Comparative Literature Commons^™

Dante's Linguistic Detail In Shelley's Triumph Of Life, Anita O'Connell

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Dante's Linguistic Detail in Shelley's Triumph of Life" Anita O'Connell analyzes Shelley's attention to detail in Dante's poetic style and presents a close textual analysis of the ways Shelley draws on the beauty of Dante's texts. When Dante's Divine Comedy re-emerged into the public sphere in Britain through Henry Cary's 1814 translation, his reputation was as a stern, dark, Medieval poet and readers and writers alike shared a love of the perceived gothicism particularly of The Inferno. Shelley, however, differed from this general view of Dante: despite the grotesque descriptions in his Triumph of Life …

A Study Of The Early American Author Judith Sargent Murray, Her Role In Early American Print Culture And Her Misappropriation By Twentieth-Century Feminism, Robert Allen Fowler

Master's Theses

In 1798, Judith Sargent Murray published a three-volume collection of one hundred miscellaneous essays on topics ranging from social politesse to women’s education to international politics. Her diligence, forethought and manipulation of pseudonyms in the print-hungry post-Revolutionary America create a unique place for her in the history of American letters. However, in the twentieth century, modern feminism has attempted to claim Murray as one of their own, choosing between one and four examples of her work as proof of her forward-looking philosophy, while ignoring significant pieces of those same works as well as much of her oeuvre as a whole …

Returning The Ticket: Rejecting God In Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov And Hardy's Jude The Obscure, Molly Throgmorton

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Fyodor Dostoevsky and Thomas Hardy both explored the intricacies of the burgeoning spiritual crisis of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in their works. The two most prominent of these works, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Hardy's Jude the Obscure, show the stories of two characters, Ivan and Jude respectively, that choose to reject God. This thesis explores the connection between these two characters, specifically as they represent the two authors' outsider characters. It looks at the reasons behind their rejection, the ways that their rejection plays out in their lives, and the novels' alternatives, namely Christianity and selfless …

Indigenismo In The Mexican Photographs Of Tina Modotti: The Revolutionary And The Indigenista, Shannon Dame

Theses and Dissertations

During Tina Modotti's time in Mexico in the 1920s, much of her photography and political activities focused on and fought for the rights of those who had been previously overlooked and marginalized, namely the indigenous people of Mexico. Many government officials, artists and intellectuals at the time believed that it was through the indigenous culture that Mexico could redeem itself and create its own national identity. Indigenismo, the philosophy that supported this claim, was of interest to Modotti and was a recurring theme throughout her photography. Following the Mexican Revolution of 1910, indigenismo appeared to be the solution to …

Huff, Toby E., Intellectual Curiosity And The Scientific Revolution - A Global Perspective., Laina Farhat-Holzman

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Tom Holland, The Forge Of Christendom: The End Of Days And The Epic Rise Of The West., Laina Farhat-Holzman

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Johnson, Ian, A Mosque In Munich: Nazis, The Cia, And The Rise Of The Muslim Brotherhood In The West., Laina Farhat-Holzman

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Terrorist Or Victim? Comparative Analysis Of The Characters In Jess Walter’S The Zero And Khaled Khalifa’S In Praise Of Hatred, Chloé Tazartez

Re-visioning Terrorism

The characters of Jess Walter’s novel and Khaled Khalifa’s are built as figures of terrorist or victim. According to Bertrand Gervais’ theory, a figure is first of all an object of obsession. The characters of these novels obsess us, questioning our cultural references which permit us to define who represents the terrorist and who represents the victim. Both novels play with these categories, underlining the manipulations of the images through various discourses. This questioning of usual conceptions is built through the use of lost characters, unable to communicate or simply live. These characters illustrate a crisis of the contemporary imaginary …

Totalitarian Threats And Colonial Geography: The Politics Of Defining Terrorism In Beauvoir, Camus, And Dib, Araceli Hernandez-Laroche

Re-visioning Terrorism

Can terrorism be justified as a means for social justice? Can a so-called democratic state engaged in indiscriminate bombardments of civilian populations be held accountable for terrorist acts? How is political crime different from senseless murder? Can and should genocide be defined differently from a civil war operation? Who has the right to decide for the life or death of others?

This paper compares important representations in prose and theater of moral dilemmas that plagued war-torn Europe and France during the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Algerian War. I analyze the complexities and divergences of existential writers …

Intermediality And Aesthetic Theory In Shklovsky's And Adorno's Thought, Oleg Gelikman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Intermediality and Aesthetic Theory in Shklovsky's and Adorno's Thought" Oleg Gelikman places the concept of intermediality in the context of the unresolved conflict between philosophical aesthetics and aesthetic theory. The conflict originated in the response of an influential generation of thinkers to the crisis of the neo-Kantian schools and the emergence of modernism in the 1910s. Despite superficial similarities, aesthetic theory is neither a revamped aesthetics of the subject nor a theoretical vindication of modernism. By severing the connection between subject-object epistemology and theory of artworks, the practitioners of aesthetic theory such as Victor Shklovsky and Theodor …

Intermediality, Translation, Comparative Literature, And World Literature, Erin Schlumpf

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Intermediality, Translation, Comparative Literature, and World Literature" Erin Schlumpf postulates that the study of literature today is best performed in a framework of comparative literature and world literature including intermediality particularly in the case of translated texts. Schlumpf contends that working in comparative and world literature today demands a reexamination of translation and the teaching of works in translation. Following her theoretical postulates, Schlumpf analyzes two films, Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise (1966) and Xiaolu Guo's She, a Chinese (Zhongguo guniang) (2009).

