Comparative Literature Commons^™

Orientalism In Hispanic Literatures, Araceli Tinajero

Open Educational Resources

This course will examine Hispanic (including Brazilian) literary and cultural representations pertaining to China, India, Korea, and Japan. Students will read novels, short stories, poems, essays, and chronicles of prominent writers of the Hispanic world in order to have a deeper understanding of the “East/West” divide conceptualized as Orientalism. Students will be exposed to films, music, and visual representations so they can have a better understanding of the historical, geographic, and transnational connections between the Hispanic world and the Far East.

Japanese-English Translation: Kitaōji Rosanjin—Why I Became A Potter (1933), Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

A translation of「なぜ作陶を志したか」、北大路魯山人著、1933年

Source, Aozora Bunko (a digital archive of public-domain Japanese-language works):

General website: https://www.aozora.gr.jp

Current text: https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/001403/files/55082_54782.html

All rights reserved, Christopher Southward, 2019

Female Experience Of Trauma And Mourning In Two Postconflict Novels Of El Salvador And Peru: Roza, Tumba, Quema By Claudia Hernández, And La Sangre De La Aurora By Claudia Salazar, Raquel Castro Salas

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on how literature approaches the Salvadoran and Peruvian armed conflicts and contributes with perspectives of the female experience while offering illustrations of mourning processes. It is based on a close analysis of two postconflict novels that emerged after the publication of the corresponding truth commissions final reports. These novels are Roza, tumba, quema (2017) by Claudia Hernández from El Salvador, and La sangre de la aurora (2013) by Claudia Salazar from Peru. The contributions studied in this analysis focus on two areas: (1) a problematization of the female experience of the armed conflicts, and (2) a focus …

Archive And Repertoire Of The Esala Perahera Performance In Sri Lanka, Hashintha Jayasinghe

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project examines the archive and the repertoire of the Esala Perahera in Sri Lanka and charts the ideological and cultural implications of the performance. The archival analysis begins with the interrogation of the historical chronicles and the recorded history of the performance in the Sinhala and English texts. Thereafter, travel literature and the dissemination of cultural knowledge on the Perahera are discussed. The study of the repertoire and the photographic archive explores key performances in the Esala Perahera in 2016 and 2017. Postcolonial theory, theories on cultural anthropology, and performance theory are used to analyze the archive and the …

Representations Of Domestic Workers In Modern Arabic Fiction, Samaher Aldhamen

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this study, I have examined the representations of domestic workers in a number of Arabic mid-century and contemporary novels, using feminism and intersectionality as my overarching framework. I employed several scholarships of feminism such as Marxist and postcolonial feminism to examine the discourse on working-class women. The initial assumption of this study is that there is a noticeable invisibility of domestic workers in Arabic novels. If these characters manage to find their way into a text, they are typically ahistorical figures whose subjectivity is not centered.

Among the Arabic novels I have examined, I found that the tradition of …

Of Faith And Faithlessness: Adaptive Fidelity In Shusaku Endo's Martin Scorsese's Silence, Teng-Kuan Ng

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Adapted from the 1966 novel by the Japanese Catholic writer Shusaku Endo, Martin Scorsese’s Silence offers a timely occasion for expanding the critical discourse on adaptive fidelity. This article explores the ways that both texts draw from historical and scriptural sources within the Christian tradition—most notably the biblical tale of Judas—to clarify the meaning of faith in their respective contexts. Employing Andre Bazin’s theory of adaptation, I argue that alongside their source texts, both novel and film compose an intertextual ‘ideal construct’ of religious fidelity as dynamically lived across time and place, a fidelity paradoxically performed via various modes and …

Narrating Refugee Lives: Political Asylum In 21st Century France, Susmitha Udayan

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This dissertation examines representations of refugees in legal and aesthetic texts. Using the notion of chronotope as a conceptual framework, it studies the use of time and space in various refugee narratives to argue that aesthetic texts about refugees foreground the concept of spatiality to materialize and historicize the refugee condition. These texts, I contend, provide a necessary counternarrative to the depersonalized, dehistoricized representations of refugees encountered in legal texts and media discourses. Comparative analysis of legal and literary texts shows that adventure-time, which dominates legal asylum narratives, contributes to produce coherent, linear, singularized legal asylum stories. Such a narration …

