Comparative Literature Commons^™

Advocating For Mother Earth In The Undergraduate Classroom: Uniting Twenty-First Century Technologies, Local Resources, Art, And Activism To Explore Our Place In Nature, Christina Triezenberg, Ilse Schweitzer Vandonkelaar

The Hilltop Review

Despite the growing evidence of humanity’s impact on the natural world and the urgent need to shape citizens who understand the impact that their choices and actions have on their local and global environments, colleges and universities throughout the United States have been slow to add environmental education as a core component of their undergraduate curricula. Harnessing our shared interest in environment issues and the humanities, we designed and taught an experimental course in environmental literature for the honors program at Western Michigan University that we hope will become a template of what is possible in postsecondary environmental education. Using …

“Über Die Liebe”: Love And Sex According To Eduard Von Keyserling, Caroline Urvater

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation is built around an annotated translation of Eduard von Keyserling’s 1907 essay, “Über die Liebe.” The author’s citations are often made from memory and consequently, are not always entirely accurate. This fact is discussed and inaccuracies are corrected.

Chapter One begins with an overview of the historical background of the Keyserling family. It includes biographical material that describes the author’s life and experiences, and introduces his illustrious forbears. It also points to the writers and philosophers who influenced the author’s thinking.

Chapter Two, a review of the literature, discusses some of the dissertations, articles and books that were …

Crossing Boundaries: The Transnational Third Space Of Contemporary Chinese-Francophone Writers, Paula S. Delbonis-Platt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the past two decades, a group of Chinese writers who pen their works in French, their adopted language, have garnered prizes in France and received international acclaim. The transnational voices of these writers have drawn attention to Chinese history, literature, and human-rights issues, as well as to their own diverse intersections with French culture. The four Francophone-Chinese writers studied—François Cheng (b. 1929), Gao Xingjian (b. 1940), Dai Sijie (b. 1954), and Shan Sa (b. 1972)—constitute themselves as subjects at least partially through their Chinese birth and French citizenship or residency and through the production of literary works that range …

Transatlantic Surrealisms, Imagined Homelands, And The Poetry Of Paul Laraque, Maxine C. Anderson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Many theoretical treatments of Caribbean and Latin American surrealism(s), most notably Fredric Jameson and Alejo Carpentier’s foundational essays on magical realism, argue that the surrealism of the European metropole is a sophisticated avant-garde movement, in contrast to the blunt tool of Caribbean and Latin American surrealism which reaches back toward a precolonial past in order to bolster a nationalist project. Existing critical writing about Paul Laraque, a Haitian poet and surrealist identifies Laraque as Haitian first and foremost: as a political poet using surrealism solely in support of a nationalist project. This reading of Laraque’s work fails to reckon with …

Fragmentation And Multiplicity In Cuban-American Identity: In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd By Ana Menéndez And Memory Mambo By Achy Obejas, Daimys E. Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Maria Lugones offers a new way of perceiving the world, which makes visible that fragmentation is not a valuable and transgressive understanding of identity, as Western philosophy and some political theory suggests. What Lugones believes in, as a strategy of resistance to the dominant gaze, is multiplicity – mestizaje. Using Lugones’s framework, this thesis will look at the different aspects of Cuban-American characters in In Cuba I was a German Shepherd by Ana Menéndez and Memory Mambo by Achy Obejas. Each novel offers insight into how characters develop and understand themselves (and others) when they use language that shows that …

Classical-Christian Friendship Operating In Western Literature: Oral Traditions To The Apex Of Print Culture, Marc G. Levasseur

Ph.D. Dissertations (Open Access)

The classical-Christian model of friendship has operated for many centuries from oral traditions and through the age of print. However, technological developments in communication and media rearrange mindscapes. Consequently, values, or, those things that give meaning, can change, such as perceptions of friendship. If one accepts that communication is vital to human relationships, the paradigm for the classical-Christian friendship should operate according to the new vocabulary of expanding communication and media possibilities. This work examines literature and philosophical thought within their historical contexts in order to gauge the operation of the classical-Christian friendship model from the beginning of Western literature …

