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National And Regional Identities In Central And East Europe After 1989: A Review Of Books By Donskis, Foster And Wigmore, And Koczanowicz And Singer, Agata Anna Lisiak
National And Regional Identities In Central And East Europe After 1989: A Review Of Books By Donskis, Foster And Wigmore, And Koczanowicz And Singer, Agata Anna Lisiak
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Literary And Cinematic Responses To The Crime Story In Contemporary France, Deborah Streifford Reisinger
Literary And Cinematic Responses To The Crime Story In Contemporary France, Deborah Streifford Reisinger
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her paper, "Literary and Cinematic Responses to the Crime Story in Contemporary France," Deborah Streifford Reisinger examines society's relationship to violence in an era of increased media dominance. Reisinger's interdisciplinary approach integrates media, cinema, and literary studies to analyze how the crime story functions as a site of discursive struggle. Reisinger focuses on the sensational Paulin and Succo affairs that became mobile signifiers about crime, insecurity and the Other in France in the 1980s. By situating these crime stories in a larger historical and political context, she analyzes how media and politicians use the crime story as a tool …
Chinese Feminisms And Adaptation-As-Translation Readings Of Letter From An Unknown Woman, Jinhua Li
Chinese Feminisms And Adaptation-As-Translation Readings Of Letter From An Unknown Woman, Jinhua Li
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her paper, "Chinese Feminisms and Adaptation-as-Translation Readings of Letter from an Unknown Woman," Jinhua Li investigates the complex cultural and political issues engendered by an increasingly popular phenomenon of transnational film adaptations. Through a comparative reading of Jinglei Xu's 2004 adaptation of Stefan Zweig's novella Brief einer Unbekannten (Letter From an Unknown Woman), Jinhua Li argues that the adaptation-as-translation approach, as a valuable theoretical model for feminist cultural studies of Eastern-Western dynamics, allows the film to be read not only as a "translated/adapted" literary discourse that functions on different narrative levels, but also as a trope for the reimagination …
Unreliable Narration Through Representations Of The Grotesque In Lagerkvist's The Dwarf, Nitya Morales Vázquez
Unreliable Narration Through Representations Of The Grotesque In Lagerkvist's The Dwarf, Nitya Morales Vázquez
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Nitya Morales Vázquez, in her paper "Unreliable Narration through Representations of the Grotesque in Lagerkvist's The Dwarf," begins with the hypothesis that most direct expression of ideology in discourse is found in the semantics of discourse. In literature, one can analyze this ideology by examining whether the narration is reliable or whether it is unreliable. Based on these presuppositions, Morales Vázquez analyses discourse in Pär Fabian Lagerkvist's novel, The Dwarf. Morales Vázquez argues that through the use of the conceptual frames of characterization, voice, and focalization the dwarf's character offers an unreliable narration. Through representations present in the novel, Morales …
Gustav Shpet's Literary And Theatre Theory, Galin Tihanov
Gustav Shpet's Literary And Theatre Theory, Galin Tihanov
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his paper, "Gustav Shpet's Literary and Theatre Theory," Galin Tihanov introduces Shpet's theoretical work on literature and theatre, until recently little studied. Neither has been sufficient attention paid to Shpet's overall presence on the Russian cultural scene in the 1910s-1930s. As a result, our knowledge and appreciation of the scope of his writings and the variety of Russian literary and theatre life in the first third of the twentieth century have remained less rich and well-informed than they could otherwise have been. Tihanov explains that Shpet's participation in contemporary literature and theatre assumed different forms: he wrote both from …
Globalizing Compassion, Photography, And The Challenge Of Terror, Ariel Dorfman
Globalizing Compassion, Photography, And The Challenge Of Terror, Ariel Dorfman
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Globalizing Compassion, Photography, and the Challenge of Terror," Ariel Dorfman reflects on the use of photography to make global violence visible and to mourn the losses caused by acts of terror. Dorfman draws on events that range from the attacks on the World Trade Center to Pinochet's dictatorship to other similar atrocities and he shows that, while these events always feel singular in the moment, they are best understood comparatively. At the core of the paper is a central question: does the shared practice of using photos to represent terror help build bridges across humanity or does …
