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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
A Postmodern Look At Modernism: A Review Article Of Books By Pera And López On Modernista Writers In Hispanic Literature, Richard A. Cardwell
A Postmodern Look At Modernism: A Review Article Of Books By Pera And López On Modernista Writers In Hispanic Literature, Richard A. Cardwell
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
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 …
Death And Love In Poe's And Schwob's Readings Of The Classics, Ana González-Rivas Fernández, Francisco García Jurado
Death And Love In Poe's And Schwob's Readings Of The Classics, Ana González-Rivas Fernández, Francisco García Jurado
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In their article "Death and Love in Poe's and Schwob's Readings of the Classics," Ana González-Rivas Fernández and Francisco García Jurado propose that although Gothic literature usually relegates the theme of love to the background, devoting most of its attention to the supernatural and to darkness, there are also literary texts in which love is mixed with life beyond the grave. This is the case, for example, of Théophile Gautier's La Morte amoureuse (1836), the story of a vampire who comes back to life in her "undead" condition in order to seduce a priest. The theme of love and death …
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.
Selected Bibliography Of Studies On The Fantastic In Literature, Terri Ochiagha
Selected Bibliography Of Studies On The Fantastic In Literature, Terri Ochiagha
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Metamorphosing Worlds In The Cinema Of The Fantastic, Juan González Etxeberria
Metamorphosing Worlds In The Cinema Of The Fantastic, Juan González Etxeberria
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Metamorphosing Worlds in the Cinema of the Fantastic" Juan González Etxeberria reads fantastic films as appealing products of both unconscious psychological and institutionalized sociological anxieties. A result of the binary opposition of rhetorical strategies that shaped modern culture, the genre is an open door to other worlds where to dream of uncertainties and to indulge in our traumas. Its transgressive indeterminacy against the Cartesian system is traced from the origin of creative filmic language to postmodern disturbing fantasies about the unknown, having social control and individual free will as the only limits of its imaginary trips across …
The Literary Fantastic In African And English Literature, Terri Ochiagha
The Literary Fantastic In African And English Literature, Terri Ochiagha
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "The Literary Fantastic in African and English Literature," Terri Ochiagha begins with pointing out that in his Introduction á la literature fantastique, Tzvetan Todorov proposed the theoretical frameworks he believed should be the basis of the identification and analysis of a literary work as fantastic. While Todorov's text is only one of the many treatises on the fantastic in literary scholarship, in most of these African prose is seldom a subject of exemplification or analysis. In the rare instances in which such texts are mentioned, they are often and hastily classified as magic realism. Ochiagha posits whether …
Fantasy Literature And The Misanthrope: A Review Article Of New Work By Cottom And Zipes, Terri Ochiagha
Fantasy Literature And The Misanthrope: A Review Article Of New Work By Cottom And Zipes, Terri Ochiagha
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Entropy And The Fantastic In Pynchon's Narratives, María Rosa Burillo Gadea
Entropy And The Fantastic In Pynchon's Narratives, María Rosa Burillo Gadea
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Entropy and the Fantastic in Pynchon's Narratives" María Rosa Burillo Gadea postulates that dealing with Pynchon's fiction one is not sure if paranoia is presented as an alternative way of grasping other possible spheres, a more comprehensive vision of the world, or merely a joke. Pynchon's stories try to reproduce reality in different fictional grounds. He uses the notion of entropy, the level of molecular disorder of a thermodynamic system when heated as a metaphor for a disorderly and chaotic universe, necessary, however, in order to avoid the fatality of system exhaustion or death. A kind of …
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 …
Cinema's Doubles, Their Meaning, And Literary Intertexts, Pilar Andrade
Cinema's Doubles, Their Meaning, And Literary Intertexts, Pilar Andrade
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his paper "Cinema's Doubles, Their Meaning, and Literary Intertexts" Pilar Andrade analyzes the figure of the double as an element of cinema. Andrade does not take under consideration films in which the double is considered merely as a clinical case with no mystery (for example as in David Fincher's Fight Club or Brad Anderson's The Machinist) or in which it is used as a useful piece to make the plot without referring to the fantasy world (as in Joel Schumacher's Bad Company); instead, Andrade focuses on films that make a clear connection between the alter ego and fantasy, including …
Translating And (Re)Creating (Cultural) Identities: A Review Article Of New Work By López Sáenz And Penas Ibáñez And Vidal Claramonte, Nuria Brufau Alvira
Translating And (Re)Creating (Cultural) Identities: A Review Article Of New Work By López Sáenz And Penas Ibáñez And Vidal Claramonte, Nuria Brufau Alvira
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Transnational Book Markets And Literary Reception In The Americas, Molly Metherd
Transnational Book Markets And Literary Reception In The Americas, Molly Metherd
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her paper "Transnational Book Markets and Literary Reception in the Americas," Molly Metherd argues that the most diffuse products of transnational cultural production in the Americas come from mass media productions packaged for transnational audiences -- i.e., Hollywood films, television shows, popular magazines, product advertisements -- and that tend to homogenize messages, promote stereotypes, and simplify complex issues. However, another effort to make sense of shifting relationships in the Americas is coming from a group of US-American and Spanish American literary figures. In their fiction, criticism, journalistic work, and public statements, such authors have been responding to the covalence …
