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Articles 1 - 23 of 23
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Elements Of Hinduism In Chandra’S Red Earth And Pouring Rain, Corinne M. Ehrfurth
Elements Of Hinduism In Chandra’S Red Earth And Pouring Rain, Corinne M. Ehrfurth
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Elements of Hinduism in Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain" Corinne M. Ehrfurth explores how Hindu tenets in the Bhagavad-gītā continue to provide a didactic framework that inspires contemporary Indian literature. Ehrfurth highlights the similarities between characters, consumed with doubt and seeking understanding, in the ancient Indian text and Vikram Chandra's novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain where protagonists represent the diversity and complexity of Hinduism to a global audience. In examining how the novel's protagonists handle dilemmas, Ehrfurth presents Chandra's novel as illuminating how healthy and destructive actions affect one's ability of achieving the peaceful …
National Trauma And The 'Uncanny' In Hage's Novel De Niro's Game, Hany Ali Abdelfattah
National Trauma And The 'Uncanny' In Hage's Novel De Niro's Game, Hany Ali Abdelfattah
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "National Trauma and the 'Uncanny' in Hage's Novel De Niro's Game" Hany Ali Abdelfattah attempts to decipher the "uncanny" in the character of George who has been haunted by the memories of Bassam, a Lebanese survivor of trauma. Rawi Hage's De Niro's Game crystallizes the national trauma of Lebanon and the massacre of Sabra and Shatila as it unfolds in the story of the friendship between George and Bassam. Abdelfattah employs the psychoanalytic method of analysis with a focus on Freudian concepts such as "repression," "belatedness," "effacement," "displacement," and "non-abreaction of experience" in order to trace …
The Writing And Reading Of Fan Fiction And Transformation Theory, Veerle Van Steenhuyse
The Writing And Reading Of Fan Fiction And Transformation Theory, Veerle Van Steenhuyse
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "The Writing and Reading of Fan Fiction and Transformation Theory" Veerle Van Steenhuyse discusses the experience of immersive reading fan fiction offers to fans based on her analysis of fan fiction about the television series House, M.D. (2004-). Van Steenhuyse postulates that a text is immersive when it evokes a mental construct with the presence of a text-independent reality. In the case of fan fiction, this reality is a "transformed universe" that builds on and deviates from particular primary texts. Following the work of Marie-Laure Ryan and Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Van Steenhuyse argues that readers feel immersed when …
Autoethnography And Garcia's Dreaming In Cuban, Samantha L. Mcauliffe
Autoethnography And Garcia's Dreaming In Cuban, Samantha L. Mcauliffe
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Authoethnography and Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban" Samantha L. McAuliffe positions Cristina Garcia's novel as a text of self-discovery and cultural reconciliation. McAuliffe examines multilingualism and hybridity in Dreaming in Cuban and postulates that the novel represents what Marie Louise Pratt calls the "contact zone" where cultures meet and clash. As autoethnography, Dreaming in Cuban allows an insider view of what being Cuban American really means. The reader is able to experience the conflict those with a hybrid identity experience through the eyes of one in the midst of that conflict. Further, McAuliffe suggests in her analysis …
Inanimate Speech From Lovecraft To Žižek, Apple Z. Igrek
Inanimate Speech From Lovecraft To Žižek, Apple Z. Igrek
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Inanimate Speech from Lovecraft to Žižek" Apple Z. Igrek explores an influential line of reasoning associated with our contemporary loss of the Real. The argument describes how the contingencies and nuances of social life have been reduced to an operational, friction-free, and homogeneous realm of signs. Slavoj Žižek contends that our inherently traumatic relationship with the Other is being foreclosed and replaced by an omnipresent technological screen of virtual communication. The danger of this shift, identified as the "digital break," is that it facilitates an extraordinary form of divine violence which strikes back at the social system …
Latino Identity In Allende's Historical Novels, Olga Ries
Latino Identity In Allende's Historical Novels, Olga Ries
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Latino Identity in Allende's Historical Novels" Olga Ries analyzes the concept of individual and group identity found in five historical novels by Isabel Allende. Ries argues that while Allende's protagonists come from different backgrounds and different epochs, they share a process of psychological transformation and that affects their identity formation. The result is the formation of a transnational "Hispanic" identity, group as well as individual. In Ries's reading of Allende's texts, transnational Hispanic identity is based simultaneously on the Mexican/Hispanic concept of mestizaje and on the US-American concepts of the "melting pot" and the "American Dream."