Democracy's Promise And The Politics Of Worldliness In The Age Of Terror, Henry A. Giroux
Democracy's Promise And The Politics Of Worldliness In The Age Of Terror, Henry A. Giroux
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Democracy's Promise and the Politics of Worldliness in the Age of Terror," Henry A. Giroux draws attention to how the crisis in US-American democracy has been heralded and exacerbated by the nation's increasing skepticism -- or even overt hostility -- toward the educational system. Part of such a challenge means that educators, artists, students, and others need to rethink and affirm the important presupposition that higher education is integral to fostering the imperatives of an inclusive democracy and that the crisis of higher education must be understood as part of the wider crisis of politics, power, and …
African Literature And The Role Of The Nigerian Government College Umuahia, Terri Ochiagha
African Literature And The Role Of The Nigerian Government College Umuahia, Terri Ochiagha
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Terri Ochiagha, in her paper "African Literature and the Role of the Nigerian Government College Umuahia," discusses how the college contributed towards nurturing the talent of some of the most relevant authors in African literary history. With the help of the testimonies of these authors in interviews, correspondence, essays, autobiographies, and with the aid of literary critics and scholars who realized the role the Umuahia College played in creating a literary elite, Ochiagha analyses this literary phenomenon and takes us on a journey through the school's literary ambience: its library and the novels which were later to prompt the authors' …
Chaos Theory And Literature From An Existentialist Perspective, Yasser Khamees Ragab Aman
Chaos Theory And Literature From An Existentialist Perspective, Yasser Khamees Ragab Aman
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Yasser Khamees Ragab Aman proposes in his article "Chaos Theory and Literature from an Existentialist Perspective" that in literature the relation, principles, and processes of chaos and order can be analyzed from an existentialist perspective. Chaos lies at the heart of nothingness and order is the appearance of the achievement it tries to realize, temporary it may seem. Aman argues that with the application of chaos theory to works of literature may yield new insight and applies in his paper aspects of chaos theory reading three literary works which represent three different literatures and cultures, namely Arabic, English, and French. …
A Postmodern Solzhenitsyn?, William H. Thornton
A Postmodern Solzhenitsyn?, William H. Thornton
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
William H. Thornton undertakes in his article, "A Postmodern Solzhenitsyn?," to bring Solzhenitsyn in from the cold, critically speaking, by closing the gap between him and his many postmodern detractors. That gap has been premised on the rough equivalence of poststructuralism and postmodernism. The postmodern realism advanced in this study challenges not only Solzhenitsyn's critics but his own stated aversion to postmodernism. Operating on both a microhistorical and macrohistorical plane, Solzhenitsyn's literary historiography testifies to the awesome scope of the gulag while never losing sight of its human factor.The double vision of Solzhenitsyn's proto-postmodern referentiality, a simultaneous centering and decentering, …
Twain's A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court And U.S. Imperialism, Jennifer A. O'Neill
Twain's A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court And U.S. Imperialism, Jennifer A. O'Neill
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her paper, "Twain's novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and U.S. Imperialism," Jennifer A. O'Neill argues that while it Twain's text is commonly viewed as an attack on monarchy and the Catholic church, one of the book's primary focuses is U.S. imperialism. In the scholarship of Twain's text some have acknowledged the text as a discussion of colonialism, most tend to see it as an exaltation of "civilizing" efforts rather than the scalding indictment it was clearly intended to be. Indeed, Twain embraced U.S. colonial efforts in the Pacific early in his life but by the time …
The "Teucer Paradigm" And The Eastern Other In Western Literature, Maria Beatrice Bittarello
The "Teucer Paradigm" And The Eastern Other In Western Literature, Maria Beatrice Bittarello
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her paper, "The 'Teucer Paradigm' and the Eastern Other in Western Literature," Maria Beatrice Bittarello argues that modern representations of characters with mixed-blood heritage (Western and Eastern) are rooted in classical representations of the Middle East and that such representations are thematically re-cast from a literary thematic archetype elaborated on in the ancient Greek and Roman cultures. Bittarello examines how Greek and Roman authors portray the Greek mythological hero Teucer, son of Telamon and the Trojan princess Hesione. Teucer's liminal position allows him to be used in already in Greek and Roman culture both as colonizer and "bridge" between …
