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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Russian Magical Realism And Pelevin As Its Exponent, Alexandra Berlina
Russian Magical Realism And Pelevin As Its Exponent, Alexandra Berlina
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Russian Magical Realism and Pelevin as Its Exponent" Alexandra Berlina seeks to enrich magical realism studies as a field of comparative literature and culture by showing that, although largely ignored in scholarship, such a thing as Russian magical realism exists and provides an interesting field for analysis. First, Berlina provides an overview of relevant scholarly works on the genre, tracing mentions (as well as striking omissions) of Russian influence, followed by a discussion of the few publications which deal with Russian magical realism, concentrating on Erika Haber's The Myth of the Non-Russian. Berlina then discusses Viktor Pelevin …
The Metaphor Of Assimilation In Rabéarivelo's Poetry, Yasser Khamees Ragab Aman
The Metaphor Of Assimilation In Rabéarivelo's Poetry, Yasser Khamees Ragab Aman
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "The Metaphor of Assimilation in Rabéarivelo's Poetry" Yasser Khamees Ragab Aman discusses the impact of the metaphor and the policy of assimilation in the poetry of Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo, who swings between a desired image of a superior France based on a mythically archetypal symbol of a patron and a reality which, as a matter of course, distorts the image of a good-natured colonizer. Aman traces the influence of French Symbolists such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Laforgue on Rabéarivelo's poems and discusses to what extent these influences help make an assimilé of the poet. In Aman's interpretation …
Myth And History In The Poetry Of Osundare, Christopher Anyokwu
Myth And History In The Poetry Of Osundare, Christopher Anyokwu
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Myth and History in the Poetry of Osundare" Christopher Anyokwu examines the interrelation of myth and history from an African perspective. Anyokwu analyzes the poetry of one of Africa's most prolific and decorated contemporary poets, Niyi Osundare. Osundare is a third-generation Nigerian poet whose work is based on Yoruba oral tradition and informed by Marxist ideology. Osundare's poetry demonstrates the so-called "return-to-roots" neo-traditionalist ethos in modern African writing. Osundare's attitude to myth, ritual, and other African animist categories is intriguingly complex, ambivalent, and giving rise to charges of ideological irresolution and culturo-epistemic bifurcation. As a champion of …
Playwriting In Three Major Nigerian Languages, Isaiah Ilo
Playwriting In Three Major Nigerian Languages, Isaiah Ilo
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Playwriting in Three Major Nigerian Languages" Isaiah Ilo analyzes the frequency of playwriting in Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba, the three major Nigerian languages, which together hold about a half of the country's estimated population of 140 million. Ilo uses a case study to contrast the importance of the languages, their evolution as literary languages, and their official status with a role in education. Ilo locates the significance of these factors next to an inventory of the plays and a listing of the writers to demonstrate the neglect of the mother tongue by experienced Nigerian dramatists. The study …
Space In Cardinal's Au Pays De Mes Racines And Goytisolo's Coto Vedado, Laura Dennis
Space In Cardinal's Au Pays De Mes Racines And Goytisolo's Coto Vedado, Laura Dennis
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Space in Cardinal's Au Pays de mes racines and Goytisolo's Coto vedado" Laura Dennis discusses the ways in which two memoirs of the late twentieth century treat exile and diverse spaces as part of a quest for a place in which to live fully and freely. Juan Goytisolo's Coto vedado and Marie Cardinal's Au Pays de mes racines constitute particularly rich treatments of space and exile and the ways in which these intersect with questions of culture, gender, and power. Dennis uses Henri Lefebvre's theories of abstract and differential space together with Gillian Rose's feminist study of …
Innovation And Multimedia In The Poetry Of Cummings And Mayakovsky, Svetlana Nikitina
Innovation And Multimedia In The Poetry Of Cummings And Mayakovsky, Svetlana Nikitina
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Innovation and Multimedia in the Poetry of cummings and Mayakovsky" Svetlana Nikitina discusses how e.e. cummings and Vladimir Mayakovsky foreshadowed the digital revolution of today in their multimedia experiments in poetry. Although they spoke different languages and lived in different societies, the two modernist poets display similarities in their modernist aesthetics. Both are artists as well as poets who blur the line between the two forms of art. Their synesthesia inoculates them against postmodern disintegration of meaning or form. Although cummings is a staunch individualist, and Mayakovsky the tribune of the collective, they both rebel against traditional …
