Comparative Literature Commons^™

Visual Representations Of Prester John And His Kingdom, Michael E. Brooks

Quidditas

The mythical figure of the priest-king known to late medieval and early modern Europeans as Prester John fascinated literate Europeans for many centuries. Historians have weighed in on textual depictions of the legendary figure, but visual interpretations by European artists of the physical appearance of this eastern potentate have not been examined in any significant depth. These portrayals primarily took the form of map and book illustrations, and this essay examines the evolving visual representations that European artists developed of Prester John. In general, there was a gradual evolution over time in European artistic depictions of the legendary Prester John, …

Public Shaming: Milton And The English People, Courtney O. Carlisle

Quidditas

“Public Shaming: Milton and the English People” discusses the role of shame and its performance in John Milton’s First and Second Defence of the People of England. As Milton attempts to shame Salmasius and More, he focuses on bodies and their relationship to shame. For Milton, shame should be morally productive—it is meant to produce a sense of self-consciousness and an appropriate moral awareness. Milton argues that Salmasius and More are shameless and therefore not self-conscious or morally aware. Involved with shame and self-consciousness is a profound awareness of one’s body and its relationship to others and to the environment. …

The End Of An Era: John E. Wills Jr’S 1688: A Global History As A Capstone, Nikolas O. Hoel

Quidditas

When designing a course, an appropriate question is how to end it. What great primary or secondary source will send students off into the larger academic world, outside the immediate class at hand with a better understanding of the period they had just been studying? The quandary is important in every medieval or early modern course; for example, does one end the medieval survey with Dante or Petrarch, or even Erasmus? The necessity for a capstone is no less great in classes that are entitled “England to 1688,” which populate many university course catalogues today. Many monographs and articles have …

Resolving Exeter Book Riddles 74 And 33: Stormy Allomorphs Of Water, Thomas Klein, William F. Klein, David Delehanty

Quidditas

The following article argues that the idea of the allomorph is a productive way to view two “transformation” riddles from the Old English collection of riddles in the Exeter Book. In the view of the authors, Riddles 74 and 33 should both be solved generally as “water,” and specifically as “in the form of a thunderstorm.” Both riddles dramatize the multiple forms that water may take, and meditate on the divinely-ordained grandeur of the storm and the particular paradox of a thing being both immensely violent and necessary for life on earth. Understanding how these riddles play out these truths …

Was Frederick Barbarossa The First Holy Roman Emperor?, Thomas Renna

Quidditas

Frederick Barbarossa (1152-90) was the first German emperor—later to be called the Holy Roman Emperor—who gave considerable attention to the three terms of the imperial title. His own registers and contemporary chronicles reveal frequent references to the three components of both his title and the Holy Roman Empire. I argue that Barbarossa was the first to attempt to integrate them into the German traditions of the empire, in particular the method of electing the king of the Romans, the historical ties with Charlemagne, and the concept of the empire as an amalgam of smaller principalities. He was the first to …

John Bale’S Kynge Johan As English Nationalist Propaganda, G. D. George

Quidditas

John Bale is generally associated with the English Reformation rather than the Tudor government. It may be that Bale’s well-know protestant polemics tend to overshadow his place in Thomas Cromwell’s propaganda machine, and that Bale’s Kynge Johan is more a propaganda piece for the Tudor monarchy than it is just another of his Protestant dramas..

Delno C. West Award Winner (2014)

Quidditas

David Strong

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

The Reality Of Utopian And Dystopian Fiction: Thomas More's Utopia And Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Casey Holliday

Honors Theses

The purpose of this research is to explore the different methods that Thomas More's Utopia and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale utilize to create a compliant population, while also situating each in their appropriate historical context to draw on the authorial intentions. Different commonalities of the various definitions of utopia and dystopia are explored to form a framework to work within, and the two works are analyzed in relation to political theories set forth by Michel Foucault: the power over life and death in Utopia and the deployment of sexuality in The Handmaid's Tale. Both are used to enforce subjugation, …

Literatura Sobre La Frontera Norte Mexicana: Comparación Y Análisis Del Discurso Pragmático, Emily Celeste Vázquez Enríquez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

En este trabajo se comparan cuatro novelas que incluyen a la frontera del norte de México entre sus páginas. El punto de diferencia del cual la comparación parte es el origen de los autores. Lo anterior se debe a que en la tradición del trabajo crítico que ha intentado entender y definir la literatura de la zona, uno de los principales puntos de debate refiere al cuestionamiento de si importa la pertenencia de los escritores al lugar narrado. Mientras hay críticos y académicos que afirman que las obras de la literatura norfronteriza mexicana son únicamente aquéllas escritas por autores de …

¡No Contaban Con Mi Astucia! México: Parodia, Nación Y Sujeto En La Serie Televisiva De El Chapulín Colorado, Carlos Aguasaco

Publications and Research

¡No contaban con mi astucia! México: parodia, nación y sujeto en la serie televisiva de ‘El Chapulín Colorado’ (Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, 2014) es un estudio revolucionario del impacto y la efectividad residual de la literatura del Siglo de Oro y el periodo colonial en la producción audiovisual de Latinoamérica en el siglo veinte. El trabajo de Roberto Gómez Bolaños (creador de El Chapulín Colorado) se transmite hoy en día tanto en el formato original como en series animadas en varios canales de USA. El público norte americano y la academia están presenciando la consolidación de los estudios audiovisuales …

Postcolonialismo, Subalternità E New Italian Epic: Intervista Con Wu Ming 1, Simone Brioni Dr.