Old And New Medialities In Foer's Tree Of Codes, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth
Old And New Medialities In Foer's Tree Of Codes, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Old and New Materialities in Foer's Tree of Codes" Kiene Brillenburg Wurth analyzes how intermediality works — not what it "is" — in the analysis of literary texts. How intermedial can texts "do," precisely when they consist only of words? Do such texts compel us to reconsider literature as a verbal art? Her analysis focuses on a recent book by Jonathan Safran Foer: Tree of Codes (2010), a literary work cut out of the remains of Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles (1934). Brillenburg Wurth points out how intermediality works as a productive interaction not only between …
The Spirit Of Matter In Büchner, Barbara Natalie Nagel
The Spirit Of Matter In Büchner, Barbara Natalie Nagel
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "The Spirit of Matter in Büchner" Barbara Natalie Nagel investigates different vectors of Georg Büchner's materialism: historical, philosophical, ethical, physiological. The analysis of what Büchner presents to be a necessary link between physiology and revolution aims to show how Büchner has a tendency first to entangle two relatively static, binary oppositions — literal/figurative and material/spiritual — in order then to play them against one another. Büchner thus uses the dynamics of literalization to evoke necessity: for example, if the revolution is conceived of in physiological terms, then the will either has to become physiological or biology has …
(Inter)Mediality And The Study Of Literature, Werner Wolf
(Inter)Mediality And The Study Of Literature, Werner Wolf
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "(Inter)mediality and the Study of Literature" Werner Wolf elaborates on the "intermedial turn" and asks whether this turn ought to be welcomed. Wolf begins with a discussion about the definitions of "medium" and "intermediality" and the impact these concepts and practices exert on scholarly, as well as student competence. He argues that despite of the fact that literary studies ought not simply turn into media or cultural studies, mediality and intermediality have become relevant issues for both teaching and the study of literature especially in the fields of comparative literature and (comparative) cultural studies. Following his postulate …
Self Enlightenment In Woolf, Joyce, And Nietzsche, Gabriel V. Rupp
Self Enlightenment In Woolf, Joyce, And Nietzsche, Gabriel V. Rupp
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Self Enlightenment in Woolf, Joyce, and Nietzsche" Gabriel V. Rupp analyzes texts drawn from late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a critical period of change characterized by an explosive set of dramatic, historically unique, and complicated transformations in society and technology. Rupp argues that in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, in James Joyce's Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and in Friedrich Nietzsche's last three "strangely beautiful but mad" letters (Kaufmann), these writers' self enlightenment of a unified and discrete self is disrupted, calling into question simultaneously the constructed nature of that unity of …
Pain And Mourning In Vogel's Baltimore Waltz And Lavery's Last Easter, Catalina Florina Florescu
Pain And Mourning In Vogel's Baltimore Waltz And Lavery's Last Easter, Catalina Florina Florescu
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Pain and Mourning in Vogel's Baltimore Waltz and Lavery's Last Easter" Catalina Florina Florescu argues that there is something of a contrapuntal, contradictory nature when a person lives with or visits someone who spends most of his days in bed. Sitting next to a patient, his attendee faces the burdensome ticking of clocks, the ache of waiting, and the dagger-piercing questions of one's meaning. In other words, it is not only the pain of the other that intrigues and baffles us. It is also narrating and performing our reactions to that pain. In Florescu's reading, the focus …
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.
The Methodology Of Architectonic Truth-Finding In Grass's The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), Stephan Schaffrath
The Methodology Of Architectonic Truth-Finding In Grass's The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), Stephan Schaffrath
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Stephan Schaffrath, in his paper "The Methodology of Architectonic Truth-Finding in Grass's The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel)," discusses how Günter Grass's The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) negotiates the treacherous terrains that lie between positivism and nihilistic relativism by means of a truth-finding methodology. Schaffrath proposes that truth-finding methodology applies approximative, and therefore architectonic, approaches to conventional concepts of narration and history. Grass's novel breaks down and reassembles playfully the conventions of narration and history, not to negate or devalue them, but to reappraise them by means of an approximative truth-finding methodology, an approach that corresponds to Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of …
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 …
Generic Identity And Intertextuality, Marko Juvan
Generic Identity And Intertextuality, Marko Juvan
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his paper, "Generic Identity and Intertextuality," Marko Juvan proposes that an anti-essentialist drive -- a characteristic of recent genology -- has led postmodern scholars to the conviction that genre is but a system of differences and that its matrix cannot be deduced from a particular set of apparently similar texts. Juvan argues that the concept of intertextuality may prove advantageous to explain genre identity in a different way: genres exist and function as far as they are embedded in social practices that frame intertextual and meta-textual links/references to prototypical texts or textual series. In Juvan's view, genres are cognitive …
Modernism And The Issue Of Periodization, Leonard Orr
