Comparative Literature Commons^™

“Following The Star”: Eärendil, Númenor, And The Star Of Bethlehem, Kristine Larsen

Journal of Tolkien Research

The following argument is made:

1. There has been a widespread and persistent interest in an astronomical explanation of the Star of Bethlehem as a single, brilliant physical object (e.g., Venus) among the general public (in both England and America) for more than a century and a half. This fascination is reflected in artwork as well as questions posed to astronomers.

2. The astronomical community has frequently referenced this interest in print articles that are available to the general public.

3. Tolkien paralleled this widespread iconography in his artwork and literary texts.

4. Tolkien’s decades-long revisions for the character of …

Arda Remade (And Remade, And Remade…); Or, Entropy, Einstein’S Blackboard, And R=Cⅇ^(Α(T-T_0 )∕3) [Sin⁡〖Β/2 (T-T_0 )〗 ]^(2∕3), Being An Exploration Of Overlapping Themes In The Venn Diagram Of The History Of Middle-Earth, The History Of Middle-Earth, And The History Of Twentieth Century Cosmology, Kristine Larsen

Journal of Tolkien Research

The concept of the "long defeat" in Tolkien's works has been widely studied, and connections drawn to the scientific idea of entropy. This paper extends those studies through the lenses of the history and popularization of science in Tolkien's lifetime, in particular drawing connections to the so-called phoenix or cyclic universe models. In addition, previously published work on cyclical time in Tolkien's works is extended to include scientific concepts of the three arrows of time.

Remix The Manuscript: Transcription Tools Dataset 2.0, Michelle Warren, Arielle Feuerstein

Other Faculty Materials

The document posted here is an annotated dataset of digital tools for transcribing handwritten manuscripts. Release 2.0 was created in 2022-23 by Arielle Feuerstein as part of the ongoing project "Remix the Manuscript: A Chronicle of Digital Experiments.” The file attached here contains the dataset as completed on June 28, 2023 along with credits for prior contributors.

Medieval Automata And J.R.R. Tolkien’S The Fall Of Gondolin, Kristine Larsen

Journal of Tolkien Research

The strange metallic dragons created by Melkor with his smiths and sorcerers for the attack on Gondolin are placed into context as medieval automata.

Daughterly Narratives In Search Of Voice: Fadwa Tuqan, Latifa Al-Zayyat, And Samar Attar, Rania Bedeir

Theses and Dissertations

A myriad of pressures and struggles affect Arab women as they are coming of age due to the familial and societal constructs they face. As daughters, they yearn for a voice amidst a plethora of generational boundaries, transmissions, and ideals. The intricacy of the psychological and interconnected structural factors is augmented by their gender in societies that are motivated, and often governed by, the implications of gender roles. While multiple layers of influence such as familial and sociocultural institutions affect how consciousness is formed, generational transmission, through the maternal figure, is paramount. Daughters, therefore, cannot narrate their personal stories without …

Fragments Of A Writer’S Mind: Virginia Woolf In Her Own Words, Baheya Zeitoun

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides a thematic reading of select autobiographical and theoretical works by Virginia Woolf. It utilizes Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of the rhizome as a methodological framework. The rhizome does not have a hierarchal structure but is rather interconnected. In the same way, the chapters interweave the multi-disciplinary theoretical approaches to connect the disparate factions of the modernist writer’s mind and life.

The early twentieth century saw the rise of post-suffrage writers with narratives that diverged from male-centric values. Woolf is one of the writers who makes a clear distinction between male and female values by championing women’s experiences …

Dinesen’S Diana: The Transformative Power Of Symbols In Ehrengard, Aishwarya A. Marathe

Anthós

This analysis of Dinesen's Ehrengard aims to illuminate the subversive transformation of the titular character of the novel, using the literal and symbolic application of artistic power.

