Comparative Literature Commons^™

Those That Trespass Against Us: Childhood, Violence, And Memory In The White Ribbon, Joseph Kuster

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis examines aesthetic representations of childhood and violence in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, I argue that Haneke’s film interrogates notions of the idealized child in the context of German history/the history of the Tätergeneration in order to question the possibility of affixing particular objective truth to historical or cultural narrative. First, I examine and deconstruct culturally accepted representations of the child as a symbol of innocence and purity, and explore how Haneke’s film manipulates and subverts these tropes. I then approach the film using three different theoretical structures: the gaze of the monstrous child in the horror …

Exploring Psychological Territoriality Through The Domestic Gothic In Beloved And Mama Day, Lori L. Cook

English Department Theses

The novels, Beloved, by Toni Morrison, and Mama Day, by Gloria Naylor, contain narratives of families with a history of slavery that explore how their female protagonists claim their identities within the new boundaries of freedom. Using a framework of the Domestic Gothic, this paper explores how formerly enslaved female characters claim new psychological territory in bounded domestic spaces by using the chores they were forced to perform during their times of slavery as a means to independence. Domestic duties such as cooking and gardening along with magical and religious ceremonies and acts of violence are passed down through the …

Strindberg's Miss Julie: An Exploitation Of Genderlect And Liberatory Pedagogy, Jenava Moreau Harris

Theses and Dissertations from 2016

Navigating the complexities of naturalist dramatic literature proves to be a challenge under the best circumstances. How do we attempt to highlight the major themes and tenants of Naturalism through an educational theatre lens? What happens when the show is then double cast due to indecisiveness? How do we handle actors with personal trauma influencing their ability to work with vulnerability and physical contact? These questions and others were answered throughout this master’s thesis production of Miss Julie by August Strindberg. Through a process guided by social research and dramaturgical attention to detail, this director was able to explore a …

Review: Shakespeare’S Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing And Competition In Renaissance Theatre. Janet Clare., Kelly Stage

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic is a fit title for Janet Clare’s investigation of Shakespeare and his theatrical environment. While her subtitle outlines the key practices that underpin her readings of Shakespeare’s plays, their co-texts, and their competition, the idea of traffic best encapsulates the complexity of the relationships that Clare charts. As she writes, Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic may enable “a more conjoined critical study of the plays of the early modern stage — one that will take into account the networks of influence, exchange, and competition of stage traffic that make up the matrix essential for talent to flourish” (267). Her …

Language Evaluation: Classical Arabic Approaches, Abdulkareem Said Ramadan

Interdisciplinary Studies Faculty Publications

This article explores the criteria and standards of literary evaluation as used by linguists in the Arabic literary tradition. Linguists did not apply such standards for instructional purposes only, but they also used them to assess poetic aesthetics. Because poetry was the primary context in which language was assessed, this linguistic evaluation appeared in various forms throughout poetry criticism. For example, giving preference to one poet over another meant the poet had reached a more superior linguistic level according to the standards that linguists followed in their judgments. These standards, which linguists in the Arabic literary tradition used, were not …

Perceval's Sister And Juliet Capulet As Disruptive Guides In Spiritual Quests, Joanna Benskin

Open Access Dissertations

Perceval’s sister in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and Juliet in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet act as disruptive guides in spiritual quests by contradicting the expectations placed on them as women characters.

Though women are banned from the quest for the Holy Grail, Perceval’s sister accompanies the Grail knights as an authoritative spiritual guide and a symbol of the Eucharist. Previous critics have not recognized Perceval’s sister as a fundamental disruption to the systemic misogyny of the Morte or her Eucharistic significance. She challenges both the chivalric misogyny that sees her as an object of rescue and the …

French Women In Art: Reclaiming The Body Through Creation/Les Femmes Artistes Françaises : La Réclamation Du Corps À Travers La Création, Liatris Hethcoat

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The research I have conducted for my French Major Senior Thesis is a culmination of my passion for and studies of both French language and culture and the history and practice of Visual Arts. I have examined, across the history of art, the representation of women, and concluded that until the 20^th century, these representations have been tools employed by the makers of history and those at the top of the patriarchal system, used to control women’s images and thus women themselves. I survey these representations, which are largely created by men—until the 20^th century. I discuss pre-historical …

Staging Famine Irish Memories Of Migration And National Performance In Ireland And Québec, Jason King

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "Staging Famine Irish Memories of Migration and National Performance in Ireland and Québec" Jason King examines recent community theater productions about the Irish Famine migration to Québec in 1847. King explores community-based and national ideas of performance and the role of remembrance in shaping and transmitting the diasporic identities of Québec's Irish cultural minority. While most of the plays re-enact French-Canadian adoptions of Famine orphans as spectacles of Irish integration in Québec, David Fennario's Joe Beef: (A History of Pointe Saint Charles) (1984, published 1991) rehearses the history of the Canadian/Québec nation in terms of recurrent labor exploitation epitomized …

Postcolonial Writing In France Before And Beyond The 2007 Littérature-Monde Manifesto, Myriam Louviot

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Postcolonial Writing in France before and beyond the 2007 Littérature-monde Manifesto" Myriam Louviot discusses the evolution of postcolonial writing in France. She argues that postcolonial writers often face great difficulty in achieving recognition as legitimate French authors. Louviot suggests that restrictive boundaries of categorization have started to become blurred but that it is still too early to rejoice, partly due to the continuing cultural ghettoization of many of these writers and the traditional differentiation of their work from French literature. Louviot discusses in detail the 2007 Pour une "littérature-monde" en français initiated by Michel Le Bris and …

Young People's Literature Of Algerian Immigration In France, Anne Schneider

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Young People's Literature of Algerian Immigration in France" Anne Schneider discusses questions of language, hybridity, and heritage in some works for young people published in France about Algeria and/or Algerian-French identity, by Leïla Sebbar, Jean-Paul Nozière, Azouz Begag, and Michel Piquemal. She argues for the need for an intercultural education at primary school that uses literature about immigration to highlight questions of place, belonging, exile and language. Schneider's focus is on Begag's Un train pour chez nous (2001) and Piquemal's Mon miel, ma douceur (2004). These texts use linguistic hybridity and an emphasis on common human experiences …

Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided for the introduction.

