Comparative Literature Commons^™

Song Reconsidered: Words And Music, Music And Poetry, Lawrence Kramer

Art History and Music Faculty Publications

This revised version of an essay first published in 1984 sustains the impetus of the original to upend the traditional understanding of song, in particular of art song, as a harmonious fusion of words and music. Song in general, and art songs or Lieder in particular with their generically mandated dependence on preexisting poetic texts, produces a much wider range of text-music relationships than mere fusion, many of them riddled with tension, cross-purposes, and even outright antagonism. Among song genres, the Lied stands out historically for giving prominence to the diversity of these relationships, starting in the early nineteenth century. …

Translating Migrant Worker Poetry : Whose Voices Get Heard And How?, Eleanor Goodman

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

Translation involves the art of knowing when to get out of the way—and of knowing when to get in the way. Chinese migrant worker poetry brings this issue to the fore with unusual urgency, as its language often breaks the rules for being “poetic” or “elegant.” But what is being conveyed by the language these poets employ, and what is lost if the translator yields to the temptation to smooth out the rough edges? And how does the act of translating and anthologizing these poets affect the ways in which they are read?

Contributors

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.

Dog Barking At The Moon : Transcreation Of A Meme In Art And Poetry, Cosima Bruno

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

This essay explores the dynamics of transcreation in art and poetry, focusing on the image of a dog barking at the moon in four Taiwanese poems. By putting them in connection with each other and with other texts from different times and artistic traditions, I wish to contribute to a dismantling of the “influence paradigm,” move beyond contestations over the comparative approach, and demonstrate a critical method that recognizes the enduring fascination for the meme but equally appreciates change, approximation and adaptation, rather than closed-off conversion from a source text to a target text.

Mapping Hong Kong’S Atlas, Christopher Mattison

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

Rooted in the broader project of representing Hong Kong through the visual and literary arts, the Hong Kong Atlas book series seeks to build a set of heritage-based networks through a literary series consisting primarily of paperback and digital editions, including bilingual poetry collections. The individual voices of the authors and translators combine to reorient the complexities of memory in relation to Hong Kong’s constantly shifting pasts.

The Cultural Translation Of Battlers Poetry (Dagong Shige), Maghiel Van Crevel

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

Contemporary mainland-Chinese poetry displays a great deal of diversity and dynamism. Battlers poetry (dagong shige)—writing by members of the underclass of domestic migrant workers—is a relatively recent arrival. This essay delves into the discourse surrounding battlers poetry and its interactions with other poetry “departments,” particularly that of avant-garde poetry. It does so from the perspective of cultural translation. I argue that this is especially helpful for understanding the dynamics of battlers poetry, and of “poetry” at large as a discursive space in China today. The essay offers a discussion of translated people, texts in transit, commentary as conflict …

Forms Of World Literature And The Taipei Poetry Festival, Nick Admussen

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

In poetry anthologies and works of literary criticism, the authority to select which literature can become “world” literature often lies with a single editor or theorist. This essay contrasts those centralizations of authority with the more egalitarian structure of international poetry festivals. Using the 2016 Taipei Poetry Festival as an example, the essay reads the impact of the form of the festival on its audience’s experience of translation, the local in the transnational, and intercultural solidarity. The essay then argues that boredom is a formal flaw in contemporary festivals, and advocates that translations be performed in local vernaculars.

Homeless In The World : War, Narrative, And Historical Consciousness In Eileen Chang, György Lukács, And Lev Tolstoy, Roy Bing Chan

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

This paper explores how Lev Tolstoy’s work was discussed by both Marxist philosopher György Lukács and Chinese writer Eileen Chang during the global crisis of the 1930s and the Second World War. According to Lukács, Tolstoy’s fiction embodied the quintessence of realist narrative’s ability to capture the mass experience of history. For Chang, defending herself against charges of being a trivial and uncommitted pulp writer, Tolstoy’s work exemplified the value of a narrative process marked by the very serendipity and contingency mirrored in reality. All three writers struggled with a conception of a unified world both as a utopian ideal, …

“Dwellers In Shadows” & Abbatial Jerusalem: Reformed Monastic Ideas By The Third Crusade In The Sermons Of Garnerius Of Rochefort And Adam The Scot, Todd P. Upton

Quidditas

In the crusading era of the Twelfth Century, a majority of Latin sermons presented Jerusalem as a visio pacis (“vision of peace”) that maintained an original characterization of the city made by Pope Urban II’s 1095 sermon at Clermont that launched the First Crusade. This essay demonstrates significant ways in which Garnerius of Rochefort and Adam the Scot transformed that visio pacis by the end of the twelfth century. For Garnerius (d. 1215)—a bishop at Langres (in northeastern France) from 1193 who wrote against the Amaurian pantheistic heresy, and died at Clairvaux—the traditional Augustinian visio spiritualis of Jerusalem was reversed, …

Delno C. West Award

Quidditas

The West Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a senior scholar at the annual conference.