The Geopolitics Of Amazônia In Souza's Fiction, Thomas O. Beebee
The Geopolitics Of Amazônia In Souza's Fiction, Thomas O. Beebee
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "The Geopolitics of Amazônia in Souza's Fiction" Thomas O. Beebee examines the ways in which the historical fiction of Brazilian author Márcio Souza (1946-) confronts prevailing notions of Brazilianness conceived as the unity of citizens within a fixed territorial space. Souza undermines this notion by frequently using non-Brazilians as protagonists of his novels that have as their theme the struggle over control of territory "within" Brazil. Beebee reviews the role played by the concept of national territorial control in theories of nationalism and the modern state, including in the Brazilian school of geopolitics developed by Eduardo Backheuser …
Rhetoric And Context In Saramago's Levantado Do Chão, David Frier
Rhetoric And Context In Saramago's Levantado Do Chão, David Frier
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Rhetoric and Context in Saramago's Levantado do Chão" David Frier analyses the 1980 novel by Nobel in Literature 1998 José Saramago. The novel, as-of-yet not translated to English, Risen from the Ground, achieves its success as a key text of the Portuguese post-Revolutionary period in part through its resourceful rhetorical development of textual conventions and echoes derived from a wide range of high- and popular cultural contexts, ranging from the epic poetry of Camões's Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads) of 1578, through glamorized medieval battle-scenes to popular stories and beliefs and to the Fado music of Amália Rodrigues. …
From Diaspora To Nomadic Identity In The Work Of Lispector And Felinto, Paula Jordão
From Diaspora To Nomadic Identity In The Work Of Lispector And Felinto, Paula Jordão
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "From Diaspora to Nomadic Identity in the Work of Lispector and Felinto" Paula Jordão analyzes Clarice Lispector's A Hora da Estrela (1977; The Hour of the Star, Trans. Giovanni Pontiero, 1992) and Marilene Felinto's As Mulheres de Tijucopapo (1982; The Women of Tijucopapo, trans. Irene Matthews, 1994). Despite being stylistically different, Lispector's A Hora da Estrela and Felinto's As Mulheres de Tijucopapo depict protagonists who share the same social and ethnic background and diasporic identity as women from the Northeast of Brazil. A closer look at the narrative trajectory of these two main characters shows us that …
Aesthetics And Ideology In Queirós's A Cidade E As Serras, Pedro Serra
Aesthetics And Ideology In Queirós's A Cidade E As Serras, Pedro Serra
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Aesthetics and Ideology in Queirós's A Cidade e as Serras" Pedro Serra contributes to the study of Eça de Queirós's post-naturalist fiction, offering an in-depth view of traces of utopian socialism -- a major ideological influence in Queirós's intellectual generation -- in the aesthetic fabric of A Cidade e as Serras (1901) (The City and the Mountains). According to Serra, who reads this novel in light of Oliveira Martins's socialist idearium, Queirós's post-naturalistic writing exposes a complex network of late nineteenth-century cultural predicaments: the collapse of liberalism and realism paves the way to an ideological and aesthetical …
Guimarães Rosa's "São Marcos" And Race And Class, Paulo Da-Luz-Moreira
Guimarães Rosa's "São Marcos" And Race And Class, Paulo Da-Luz-Moreira
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Guimarães Rosa's 'São Marcos' and Race and Class" Paulo da-Luz-Moreira analyzes a pivotal short story in João Guimarães Rosa's oeuvre. Published in Sagarana, Guimarães Rosa's first short fiction collection, "São Marcos" has an extremely complex structure in its juxtaposition of layers of idiosyncratic and careful ethnographic and literary erudition, making the story a challenge to critics and readers alike. Guimarães Rosa worked exhaustively on this unique piece that touches with disconcerting openness on issues of strained racial and class relations in Brazil and expounds on the power of language and on the delicate point upon which one's …
Report On The 9th Biennial Conference Of The Comparative Literature Association Of India, Babli Moitra Saraf
Report On The 9th Biennial Conference Of The Comparative Literature Association Of India, Babli Moitra Saraf
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Report on the 9th Biennial Conference of the Comparative Literature Association of India" Babli Moitra Saraf presents her perception of the intellectual trajectories of the conference and discusses a number of selected papers read. The conference in the main addressed two issues: the institutional status of Comparative Literature and Comparative Literature as an academic discipline. A close third was the agenda of Comparative Literature to construct a World Literature.
