Comparative Literature Commons^™

Decay As Political Metaphor In Ely Dagher's "Waves '98" And Mounia Akl's "Submarine", Joey Ayoub

Regards

Lebanese cinema serves as a useful tool with which to assess postwar dynamics given the dominance of the civil war in artistic production since 1990. As the first postwar generation reached adulthood, we have been witnessing the inevitable rise of a “second wave” of postwar Lebanese cinema – defined as the generation of filmmakers born towards the end of or after the civil war. This essay analyses two postwar Lebanese films, Ely Dagher’s 2015 Waves ’98 and Mounia Akl’s 2016 Submarine, as unique responses to a feeling of despair brought about by the city/nation, explored through the theme of …

Ya Omri (104 Wrinkles) De Hady Zaccak, Joseph Korkmaz

Regards

Elle est dure, la vieillesse. Simone de Beauvoir en sait quelque chose. Ici, l’âge de Henriette (104 ans), l’héroïne du film et grand-mère maternelle du réalisateur, ne laisse place à aucun euphémisme. Elle n’est pas une personne âgée, ni une femme d’un certain âge, mais bel et bien une vieille, et même une très vieille dame, car les stigmates des années vécues sont flagrants […]

Entretien Avec Hady Zaccak, Joseph Korkmaz

Regards

Pourquoi un film sur votre grand-mère ? Aviez-vous un rapport particulier avec elle ou vous vous êtes intéressé à elle parce qu’elle est un cas rare d’une centenaire encore alerte ? Quand est-ce que vous avez commencé à la filmer ?
Un film sur ma grand-mère car le documentaire est un moyen de lutter contre la mort et de préserver la mémoire de ceux qu’on aime […]

« Cinematheque Beirut » Entretien Avec Nour Ouayda, Yara Nashawaty

Regards

En juin 2018, Cinematheque Beirut, un projet dédié à la conservation de l’héritage cinématographique libanais, fut inauguré par l’association Metropolis Cinema. Ce dernier-né est sans doute son projet le plus ambitieux, car il résulte d’une multitude d’initiatives déjà mises en place par l’association et ne pourrait réellement évoluer qu’en s’inscrivant dans la durée. De plus, miser sur la préservation d’un héritage en danger relève d’une lourde responsabilité auprès d’un public souvent sceptique, témoin impuissant du bafouage, voire du sabotage, de son héritage culturel depuis le début de la guerre civile, puis durant la période dite de reconstruction dans les années …

Filming Against The System In North Africa: Pioneering Women Documentary Makers And Their Common Aesthetics, Stefanie Van De Peer

Regards

This article draws attention to the pioneering women of North African documentary making, and specifically their work in addressing the image of women on screen in rapidly changing societies. Highlighting the creativity of the filmmakers in defying the contemporary censor or addressing taboo topics such as women’s rights, the history of women contributing to politics, or women’s roles in the wars for independence, this article uncovers neglected “feminist” histories and the ways in which women documentary makers tackle audio-visually challenging topics. The films under discussion show their creative potential to address difficult themes through a poetics of permissibility. This is …

Tracing Trans Bodies In Neobaroque Literature, Huber David Jaramillo Gil

Publications and Research

This document briefly explores the ways in which trans people have been written through Baroque aesthetics in the social and cultural imaginary of Latin America, despite the various unjust forces that have attempted to make them invisible and exclude them from the national narrative. The differences between Severo Sarduy’s Neobaroque, Néstor Perlongher’s Neobarroso, and Pedro Lemebel’s Neobarrocho are analyzed, while exploring their individual limitations and potentialities for voicing the joys and pains of being trans in an exclusionary society.

The Child Ethnographer In The Field: Examples From English, Spanish, And French Caribbean Literature, Emily Ann O'Dell

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation I consider the child to be an ethnographer in works of fiction and autofiction from the Caribbean islands. Through their liminality as culturally and developmentally betwixt or between, their cultural malleability, their linguistic fluidity, and their curiosity, the child becomes a "native" ethnographer who is capable of translating the culture (both linguistically and culturally) for the reader in order to establish understandings of Caribbean cultures. This is accomplished through the creation of hybridized or creolized texts that have many of the same characteristics as postmodern ethnographies.

