Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Literary Cosmotopia And Nationalism In Ariel, Camilla Fojas
Literary Cosmotopia And Nationalism In Ariel, Camilla Fojas
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Camilla Fojas, in her paper "Literary Cosmotopia and Nationalism in Ariel," argues that turn-of-the-century cosmopolitan literary texts encoded political interests and that they were concerned with the proper way of being cosmopolitan and national at the same time, of forging literary and diplomatic parity between national and international interests. Unfortunately, this search for balance was beset by rhetorical and ideological prejudices manifest in phobic language about the corrupting forces of cosmopolitan effeminacy on national character. The conflict of cosmopolitanism with nationalism was played out as a kind of war between the sexes, as a gendered battle for dominance. This tension …
Reading Ondaatje's Poetry, Eluned Summers-Bremner
Reading Ondaatje's Poetry, Eluned Summers-Bremner
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Eluned Summers-Bremner pursues in her paper "Reading Ondaatje's Poetry" a psychoanalytic reading of Ondaatje's poetry based on Lacan's thought, highlighting occasions where nature and culture meet. Focusing on the volumes Secular Love and The Man with Seven Toes, Summers-Bremner explores how nature's troubled regions are navigated through the structural estrangement of looking for a name. In Lacanian terms, a proper name signals the contradiction of one's belonging to a biological or other kind of family, whence one's name often arises, and being a user or respondent of language, which produces meaning through its infringement or exceeding of its users' intentions, …
Representations Of Buddhism In Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Marlene Goldman
Representations Of Buddhism In Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Marlene Goldman
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Marlene Goldman suggests in her paper "Representations of Buddhism in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost" that at first glance Ondaatje appears to promote the idea of a Sri Lankan Buddhist faith as transcending history. Ondaatje introduces the subject of Buddhism early on in the novel, emphasizing initially the devastation wrought by imperial and colonial forces. Goldman, however, argues that subsequent references to Buddhism undermine the initial portrayal of a religion besieged by external imperialist forces. For example, at one point, the character Palipana refers to the assassination of his brother, Narada, a Buddhist monk. Narada was possibly the victim of a "political …
The Motif Of The Collector And History In Ondaatje's Work, Jon Saklofske
The Motif Of The Collector And History In Ondaatje's Work, Jon Saklofske
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Jon Saklofske, in his paper "The Motif of the Collector and History in Ondaatje's Work" recognizes that Ondaatje rescues Buddy Bolden from historical obscurity by elevating and complicating the musician's largely forgotten history with a self-conscious and largely fictional synthesis of memory and imagination. The liberties Ondaatje takes in Coming Through Slaughter with his subject to achieve this re-presentation and the ownership of the portrait that results exposes this type of authorial activity as a problematic appropriation. Saklofske suggests that to understand the implications of Ondaatje's activity it is useful to compare his efforts with Walter Benjamin's "collector" figure, who …
Touching The Language Of Citizenship In Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Sandeep Sanghera
Touching The Language Of Citizenship In Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Sandeep Sanghera
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Sandeep Sanghera, in her paper "Touching the Language of Citizenship in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost" discusses questions which make Ondaatje's novel a text about postmodern identity: who is this woman Anil who lives mostly in the West, travels on a British passport, works for an international organization, and no longer has any real ties to her first home? In the paper, these questions are examined via the languages Anil adopts and abandons in the novel. Sanghera elaborates on the question of foreign-ness represented by the protagonist of the novel; however, this foreign-ness is examined in the particular context concerning the substance …
Oral History And The Writing Of The Other In Ondaatje's In The Skin Of A Lion, Winfried Siemerling
Oral History And The Writing Of The Other In Ondaatje's In The Skin Of A Lion, Winfried Siemerling
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Winfried Siemerling argues in his paper "Oral History and the Writing of the Other in Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion" that the simulation of oral narratives in the novel imagines the conveyance of oral histories of immigrant experiences obscured by historiography. The narrative device of simulated orality -- the written text casts itself as the outcome of serial story-telling -- serves here to introduce erstwhile anonymous societal actors as makers of history, and emphasizes the collective production of story and history. Oral narratives emerge dreamlike like light out of darkness in this text; yet light, like writing, creates …
Ondaatje's The English Patient And Altered States Of Narrative, Beverley Curran
Ondaatje's The English Patient And Altered States Of Narrative, Beverley Curran
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Beverley Curran argues in her paper "Ondaatje's The English Patient and Altered States of Narrative" that Ondaatje reconfigures in his novel the "romantic" figure of the father/artist as a clandestine lover, a drug addict, or an eccentric translator, all figures with dependencies. In The English Patient, the father or artist's sense of source, continuity, or authority are translated into a narrative which rejects the perverse captivity demanded of the lover and the translator by fidelity or by the tenets of realistic representation. Using sex, drugs, and translation, Ondaatje deranges both time and space to reconfigure the role of the artist …
Asian-American Literature And A Lacanian Reading Of Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey, Fu-Jen Chen
Asian-American Literature And A Lacanian Reading Of Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey, Fu-Jen Chen
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his paper, "Asian-American Literature and a Lacanian Reading of Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey," Fu-jen Chen explores the protagonist's subjective progression into the post-Symbolic Real in Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey -- from subject as Demand, through subject as Desire, to subject as jouissance. Tripmaster Monkey records Ah Sing's transformation from a racial paranoiac at the beginning of the novel through a subject as demand to a subject as desire who is learning to target new desires via his engaging in real myth and staging real theater, and finally to a subject as jouissance -- one who is oriented to his …
Monénembo's L'Aîné Des Orphelins And The Rwandan Genocide, Lisa Mcnee
Monénembo's L'Aîné Des Orphelins And The Rwandan Genocide, Lisa Mcnee
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her paper, "Monénembo's L'Aîné des orphelins and the Rwandan Genocide," Lisa McNee discusses Tierno Monénembo's L'Aîné des orphelins, a novel that offers a double discourse and a dual memory of the genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994. McNee argues that L'Aîné des orphelins presents us with an extraordinary kind of fictional testimonial to genocide. Although Monénembo is not from Rwanda and did not participate in the tragedy, only someone who has paid the price of the clarity needed to distinguish between good and bad faith could have written a novel like L'Aîné des orphelins. Monénembo's characterization of …