The Objectives Of The Literary Translator: Translating A Science Fiction Nouvelle, Aishwarya Marathe

University Honors Theses

Language cannot be separated from its sociocultural context, given that it is a foundational tool with which humans communicate, understand, and connect with one another. This complicates the act of translating literary works from one language to another because the translator is translating more than words, she is transposing a cultural context into another. In addition, literary translators are faced with editorial expectations, the target language audience, and the demands of the source text itself, factors that are not always in agreement and can pose challenges during the translation process. In this paper, I present my original English translation of …

The Impact Of Slavery And Colonialism On The Black Consciousness: Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass, The Confessions Of Nat Turner, And Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl, Mariam Badawi

Theses and Dissertations

According to the German author, essayist, and empirical psychologist Karl Philipp Moritz, to be able to analyze someone psychologically, we have to be able to analyze ourselves as one would know oneself better than one would know anyone else. Therefore, he proposed the study of autobiographies to be able to delve into a writer's "innermost soul"; through their knowledge of themselves" (qtd. in Schlumbohm 32). Moreover, "the psychological effect that the ideology of white supremacy and European imperialism, in the form of slavery and colonialism, has had on Africa and her people has never been fully addressed and understood" (Nobles …

Palestine Without Borders: A Study Of Arab And Western Voices In Theater, Bassem Mohsen Ahmed El-Sayed Ahmed Ibrahim

Theses and Dissertations

Theater has always been perceived as a way to link different cultures together and bring them under one large domain. Regardless, the genre does not give the needed attention to works written in certain regions that may otherwise fall outside the consensus. One good example is Palestine and any works that deal with it as a setting. The first thing that comes to mind whenever the word “Palestine” is brought up is almost always of a political nature, having to do with the Palestinians’ national conflict with Israel. This thesis undertakes to amend this by probing into plays written by …

The Death And Rebirth Of The Feminine Muse: Edgar Allan Poe And Sylvia Plath, Noha Ibrahim

Theses and Dissertations

While drawing on mythology and a literary history that associated women with death as well as creativity, Edgar Allan Poe and Sylvia Plath experimented with binary oppositions such as masculine/feminine, composition/decomposition, and death/(re)birth. They gained inspiration from the same source, the dead muse, but how do they transform traditions that derive from classical and medieval literary precedent, perhaps in ways that are inherently critical of patriarchal modes of gender dynamics? Why is Poe fixated on a feminine dead muse while Plath is inspired by what she calls her “father-sea-god muse”? How do both authors represent the female body, and how …

Postcolonial Hauntology Of Modernity: Exploring Legacies Of Enlightenment Thought In The Understanding Of The 'Human' Through Intertextualities In Heart Of Darkness And Hunter X Hunter, Pumho Karimi

Comparative Literature Undergraduate Senior Theses

The thesis explores how Enlightenment Thought defined a certain idea of being human through intertextual motifs observed in Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness and Yoshihiro Togashi's Japanese manga Hunter x Hunter. Such a comparative analysis is premised on the idea that the historical context that inspires the plot in both texts are interlinked i.e., the colonial context in the Congo under Belgian rule mined the uranium that was used in making the atomic bomb that struck Japan in 1945. As such, using a postcolonial biopolitical framework, the intertextual motifs are analysed to argue how Enlightenment Thinking became a haunting …

Moving At The Speed Of Trust, Sun Ho Lee

Masters Theses

Moving at the Speed of Trust is a workbook of strategies — practices, definitions, and techniques — to nurture community-building in support of inbetweeners who live between power structures and cultures and are often left out. Inbetweeners are those individuals whose lives are in transition through recent immigration or forced translocation from Asia to America.