The Dream Scene And The Future Of Vision In The City Of Lost Children And Until The End Of The World, Donna Wilkerson-Barker
The Dream Scene And The Future Of Vision In The City Of Lost Children And Until The End Of The World, Donna Wilkerson-Barker
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, "The Dream Scene and the Future of Vision in The City of Lost Children and Until the End of the World," Donna Wilkerson-Barker examines how these films investigate the place of imagination (or representation) in postmodern visual culture through their portrayal of technologized vision as an obstacle to experience. Drawing parallels between the dream scenes in these films and virtual reality and cyberspace, she argues that image technologies in The City of Lost Children and Until the End of the World lead to a dissociation of experience from corporeal reality, a dissociation that is ultimately linked to …
Globalisation, Empire, And The Vampire, Mario Vrbančić
Globalisation, Empire, And The Vampire, Mario Vrbančić
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his paper, "Globalisation, Empire, and the Vampire," Mario Vrbančić opens up the question of the possibility of a dialectical utopian thinking in postmodernism. Following Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Vrbančić analyses the vampire as the nation looking both at Hardt and Negri's theory of Empire and Žižek psychoanalytically inclined theory of nationalist identification. The vampire always occurs in the wake and decay of Empires: Dracula embodies Victorian fears of the infestation of the undead by invading the imperial centre; in America vampires disperse and multiply in popular culture and the mass media; in a newly emerging global order (Empire) they may …
The Rebirth Of Comparative Literature In Anglocalization, Anand Patil
The Rebirth Of Comparative Literature In Anglocalization, Anand Patil
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Anand Patil examines in his paper, "The Rebirth of Comparative Literature in Anglocalization," the debates on effects of "globalization" on literary studies and "cultures" in India. The focus of his comparative scrutiny follows the debate about the "death" of comparative literature. Patil re-imagines the rebirth of interdisciplinarity, a basic tenet of the discipline of comparative literature and a characteristic of globalization. He has coined the term "Anglocalization" to analyze the complexity of the effects of globalization in the multilingual and multicultural situation of the sub-continent. The term is used to describe a tripartite process: Anglicization by global English, economic liberation, …
Radical Theology And The Reorganization Of The Us-American Religious System, Philippe Codde
Radical Theology And The Reorganization Of The Us-American Religious System, Philippe Codde
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Radical Theology and the Reorganization of the US-American Religious System," Philippe Codde uses the example of the highly popular movement of death-of-God theology in the 1960s to demonstrate the wide applicability for cultural research of Itamar Even-Zohar's polysystem theory and to illustrate the validity of Even-Zohar's assertion that peripheral elements in any system can yet occasion a dramatic shift in the system's central repertoires. Although Richard Rubenstein's reality model never made it to the center of the US-American religious system, his radical theology did impel the more traditional theologians in the center of the system finally to …
Empathy Versus Abstraction In Twentieth-Century German And Russian Aesthetics, Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
Empathy Versus Abstraction In Twentieth-Century German And Russian Aesthetics, Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his paper, "Empathy versus Abstraction in Twentieth-Century German and Russian Aesthetics," Thorsten Botz-Bornstein argues that Alexander Koyré has shown how the crisis of belief incited by Bacon, Montaigne, Pascal, and Descartes made that "man lost his place in the world." The German term Einfühlung (empathy) played an important role in the transformation of the relationship between the person and his/her world at the moment when modern science began to emerge. Botz-Bornstein examines the conceptual links between empathy and Verfremdung (in Russian ostranenie), and style by showing how German and Russian literary critics of the 1910s attempted to retrieve the …
The Cognitive Construction Of The Self In Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Patrick S. Bernard
The Cognitive Construction Of The Self In Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Patrick S. Bernard
