Comparative Literature Commons^™

Conference Report: Romola And Felix, Institute Of English Studies, 23 November 2013., A.G. Van Den Broek

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's two Marmite novels - given their reputations, not everyone tries them, and when they do, they often leave them only partially digested - Romola (1862-3), the one she famously said aged her, and Felix Holt (1866), the one with that involved legal plot, were the focus of last year's George Eliot Conference sponsored by the Institute of English Studies at the University of London. Nevertheless, despite their uneven appeal, the Conference drew a tolerably-sized audience. Barbara Hardy (Birkbeck and Swansea) and Louise Lee (Roehampton) once again organized the Conference, bringing together a group of speakers who variously dealt …

Blood And Water: Unity In The Gospel Of John (1), Matthew G. Ancell, Dr. V. Stanley Benfell

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The stated purpose of the Gospel of John is that the reader or hearer “may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name” (20.31) (2). Regardless of whether the Fourth Gospel is written to a community of believers or to convert the unbelieving, as is debated, this verse points to life through Jesus Christ as the focus of the book. Each of the four Gospels offers a testimony of Jesus as the Christ. Culminating in the passion and resurrection narratives, each version presents a unique …

Carmen De Bello Actiaco (Pherc 817): The Illumination Of A Two Thousand Year-Old Papyrus With A 21st Century Eureka, Stewart Tanner, Dr. Roger Macfarlane

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The days when scholars of the Classics refuted the ability of technology to contribute to their discipline are a memory of the past. From archaeology to papyrology the study of the Ancients through the lens of tomorrow advances daily. Such was my experience with the revolutionary breakthrough of multi-spectral imaging (MSI) on a remnant from the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D.: A charred, millennia-old piece of papyrus (PHerc 817) from Herculaneum, Italy treating the famous Battle of Actium in 31 B.C. From Provo to Palo Alto, from Naples to Oxford, the ORCA Grant provided me with the necessary …

Liu Yuxi In The Paradox Of The Sign, Kyle David Anderson, Dr. Steven P. Sondrup

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Western perspectives on Chinese literature and poetics have generally been overly mystified (or even nonexistent). This fledgling view of the knowledge and literary achievements of China is to be anticipated during the beginnings of a cultural exchange between the East and the West.

Something Written In The State Of Denmark: Contemporary Danish Literature, Kevin C. Brimhall, Dr. Steven Sondrup

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The works of such well-known authors as H.C. Andersen and Karen Blixen are relatively accessible in the original Danish, but have the disadvantage of failing to reflect contemporary spellings, syntax, and word usage common in present-day Danish. Like all languages, Danish is constantly changing and the passage of over a century has certainly left its mark on Danish literature. Unlike, older Danish works, contemporary Danish literary works are relatively hard to come by, which poses a problem for those interested in learning Danish as its written and spoken today. Consequently, the purpose of this project was to compile and supplement …

A Downright Dilemma For Danish Ducklings: The Development Of Additional Instructional Resources For Byu’S Danish Program, George Bailey, Dr. Steven Sondrup

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Danish is an important language for many who wish to make a study of family history and genealogy. Opportunities to learn Danish are very rare, and BYU is one of only several universities in the United States that offers courses in Danish. Due to this scarce availability of Danish classes, resources for Danish teaching and learning are likewise difficult to come by. To this point in time, BYU has been using Danish for Ducklings for its first-year course. However, this textbook not only has an insufficient amount of material to cover the first year, but it is also geared towards …

The Influence Of Dorothea Lange On American Culture, Heather Heyman, Dr. Allen J. Christenson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

When America experienced the Great Depression during the 1930’s, a large number of people struggled to survive each day. Countless men and women were unemployed, and therefore, had no means of providing for their families. The migrant workers of the west were hit the hardest, and their former lives of simplicity became a serious fight for existence. At this same time, however, a portrait photographer in San Francisco, named Dorothea Lange, captured city conditions with her camera. Out of curiosity and boldness, Lange began to take pictures of citizens in San Francisco. These photographs documented the results of the chaotic …

Baroque Influence In Tongan Church Music, Sara Black, Dr. Larry Shumway

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In Tongan culture, music is very much a part of the natural expression of the people. In the Western tradition, musical experience is often limited to a setting in which an isolated group of performers presents a work to the general public, who observe as an outside audience. In Tongan culture, members of the general public are both audience and performer. Large groups of people are gathered together to present a work of both music and dance. In this setting, performance is not so much dependent upon isolated skills developed by a few, but it is a more democratic experience …

Navigating 18th Century Haiku: Translating The Poetry Of Yosa Buson, Allan Persinger