Minor Transnational Writing In Ireland, Borbála Faragó

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Minor Transnational Writing in Ireland" Borbála Faragó investigates the poetic work of some of Ireland's migrant writers through the lens of minor transnationalism. Ireland's peculiar migration history where there are two quite distinct groups of inward migrants, requires careful rethinking of terminology. Faragó proposes to circumnavigate the binary approach of investigating center versus periphery and instead look for lateral connections between marginalized groups. Reading the works of Ireland's internal others brings to the fore issues of authenticity, ethics, and identity that can foreground some of the ambiguities inherent in transnational studies today. Interpreting the oeuvre of these …

Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Twice Heard, Paradoxically (Un)Seen: Walking The Tightrope Of Invisibility In Palestinian Translated Fiction, Mona Nabeel Malkawi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the translators’ invisibility in postcolonial translated Palestinian fiction. On one hand, this analysis revolves around the ethical stance of translators towards authors in a postcolonial theoretical framework. On the other, it brings postcolonial translation scholars’ approaches into practice and examination. Therefore, this study provides a critical analysis of reading novels in translation as both a channel of decolonization from Oriental and imperial discourses and an aesthetic catalyst for freedom in exile, specifically translated by Trevor LeGassick, Elizabeth Fernea, Salma Jayyusi, Adnan Haydar, and Roger Allen. The intriguing paradox of the translator’s invisibility is inherent in the contradiction …

Literary And Theatrical Circulations In The Democratic Republic Of Congo, Rwanda And Burundi, From The Belgian Colonial Empire To The Africa Of The Great Lakes., Maëline Le Lay

Artl@s Bulletin

This article on literary and theatrical circulations in Africa’s Great Lakes region begins by retracing the history of these practices, taking several examples from the colonial period. It then analyzes contemporary modalities of the circulation of texts (via procedures such as reprising narrative patterns and adaptation), and cultural actors, in the different transnational arts networks that are more or less closely tied to the humanitarian sector, or to international cooperation. Finally, it proposes a critical questioning of the concept of artistic circulation.

B-2 Philological Problems In Isaiah 6 – An Investigation Of The Dead Sea Scroll Evidence, Rodrigo G. Barbosa

Celebration of Research and Creative Scholarship

In this paper, I use Moshe Held-Chaim Cohen’s method to try to establish a preferable reading of Isaiah chapter 6 in light of the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS). The importance of the DSS for biblical textual criticism has not been rightly appreciated on the aspect that very few commentaries or critical study of a particular biblical text make use of it. So this work try to make the case of the relevance of the DSS textual evidence in order to establish a preferable variant of the Hebrew Bible.

Cooking, Language, And Memory In Farhoud's Le Bonheur À La Queue Glissante And Thúy's Mãn, Simona Emilia Pruteanu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Cooking, Language, and Memory in Farhoud's Le Bonheur à la queue glissante and Thúy's Mãn" Simona Emilia Pruteanu discusses two moments in the evolution of (im)migrant writing in Québec. Abla Farhoud's 1998 novel shows the struggle of Dounia, a Lebanese immigrant living in Montréal, who in her seventies finds a voice with the help of her daughter's writing and starts to reflect on her identity. Themes of language and cooking overlap and reinforce one another and offer a new perspective on memory and the act of remembering. Language, cooking, and memory also intertwine in Thúy's 2013 …

Fundamentals Of Machine Learning For Neural Machine Translation, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

This paper presents a short introduction to neural networks and how they are used for machine translation and concludes with some discussion on the current research challenges being addressed by neural machine translation (NMT) research. The primary goal of this paper is to give a no-tears introduction to NMT to readers that do not have a computer science or mathematical background. The secondary goal is to provide the reader with a deep enough understanding of NMT that they can appreciate the strengths of weaknesses of the technology. The paper starts with a brief introduction to standard feed-forward neural networks (what …

Barrie's Traditional Woman: Wendy's Fatal Flaw, Charlsie G. Johnson

Oglethorpe Journal of Undergraduate Research

The primary goal of this literary critique of J.M. Barrie’s novel Peter and Wendy, with the utilization of a feminist psychoanalytical approach, is to explore issues such as: Neverland’s perpetuation of patriarchal structures under the guise of a false modernity and Wendy’s inability to achieve modernity through the societal expectations that undermine the freedom within Peter’s Neverland, as well as her inherent tendencies to gravitate to the traditional feminine role. The arguments and conversation of this topic is based upon a close reading of the Centennial Edition of The Annotated Peter Pan, Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, and articles …

The Epic Of Gilgamesh: Selected Readings From Its Original Early Arabic Language. Including A New Translation Of The Flood Story, Saad D. Abulhab

Publications and Research

This book introduces the earliest known literary and mythology work in the world, the Epic of Gilgamesh, in its actual language: early Classical Arabic. It provides a more accurate translation and understanding of the important story of the flood, one of the key stories of the monotheistic religions. In this book, the author was able to decipher the actual meanings and pronunciations of several important names of ancient Mesopotamian gods, persons, cities, mountains, and other entities. He was able to uncover the evolution path of the concept of god and the background themes behind the rise of the monotheistic religions. …