Recipient of the West Award for 2017

Kristin M.S. Bezio

University of Richmond

The Local Costs Of Religious Reform And The Decline Of Parish Performances In Tudor England, James H. Forse

Quidditas

The volumes of the Records of Early English Drama show that there was a lively tradition of local, religious performances throughout England in the late medieval and early Tudor period. Parishes, large and small, rich and poor, supported plays, processions, ales and other activities like Robin Hood celebrations. Great care, money and time went into creating costumes and staging for these events. Most of these local performances disappeared by the middle of the sixteenth century. A few, notably at York, Chester, Coventry and Norwich, continued into the early 1570s, but focus on these performance “giants” of English theatrical history fails …

Thematic Patterning In English And Arabic And Its Implications On Translation, Saud Abdulrahman Alshehri

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis examines patterns of thematization between English and Arabic, demonstrating variations in textual meaning and implications of such an examination on the activity and education of translation. Translators frequently encounter the challenge of positioning clausal constituents at the beginning of a sentence when translating from English to Arabic. The study, drawing on Halliday’s SFL theory, applies the system of Theme as a tool to the analysis of an English text and six Arabic translations to investigate such variations. The analysis also aims to demonstrate to what extent thematic patterning is preserved or changed between the original and target text. …

Ancestral Queerness: Normativity And Deviance In The Abraham And Sarah Narratives, Gil Rosenberg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Interpreters of the Abraham and Sarah narratives in Gen 11-21 often focus on the importance of the line of inheritance, through a particular biological child. While they also note the many irregularities in Abraham and Sarah's familial relationships and activities, there has been no sustained attention to the combination of deviance and normativity that characterizes these narratives. I argue that, due to their particular combinations of normativity and deviance, Abraham and Sarah are Queer, where Queer is a general, cross-cultural category which includes but is not limited to contemporary forms of queerness (e.g., lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, etc.).

Using …

The Composing, Editing, And Publication Of Willa Cather’S Obscure Destinies Stories, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In 1998, Willa Cather’s 1932 short story collection Obscure Destinies appeared as the fourth volume of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition (WCSE). As the editors would explain in an essay reflecting on the “The Issue of Authority in a Scholarly Edition,” Cather “habitually sought to exert her authority over the full process governing the preparation and presentation of her novels: from drafting and revising the text to shaping the physical appearance of the published books.” In line with that sense of Cather’s authority, the WCSE chose and continues to choose the first edition of each work as book form as …

The Role Of George Henry Lewes In George Eliot’S Career: A Reconsideration, Beverley Rilett

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This article examines the “protection” and “encouragement” George Henry Lewes provided to Eliot throughout her fiction-writing career. According to biographers, Lewes showed his selfless devotion to Eliot by encouraging her to begin and continue writing fiction; by fostering the mystery of her authorship; by managing her finances; by negotiating her publishing contracts; by managing her schedule; by hosting a salon to promote her books; and by staying close by her side for twenty-four years until death parted them. By reconsidering each element of Lewes’s devotion separately, Rilett challenges the prevailing construction of the Eliot–Lewes relationship as the ideal partnership of …

Review Of The Gift Of Active Empathy: Scheler, Bakhtin, And Dostoevsky, By Alina Wyman, Slav N. Gratchev

Modern Languages Faculty Research

There are certain writers that literary scholars of all times will study again and again, and there are certain literary works that are too important to be examined only once. Reading Dostoevsky is always an “excruciatingly visceral experience” not only for us, the readers, but also for scholars like Max Scheler and Mikhail Bakhtin (p. 230). Alina Wyman’s book makes a major contribution to this experience.

Wyman’s argument is both original and elegantly simple: for Bakhtin and Scheler the concept of loving empathy is fundamental in both their respective models of being and in the particular structure of their careers. …

La Circunstancia De La Víctima En Las Novelas De Alicia Giménez Bartlett., Eyda Elisa Vaughn

Wayne State University Dissertations

The detective series of Petra Delicado published by the contemporary Spanish writer, Alicia Giménez Bartlett presents the individual characters in a changing, complex and fragmented society. The emphasis is placed on the special circumstances that lead the characters to become the victim. The facts presented in this study, demonstrate that the character's ability to change their unfavorable circumstance are not due to the lack of agency or unwillingness. In some cases, the circumstances in which the individual is borne, places limited to their access to resources. In others, the characters in position of power manipulate others individual's circumstance to their …

The Transculturation Of American Poetry In China, 1917-1937, Chris Song

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

This paper offers a critical overview of the reception of American poetry in China from 1917 to 1937. Drawing on Maria Tymoczko’s theory of transculturation, it shows how in order to meet local poetic and ideological demands, America’s New Poetry Movement, Left poetry, and Black poetry were “performed” in (relay) translations by Chinese authors. Understudied to date, these texts reveal a fascinating literary and political process in which American poetry and Chinese poetry were mutually shaped through translation.

Cultivating Our Garden, Daniela Chavez

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

Candide by Voltaire promotes social reform in areas dealing with injustice and corrupt power–especially in religious organizations. One biographical book, one master of arts thesis, and two literary criticism essays were read to further expand the reader’s understanding of Candide. The impact religious organizations had on Voltaire and on European societies, their insincerity, and the abuse of their power sparked a fervent desire in Voltaire to criticize such institutions in order to reinvigorate the rights and freedoms of citizens and eliminate the abuses that societies continued to bear. The last phrase in the novel reflects Voltaire’s call to speak …

The Translated Identities Of Chinese Minority Writers : Sinophone Naxi Authors, Duncan Poupard

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

This paper will show the interplay between language and identity in the writing of Sinophone Chinese minority writers, who write what can be envisioned as a form of postcolonial literature. It is postcolonial in the sense that they are transposing their native, subaltern culture into Chinese for a Han Chinese audience. The focus of the discussion is on Naxi minority writers such as Sha Li and Niu Gengqin who are writing their own racial identity in Chinese. They are essentially “translating” the cultural metatext of their home (Naxi) culture for a dominant-culture (Han) audience. It is argued that the use …