Comparative Literature Commons^™

Travel, Culture, And Society: A Book Review Article Of New Work By Andraş And Tötösy De Zepetnek, Wang, And Sun, Katerina Soumani

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Davis's Poetic Dialogue With Leiris's Autobiography, Jonathan Evans

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Davis's Poetic Dialogue with Leiris's Autobiography" Jonathan Evans analyzes Lydia Davis's translation of the first two parts of Michel Leiris's autobiography, which shows an encounter between two writers. Davis has also written stories which reference Leiris and thus position him as a precursor. Evans proposes that Leiris is not only a source of influence for Davis, but that their texts can be read as a dialogue. Using a methodology that draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Evans shows how Leiris focuses on sound and graphological patterns in order to understand his own conscious and unconscious relationship with words. Davis, …

The Wounded Healer As Cultural Archetype, Galia Benziman, Ruth Kannai, Ayesha Ahmad

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "The Wounded Healer as Cultural Archetype" Galia Benziman, Ruth Kannai, and Ayesha Ahmad discuss the topos of the wounded healer, a concept of an archetypal dynamic coined by Jung to describe a phenomenon which may take place between analyst and analyzed. They examine representations of the archetype in diverse cultures and demonstrate how a reading of its various narratives may enrich our theoretical and practical understanding of the importance of empathy and mutuality in the healing process. The archetype of the wounded healer is valuable in acknowledging cultural diversity, as well as universal parallels between healing practices …

The Notion Of Life In The Work Of Agamben, Carlo Salzani

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Notion of Life in the Work of Agamben" Carlo Salzani analyzes the notion of "nudity" Giorgio Agamben's understanding of Western culture. Beginning with a reading of the essay "Nudity," in which Agamben proposes an archaeological investigation of the theological apparatus of the concept, Salzani analyzes the pivotal trope in Agamben's Homo Sacer project, "bare" or "naked life," that is, the nudity of life in the grip of sovereign power. Nudity and the nudity of life are construed as a "limit-concept" in a double movement of simultaneous positing and negation or in a positing that grants at …

Us-American New Women In Italy 1853-1870, Sirpa A. Salenius

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "US-American New Women in Italy 1853-1870" Sirpa A. Salenius discusses the Italian experience of sculptors such as Harriet Hosmer and Edmonia Lewis, who were independent, career-oriented women studying and working in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century. They were among the most representative New Woman figures who started to challenge US-American society's male-dominant norm and gender-imposed limitations, while reinventing an identity for themselves. Other progressive women, who observed them in Italy, were impressed and influenced by the example of their lives and work. For instance, the influence of Frances Willard's visit to Italy became visible after her return …

National Trauma And The 'Uncanny' In Hage's Novel De Niro's Game, Hany Ali Abdelfattah

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "National Trauma and the 'Uncanny' in Hage's Novel De Niro's Game" Hany Ali Abdelfattah attempts to decipher the "uncanny" in the character of George who has been haunted by the memories of Bassam, a Lebanese survivor of trauma. Rawi Hage's De Niro's Game crystallizes the national trauma of Lebanon and the massacre of Sabra and Shatila as it unfolds in the story of the friendship between George and Bassam. Abdelfattah employs the psychoanalytic method of analysis with a focus on Freudian concepts such as "repression," "belatedness," "effacement," "displacement," and "non-abreaction of experience" in order to trace …

Free Indirect Discourse In Farsi Translations Of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Zohreh Gharaei, Hossein Vahid Dastjerdi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Free Indirect Discourse in Farsi Translations of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway" Zohreh Gharaei and Hossein Vahid Dastjerdi discuss the degree to which free indirect discourse is reproducible in Farsi translations of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Gharaei and Vahid Dastjerdi's analysis reveals that while it is possible to employ free indirect discourse in Farsi, the grammatical features of the technique represent the most problematic areas of translation to Farsi. Although some studies have attributed deviations from the style of the original writer to the structural differences between Farsi and English or domesticating strategies on the part of …

(Dis)Quieting The Canon: A Book Review Article Of New Work By Fishelov And Papadema, Damrosch, And D'Haen, Marta Pacheco Pinto

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Selling The Amish: The Tourism Of Nostalgia, Susan L. Trollinger

English Faculty Publications

In this book, I address these and related question. Although I talk about the Amish, my primary goal is not to describe them. Many others have offered excellent accounts of the Amish, and references to their books and articles can be found in this book's bibliography. Instead, my purpose is to understand Amish Country tourism and, specifically, how it attracts and sustains the interest of millions of visitors each year. The purveyors of Amish Country tourism use a variety of strategies to draw tourists in and give them pleasure during their stay, and I explore those techniques. I focus especially …

The Burden Of Knowing: Camus, Qohelet, And The Limitations Of Human Reason, Justin K. Morgan

Liberty Theological Review

In one of the most influential works of the twentieth century, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus writes this: “This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction.” Here, Camus addresses what he believes to be one of the main sources of the absurd: the limitations of human reason. He claims that his inability to fully understand human reality creates a gap between his existence and its meaning, and, in effect, renders the …

Rachilde, Marguerite Eymery Vallette (1860-1953), Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

This is a biographical overview of the life and principle works of the French author Rachilde, a.k.a. Marguerite Eymery Vallette (1860-1953), one of the few women writers working in the masculinist field of fin-de-siecle or decadent fiction.