In the English Caribbean Xuela provides an ethnographic perspective of Dominican …

Multiple Voices In The Poetry Of Transculturation: Reading Contemporary Ex-Phonic Poetry Through Muwaššah: Ryoko Sekiguchi, Etel Adnan, And Suheir Hammad, Thana Al-Shakhs

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research is a comparative study that compares two types of multicultural poetry: contemporary poetry written by non-native speakers and the Andalusian medieval genre of muwaššah. In spite of the cultural and temporal gap between the two periods, the poets apply similar strategies to represent multicultural voices, for example integrating foreign expressions. I argue that multicultural poetics break the rules of classical writing and use oral expressions that are more flexible to include different languages and cultural references. This study focuses on oral techniques that offer an appropriate style to express multiplicity.

This thesis is divided into four chapters. …

¡Che Gallego!: Relaciones Transatlánticas Entre Galicia Y Argentina En El Siglo Xx, Fabio Suárez Garcia

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this thesis is focused on demonstrating the strong influence that Galician immigrants exerted on the Argentinian society at the beginning of the 20th century. In this transatlantic literary study, the bonds between the old and the new continent will be established by analysing some of the authors who became affected by immigration and exile conditions: Xosé Neira Vilas, Luis Seoane and Alfonso Rodríguez Castelao. The thesis will also examine the Argentinian literature related to immigration, and how some relevant authors accepted or rejected stereotyping. Both views, the one from exiles and the one from local authors, were …

Vulnerability And Resistance In Carmen Aguirre’S Mexican Hooker #1, Cinta Mesa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Vulnerability and Resistance in Carmen Aguirre’s Mexican Hooker#1,” Cinta Mesa examines Chilean-Canadian playwright and actress Carmen Aguirre’s latest autobiographical novel, Mexican Hooker#1, to analyze Latina vulnerability in relation to exile, emigration, gender violence and stereotypes. The article relies upon Judith Butler’s definition of vulnerability (20), which is excluded from official texts. The consequences of these types of trauma, which are written on female bodies, are expressed through post-traumatic stress disorder. The author expresses the difficulty of acting because of her post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms and the challenges she meets on her way to heal herself and …

Motherhood, Vulnerability And Resistance In The Elysium Testament By Mary O’Donnell, María Elena Jaime De Pablos

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Mary O’Donnell’s novel The Elysium Testament (1999) narrates the story of Nina, an accomplished grotto restorer, but a neglectful wife and mother according to the Irish patriarchal symbolic order –the “register of regulatory ideality” (Butler, Bodies that Matter 18). Estranged from her husband, Neil, she sends him a series of letters, her “testament,” where some of the most significant aspects of her life are exposed. Readers discover that Nina’s and Neil’s marriage begins to crumble after the birth of their second child, Roland, to whom Nina attributes a frightening dual nature, which she tries to control through physical and psychological …

Chase Riboud’S Hottentot Venus (2003) And The Neo-Victorian: The Problematization Of South-Africa And The Vulnerability And Resistance Of The Black Other, Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article touches upon issues of captivity, suppression, misrepresentations and exclusion of black people from a historical and cultural point of view through the analysis of Chase-Riboud’s neo-Victorian novel Hottentot Venus (2003). It also focuses on the implications and consequences for contemporary South Africa of situations of slavery and exploitation of African descended peoples. Notions of identity and moral and legal inclusion of black women into past and contemporary societies and communities will be also discussed from the point of view of postcolonial and gender and sexuality studies. The complexities of blackness and the violation of human rights as a …

The Commodified Body And Post/In Human Subjectivities In Frears’S Dirty Pretty Things And Romanek’S Never Let Me Go, Rocio Carrasco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Following new materialist analysis, this article takes the body as the central locus of analysis, and relates it to broader questions such as ethics, ideology, power and/or technologies. Specifically, it revolves around the idea of embodied subjectivity as articulated by scholars Rosi Braidotti, Sherryl Vint or Cary Wolfe, whereby body and subjectivity are indissolubly and interestingly connected. Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (2010) exploit the idea of the commodified body, understood here as a vulnerable body, a disposable commodity at the service of powerful and/or wealthy people. Victims of the cruelties inflicted …