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "The Cognitive Construction of the Self in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God," Patrick S. explores the conception and representation of the self as a cognitive construct in Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. By this approach, Bernard proposes that cognitive paradigms, such as knowing, seeing, thinking, and speaking, for example, and their capacities to engender knowledge and perception, identity and consciousness, memory and narrative, language and speech, are central to the novel's exploration of the self as an epistemological and ideological product. Using tools of interpretation adapted from cognitive psychology and radical constructivism, …
The Global Phenomenon Of "Humanizing" Terrorism In Literature And Cinema, Elaine Martin
The Global Phenomenon Of "Humanizing" Terrorism In Literature And Cinema, Elaine Martin
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her paper "The Global Phenomenon of 'Humanizing' Terrorism in Literature and Cinema" Elaine Martin presents -- following a discussion of two early examples, Schiller's The Robbers and Heinrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas (1810) -- an analysis of several contemporary works that model different ways of representing terrorism: Heinrich Böll's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975) and its 1976 filmic adaptation by Volker Schlöndorff, Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist (1985), Santosh Sivan's film The Terrorist (1999), and Tom Tykwer's film Heaven (2002). Edward Said provided a critique of the battle against terrorism, saying that it is selective ("we" are …
The Black Body And Representations Of The (In)Human, Li-Chun Hsiao
The Black Body And Representations Of The (In)Human, Li-Chun Hsiao
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Li-Chun Hsiao, in his article "The Black Body and Representations of the (In)human," takes cues from the theoretical insights of Agamben's "bare life" as well as Laclau's and Mouffe's "social antagonism" and explores how the slave can be considered a constitutive element which is nevertheless foreclosed from Western democracies. Hsiao also analyzes the various ways the term "slave" functions as trope in the founding discourses of Western democracy. "Bare life" remains included in politics "in the form of the exception," as "something that is included solely through an exclusion." Such an "inclusive exclusion" is represented not in its differential relationship …
Bearing Witness Through Fiction, Carolina Rocha
Bearing Witness Through Fiction, Carolina Rocha
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, "Bearing Witness through Fiction," Carolina Rocha explores the ways in which three Argentine writers grappled with their roles as public intellectuals and witnesses to acts of terror, undeniable violence, and human rights abuses during the most recent military dictatorship. By examining three narrative texts written from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s Aquí pasan cosas raras (Strange Things Happen Here) (1975) by Luisa Valenzuela, La casa y el viento (The House and the Wind) (1984) by Hector Tizón, and El árbol de la gitana (The Tree and the Gypsy) (1997) by Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, she argues that …
Landmines, Hiv/Aids, And Africa's New Generation, Barbara Harlow
Landmines, Hiv/Aids, And Africa's New Generation, Barbara Harlow
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, "Landmines, HIV/Aids, and Africa's New Generation," Barbara Harlow asks the question what do "humanitarianism" and "human rights" have to do with the humanities? In a globalizing culture, how do personal stories contribute to political histories? What might be the effect of literature on these pressing questions? Harlow focuses in her essay on the work of Swedish writer and Maputo theater director Henning Mankell through particular attention to Secrets in the Fire and Playing with Fire: Two novels about a young Mozambican named Sofia. Harlow shows how Mankell's linking of the experiences of Sofia to the legacy of …
Dorfman, Schubert, And Death And The Maiden, David Schroeder
Dorfman, Schubert, And Death And The Maiden, David Schroeder
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Dorfman, Schubert, and Death and the Maiden," David Schroeder suggests that the selection of the play's title Death and the Maiden (1991) by Ariel Dorfman is a careful one. Schroeder proposes that it is not only that the title of the piece comes directly from Franz Schubert's String Quartet in D minor, so named because it uses material from the song of the same name as the theme for the second movement. Schroeder argues that Dorfman's thoughtful choice is as much related to the strong parallels between Schubert's Maiden and Dorfman's character Paulina Salas, as to Dr. …
The Tortured Body, The Photograph, And The U.S. War On Terror, Julie Gerk Hernandez