Overlapping Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature As A Global Assemblage, Wai-Chew Sim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Overlappinig Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature as a Global Assemblage,” Wai-Chew Sim offers a globalist vision or understanding of Chinese literary studies/Sinophone studies. Deploying the notion of scriptworld (Damrosch), he examines how the Chinese, English, and Malay-language scriptworlds interact in the Southeast Asian context. He traces the rhizomatic connections between Joo Ming Chia’s Exile or Pursuit, a Singapore Sinophone text that explores multiple belongings, and two novels: M. L. Mohamed’s Confrontation (originally published as Batas Langit), and T.H. Kwee’s The Rose of Cikembang (originally published as Bunga Roos dari Cikembang). Tracing the sinophonicity of the latter …

Final Words, Final Shots: Kurosawa, Bortko And The Conclusion Of Dostoevsky’S Idiot, Saera Yoon, Robert O. Efird

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Final Words, Final Shots: Kurosawa, Bortko, and the Conclusion of Dostoevsky’s Idiot" Robert O. Efird and Saera Yoon discuss film adaptations of Dostoevsky’s novel. Both in his homeland and abroad, the major works of Fyodor Dostoevsky have largely made for disappointing film adaptations. This article examines the cultural diversity and aesthetic motivations underlying two very different adaptations of his novel Idiot, with particular attention to the concluding scenes. Both Akira Kurosawa and Vladimir Bortko follow the novelist's lead by hinting at some form of hope and future redemption amidst the tragedy but, for different reasons, …

Retro-Future In Post-Soviet Dystopia, Sergey Toymentsev

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Retro-Future in Post-Soviet Dystopia” Sergey Toymentsev explores the vision of retrospective future in such Russian novels as Tatiana Tolstaya’s The Slynx, Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, Olga Slavnikova’s 2017, and Dmitry Bykov’s Zhd. Unlike Zamyatin’s and Platonov’s anti-Soviet satires, post-Soviet dystopias do not respond to any utopian narrative, but project the historical and ideological reality of Russia’s violent (predominantly Soviet) past into the future. Such a traumatic reenactment of the Soviet past in the dystopian future testifies to the rise of authoritarianism in contemporary Russia as well as its incomplete collective memory …

On Imaginary Content Analogies In Musico-Literary Imitation, Rodrigo Guijarro Lasheras

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "On Imaginary Content Analogies in Musico-Literary Imitation,” Rodrigo Guijarro Lasheras analyzes "imaginary content analogy," a term often used in musico-literary studies to describe a type of imitation of music in literature. His paper aims to examine and characterize this important concept, establishing several of its features that musico-literary criticism has not normally paid attention to, such as its static or dynamic character, its implicit or explicit musical correlate, and its relation to vocal music. He argues that all imaginary content analogies must have a correlate, and that, despite the fact that we normally think of them as …

The Disenchantment Of History And The Tragic Consciousness Of Chinese Postmodernity, Alberto Castelli

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Magic Realism brings fantastic events into the frame of the narration. Yet it cannot quite be defined. At the very start of the process of definition, there is a question: Magic Realism is a mode of narration, or rather a post-colonial movement rising sociological issues alternative to the logic of power? The paper parallels and juxtaposes Latin American Magic Realism and the literary experience of Chinese literary Avant-garde in the 80s, similar apocalyptic thematic, but different narrative structures. Relating to the fictional universe of Can Xue and Yu Hua, the aim is to illuminate an exclusive mode to narrate history: …

Okonkwo’S Reincarnation: A Comparison Of Achebe’S Things Fall Apart And No Longer At Ease, Mary J. N. Okolie, Ginikachi C. Uzoma

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Abstract: The reincarnation myth is a global concept, founded basically in religion and tradition. It was especially vibrant in the ancient times in places like Egypt, Greece, and in continents like Asia and Africa, which possess varying understandings of the myth. In Igbo tradition, for example, it is believed that reincarnation occurs within a family. And that some of the marks of reincarnation are usually the possession of the birthmark or certain other physical features and the exhibition of character and behavioral traits of a deceased person by a living member of his/her immediate or extended family. Thus, reincarnation entails …

Thinking With Adorno [Table Of Contents], Gerhard Richter

Philosophy & Theory

What Theodor W. Adorno says cannot be separated from how he says it, and what he thinks cannot be isolated from how he thinks it. Richter’s book teaches us to think with Adorno—both alongside him and in relation to his diverse contexts and constellations, from aesthetic theory to political critique, from the problem of judgment to the question of how to lead a right life within a wrong one.

