, African-related symbolic templates in order to make the sense of the hero in both traditional and postcolonial African/Nigerian literatures …


Makine's Postmodern Writing About Exile, Memory, And Connection, Mary Theis Dec 2012

Makine's Postmodern Writing About Exile, Memory, And Connection, Mary Theis

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Makine's Postmodern Writing about Exile, Memory, and Connection" Mary Theis explores the implications of some of the many literary epiphanous moments that Andreï Makine shares with his readers in his neo-Romantic metaphysical literary quest to transcend lyrically the limitations imposed by our human condition. The analysis of this theme in Makin's literary career features several of his most important novels, his one play, and his subsequent meta-utopian reflections in Alternaissance, written under the pen name Gabriel Osmonde.


Horizontality And Impossibility In Kafka's Parabolic Quests, Frank W. Stevenson Dec 2012

Horizontality And Impossibility In Kafka's Parabolic Quests, Frank W. Stevenson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Horizontality and Impossibility in Kafka's Parabolic Quests" Frank W. Stevenson explores a horizontal-parabolic interpretation of several Kafka narratives. The key idea is that the meaning/truth of a parable is being thrown-beside-itself "on the horizontal": thus it is impossible not only to vertically reach any higher meaning/truth but even to "cross-over" to a truth which has now been horizontally "displaced." Noting that Derrida's and Agamben's reading of "Before the Law" — the narrator cannot "enter into the Law" because the latter "prescribes nothing," is nothing but an "opening" — not only excludes any vertical-hierarchical dimension but even any …


Power And Representation In Anglo-American Travel Blogs And Travel Books About China, Stefano Calzati Dec 2012

Power And Representation In Anglo-American Travel Blogs And Travel Books About China, Stefano Calzati

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Power and Representation in Anglo-American Travel Blogs and Travel Books about China" Stefano Calzati presents a comparative analysis between two travel books and two travel blogs written by Anglo-American travellers about China. The assumption is that travel books and travel blogs, being two differently mediated forms of travel writing, share some similarities: they are "autodiegetic narratives" and they bear a (cross)cultural potential. Through a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis I investigate how Anglo-American travel writers represent themselves and Chinese people as to what extent the definition of travel writing is medially affected; 2) to what extent the cross-cultural …


The Slave Trade In The Work Of Fox, Johnson, And Spielberg, Ya-Huei Lin Dec 2012

The Slave Trade In The Work Of Fox, Johnson, And Spielberg, Ya-Huei Lin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Slave Trade in the Work of Fox, Johnson, and Spielberg" Ya-huei Lin analyzes Paula Fox's The Slave Dancer (1973), Charles R. Johnson's The Middle Passage (1990), and Amistad, the 1997 film directed by Steven Spielberg based on the true event of 1841. Lin's examination of these three texts is an attempt to clarify the event's narration in the context of Walter Benjamin's historical materialism. Further, Lin explores what Louis Althusser proposes in "A Letter on Art" as to how the texts at hand make one see the ideology from which they are located. The authors' …


Forgács's Film And Installation Dunai Exodus (Danube Exodus), Zsófia Bán Dec 2012

Forgács's Film And Installation Dunai Exodus (Danube Exodus), Zsófia Bán

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Forgács's Film and Installation Dunai exodus (Danube Exodus)" Zsófia Bán analyzes film maker and video artist Péter Forgács's film The Danube Exodus (1998) and compares it with the installation Dunai exodus. A folyó beszédes áramlatai (Rippling: Currents of the River) (2002). Combined with additional materials, the two works are based on footage by ship captain Nándor Andrásovits documenting two successive journeys of forced displacement aboard his vessel, the Queen Elizabeth. Bán's analysis includes the 1939 event of the Jewish exodus from Slovakia to the Black Sea with the eventual goal of reaching Palestine followed by …


Miłosz's Quest For Affirmation And His Reflections On Us-American Culture, Joel J. Janicki Dec 2012

Miłosz's Quest For Affirmation And His Reflections On Us-American Culture, Joel J. Janicki

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Miłosz's Quest for Affirmation and His Reflections on US-American Culture" Joel J. Janicki discusses Czeslaw Miłosz's writings in exile devoted to his home in California. Miłosz, a Polish Lithuanian poet, essayist, and historian of literature, after experiencing five years of the nazi regime in Warsaw and six years of Stalinized rule in post-World War II Poland, threw himself "into the abyss" of exile. Miłosz's writings and translations have served as a bridge between the Polish and Anglo-Saxon cultures seldom encountered on such a scale. At the same time, his ability to look at a distance, his sensitivity …


Travel And Empire In Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, Yi-Chin Shih Dec 2012

Travel And Empire In Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, Yi-Chin Shih

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Travel and Empire in Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good" Yi-chin Shih analyzes Our Country's Good from the perspective of travel in order to explore the exercise of empire and the practice of resistance. Considered as one of the luminaries in British theater, Timberlake Wertenbaker (1951-) has produced several successful works, especially Our Country's Good (1988), which won her a Laurence Olivier Award for the Best Play and solidified her reputation as an important playwright in world theater. Our Country's Good is based on real historical facts about the First Fleet's transportation of criminals from England to Australia …


Nádas's A Book Of Memories And Central European Journeys, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek Dec 2012

Nádas's A Book Of Memories And Central European Journeys, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Nádas's A Book of Memories and Central European Journeys" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek discusses theoretical, literary, political, social, etc., aspects of travel in Péter Nádas's novel. "Travel" in the novel represents both a conceptual and lived experience at a time when travel between the East and the West in Europe was restricted and when a person hailing from the "East" considered a journey to the West a complex and ideological matter. Further, the aspect of urbanity, that is, cultural and social spaces and the journey and what such entails in terms of ideology, points of origin, knowledge, …


Cannibalism, Ecocriticism, And Portraying The Journey, Simon C. Estok Dec 2012

Cannibalism, Ecocriticism, And Portraying The Journey, Simon C. Estok

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Cannibalism, Ecocriticism, and Portraying the Journey" Simon C. Estok discusses the ways early modern preoccupation with cannibalism is at once rooted in and reflective of an ecophobic environmental ethics. Looking both at descriptions of metaphoric and literal cannibalism, Estok shows that imagining cannibalism was central to the travel narrative and to its investments in writing the center and the periphery, the human and the nonhuman, the acceptable and the repugnant — binaries which reveal ethical positions, not only toward people, but, more broadly, toward the natural environment. Estok argues that it is relevant to discuss the discourse …


Introduction To New Work About The Journey And Its Portrayals, I-Chun Wang Dec 2012

Introduction To New Work About The Journey And Its Portrayals, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Artaud's Journey To Mexico And His Portrayals Of The Land, Tsu-Chung Su Dec 2012

Artaud's Journey To Mexico And His Portrayals Of The Land, Tsu-Chung Su

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Artaud's Journey to Mexico and His Portrayals of the Land" Tsu-Chung Su examines Artaud's visions, visualizations, descriptions, and conceptualizations of Mexico. Su argues that Artaud's writings about Mexico were his textual appropriations and cartographical remappings of the land. They embodied both the geographic wandering of his itinerary and the bodily spasms of his thought. At once geographical and psycho-physiological embodiments, they were not only texts of a questing spirit but also words of a schizophrenic mind. While tracing and mapping Artaud's deterritorialized wanderings in cultures, religions, and rituals of Mexico, Su aims to explore the interlinking relationships …