Modernism And The Issue Of Periodization, Leonard Orr
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his paper, "Modernism and the Issue of Periodization," Leonard Orr describes how literary theorists, historians, and anthology editors have put forward many conflicting models for literary periodization, while simultaneously expressing their doubts about the categories they have created. They are caught between intellectual despair and pragmatic necessity, scholarly journals and presses and academic departments imagine they are working at the cutting edge of thinking about their subjects but period concepts remain in place, even while every article focused on the subject expresses strong objections to the terms. Orr traces in his paper these problems and issues through the twentieth …
Bibliography Of Contextual (Systemic And Empirical) Approaches In The Study Of Literature And Culture, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek
Bibliography Of Contextual (Systemic And Empirical) Approaches In The Study Of Literature And Culture, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Literary Careers: Breaks And Stalls, W. Ray Crozier
Literary Careers: Breaks And Stalls, W. Ray Crozier
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Literary Careers: Breaks and Stalls," W. Ray Crozier argues that biographical evidence points to considerable individual variation in writers' output over the life span even when allowance is made for longevity and length of writing career. This issue has been neglected by psychological accounts of creativity. Crozier outlines a theoretical framework for understanding variation in terms of an "artistic career." This is conceptualised as a sequence of projects, the success of which are influenced by intra-project factors such as the rewardingness and difficulties of literary projects and extra-project factors such as work pressures, poverty, and competing demands …
Theory, Period Styles, And Comparative Literature As Discipline, Slobodan Sucur
Theory, Period Styles, And Comparative Literature As Discipline, Slobodan Sucur
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Theory, Period Styles, and Comparative Literature as Discipline," Slobodan Sucur attempts to answer the following question: Can a rapprochement be brought about between various, often antagonistic, literary-theoretical views and the concept of comparative literature itself, which requires accord, consensus, agreement, etc., for it to function as a concrete body and discipline? Sucur attempts dealing with this question in three parts of the paper: First, he establishes a relationship/link between the theoretical discord of today (humanism, formalism, deconstruction, etc.) and the high theorizing which began during the Jena-Berlin phase of Romanticism (Shelling, Hegel, F. Schlegel, etc.); secondly, he …
Thematizing The Subject From Gothicism To Late Romanticism, Slobodan Sucur
Thematizing The Subject From Gothicism To Late Romanticism, Slobodan Sucur
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In "Thematizing the Subject from Gothicism to Late Romanticism," Slobodan Sucur takes Habermas's suggestion that "modern art reveals its essence in Romanticism; and absolute inwardness determines the form and content of Romantic art" and offers an analysis of a spectrum of primary texts in relation to the statement. The texts analysed range from Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto to Odoyevsky’s Russian Nights. The texts are analyzed in chronological fashion, in an attempt to see how the thematization of the subject shifts as the Early Gothic novel (Walpole, Radcliffe) develops into High Romanticism (Hoffmann, Maturin) and finally into Late Romanticism (Poe, …
How Is A Genre Created? Five Combinatory Hypotheses, Johan F. Hoorn
How Is A Genre Created? Five Combinatory Hypotheses, Johan F. Hoorn
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "How is a Genre Created? Five Combinatory Hypotheses," Johan F. Hoorn discusses that in genre theory, the creation of a genre is usually envisioned as a complex selection procedure in which several factors play an equivocal role. First, he advances that genre usually is investigated at the level of the phenomenon. For instance, questions may drawn on the effects of social status, education, or "intrinsic values" on forming a genre, on an author's decision with regard to in which genre to express his/her creativity. Second, Hoorn attempts to formulate a general mechanism that explains the forming of …
On Literariness: From Post-Structuralism To Systems Theory, Marko Juvan
On Literariness: From Post-Structuralism To Systems Theory, Marko Juvan
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "On Literariness: From Post-Structuralism to Systems Theory," Marko Juvan argues that the question of literariness concerns the very identity and social existence of not only literature per se but of literary theory as a discipline. A literary theorist is not only an observer of literature; he/she is also a participant who -- at least indirectly, via the a priori systems of science and education -- is engaged in constructing both the notion and the practice of literature as well as the study of literature. Literariness is neither an invariant cluster of "objectively" distinctive properties of all texts …
Bakhtin, Genre Formation, And The Cognitive Turn: Chronotopes As Memory Schemata, Bart Keunen
Bakhtin, Genre Formation, And The Cognitive Turn: Chronotopes As Memory Schemata, Bart Keunen
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Bakhtin, Genre Formation, and the Cognitive Turn: Chronotopes as Memory Schemata," Bart Keunen proposes a new reading of Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope. Bakhtin is widely taken to be a pioneer of genological thinking, but one of his key concepts -- the chronotope -- is still subject to highly divergent interpretations. Moreover, the epistemological implications of his genology have not yet been fully realized. In this article, a methodological grounding in schema theory is proposed. Bakhtin's concept can be used to study the way in which literary communication functions through what the psychologist Frederic Bartlett first called …