Thinking with Adorno’s uncoercive gaze not only means following the fascinating paths of his own work; it also means extending hospitality to the ghostly voices of others. As this book shows, …

Global And Radical Homesickness: Rewriting Identities In The Airport Narratives Of Pico Iyer And Sir Alfred Mehran, Sean Scanlan

Publications and Research

This article explores the personal narratives of two displaced travelers, Pico Iyer and Sir Alfred Mehran. Their memoirs, The Global Soul (2000) and The Terminal Man (2004), provide evidence that anxieties associated with global mobility are heightened due to a loss of community anchors and social orientation points. My reconceptualization of homesickness provides a powerful expression for these losses and uncertainties. In particular, the collision between past memories and present identity tests, especially as these tests occur in global airports, can produce global homesickness or a more destabilizing feeling: radical homesickness. Iyer’s class, national affiliation, and passport allow him to …

Camp De Thiaroye Ou La Déconstruction Du Mythe Colonial Par Le Truchement De La Langue Française, Maurice Tetne Mr.

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The history between France and Africa has been peppered with numerous irregularities and crimes. Senegalese filmmaker Sembene Ousmane’s film Camp de Thiaroye (1988) returned to this painful story of the Thiaroye tragedy. That film chronicles the criminal massacre by the French of returning Senegalese soldiers. The latter, having sacrificed themselves for France during WWII, demanded treatment and compensation equal to their French counterparts. Interestingly, one of the significant details of this film is the multitude of languages and “patois” that the various African soldiers speak. At the same time, the lingua-franca, a kind of “pidgin” called Français-tirailleur, is simultaneously …

Between Holy Russia And A Monkey: Darwin's Russian Literary And Philosophical Critics, Brendan G. Mooney

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is dedicated to the response of nineteenth-century Russian writers to the English naturalist Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. His theory was by no means the next discovery in a series of indistinguishable scientific discoveries; the fact that its implications touched every aspect of human social life was lost on no one, despite the fact that Darwin did not discuss human evolution in any detail. The Origin changed what it meant to be human: what Darwin’s readers took to be their place in the universe and how they ought to act with regard to both other …

Time, Space And Nonexistence In Joseph Brodsky's Poetry, Daria Smirnova

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this thesis is twofold: first, to examine the two major themes that permeate Joseph Brodsky’s works, time and space, and see how the poet employs various theoretical approaches to the topics and synthesizes them in order to deliver his unique view on both. Second, based on the examination of time and space, this study defines and distinguishes in relation to the chronotope two sorts of nonexistence – nebytie – heavily present in Brodsky’s later works. This project demonstrates that one kind of nebytie is defined through spatial references and primarily addresses one’s location in space or one’s …

El Jardí Dels Set Crepuscles, La Intelectualización De La Ficción Especulativa En La Literatura Catalana De Los Años Ochenta, Miguel A. Albújar Escuredo

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

En este ensayo se explica cómo Miquel de Palol, con la publicación del Jardí dels set crepuscles (1989), culmina la evolución de la novelística popular catalana de la década de los setenta y ochenta. La novela a partir de elementos narratológicos y simbólicos queda intelectualizada al situar el escenario en un ambiente de ficción especulativa pos apocalíptico. Finalmente, se ofrece una interpretación novedosa bajo la figura de un narrador “loco” que justifica ese carácter intelectualizante del Jardí.

Abstract: This essay illustrates how Miquel de Palol, with the publication of the Jardí dels set crepuscles (1989), culminates the evolution of the …

"If They Don't Tell You, The Hair Will": Hair Narrative In Contemporary Women's Writing, Darina Pugacheva

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The history of colonial and racial oppression made hair stories and testimonials fundamental to understanding hair as a unifying element particular for women of African descent in the post-slavery era. Seen as such, their hair narrations provide the first-person perspective of their life experiences while at the same time inviting a critical investigation of colonial and racial oppression. Contemporary women writers develop these types of narrations into a special language of hair that helps them tell a story that is not apparent or straightforward. This literary device that uses hair to uncover deeper social and political issues is bound up …