The Meaning Of Myth In Ulysses And The Magic Mountain, Susan V. Scaff
The Meaning Of Myth In Ulysses And The Magic Mountain, Susan V. Scaff
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "The Meaning of Myth in Ulysses and The Magic Mountain" Susan V. Scaff discusses the proposition that Joyce and Mann combine in their novels myth and history and contradicts Joseph Frank's influential early view that modernist writers avoid history in favor of myth and the more recent verdict of Hayden White that this evasion amounts to an abrogation of civic responsibility mirroring fascism. Mann and Joyce recoil from the horrors of history while exploring the recovery of myth as amelioration. They realize that myths may lose their life bearing quality, and they portray a disoriented Europe lacking …
Images Of Liminality In Book Vi Of The Aeneid, Pouneh Saeedi
Images Of Liminality In Book Vi Of The Aeneid, Pouneh Saeedi
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her paper "Images of Liminality in Book VI of The Aeneid" Pouneh Saeedi discusses the concept of "liminality" in Virgil's The Aeneid and its potential in defying designated boundaries. The concept of liminality undercuts binarisms such as those separating winners and losers as well as heroes and monsters. In addition, an investigation of liminality as a zone of constant becoming continues to shed light on a vast array of new transitions. Aeneas's future success in the construction of a new empire and the rebuilding of a Roman nation, to a large extent, is indebted to his having ventured onto …
The Gay Artist As Tragic Hero In The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Henry Alley
The Gay Artist As Tragic Hero In The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Henry Alley
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "The Gay Artist as Tragic Hero in The Picture of Dorian Gray" Henry M. Alley discusses the central artistic figure in Oscar Wilde's novel, Basil Hallward. As the novel's tragic protagonist, he commands the most pity and fear and serves as the most dynamic member of the dramatis personae. Alley contextualizes his discussion within Aristotle's Poetics, contemporary criticism, as well as Wilde's own comments. In addition, Alley looks at Hallward's attempt to hide or censor his gay feelings as parallel to Wilde's struggle with the various versions of the novel. Nevertheless, the characterization of Hallward celebrates the …
Literature, Ideology, And The Imaginary, Marcello Potocco
Literature, Ideology, And The Imaginary, Marcello Potocco
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his paper "Literature, Ideology and the Imaginary," Marcello Potocco analyses the elusive relation between literature and ideology. The notion of the "social imaginary" -- as developed by Castoriadis -- brings the possibility to reconsider the relation between the literary structure, its reception, and ideology. While ideology is seen as a radical expression of the social imaginary in modern society, it can only manifest itself through the ideological function, which does not necessarily destruct the aesthetic experience. In a literary structure, elements may exist that enable a strong identification with the extra-textual world, but this involves primarily identifications with significations …
Narrative Silences Between History And Memory In Schumann's Being Present: Growing Up In Hitler's Germany, Anne Rothe
Narrative Silences Between History And Memory In Schumann's Being Present: Growing Up In Hitler's Germany, Anne Rothe
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Narrative Silences Between History and Memory in Schumann's Being Present: Growing Up in Hitler's Germany" Anne Rothe analyzes Willy Schumann's 1991 memoir as an instance of a growing sub-genre among autobiographical writing on the Third Reich and the Holocaust, the Hitler Youth Generation memoir. Written in English for US-American college students, the memoir constructs a reactionary counter-memory to Holocaust discourse in order to exculpate ordinary Germans like himself not only from any responsibility for but any association with nazi crimes. In order to do so, Schumann not only largely omits the Holocaust but recasts the perpetrator/victim dichotomy …
Figurative Language In Delbo's Auschwitz Et Après, Elizabeth Scheiber
Figurative Language In Delbo's Auschwitz Et Après, Elizabeth Scheiber
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Figurative Language in Delbo's Auschwitz et après" Elizabeth Scheiber exeamines the use of figurative language in Charlotte Delbo's trilogy Auschwitz et après. Aucun de nous ne reviendra and shows how metaphors and symbols in the texts not only establish a means of imagining the concentration camps, but also how they create a community between author and reader. In Delbo's work, the ironic symbol of the stretcher as a means of conveying corpses gives the reader insight into the author's psyche at roll call as she witnesses the grim sight of the indignity of death in the concentrationary …