About The Literatures Of The Americas: A Review Article Of New Work By Castillo And Mcclennen, Deborah N. Cohn
About The Literatures Of The Americas: A Review Article Of New Work By Castillo And Mcclennen, Deborah N. Cohn
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Myth And Power Structures In Sartre's Les Mouches And La Putain Respectueuse, Martha Evans Smith
Myth And Power Structures In Sartre's Les Mouches And La Putain Respectueuse, Martha Evans Smith
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her paper "Myth and Power Structures in Sartre's Les Mouches and La Putain respectueuse," Martha Evans Smith analyses Sartre's plays with regard to the relationship of the individual with the collective, the purportedly self-determinate part of an apparently universalizing whole. Seeming to illustrate an enactment of freedom and an absence thereof, the disparate outcomes of the hierarchies in the plays impose a success/failure paradigm on the concomitant reading of the two plays. Evans Smith argues that these issues in the plays read with regard to structures of classical mythology and racism in the US-American South demonstrate the close relationship …
Patriarchy In Post-1989 Poland And Tokarczuk's Dom Dzienny, Dom Nocny (The Day House, The Night House), Justyna Sempruch
Patriarchy In Post-1989 Poland And Tokarczuk's Dom Dzienny, Dom Nocny (The Day House, The Night House), Justyna Sempruch
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her paper "Patriarchy in Post-1989 Poland and Tokarczuk's Dom Dzienny, Dom Nocny (The Day House, the Night House)" Justyna Sempruch analyzes Tokarczuk's 1998 narrative in the context of the post-communist revival of patriarchy in Poland as well as the parallel Western feminist impact on women's writing in Poland. These two distinct socio-cultural developments, as reflected in Tokarczuk's novel, expand the concept of a subversive household into a transnational dis/order that abolishes borders between domestic (national) and foreign structures: an increasing masculinization of the power structures (political arena and "scientific" practices) impacts the management of the social and the most …
Geographies Of Nation And Region In Modern European And American Fiction, Thomas O. Beebee
Geographies Of Nation And Region In Modern European And American Fiction, Thomas O. Beebee
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Geographies of Nation and Region in Modern European and American Fiction" Thomas O. Beebee proposes that beyond using character, plot, and style, modern fiction also has entertained its readers with mental maps of heterotopias. A mental map is an imaginative representation of place derived from experience or story. Following Michel Foucault, heterotopia is defined as an "other space" both familiar as and different from the real. The "imagined communities" (Anderson) of nation and region are themselves heterotopias that receive confirmation and/or contestation through the discursive territoriality of literary prose. The mental maps of literature participate in the …
A Moral Reading Of Mahfouz's Fountain And Tomb (Hekayat Haretna), Amal Al-Leithy
A Moral Reading Of Mahfouz's Fountain And Tomb (Hekayat Haretna), Amal Al-Leithy
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "A Moral Reading of Mahfouz's Fountain and Tomb (Hekayat Haretna)," Amal Al-Leithy analyses Naguib Mahfouz's Fountain and Tomb. In Al-Leithy's reading, Mahfouz delineates a gloomy picture of modern humanity still living in a struggle against destitution, ignorance, squalor, and the power of superstition. Society is portrayed as seeped in hopelessness as Mahfouz stresses the physical and moral degradation of his protagonists. He draws a dismal picture of life as swinging between two poles: the fountain of life and the tomb of death. In a symbolic alley in 1920s Cairo, Mahfouz describes humanity's predicament swaying between meaningfulness and …
Towards A Cultural Framework Of Audience Response And Television Violence, Lajos Császi
Towards A Cultural Framework Of Audience Response And Television Violence, Lajos Császi
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his paper "Towards a Cultural Framework of Audience Response and Television Violence" Lajos Császi argues that media violence is not a reification of social violence; rather, a popular ritual allowing contemporary societies to sublimate, to substitute, and to discuss aggression in the public sphere. Császi reviews the central questions of contemporary debates about television violence including Stuart Hall's thought on this topic and introduces the ideas of Elias, Geertz, Turner, Bettelheim, Benjamin, Girard, and others in order to locate the representation of violence in an interdisciplinary context. Using the genre of the horror film as an example, Császi suggests …
Audience, Sentimental Postmodernism, And Kiss Of The Spider Woman, Kimberly Chabot Davis
Audience, Sentimental Postmodernism, And Kiss Of The Spider Woman, Kimberly Chabot Davis
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Audience, Sentimental Postmodernism, and Kiss of the Spider Woman" Kimberly Chabot Davis analyzes the three media forms of Kiss of the Spider Woman -- novel, film, and musical -- and their reception by gay, bisexual, and heterosexual fans: Davis reads Kiss as a key example of a hybrid contemporary genre she designates as "sentimental postmodernism." Chabot Davis positions the text's dialogic negotiation between the popular and the postmodern in relation to the critical discourse of camp, as a form of sentimentality-cum-irony. Manuel Puig's novel offers a powerful rebuttal to the Frankfurt School's dismissal of sentimental mass culture …
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 …