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Articles 1 - 18 of 18
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Why Fantasy Matters Too Much, Jack Zipes
Why Fantasy Matters Too Much, Jack Zipes
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Why Fantasy Matters Too Much" Jack Zipes proposes that fantasy in contemporary culture functions as a celebrity and money-making machine. Fantasy mobilizes and instrumentalizes the fantastic to form and celebrates spectacles as illusions of social relations based on power. Thus, spectacles violate and drain our imagination by glorifying social relations of power made spectacular and involve the magic of fetishism. Generally, the results bring about delusion and acclamation of particular sets of social relations that are commodified, sold, and consumed. We acclaim commodities that we do not know and products not of our own making we consume …
The Posthuman Ethos In Cyberpunk Science Fiction, María Goicoechea
The Posthuman Ethos In Cyberpunk Science Fiction, María Goicoechea
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "The Posthuman Ethos in Cyberpunk Science Fiction" María Goicoechea explores the posthuman tendencies of Anglo-American popular culture as they are manifested in the representations of the cyborgs, clones, and artificial intelligences that populate cyberpunk science fiction. Choosing the figure of the cyborg as the central myth of cyberculture, Goicoechea exposes the underlying tensions and contradictions present in cyberpunk prescient visions of humanity's evolution. Goicoechea reviews the variety of contradictory meanings that have been sedimented over this hybrid creature, using as ideological framework the digital narratives of "Technoromanticism" and "Cybergothic," respectively the dominant and the countercultural trend inside …
Introduction To New Studies On The Fantastic In Literature, Asunción López-Varela
Introduction To New Studies On The Fantastic In Literature, Asunción López-Varela
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Cultural Scenarios Of The Fantastic, Asunción López-Varela
Cultural Scenarios Of The Fantastic, Asunción López-Varela
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, "Cultural Scenarios of the Fantastic," Asunción López-Varela Azcárate explores the relationship between technological development, the materiality of objects, the concept of ontological presence, and the emergence of abstract and fantastic models. López-Varela Azcárate argues that since the early twentieth century there has been a return to the fantastic in literature and that this is related to neo-baroque attitudes whose foundations are a systemic way of knowing that unveils a world understandable from an epistemology of complexity and ambiguity. In postmodern neo-baroque aesthetics, with its focus on technological re-mediating, that is, transferring information across different media, originality is …
Towards A History Of Intertextuality In Literary And Culture Studies, Marko Juvan
Towards A History Of Intertextuality In Literary And Culture Studies, Marko Juvan
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his paper "Towards a History of Intertextuality in Literary and Culture Studies" Marko Juvan argues that the theory of intertextuality reshaped fundamentally the understanding of influence in literature. It showed that supposedly primary sources are themselves but intertextual transformations dependent on cultural "encyclopedia." Intertextuality as a framework offers a refined terminology of forms and functions of both domestic and foreign literatures' creative reception while respecting specific linguistic and cultural spaces, traditions, and literary systems. It deconstructed the postulates of influence; for example, the concepts of author, the logic of cause and effect, and boundaries between texts. It revealed the …
Race And Gender Representations In Advertising In Cable Cartoon Programming, Debra L. Merskin
Race And Gender Representations In Advertising In Cable Cartoon Programming, Debra L. Merskin
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her paper "Race and Gender Representations in Advertising in Cable Cartoon Programming," Debra L. Merskin explores what children see and what they learn about racial, ethnic, and gender identity in television advertisements. Merskin examines race and ethnicity in commercials on cable television, specifically on the Turner Cartoon Network, an environment devoted entirely to cartoons and to children. Her content analysis of 381 advertisements reveals that while White and African American children are overrepresented in relationship to their percentage of the U.S. population, other minority group children are rarely portrayed. In only one instance were children of color shown alone, …
Natives, Nostalgia, And Nature In Children's Popular Film Narratives, C. Richard King
Natives, Nostalgia, And Nature In Children's Popular Film Narratives, C. Richard King
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his paper "Natives, Nostalgia, and Nature in Children's Popular Film Narratives," C. Richard King offers a critical reading in an effort to appreciate the entanglements of nature, natives, and nostalgia in children's narratives. In this context, an analysis of Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron Spirit affords an ideal occasion for such a reading because it centers on the relations between Native Americans, Euroamericans, and the natural world as it tells the story of a wild mustang living in western North America in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, as close examination reveals, the film uses race, gender, civilization, and wildness …
The Politics Of Childhood In Ellis's Three Wishes, Wafaa Hasan
The Politics Of Childhood In Ellis's Three Wishes, Wafaa Hasan
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In "The Politics of Childhood in Ellis's Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak," Wafaa Hasan outlines the recent controversy in Canada over the restrictions that shape children's literature. Using Neil Postman's and John Locke's conceptions of childhood, Hasan unpacks the ways in which Ellis's Three Wishes has threatened popular conceptions of childhood. Specifically, as her analysis shows, Ellis's work redefines the boundaries of children's fiction by heterogenizing childhood experience and by affording its readers -- limited but consequential -- authorial agency. Further, Hasan asserts that Three Wishes liberates the idea of childhood as a developmental stage of ignorance by …
Introduction To Racialized Narratives For Children, C. Richard King
Introduction To Racialized Narratives For Children, C. Richard King
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Narrative Politics In Historical Fictions For Children, John Streamas
Narrative Politics In Historical Fictions For Children, John Streamas
