Comparative Literature Commons^™

Basil Bunting And The Challenges Of Literary Translation From Persian Into English: A Case Of Rūdhakī, Emadeddin Naghipour

Languages and Cultures Publications

The purpose of this study is to analyze Basil Bunting's literary translation. It turns to the theories of translation by Steiner, Benjamin, and Eco, among others, to study Bunting’s translation of Rūdhakī’s ‘Dandaniyyeh’ poem, a 10th century qaṣīdah replete with mesmerizing musicality and with a form galvanized in its originating language, time, and locale. A deep contrastive analysis of its translation into English by the poet, Bunting, shows the difficulties that can arise from literal translations of classical Persian poetry.

Orpheus And The Harrowing Of Hell In The Tale Of Beren And Lúthien, Giovanni Carmine Costabile

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Critics have observed that Beren and Lúthien’s tale is a Christian retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The “Harrowing of Hell” tradition is widespread in Italy as attested by the mosaic of San Marco among others, but it is in France that the Ovid Moralized reconnects it to Orpheus who descended into the Underworld to save Eurydice (an already late antique parallel) and therefore attests a happy ending version of the story that can be found in medieval England and also in various classical sources, perhaps even in the original legend of Orpheus. The apocryphal Harrowing is also …

Denial And Acceptance: A Core Myth Of Orpheus And Eurydice In The Modern Lyric, Brian O. Murdoch

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

The story of Orpheus’s failed attempt to bring Eurydice back from the dead is a frequently used theme in literature and in the modern lyric in particular, and it has been the subject of sometimes excessively complex critical attention. One core of the myth, however, is the need for the living to face and to accept the fact of the death of someone close to them. Modern lyrics in different European languages—the heirs to the classical myth—make clear how Orpheus’s attempt to bring his wife back from Hades was always impossible, and that his reaction was thus a form of …

A New Nature Is Coming. We Will Be Repossessed, And The Spectres Of The Post-Natural Will Take The World. Predictions Of A New Symbiotic Earth In "Fafner" (2018) By Daniel Perez Navarro, Miguel Angel Albújar-Escuredo

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

This paper engages in the debates about decentralizing the role of men in the world we live in. Byproducts of this new mindset are concepts such as the “Posthuman” (Braidotti 2012); the status of “Holobiont” (Haraway 2016), and the experiencing of a new “Coexistence” with the non-human (Morton 2018). I suggest the novel Fafner (2018) as a perfect sample of this intellectual debate from an artistic and fictional view. Using concepts from diverse fields of thinking and applying them to literary analysis, this paper will review the in-depth transformation of nature portrayed by Fafner’s narration. Additionally, it will accomplish …

The Ghosts Of Memphis, Dale Tate

FUSION

A personal essay about one man’s musical journey to the place where it all began for him, and his battles to reconcile modern day values with the racial struggles and discrimination past times and past places. This “Personal Place Essay” was submitted for American Literature (ENGL 2130) in February 2023.

This piece was written in response to an assignment that asked students to write a personal essay based on a place to which they are connected. An experience in that place is the foundation of the essay; this experience is woven together with detailed description, reflection, and analysis of both …

Darling: An Adaptation Of "The Yellow Wallpaper", Dawniqueca A.L. Steele

FUSION

Based on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the following story depicts the vacation of a young woman and her fiancé to an isolated mountain cabin. Similar to the original text, the woman gains a fixation on a specifically colored item, this being the white snow outside. The intentions of this story were to depict how misogyny and female insanity have both evolved and remained stagnant throughout time. Even though the original text featured traditional concepts of misogyny while the following focuses on modern forms, the two show the same maddening fear of a woman in the presence of inequality. …

Mother And Son, By F Odun Balogen, A Brief Analysis Through The Lens Of New Historicism, Mattie L. Frascella

FUSION

This article employs New Historicism to analyze F. Odun Balogun's short story "Mother and Son," exploring its reflection of social, political, and cultural dynamics. By examining the story through a New Historicism lens, this analysis sheds light on the complexities of navigating a rapidly changing society while acknowledging the enduring racial barriers faced by the narrator.

The essay was created in response to an assignment prompt that asked students to choose a literary theory and apply it to a story in order to argue for the story's meaning.

Protection Against Ruin: The Reality Of Judgment, Sarah B. Brooks

FUSION

This essay analyzes the works of Chekhov and Eliot in depicting the prevention of ruin in strict societies. Whether they deserve it or not, characters may face personal or societal ruin. With this understanding, this essay inspects the lives of three characters and how their decisions impact their role in society. Additionally, this essay allows readers to form their own opinions on the actions of each of the characters from Chekhov and Eliot's works. By analyzing the ideas of judgment, morality, and the merit of societal standards, this essay discusses pieces that took place in the past, but messages that …

Political Symbolism In Literature: Themes Of Colonialism, Corruption, And Greed, Ava E. Briglevich

FUSION

This Final Essay for World Literature Section 008 compares the texts “In the Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka and “Death Constant Beyond Love” by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez while analyzing themes of colonialism, corruption, and greed. Both authors are recognized for producing works rich with political and social commentary, and reading these stories allows one to gain new perspectives on these themes. In this essay, I share insight into the events that occurred during the stories' creation that contribute to the overall themes. Additionally, I connect these themes to modern events to demonstrate how the ideas put forth by Kafka and Garcia-Marquez …

2024 Conference Program, Georgia Southern University

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

2024 Conference Program

Traduttore, Traditore: A Comparative Translation Activity, Katherine Tilghman

Generative AI Teaching Activities

Students will translate a paragraph-long passage, then ask ChatGPT to translate the same passage. Students will then compare and evaluate the two translations.