Trauma, Ethics, And The Body At War In Brittain, Borden And Bagnold, Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “Trauma, Ethics, and the Body at War in Brittain, Borden and Bagnold,” Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo discusses how the autobiographical accounts of the conflict by Vera Brittain, Enid Bagnold and Mary Borden, inspired by their experiences as voluntary nurses in the front, deconstruct the meanings of femininity, masculinity and patriotism, contesting the official rhetoric of passivity that defined the role of women in World War I. Their extreme engagement with the precariousness and vulnerability of others elicits an empathic response that can be interpreted through Judith Butler (2004; 2009), Emmanuel Lévinas (1969) and Alan Badiou’s (1993) ethics of …

Introduction, Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz, Manuela Coppola

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This special issue addresses contemporary representations of “vulnerable” bodies in transit in Anglophone literature and culture and explores their strategies of resistance. The use of the expression “bodies in transit” in this issue has to be understood both as a reference to the materiality of diasporic, exiled, migrating, trafficked bodies, and as an allusion to the metaphorical transition of these marginalized subjects from alienation to regeneration in multiple contexts. The interdisciplinary contributions in this special issue tackle vulnerability as a marginal(ized) and potentially enabling condition entailing the crossing of bodily, sexual, mental, ethical, cultural, and national borders. Ranging from literature …

"The Tyrant Father": Leslie Stephen And Masculine Influences On Virginia Woolf And Her Novel, To The Lighthouse, Anya Graubard

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

This paper examines the volatile yet nurturing relationship between Virginia Woolf and her father, Leslie Stephen. It specifically considers the effects of three male “tyrants” in Woolf’s childhood, including not only her father but also her two half-brothers, who abused her sexually. Analysis of the dynamics of these relationships provides insight into Woolf’s lifelong battle with mental illness and helps us to understand the complicated relationships she had as an adult with men and women.

In her letters, diaries, and memoir essays, Woolf reveals how she drew from her own experiences of childhood to write her most famous novel, To …

The Urban Domestic: Homosocial Domesticity, Literature, And Culture In 19th And 20th Century New York City, Krystyna Michael

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation, The Urban Domestic: Homosocial Domesticity in the Literature and Culture of 19^th- and 20^th-Century New York City,explores the relationship between transformations in urban planning and domestic ideology through American literature. Specifically, I take up Walt Whitman and Edith Wharton as two authors with distinctly ambivalent relationships to the hetero-normative nuclear family and the ways New York’s built environment shaped and controlled the nation’s gender and sexual politics. My reading bridges a critical gap between studies of culture and its literary expressions on the one hand, and of architectural design and the urban environment …

The Music In His Words: The Art Of Sound And Folk In Louis Armstrong’S Manuscript For Satchmo: My Life In New Orleans, “The Armstrong Story”, Adriana C. Filstrup

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis dives into the musical journey embedded in the autobiographical writings of America’s jazz ambassador, Louis Armstrong. It examines Armstrong’s typewritten manuscript, The Armstrong Story, which was eventually revised by an editor and published as his second autobiography with the title of Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans in 1954 (originally published in France in 1952.) Armstrong’s manuscript reads like sheet music, where any sound could affect the harmony of the story. He created a voice that had met every art form before it became the manuscript of his autobiography, but along with that voice, references from Black …

The Subject Of The Novel: Aphra Behn, Charlotte Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky, And Samuel Beckett, Jin Chang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Aesthetic theory arose as a response to the fragmentation of areas of life in early modernity. As the discourse that could recuperate the senses for the larger project of knowing the world, aesthetics also provided a grammar of the subject, a way of conceiving the troubled relationship between subject and object. In Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, aesthetic discourse found its strongest and most totalizing form as that which supplanted the object of aesthetic theory – the work of art. Thus Hegel’s infamous statement that “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing …

Japanese-English Translation: Nishida Kitarō—Self-Determination Of The Expressive Self (May 1930), Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Excerpt of working translation of 「表現的自己の自己限定」、西田幾多郎著. Source: 『西田幾多郎全集』、第五巻 （第一回配本）。東京、株式会社岩波書店、二〇〇二年一一月二七日。ページ 十一〜六十七。[The Complete Works of Nishida Kitarō, Vol. 5 (1st edition). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, Nov. 27, 2002. Pages 11-67].