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In "Narrative Politics in Historical Fictions for Children," John Streamas points out that narrative theory and ethnic studies need to ask each other basic questions before a reading of race in children's literature can be useful. Is the literature merely a reflection of the experience of adult writers and parents? That is, must we read the literature as nostalgic, reflecting a developmental bias? Or does it engage children on their own contemporary terms? Are children themselves capable of racism, even if only as extensions of adult racial imaginations? Certainly the growing number of children's books written by writers of color …
Polly Bemis, Pedagogy, And Multiculturalism In The Classroom, Katy Fry
Polly Bemis, Pedagogy, And Multiculturalism In The Classroom, Katy Fry
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
As Katy Fry suggests in her paper "Polly Bemis, Pedagogy, and Multiculturalism in the Classroom," the history of the US-American West is too often taught in mythological terms. This is especially true in grade school classrooms, where children are told that the West was settled by courageous men and women who dared to come to and conquer a wild, untamed place. The notion of what it meant to be a pioneer remains simple and uncomplicated. As Fry points out, however, there were pioneers of a different sort, such as the Chinese immigrant Polly Bemis. Fry's article examines the various pedagogic …
A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Representation Of Asian Indian Folk Tales In Us-American Children's Literature, Sudeshna Roy
A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Representation Of Asian Indian Folk Tales In Us-American Children's Literature, Sudeshna Roy
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "A Critical Discourse Analysis of Representation of Asian Indian Folk Tales in US-American Children's Literature," Sudeshna Roy explores the representation of India in U.S. children's picture books by interpreting prevailing images of the subcontinent and its peoples and their impact on children's understandings. Roy analyzes three key elements -- titles, illustrations, and text -- identifying a set of predominant themes: nature and wild animals, poverty and hardship, spiritual hermits, and wit and common sense wisdom. From these findings, Roy suggests that Eurocentric imperial ideologies continue to inform the formulation of race, gender, and nation in U.S. children's …
Children's Film As Social Practice, J. Zornado
Children's Film As Social Practice, J. Zornado
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his paper "Children's Film as Social Practice," J. Zornado argues that the animated feature is a genre distinct in its own right, and, although overlooked by film criticism up to now, deserves rigorous, scholarly attention. Zornado employs the term "iconology" to develop a foundation for a critical methodology indebted to Althusser, Foucault, and Lacan as well as contemporary film criticism. Iconology of the animated feature film is the study of the meaning systems of the dominant culture and the ways in which such systems are inscribed into all kinds of social practice geared, specifically, to seduce and inform the …
Racism, Disable-Ism, And Heterosexism In The Making Of Helen Keller, Andy Prettol
Racism, Disable-Ism, And Heterosexism In The Making Of Helen Keller, Andy Prettol
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his paper "Racism, Disable-ism, and Heterosexism in the Making of Helen Keller" Andy Prettol offers an analysis of prevailing narratives about Helen Keller. Prettol focuses on the dynamic interplay of race, (dis)ability, sexuality, and gender inherent to all Keller stories of triumph that are so popular in elementary schools across the U.S. He examines three specific works: William Gibson's playscript The Miracle Worker, written in 1956; the film of the same title directed by Arthur Penn in 1962; and the compiled letters of Anne Sullivan in Helen Keller's The Story of Life. Prettol's analysis works to unpack the articulations …
A Bibliography Of Work On Racial Narratives For Children, Marie Drews
A Bibliography Of Work On Racial Narratives For Children, Marie Drews
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
The Ambiguous Nature Of Multiculturalism In Two Picture Books About 9/11, Jo Lampert
The Ambiguous Nature Of Multiculturalism In Two Picture Books About 9/11, Jo Lampert
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her paper "The Ambiguous Nature of Multiculturalism in Two Picture Books about 9/11," Jo Lampert looks at how some of the Western discourses of multiculturalism and cultural diversity have shifted since 11 September 2001 by discussing two exemplar picture books about 9/11. Lampert begins with a general discussion of children's books as significant cultural producers of knowledge and provides brief summaries of Patel's On That Day: A Book of Hope for Children and Carlson's There's a Big, Beautiful World Out There! Lampert discusses how the imagined readers of these books are positioned problematically in order to embrace racial tolerance, …
Marx, Postmodernism, And Spatial Configurations In Jameson And Lefebvre, Arina Lungu
Marx, Postmodernism, And Spatial Configurations In Jameson And Lefebvre, Arina Lungu
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, "Marx, Postmodernism, and Spatial Configurations in Jameson and Lefebvre," Arina Lungu discusses the connection between Marxist sociology and postmodernist theory. Lungu examines Fredric Jameson's volume Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism under the light of the spatial theory developed in the 1970s by Marxian theoretician Henri Lefebvre. For Jameson, the spatial turn is a consequence of the gap between the limited abilities of the human perceptive apparatus and the unrepresentability of the multinational hyperspace. In Lungu's view, Jameson reaches his definition of "culturally-dominant" sensibility by disregarding the rich body of spatial criticism outside postmodern theory. …
On The Convergence Of Innis's International Political Economy And Sebald's Novels, Joseph S. Pinter
On The Convergence Of Innis's International Political Economy And Sebald's Novels, Joseph S. Pinter
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his paper "On the Convergence of Innis's International Political Economy and Sebald's Novels" Joseph S. Pinter contributes to the development of an area of scholarship on Harold A. Innis and Canadian political economy which deals with issues of representation, landscape, and memory. Pinter draws attention to a specific aspect of Innis's approach to political economy and focuses on ways in which Innis was able to represent fundamental aspects of the settlement process in Canada. Pinter argues that Innis focussed on landscape as a basic element in the European experience of North America (US and Canada) that, in turn, enabled …