History Commons^™

Of Ghosts And Spaceships: Reclaiming Chinese National Identity Through Science Fiction, Nicholas M. Stillman

Global Honors Theses

This paper examines the extent to which Chinese science fiction literature has played a role in the reframing of Chinese national identity as one that is based in scientific and technological development. Specifically, whether the recent push during a 2007 conference in Chengdu for increased science fiction consumption has resulted in more scientific development and more positivist science fictional literature.

The paper both evaluates the current state of science fiction in China and the potential impact of its narratives through an analysis of the historical context of the role of science fiction in China compared to the more modern usage …

"Future City In The Heroic Past: Rome, Romans, And Roman Landscapes In Aeneid 6–8", Eric Kondratieff

History Faculty Publications

From the Intro: “Arms and the Man I sing…” So Vergil begins his epic tale of Aeneas, who overcomes tremendous obstacles to find and establish a new home for his wandering band of Trojan refugees. Were it metrically possible, Vergil could have begun with “Cities and the Man I sing,” for Aeneas’ quest for a new home involves encounters with cities of all types: ancient and new, great and small, real and unreal. These include Dido’s Carthaginian boomtown (1.419–494), Helenus’ humble neo-Troy (3.349–353) and Latinus’ lofty citadel (7.149–192). Of course, central to his quest is the destiny of Rome, whose …

Front Matter

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

The Quixote Code: Reading Between The Lines Of The Cervantes Novel, Massimiliano Adelmo Giorgini

Open Access Dissertations

This study in two parts reexamines the notion that Don Quixote was originally seen as no more than a humorous story, and suggests that due to a variety of factors, a closer, more exegetical reading of the text may well be appropriate. In the first section of this work, focus is placed on the long history of the reception of the Cervantes novel as containing some deeper truth beneath the literal surface of the novel. This is complemented by a review of some examples of when several esoteric readings—done without academic rigor and adequate contextual research—have struck dramatically off-target and …

Memories Of An Editor, Laina Farhat-Holzman

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Essay: The Great Literary Utopias Have A Nightmarish History, Laina Farhat-Holzman

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Islamic Capitalism: The Muslim Approach To Economic Activities In Indonesia, Hisanori Kato

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Paul S. Kinderstedt. Cheese And Culture: A History Of Cheese And Its Place In Western Civilization, Laina Farhat-Holzman

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

The Ha-Ha Holocaust: Exploring Levity Amidst The Ruins And Beyond In Testimony, Literature And Film, Aviva Atlani

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

ABSTRACT

Jewish humour sheds a crude light on the social, political, and historical realities of the Holocaust. Paradoxically, contentiously, doses of levity during this period were very much a reality, and even a psychological necessity. The purpose of my thesis is to explore the historical, social, and political ramifications of such laughter provoking manifestations. In doing so, the nuances are highlighted which are found within the laughter of the ghettos, the transit camps, and the concentration camps. Furthermore, some of these jokes, and their subsequent variations, reappear within the discourse of children of survivors. The dissertation explores how some of …

The Dutch Black Legend, Carmen Nocentelli

Carmen Nocentelli

English “Hollandophobia” is usually understood as a function or reflection of the rivalries that characterized Anglo-Dutch relations during the seventeenth century. Working against such a circumscribed understanding, this essay contends that Hollandophobia is best thought of as a “Dutch Black Legend”—that is, as a deliberate repetition of the Hispanophobic topoi known as the Spanish Black Legend. Only by acknowledging the intimate relationship between these two phenomena can we make sense of Hollandophobia’s peculiar features while discerning how this discourse helped construct what the English took to be proper Europeanness.

The [Ftaires!] To Remembrance: Language, Memory, And Visual Rhetoric In Chaucer's House Of Fame And Danielewski's House Of Leaves, Shannon Danae Kilgore

Honors Program Theses

Geoffrey Chaucer's dream poem The House of Fame explores virtual technologies of memory and reading, which are similar to the themes explored in Danielewski's House of Leaves. "[ftaires!]", apart from referencing the anecdotal (and humorous) misspelling of "stairs" in House of Leaves, is one such linguistically and visually informed phenomenon that speaks directly to how we think about, and give remembrance to, our own digital and textual culture. This paper posits that graphic design, illustrations, and other textual cues (such as the [ftaires!] mispelling in House of Leaves] have a subtle yet powerful psychological influence on our reading and …