Through The Lens Of Trauma: Analyzing Narrative Voice In 'The Handmaid's Tale'", Bianca Ramos

Honors Program Theses and Research Projects

Despite not being solely about trauma, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale's (1985) is written through the voice of a traumatized narrator. Offred's narration in this novel is unreliable, shifting between past and present and sharing multiple possibilities of events. This narrative voice accentuates the uncertainty and tension within this story. Offred's unreliable narration reveals her inner psychological state. Through readings of medical-humanity and cognitive literary theory, this thesis examines how trauma alters Offred’s narrative voice in The Handmaid’s Tale. I argue that Offred’s narration is a trauma response to her oppressive environment and is motivated by an attempt to reclaim …

Paul Celan And The Processes Of Survival In Post-Shoah Jewish Writing, Ari Savage

Theses

The following is a study of the poetry of Paul Celan as a representation of psychological and social processes present in the written works of Shoah survivors. It begins with an analysis of the place of writing in Jewish culture, then identifies three primary processes which operate in sequence: alienation, individuation, and integration. By examining Paul Celan’s highly personal and autobiographical texts in the context of his life experience as a Shoah survivor it is possible to discern the social and psychological forces at work which compel survivors to express their traumas in written form, and to gain a better …

The Impact Of The Gut-Brain Axis On Alzheimer’S Disease, Elissa Wakim

Best Integrated Writing

Elissa’s review for the Graduate Biomedical Review focuses on the links between the gastrointestinal tract and the brain; the gut-brain axis and the development of Alzheimer’s disease. As a student in the Microbiology and Immunology Masters Program Elissa was particularly interested in the gut microbiota and their connection to neurodegenerative disease. She tidily reviewed the literature and wrote a fascinating and compelling piece of work.

Best Integrated Writing 2024 - Complete Edition, Wright State University School Of Humanities And Cultural Studies

Best Integrated Writing

Best Integrated Writing includes excellent student writing from Integrated Writing courses taught at Wright State University. This is the first issue after a 5 year hiatus.

Western Theory’S Chinese Transformation: Postscript, Liu Kang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Out Of The Myths Of “Revolutionary China”: Liu Kang Versus Žižek & Badiou, Liu Xin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The highlight of the 2011 special issue of Positions on Slavoj Žižek is the debate between Liu Kang and Žižek on “Revolutionary China.” It unpacks the Western left’s political unconsciousness and myths about China in several respects. First, revolution is not a parody-travesty of the “tradition” that Žižek concocts from romanticized fantasies of a “retrospective tradition” drawn from Jorge Luis Borges and T. S. Eliot. Second, revolution is not Alain Badiou’s “truth event,” which tends to reduce the Chinese Cultural Revolution to an abstract “event” in process, neglecting the real calamities of the so-called utopian experiment. Third, the key problematic …

Two Imagined Chinas In Tel Quel, Wang Yichen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

From the mid-1960s, the literary review Tel Quel shifted its anti-traditional and avant-garde stance in arts and literature toward politics within the radical political context in France. Its editor Philippe Sollers initiated a “political turn,” marked by its transformation from its “structuralist period” to its “China period.” Its “China period” inadvertently created a “textual spectacle” of two imagined Chinas: first, a poetic, static “ancient China” represented by Daoism (Taoism), Chinese ideograms, and classical Chinese art and poetry; and second, a revolutionary, subversive “modern China” represented by Maoism along with Lu Xun and other left-wing writers. Taking appropriation, rather than misreading, …

Deleuze’S Challenge To Hegel’S Aesthetics—Chinese Aesthetics In The Confrontation Between German Classical Aesthetics And Postmodernism, Wu Yuyu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

German classical aesthetics, featuring a systematic analysis of concepts and theories, plays a fundamental role in the founding of Chinese modern aesthetics. From the 1980s, when the spread of Western theories began to flourish, Chinese scholars assimilated deconstructionist thought (for example, that of Deleuze) and started to reflect on German classical aesthetics as represented by Kant and Hegel. Chinese aesthetics presents various characteristics in the confrontation between German classical aesthetics and French deconstructionist thought. From the perspective of German classical aesthetics, China has no philosophy, tragedy, or system. The Chinese culture became a thinking resource for criticizing essentialism and dualism …

French Left-Wing Literary Theory And Mao Zedong Thought, Han Zhenjiang, Zhang Yuling

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

French left-wing literary theories have continued to accept and interpret Mao Zedong’s thought (including his theories on literature and art) from the 1960s to today. This intellectual communication enabled the formation of Louis Althusser’s structural Marxism and contemporary left-wing literary theory. Mao’s theory of contradiction and his thoughts on reliance on the popular masses, aesthetics and politics, and people’s literature and art are the major intellectual resources for Louis Althusser’s, Alain Badiou’s, and Slavoj Žižek’s theories and are fully integrated into their theoretical system and critical practice. Althusser, Badiou, and Žižek innovated materialistic dialectics on the basis of Mao’s theory …