Department of English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

[Introduction To] Escrituras A Ras De Suelo: Crónica Latinoamericana Del Siglo Xx, Marcela Aguilar, Claudia Darrigrandi, Mariela Méndez, Antonia Viu

Bookshelf

El proyecto de publicar una colección de artículos sobre la crónica latinoamericana aparecida en el siglo xx, principalmente entre 1930 y 1970, intenta hacerse cargo de una producción mucho menos estudiada que la crónica modernista o que la crónica de las últimas décadas, problematizando las definiciones y fundamentos que se le han atribuido al género a partir de esas tradiciones. Más que una nueva revisión de tales concepciones de la crónica, lo que el lector encontrará en los escritos agrupados en las distintas secciones de este libro son elementos parciales y problemas concretos que surgen en muy distintos contextos y …

Decadent Wealth, Degenerate Morality, Dominance, And Devotion: The Discordant Iconicity Of The Rich Mountain Of Potosí, Claudia A. Cornejo Happel

Publications

The rich mountain of Potosí, with its famed silver mines, has commanded the attention of Europeans, creoles (Americans of Spanish descent), and indigenous Andeans since the Spanish colonizers of Peru were made aware of its existence in 1545. Soon after its discovery, the rich mountain was represented in a variety of written and visual texts created by writers and artists from the Andes, Spain, and other parts of Europe. Independent of its physical form, in these representations the rich mountain assumed a discursive meaning, functioning as an icon that, depending on the context, represented abstract ideas of wealth, immorality, dominance, …

World Literatures In Secondary School Curricula In Iran, Massih Zekavat

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "World Literatures in Secondary School Curricula in Iran" Massih Zekavat argues that the inclusion and teaching of works of world literature is significant at the secondary school level because it introduces students to a dialogic and polyphonic world where difference is appreciated. Further, Zekavat posits that the pedagogical use of reading world literatures would be the case in particular in countries and cultures where essentialist and homogenizing objectives and practices of culture prevail. Zekavat's argumentation is based on the recent revival of Goethe's concept of Weltliteratur in the U.S. as a pedagogical tool and practice of reading …

Comparative Literature In Chinese: A Survey Of Books Published 2000-2013, Miaomiao Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Variation Theory And Comparative Literature: A Book Review Article About Cao's Work, Ning Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Comparative Literature, (Comparative) Cultural Studies, Aesthetic Education, And The Humanities, Sonja Stojmenska-Elzeser

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Comparative Literature, (Comparative) Cultural Studies, Aesthetic Education, and the Humanities" Sonja Stojmenska-Elzeser discusses comparative literature in the context of cultural studies and aesthetic education. Her starting point is the complexity of comparative literature as an academic discipline propelled by intellectual curiosity for what lies across the barriers which stand in the way of understanding and enjoying creative acts of all kinds everywhere and at all times. Literary and artistic investigations which focus on aesthetic values lead us towards general aesthetics, analyses which situate the arts and literature in context with little regard for aesthetic criteria take us …

European Comparative Literature As Humanism, Bernard Franco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "European Comparative Literature as Humanism" Bernard Franco presents an epistemological reflection on comparative literature in the context of the evolution of the relationships between different forms of knowledge. Franco argues that in the late nineteenth century the notion of the "humanities" replaced that of the "human sciences," but that we have recently returned to a humanist concept of knowledge linked to ethics. Franco focuses on the origins of this critical reflection about the nature of knowledge and on the debate in the Romantic period between rational and non-rational forms of knowledge. The idéologues (Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy, …

Literary Aspects In New Media Art Works, Narvika Bovcon

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Literary Aspects in New Media Art Works" Narvika Bovcon discusses examples of new media literature in the works of new media artists Jaka Železnikar and Srečo Dragan. While Železnikar is primarily a net artist who authors new media poetry and online linguistic interventions, the literary segments in Dragan's work are based in conceptual art and video art and he uses them to initiate a happening. Bovcon argues that studies of new media literature — of those works which require a readerly perception — should take time and attempt to capture the general flavor of such works which …

Artaud, Barney, And The Total Work Of Art From Avant-Garde To The Posthuman, Matteo Colombi, Massimo Fusillo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Artaud, Barney, and the Total Work of Art from Avant-Garde to the Posthuman" Matteo Colombi and Massimo Fusillo discuss the aesthetics of Matthew Barney's video-performance art and the theater of Antonin Artaud. Colombi and Fusillo highlight the characteristics of the posthuman: the rejection of Western anthropocentrism and its subversion through hybridization with human, animal, and mechanical elements, the incorporation of Dionysian imagery of the body, and a commitment to the idea of the total work of art in its blending of different artistic mediums, and indeed, of art and life. Using examples from Artaud's writings on theater, …