Logogenesis And Appraisal: A Systemic Functional Analysis Of English And Japanese Language Arts Textbooks, Shinji Kawamitsu

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate the distinct and purposeful differences of the language of evaluation between English textbooks and Japanese textbooks. This thesis applies Appraisal system in Systemic Functional Linguistics to the language arts textbooks used in 2nd to 4th grade classrooms in Japan and in the U.S. The analysis shows that the number of Attitudinal lexical items, especially invoked Attitude, is notably higher than that in the English texts. The analysis also shows that the Japanese texts employ Judgment lexis, which is a resource to form a sense of group harmony, more than the other Attitudinal …

Who Killed Lycidas?: Lycidas And The Spanish Tragedy, Clay Daniel

Quidditas

In Lycidas, the protagonist searches for an explanation for why his virtuous friend has mysteriously died in a cultural-political landscape of unpunished, thriving, official corruption. Though Renaissance pastoral sometimes inveighed against corrupt authorities, pastoral elegy did not. What models, then, other than the Bible, would Milton have had for the swain’s search? Milton’s headnote calls his poem a monody, which within a literary context primarily is a speech in Greek tragedy. Milton then invites us to read the poem within a dramatic context. But which dramatic context? The Book of Revelation of course is one these contexts. But contemporary …

The Shape Of Catharine Sedgwick's Career, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Catharine Maria Sedgwick published her first novel in 1822 and her last in 1857. Her productivity slackened in the 1850S, as aging weakened her eyesight and arthritis made it difficult to write clearly. However, from 1822 through the 1840s, she published multiple works of prose fiction (tales, sketches, novellas, or novels) nearly every year. Despite this extraordinary record of productivity, Sedgwick regularly appears in literary history as the author of a single work, Hope Leslie (I827), her historical novel about relations between the Puritans and the native inhabitants of New England. A few other women authors before and contemporary with …

“I Just Wikipedia It”: Information Behavior Of First-Year Writing Students, Megan Whitney Olsen, A. R. Diekema

English Faculty Publications

First-year writing students are a very large, diverse, and ubiquitous information user group, as writing courses are typically required of all undergraduate students, regardless of major. While in their institution's writing program, students frequently must utilize research (information) in their writing assignments. While this formal, task-related information behavior is important for stakeholders in the fields of information science and the humanities to understand, little research has been done on this significant group of students. This study arrived at key exploratory findings by collecting data and context from first-year writing students through semi-structured interviews. The researchers found that students continue to …

Front Matter

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Delno C. West Award (2012)

Quidditas

Jessica Winston

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

Hyperreal Blessings: Simulated Relics In The Pardoner’S Tale, Chelsea Henson

Quidditas

This article argues that reading the relics Chaucer’s Pardoner carries through the lens of Jean Baudrillard’s definition of simulacra illustrates the potential existence – and subsequent dangers – of a simulated hyperreality to the spirituality of the fourteenth century. Juxtaposing “The Pardoner’s Prologue” from The Canterbury Tales and Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation lends meaning to both the machinations of Chaucer’s (arguably) most corrupt pilgrim, and to the postmodern idea of simulated realities. Rather than doubles or imitations of an original image or conception of reality, Baudrillard’s simulacra are indistinguishable replacements for the real, as the Pardoner would have us believe …

“A Neighbour, Hedges Haue Eyes, And High-Wayes Haue Eares” Traveling Players, Traveling Spies In 1 Henry Iv And The True Tragedie Of Richard The Third, Robert D. Stefanek

Quidditas

The Elizabethan government used companies of travelling players to serve a number of intelligence functions, which extended to the surveillance of audiences during performances. This surveillance was facilitated by the discursive instabilities of their plays and the architecture of the spaces in which they were performed. Surveillance by travelling players was part of an essentially colonial project in which the crown sought to extend its power and increase its visibility while attempting to fashion a nationalist, pro-Protestant, pro-Tudor identity in the provinces. To consider these dynamics, this article considers two conjectured performances. First, Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV performed by the …

A Fascinating But Frustrating Study Of Marlowe’S Drama And Its Historical Context, Jefferey H. Taylor

Quidditas

Clayton MacKenzie’s Deathly Experiments; A Study of Icons and Emblems of Mortality in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays is a fascinating, but equally frustrating, study of Marlowe’s drama and its historical context. The basic premise, to enrich our reading of Marlowe’s plays through resonance with widely available printed emblems and similar iconic art, is a worthy endeavor, one that follows the impulse to illuminate drama by examining contemporary visual art, and foregrounding the presence of theater as visual communications and enriching sensitivity to the communicative power of image and icon.