La Littérature Africaine Francophone Et La Théorie Bourdieusienne De Champ Symbolique, Louis Bertin Amougou

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic fields as a social arena for rivalries between agents for the capture, accumulation or conservation of capitals of its own is now implemented with the same rigor to African literature as to French literature which served as the material for the French sociologist. Yet, the specific characteristics of African literary production make it a weak institution. The present article is an attempt to put in perspective the relevance of Bourdieu’s studies to an insufficiently autonomous literary institution and holds the point that any literary field is a secondary field.

Introduction To New Work In The Empirical Study Of Literature And Culture, Aldo Nemesio

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Toward An Aesthetics Of Adaptation In Empirical Research, Marion Behrens, Christian Kell, Pascal Nicklas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Toward an Aesthetics of Adaptation in Empirical Research" Marion Behrens, Christian Kell, and Pascal Nicklas discuss the requirements and potential of empirical research into the reception of adaptations: adaptation is one key strategy in the creation of literature and art in general. The creative process and product of adaptation has its counter-part on the side of reception. Empirical research into the aesthetics of adaptation aims at the experimental elucidation of the physiological background and the establishment of a model describing the perceptual underpinnings of the act of seeing an adaptation as adaptation. This implies evolutionary biological reasoning …

Methodological Reflections On Investigating The Reception Of Fiction In Public Spaces, Katarina Eriksson Barajas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Methodological Reflections on Investigating the Reception of Fiction in Public Spaces" Katarina Eriksson Barajas discusses how to find and approach research participants in public spaces. Eriksson Barajas's study is based on tenets of the empirical study of literature. Reader response and reception theories and discursive psychology are both employed in the analysis. This approach, called discursive reception studies, enables researchers to analyze the role of social interaction in the co-construction of the experience of, in this case, a film or a play. Eriksson Barajas discusses the following methodological issues: 1) how to gain access to "naturally" occurring …

Young Adults In Sweden On Reading Literary Fiction In Print And Electronic Media, Skans Kersti Nilsson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Young Adults in Sweden on Reading Literary Fiction in Print and Electronic Media" Skans Kersti Nilsson analyses 16-25 year old young adults' reflections on the reading of fiction in printed books versus electronic media. In Nilsson's study focus group interviews were conducted to gauge how conversations on the importance of reading literary fiction develop inside and outside the learning environment of school. The results suggest that young adults derive benefit from reading fiction and that they think this activity yields more benefits than reading fiction on electronic media or viewing filmed literature. Results also suggest that participants …

The Indirect Path To The Literary Canon Exemplified By Shelley's Frankenstein, David Fishelov

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Indirect Path to the Literary Canon Exemplified by Shelley's Frankenstein" David Fishelov examines the indirect path of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to the literary canon. Fishelov offers a multi-dimensional model for describing the dynamic process of acquiring, maintaining, and changing canonical status. The model emphasizes the important role played by artistic dialogues and echoes that certain works initiate or inspire in other authors and artists in the form of allusion, homage, parody, and adaptation. The data introduced in the article suggest that the popular cinematic versions of Frankenstein probably not only played a mediating role but …

Toward An Empirically-Generated Typology Of Weblog Genres, Maciej Maryl, Krzysztof Niewiadomski, Maciej Kidawa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Toward an Empirically-generated Typology of Weblog Genres" Maciej Maryl, Krzysztof Niewiadomski, and Maciej Kidawa propose a typology of weblog genres based on empirical data, namely on the analysis of metadata and the study of blogs' content. In Study 1 they explore 287 categories used by Polish bloggers to classify their blogs. The analysis shows that most categories are topical, but some could be useful for genre analyses. In Study 2 they analyse "syntagma" combinations of 2-3 categories assigned to 88 252 blogs on one of the Polish blog platforms. Through quantitative analysis and clustering 3 main groups …