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

One of the difficulties in translating the poetry of Yosa Buson, an 18th century Japanese poet and painter is negotiating the cultural differences between time and place, and still writing a translation that moves the audience within the limits of a haiku without doing any violence to the original text. My presentation is on the difficulties in translating a literary master from the Edo Era, Yosa Buson, especially when the poems contain embedded cultural references that the average American reader would not be familiar with as it is important to convey all of the information in a meaningful way and …

Turning Into A Shadow: Textual Management Of Sexual Violence In Taketori Monogatari, Otilia C. Milutin

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

This paper is an integral part of an ongoing doctoral research which examines the varied textual representations of sexual violence in Heian and Kamakura monogatari. The first part of this dissertation, opening with the section presented here, addresses the three mid-ninth to mid-tenth century texts, Taketori, Utsuho and Ochikubo monogatari, whose representations or misrepresentations of sexual violence shaped Murasaki Shikibu’s own, in the eleventh century Genji monogatari.

The present study focuses on the Taketori text and its management of sexual violence; it traces the work’s textual lineage and underlines the consistent and sustained attempts to sanitize its content …

Henry David Thoreau: Perpetuating The Myth Of Paradoxical Environmentalism, Rachelle Koenen, Dr. Kerry Soper

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The knowledge that I have of Thoreau began with an interest early in my life, developed into a Thesis Proposal one year ago, and intensified with research at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. In addition to the research I did there, I also spent upwards of 40 hours reading and talking with professors about this man. Initially I wanted to discover the “true” Thoreau—find out what he was really saying and disprove all other theories—but I quickly realized that the subject was too complex and that at best all I could to would be to present the complexity and do …

Herculaneum Disegni, Nick Frederick, Julie Frederick, Dr. Roger T. Macfarlane

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Thanks to the BYU multi-spectral images, scholars around the world have been able to access the Herculaneum scrolls without having to travel to Naples. Those images greatly facilitated scholarship by both their readability and availability. Because of the availability of the multi-spectral images, the necessity and benefit of having other related resources available in digital from became apparent.

Willa Cather, Edith Lewis, And Collaboration: The Southwestern Novels Of The 1920s And Beyond, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In Willa Cather: A Memoir, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant makes Edith Lewis, with whom Cather shared a home for nearly four decades, a relatively minor character in Cather’s life, and yet occasionally, Lewis moves to the forefront. Describing Cather’s “personal life” in the 1920s, Sergeant notes that when she visited their Five Bank Street apartment,

Edith Lewis, who now worked at the J. Walter Thompson Company, was always at dinner. One realized how much her companionship meant to Willa. A captain, as Will White of Emporia said … must have a first officer, who does a lot the captain never knows …

Megacities: A Survey And Prognosis, Laina Farhat-Holzman

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

David J. Rosner, Conservatism And Crisi, The Anti-Modernist Perspective In Twentieth-Century German Philosophy., Laina Farhat-Holzman

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Course Syllabus (Fa13) Coli 211 Literature & Psychology: "Power, The Subject, And Technological Rationality", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description and Objectives:

In this course, we will examine mechanisms of power and the processes by which these produce categories of subjectivity. Theoretically speaking, we will begin by considering these processes at the level of society and then dwell on their human experience at the level of the psyche. Here, we will aim to discover processes by which the subject reproduces conditions of domination by power at the level of psychic experience. Power-practices assume their condition of possibility by positing, on the one hand, that the category of the subject is a priori existent and, on the other, that …

Europe As A Civilization: The Revolution Of The Middle Ages & The Rise Of The Universities, Toby E. Huff

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Richard Lynn And Tatu Vanhanen, Intelligence: A Unifying Concept For The Social Sciences., Michael Andregg

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

“An Imperialism Of The Imagination”: Muslim Characters And Western Authors In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Robin K. Miller

Student Publications

This paper specifically discusses the cultural attitudes that made writing fully realized Muslim characters problematic for Western authors during the 19th and 20th centuries and also how, through their writing, certain authors perpetuated these attitudes. The discussed authors and works include William Beckford's Vathek, Lord Byron's poem “The Giaour,” multiple short stories from the periodical collection Oriental Stories, one of Hergé's installments of The Adventures of Tintin, and E.M. Hull's novel The Sheik. Three “types” of Muslim characters emerge in these works: the good, the bad, and the white. All three reflect Western attitudes towards the East as a place …

Digitization Of Neapolitan Disegni For The Byu Herculaneum Papyrus, Seth M. Reynolds, Dr. Roger Macfarlane

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In 1999 CPART began working with the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples to create a database of the unique materials which they possessed. These are the remains of the papyri which were found in the archaeological excavations of Herculaneum. Herculaneum was a town along the Bay of Naples which was destroyed in the same eruption that buried Pompeii. However, the eruption destroyed these two towns in different ways. Whereas Pompeii was buried in layers of pumice and ash, Herculaneum was buried in a super-heated landslide known as a pyroclastic flow. These different modes of destruction led to different modes of preservation. …