These strategies revolve around threads of trust: kin, giggles, vulnerability, and shared experience. With these threads, we can question power. We can preserve stories, expand the ways we connect, shift perspectives on what is “standard,” and cultivate a community rooted in understanding. To understand each …

An Ambiguous Hermeneutic: Doubleness In Ingmar Bergman’S Quest For Self, Ingy Aziz

Theses and Dissertations

One of the functions of art in all its forms is to provide the means for self-exploration and, in this way, to enable us to relate cultural representation to the question of meaning. The beauty of cinematic art is that it gives voice to our deepest and most profound concerns and enables us to bridge the gap between personal psychology and public understanding. As interpreters, we do not always unearth the answers that we seek, but we certainly gain more insight through delving into the minds of major filmmakers in the canon of modern cinema. This thesis is on the …

Narratives Of Trauma In South Asian Literature, Ryan Wander

Critical Humanities

Narratives of Trauma in South Asian Literature uses seven geographically-focused clusters of essays to elucidate the ways in which the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies allows for a delineation of the cultural and historical specificity of South Asian narratives of trauma. These essays simultaneously serve as a means for connecting South Asian literary accounts of individual and collective trauma to broader national and transnational dynamics.

Dispositif, Biopolitical Governance, And Significance Of Genealogical Approach In Navigating Refugees’ Experiences Of Camp And Community, Rabindra Chaulagain

Critical Humanities

Foucault’s distinction between biopolitics and biopower is significant to society, a normative body in terms of seeing biopower as the practical production of the visible and invisible poles of the dispositif through interdependent discursive and institutional practices of administration. This paper fundamentally discusses two theoretical ideas ingrained with the notion of Foucauldian biopolitics---dispositif and genealogy that Foucault brought into account for merging them into modern biopolitical administrative forces. First, it discusses the idea of dispositif as a mechanism of governance and critically examines its connection to biopower and biopolitics. Second, it analyzes the notion of genealogy as a tool to …

Who Am I?: How Natives’ Mental Trauma Develop During Precolonial And Colonial Eras As Seen In Achebe’S Things Fall Apart And Fanon’S The Wretched Of The Earth, Sophia D. Casetta

Pepperdine Journal of Communication Research

Colonialism is a long, brutal process, where natives’ identities are uprooted as colonizers establish their influence in a foreign land. Consequently, through the exploration of the natives’ response to this upheaval throughout the precolonial and colonial eras, the psychological toll that is placed on the colonized is evident. Such mental trauma that is incited is explored in Chinua Achebe’s fictional novel Things Fall Apart, which unveils the slowly lost of the natives’ identities during the precolonial shift, and the non-fiction work of Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth that details psychological disorders of the colonized due to colonization. …

Versions Of An Arab American Identity: Toward A Revision Narrative For Rajia Hassib’S In The Language Of Miracles, John K. Young

Critical Humanities

This essay compares the draft and published versions of three central chapters in Rajia Hassib’s 2015 novel In the Language of Miracles, as a smaller instance of what John Bryant terms a revision narrative. The key differences in characterization across the evolution of the narrative, along with the elements of a related character that remain largely unchanged, indicate the ways in which Hassib negotiates public and private versions of a gendered Arab American identity. By revising one chapter to remove a scene depicting a public assault in a pharmacy, the essay concludes, Hassib resists familiar narratives constraining Arab American …

“Speechless, Placeless Power”: Affect And Trauma In Moby-Dick And “Bartleby, The Scrivener”, Lauren Colandro

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and “Bartleby, the Scrivener” contain affectively unsound figures such as Captain Ahab and Bartleby that seem to disrupt larger narrative functions, both developing these characteristics in response to prior trauma. However, narrators are not privy to the extent of their feelings because of their idealistic attachments to the disruptive figures. This thesis examines the commonalities of Melville’s disruptive characters in both stories using affect theory, as well as how their disruptions illuminate the effects of repressed trauma in an increasingly capital-driven society.

Cmlit 100: Writing About World Literature (Philosophical Literature), Victoria Tomasulo

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus was designed as an Open Educational Resource for Writing about World Literature, a comparative literature course focused on the writing of research papers. The course theme, Philosophical Literature, will be of interest to those in the academic community who are engaged in the teaching and learning of interdisciplinary writing. Students choose a philosophical concept that interests them the most, among three-- the absurd hero, lightness versus weight, and the will to power-- and they use it as a lens through which to better understand literary works from different cultures. They learn to write recursively, putting literature and philosophy …