Bibliography Of Contextual (Systemic And Empirical) Approaches In The Study Of Literature And Culture, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Audience Response And From Film Adaptation To Reading Literature, Klaudia H.Y. Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Audience Response and from Film Adaptation to Reading Literature" Klaudia H.Y. Lee analyses results from 3000-plus interview conducted across university campuses in Hong Kong in order to investigate the roles of screen adaptations and their intertextual relationship for developing students' critical textual practice. Lee combines reader-response theory (Iser and Rosenblatt) with empirical data to explore students' actual encounters and experience with texts. While the data suggests an influence of screen adaptations on students' choice and motivation of reading, this interest can potentially be developed into a critical awareness of the various intertextual possibilities that exist in different …

Empirical Research And Practice-Oriented Physics For The Humanities And Sciences, István Berszán

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Empirical Research and Practice-oriented Physics for the Humanities and Sciences" István Berszán proposes an empirical approach for the humanities and sciences he designates as "practice-oriented physics." He bases his argumentation on Albert-László Barabási's network theory applied and question tenets of complexity, networks, and spaces. Further, Berszán elaborates on the affinity between the spaces of practical orientation and the spaciousness of parallel worlds as explicated in Brian Green's string theory. Berszán posits that because the universe as "symphony" of string oscillations leads to parallel rhythms of happenings and their different spaces of motion and argues that this kind …

Fictionality And The Empirical Study Of Literature, Torsten Pettersson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Fictionality and the Empirical Study of Literature" Torsten Pettersson surveys three types of studies and argues for research which disentangles fictionality from other aspects of literariness. Pettersson conceptualizes the basic paradoxical phenomenon that made-up stories can influence readers' perceptions of the real world and presents an empirical study of the impact of fictionality based on a five-page narrative presented to two groups of young Swedish readers as an extract from an autobiography and a novel, respectively. A questionnaire elicited reactions to the narrative, as well as attitudes to fictionality and to literary reading in general. Results include …

Teaching Literature Through Online Discussion In Theory And Practice, Monica Manzolillo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Teaching Literature through Online Discussion in Theory and Practice" Monica Manzolillo focuses on the teaching of literature at the university through on-line discussion. Integrating discussion-based techniques with the predominant lecture mode is necessary because we need to modify students' merely receptive attitude, and help them develop the fundamental skills of reading, interpreting, and criticizing literary texts. Compared to live discussions, electronic communication has the advantage of providing a more relaxed atmosphere where social conventions are less important and this encourages positive interaction among students. Manzolillo illustrates the experimental use of the website Learning Literature http://www.learningliterature.it/ as support …

Paratexts In Travel Blogs, Travel Books' Hypertextuality, And Medial Format Usage, Stefano Calzati

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Paratexts in Travel Blogs, Travel Books' Hypertextuality, and Medial Format Usage" Stefano Calzati compares a number of contemporary travel books and travel blogs. Calzati's objective is to promote a bridging approach between the digital and the analogue that goes beyond their differences. He posits a critique socio-linguistics where online multimodal texts are analyzed by identifying layers of analysis. Against these compositional models, Calzati suggests a double move: on the one hand, he applies Gérard Genette's notion of "paratext" to travel blogs and on the other he extends the concept of "hypertextuality" to travel books. From his analyzis …

Uncanny Bodies In Sacred Settings: Creating The Divine In Rodney Smith's Photography, Rebecca Leigh Langham

Theses and Dissertations

The photographer Rodney Smith shows us images of real things and people, but real things and people that aren’t positioned in real ways and places people would actually be. Instead, he uses something very familiar to each of us–the human body–and consistently puts it in very unfamiliar situations. By using something so intimately familiar to each of us as the body in weird ways, he automatically jars our own experienced sensations. And this jarring of familiar sensations, this defamiliarization of something so familiar to us, is what typically results in what literary critics term the feeling of the uncanny. What …