Introduction To And Bibliography Of Central European Women's Holocaust Life Writing In English, Louise O. Vasvári
Introduction To And Bibliography Of Central European Women's Holocaust Life Writing In English, Louise O. Vasvári
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her "Introduction to and Bibliography of Central European Women's Holocaust Life Writing in English," Louise O. Vasvári discusses aspects and perspectives of women's life writing, including her criteria of selection, the problematics of sourcing, issues of translation, and processes of publication. While the authors listed in the bibliography are overwhelmingly Jewish and from Central and East Europe, there are works listed by others whose experiences also offer important testimony not only on the camps but also on other aspects of the Holocaust. The bibliography suggests that women have written as much and, especially during the last decades, more than …
"Ideologically Incorrect" Responses To The Holocaust By Three Israeli Women Writers, Rachel Feldhay Brenner
"Ideologically Incorrect" Responses To The Holocaust By Three Israeli Women Writers, Rachel Feldhay Brenner
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "'Ideologically Incorrect' Responses to the Holocaust by Three Israeli Women Writers" Rachel Feldhay Brenner examines the departure from the accepted literary response to the Holocaust in the works of three Israeli women writers: the play Lady of the Castle (1954) by Lea Goldberg (1911-1970), Ruth Almog's (1936-) novel Exile (1971), and Shulamith Hareven's (1930-2003) short stories "The Witness" and "Twilight" (1980). While the writers recognized the historical bonds of the European destruction and the Zionist Jewish revival, their literary responses deviated from the mainstream which tended to concur with contemporaneous ideological positions. Feldhay Brenner begins with a …
Emigrée Central European Jewish Women's Holocaust Life Writing, Louise O. Vasvári
Emigrée Central European Jewish Women's Holocaust Life Writing, Louise O. Vasvári
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her paper "Emigrée Central European Jewish Women's Holocaust Life Writing," Louise O. Vasvári analyzes voices of women survivors from a gendered perspective in order to provide insights for both Holocaust studies and gender studies. Vasvári considers whether it can be claimed that there is a specifically female style of remembering and of testifying about these traumatic experiences. Vasvári's selection includes the writings of some two dozen Central European emigrée survivors, all native speakers of Hungarian, later writing and publishing in languages of their adopted countries. The first group of women consists of adult survivors who must bear witness in …
Autobiography And Fiction In Semprún's Texts, Laia Quílez Esteve, Rosa-Àuria Munté Ramos
Autobiography And Fiction In Semprún's Texts, Laia Quílez Esteve, Rosa-Àuria Munté Ramos
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In their article "Autobiography and Fiction in Semprún's Texts" Laia Quílez Esteve and Rosa-Àuria Munté Ramos explore aspects of narration in Jorge Semprún's literary work with regard to his experience in the concentration camp. Quílez Esteve and Munté Ramos analyze auto-novelistic mechanisms Semprún employs and reflect on the various meanings of that use by Semprún. Semprún's biographical journey is characterized by a series of experiences which would determine the form and content of his writing. The perception and experience of exile permeates Semprún's pages, the fluctuation of identities which are masked or unmasked within them, or the dissolution of the …
Visions Of Catastrophe In The Poetry Of Miklós Radnóti, Zsuzsanna Ozsváth
Visions Of Catastrophe In The Poetry Of Miklós Radnóti, Zsuzsanna Ozsváth
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Visions of Catastrophe in the Poetry of Miklós Radnóti" Zsuzsanna Ozsváth proposes that the poet's work shows an evolution of a set of visionary images auguring the Holocaust. This development followed on the heels of the poet's earlier interest in the socialist, populist, and left-oriented movements and ideas that drove a number of Hungarian artists and young intellectuals of the time. Immersed in social-cultural activities during his university years in Szeged (1930-35), Radnóti underwent a significant change when he moved back to Budapest. He recognized the threat posed by the Third Reich and watched with great consternation …