Welsh Manipulations Of The Matter Of Britain, Timothy J. Nelson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

"Welsh Manipulations of the Matter of Britain" examines the textual relationships between Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae and the Welsh Brut y Brenhinedd in the Cotton Cleopatra manuscript. This thesis initially provides an overview of the existing scholarship surrounding the Welsh translations of Geoffrey's Historia with a specific focus on the Cotton Cleopatra Brut. The textual examination of the two histories begins with an extended commentary on the general textual variations between the two texts before concentrating on the specific changes that were made in the Cotton Cleopatra to reflect the adapter's pro-Welsh nationalistic and political biases. The general …

La Muerte, La Memoria Y La Filosofía Existencial En La Literatura Testimonial Pos-Dictatorial De Primo Levi, Jorge Semprún Y Jacobo Timerman, Andrew Mcnair

Senior Theses and Projects

What effect does the ubiquity of death in a traumatic experience have on an individual's memory and soul, and how is this manifested in one's written testimony? Through the analysis of their philosophical introspection, the testimonies of Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved, Jorge Semprún's Literature or Life, and Jacobo Timerman's Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number meditate on the atrocities they experienced during Levi and Semprún's incarceration under the Nazi regime in Europe between 1942 and 1945, and Timerman's imprisonment under the regime of Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina between 1976 and 1983. The …

The Plight Of Prostitution: A Study Of Sonia Marmeladov In Crime And Punishment, Clare Carroll

Spring 2014, Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky's celebrated novel Crime and Punishment (1866) exposes complex moral issues testing the urban population of nineteenth century St. Petersburg. Prostitution is one theme that complicates the novel, and Dostoevsky invites readers to consider the prostitute’s point of view. In 1843, the tsarist Ministry of Internal Affairs appointed “medical-police committees” to regulate prostitution in Russia. Registered prostitutes were typically poor urban women, and they became subject to strict rules. Sonia Marmeladov, an emblem of virtue in Crime and Punishment, endures the horrors of commercialized sex. Though her virtue and religious faith far exceed that of the average person, her …

Essay: An Observation On The Universal Significance Of Western Civilization, Laina Farhat-Holzman

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge Of Geography: What The Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts And The Battle Against Fate, Laina Farhat-Holzman

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

James Demeo, Saharasia, The 4000 Bce Origins Of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare, And Social Violence In The Deserts Of The Old World, Laina Farhat-Holzman

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Enlightenment And Catholicism In Europe. A Transnational History, Ulrich Lehner, Jeffrey Burson

Ulrich L. Lehner

No abstract provided.

Perspectives On Identity, Migration, And Displacement, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek, I-Chun Wang, Hsiao-Yu Sun

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven & Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven

Perspectives on Identity, Migration, and Displacement -- edited by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, I-Chun Wang, and Hsiao-Yu Sun (Kaohsiung: National Sun Yat-sen University Press, 2010. ISBN 9789860235418 209 pages, bibliography, index) is a collection of articles about sociological and literary aspects of identity formation as a consequence of (im)migration. (Im)migration results in the problematics of assimilation and hybridity and in postcolonial scholarship, in particular, attention is paid to the concept of migration termed "Creolization" on the ground that cultural contact, cultural transmission, and cultural transformation result in the creation of new cultures. Copyright release by National Sun Yat-sen University to …

文学研究的合法化：一种新实用主义、整体化和经验主义文学与文化研究方法 (Legitimizing The Study Of Literature: A New Pragmatism And The Systemic Approach To Literature And Culture), Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven & Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven (斯蒂文·托托西). 文学研究的合法化：一种新实用主义、整体化和经验主义文学与文化研究方法 (Legitimizing the Study of Literature: A New Pragmatism and the Systemic Approach to Literature and Culture). Trans. Ma Jui-ch'i (马瑞琪翻). Peking University Academic Lectures Series 7. Beijing: Peking University Press, 1997. ISBN 7-301-03482-2 217 pages. The book contains texts of invited public lectures at Peking University in 1994, 1995, and 1996 on radical constructivism, culture and literary theory and methodology, women's writing, film and literature, and Canadian and Hungarian modern and contemporary prose. The Peking University Press 1997 print version of the book does not include a Works Cited: in the 2011 pdf version …

Bibliography For Work In Digital Humanities And (Inter)Mediality Studies, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven & Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven

No abstract provided.

Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven & Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven. Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. ISBN 90-420-0534-3 299 pages, bibliography, index. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek presents a framework of comparative literature based on a contextual (systemic and empirical) approach for the study of culture and literature and applies the framework in audience studies, film and literature, women's literature, translation studies, new media and scholarship in the humanities and in the analyses of English, French, German, Austrian, Hungarian, Romanian, and English-Canadian modern, contemporary, and ethnic minority texts. Copyright release to the author in 2006.

Annual Reports Of Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture 1999-, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven & Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven

No abstract provided.

Unmasking The Protester: The Meanings And Myths Of Collective Civil Resistance Movements In African American And Polish Postresistance Prose Fiction, Agnieszka Herra

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My contention is that the narrative framework of social movements, especially the ones deemed “successful” such as the American Civil Rights Movement and the Polish Solidarity Movement, reflects unity and collectivity within collective memory. During the period of the movements’ duration, this provides a clear rhetorical purpose: to give the appearance of unity in order to give effective voice to the demands. I argue that the voices that did not fit into the collective movements emerge subsequently to question this monologic language in literary form. This dissertation uses Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic language to argue that novels in the postresistance …

Resolving Exeter Book Riddles 74 And 33: Stormy Allomorphs Of Water, Thomas Klein, William F. Klein, David Delehanty

Quidditas

The following article argues that the idea of the allomorph is a productive way to view two “transformation” riddles from the Old English collection of riddles in the Exeter Book. In the view of the authors, Riddles 74 and 33 should both be solved generally as “water,” and specifically as “in the form of a thunderstorm.” Both riddles dramatize the multiple forms that water may take, and meditate on the divinely-ordained grandeur of the storm and the particular paradox of a thing being both immensely violent and necessary for life on earth. Understanding how these riddles play out these truths …

Causality In La Mort Le Roi Artu: Free Will, Accident, And Moral Failure, David S. King

Quidditas

The thirteenth-century French La Mort le Roi Artu indicates forthrightly how the Arthurian world comes to an end, but the text leaves less clear what motivates the disaster. Many critics attribute the cause to an external force, God or the goddess Fortune, that obliges Arthur and others to pursue their own destruction. A few offer greater insight into the nature of causality in the romance. They see the characters as exercising some degree of free will or even complete liberty. But these critics err in alienating the notion of free choice from moral concerns. In their reading, the heroes suffer …

The Intersection Of Music Philosophy, Performance And Genre In The Middle English Breton Lay Sir Orfeo, Lisa Myers

Quidditas

The Middle English romance Sir Orfeo is a dynamic and creative retelling of the classical Orpheus myth in which the wife of the English king, Orfeo, is abducted by fairies but eventually restored to her position and husband through Orfeo’s musical prowess. While any retelling of the Orpheus myth would necessarily contain references to music and would, therefore, likely use music as an important cue within the text, the poet of Sir Orfeo displays a sophisticated understanding of musical philosophy, composition and performance, as well as the Breton lay genre. The intersection of these elements all work together not only …

Public Shaming: Milton And The English People, Courtney O. Carlisle

Quidditas

“Public Shaming: Milton and the English People” discusses the role of shame and its performance in John Milton’s First and Second Defence of the People of England. As Milton attempts to shame Salmasius and More, he focuses on bodies and their relationship to shame. For Milton, shame should be morally productive—it is meant to produce a sense of self-consciousness and an appropriate moral awareness. Milton argues that Salmasius and More are shameless and therefore not self-conscious or morally aware. Involved with shame and self-consciousness is a profound awareness of one’s body and its relationship to others and to the environment. …

The End Of An Era: John E. Wills Jr’S 1688: A Global History As A Capstone, Nikolas O. Hoel

Quidditas

When designing a course, an appropriate question is how to end it. What great primary or secondary source will send students off into the larger academic world, outside the immediate class at hand with a better understanding of the period they had just been studying? The quandary is important in every medieval or early modern course; for example, does one end the medieval survey with Dante or Petrarch, or even Erasmus? The necessity for a capstone is no less great in classes that are entitled “England to 1688,” which populate many university course catalogues today. Many monographs and articles have …

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.