The Tortured Body, The Photograph, And The U.S. War On Terror, Julie Gerk Hernandez
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Julie Gerk Hernandez, in her article "The Tortured Body, the Photograph, and the U.S. War on Terror," engages in an analysis of the institutional mechanisms that lead to dehumanizing violence as a result of the ongoing allegations of torture of detainees at U.S. military bases at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, and at Guantánamo. Hernandez conducts her investigation by examining the photographed torture at Abu Ghraib as an atavistic resurgence of the representational practices at work in post-Civil-War racial lynching. Hernandez also explores the historical and visual parallels between the photographs at Abu Ghraib and the photographs of post-Civil-War lynchings in …
Collateral Damage And The "Incident" At Haditha, Tom Engelhardt
Collateral Damage And The "Incident" At Haditha, Tom Engelhardt
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his paper, "Collateral Damage and the 'Incident' at Haditha," Tom Engelhardt provides a comparative analysis of the massacres of innocent civilians in the Viet Nam and Iraqi wars. Focusing on the events of My Lai, Haditha, Abu Ghraib, and Fallujah, Engelhardt traces the uncanny resemblance between the ways that the military attempted to contain the flow of information about these atrocities. Engelhardt analyzes the rhetorical tropes of media coverage via the favored terms of "collateral damage" and "incident" and the preferred statistics that always claim that 99.9% of the military conducts itself professionally. The fact that the media not …
Narration In International Human Rights Law, Joseph R. Slaughter
Narration In International Human Rights Law, Joseph R. Slaughter
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his paper, "Narration in International Human Rights Law," Joseph R. Slaughter argues that the prohibitions and entitlements articulated in international human rights law presume and promote an image of the human being as a self-narrating subject. He proposes that human rights law enshrines commitments to the human voice and to the ability of the individual to construct narratives of identity. In this sense, human rights violations can be understood as assaults on the human voice and on the socio-cultural structures that make certain kinds of narratives and narration possible. This narratological reading of the law offers a way to …
A Monk's Tale, Sam Hamill
A Monk's Tale, Sam Hamill
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his paper, "A Monk's Tale," Sam Hamill recounts his ongoing commitment to using poetry as a form of protest and explains how poetry bridges the personal and the public, weaving together the life of one poet and that of an entire globe. In late January 2003, in response to an invitation to a symposium by Laura Bush to celebrate "Poetry and the American Voice," Hamill declined to participate; a longtime pacifist, he could not in good faith visit the White House following the recent news of George W. Bush's plan for a unilateral "Shock and Awe" attack on Iraq. …
Selected Bibliography Of Comparative Studies On Human Rights Culture, Henry James Morello
Selected Bibliography Of Comparative Studies On Human Rights Culture, Henry James Morello
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
The Logic And Language Of Torture, Jonathan H. Marks
The Logic And Language Of Torture, Jonathan H. Marks
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his paper "The Logic and Language of Torture," Jonathan H. Marks explores the tragic temptation of torture in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks. Emotive responses to terrorism fueled by ticking bomb scenarios and other narrative constructs caused the U.S. to reconsider torture and the boundaries of permissible interrogation tactics in the aftermath of 9/11. While many in the media and the academy debated the necessity of "interrogational torture," the government decided that something more than moral reconstruction was required. For that reason, it embarked on a campaign of legal exceptionalism. While affirming its commitment to the …
Media In A Capitalist Culture, Barbara Trent
Media In A Capitalist Culture, Barbara Trent
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, "Media in a Capitalist Culture," Barbara Trent looks at the negative effects that capitalism has on the media and how those effects may be overcome. Trent intertwines personal experience with socio-historical context to give the reader a genuine feel for political filmmaking in a Hollywood dominated world. She describes how her Academy Award winning film The Panama Deception was removed from a Cineplex, even after out-grossing all of the other films there, because Warner Brothers wanted the screen. After an examination of the impact a dominant Hollywood has on local culture around the world, Trent offers three …