Old And New Medialities In Foer's Tree Of Codes, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Old and New Materialities in Foer's Tree of Codes" Kiene Brillenburg Wurth analyzes how intermediality works — not what it "is" — in the analysis of literary texts. How intermedial can texts "do," precisely when they consist only of words? Do such texts compel us to reconsider literature as a verbal art? Her analysis focuses on a recent book by Jonathan Safran Foer: Tree of Codes (2010), a literary work cut out of the remains of Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles (1934). Brillenburg Wurth points out how intermediality works as a productive interaction not only between …

Intermedial Representations In Asian Macbeth-S, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Intermedial representations in Asian Macbeth-s" I-Chun Wang discusses three Asian versions of Macbeths that exemplify the cultural meanings through the interaction of landscape, body, and spectacles of power. Shakespeare remains one of the most popular playwrights in the Eastern world, and playwrights in the Asian world find Shakespearean plays attractive to the Asian audience. Among Shakespearean plays, Macbeth fascinates its Asian audience with its theme on kingship, territory of social relationships as well as moral and emotional development. These adaptations oftentimes become cross-cultural reproductions because each adapted text manifests not only cross-cultural interpretations but also highlights …

The Spirit Of Matter In Büchner, Barbara Natalie Nagel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Spirit of Matter in Büchner" Barbara Natalie Nagel investigates different vectors of Georg Büchner's materialism: historical, philosophical, ethical, physiological. The analysis of what Büchner presents to be a necessary link between physiology and revolution aims to show how Büchner has a tendency first to entangle two relatively static, binary oppositions — literal/figurative and material/spiritual — in order then to play them against one another. Büchner thus uses the dynamics of literalization to evoke necessity: for example, if the revolution is conceived of in physiological terms, then the will either has to become physiological or biology has …

Musical, Rhetorical, And Visual Material In The Work Of Feldman, Kurt Ozment

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Musical, Rhetorical, and Visual Material in the Work of Feldman" Kurt Ozment compares early and late scores by Morton Feldman and argues that Feldman's interest in the visuality of the score was not limited to his experiments with graphic notation. More specifically, Projection 3 (1951) and String Quartet (II) (1983) suggest that Feldman experimented with notation from beginning to end. Up until the early 1980s, one of Feldman's main strategies for commenting on his music was to refer to painting. In his essay "Crippled Symmetry" and in an interview with the percussionist Jan Williams, Feldman also turns …

Intermediality As Cultural Literacy And Teaching The Graphic Novel, Geert Vandermeersche, Ronald Soetaert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Intermediality as Cultural Literacy and Teaching the Graphic Novel" Geert Vandermeersche and Ronald Soetaert argue for the inclusion of the graphic novel for the teaching of cultural literacy and literature. As the printed book is no longer the sole carrier of cultural literacy, Vandermeersche and Soetaert postulate that literary culture must be repositioned in intermedial culture and practices. In order to do so, Vandermeersche and Soetaert apply Werner Wolf's typology of intermediality, aspects of narratology, and scholarship about comics. Following a theoretical discussion they analyze the graphic novel series The Unwritten, a text that thematizes the …

Songs And Intellectuals: The Musical Projects Of Alain Locke, Alejo Carpentier, And Mário De Andrade, Luiza Franco Moreira

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Smashing The Mirror Of Yamato: Sakaguchi Ango, Decadence & A Postmetaphysical Buddhist Critique Of Culture, James Mark Shields

Faculty Journal Articles

This article focuses on several key philosophical themes in the criticism of Sakaguchi Ango (1906–1955), one of postwar Japan’s most influential and controversial writers. Associated with the underground Kasutori culture as well as the Burai-ha of Tamura Taijirō (1911–1983), Oda Sakunosuke (1913–1947) and Dazai Osamu (1909–1948), Ango gained fame for two provocative essays on the theme of daraku or “decadence”—Darakuron and Zoku darakuron—pubished in 1946, in the wake of Japan’s traumatic defeat and the beginnings of the Allied Occupation. Less well-known is the fact that Ango spent his student years studying classical Buddhist texts in Sanskrit, Pali and …

Digital Humanities In Developed And Emerging Markets, Verena Laschinger

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Digital Humanities in Developed and Emerging Markets" Verena Laschinger discusses the impact e-culture has on humanities pedagogy both in affluent countries and emerging markets. Claiming that e-literacy training generally offers opportunities to recover the traditional agency of the humanities thus catapulting the disciplines into the educational forefront of the creative economy, special attention is given to the chances digital humanities education offers in Turkey’s emerging market economy. Given that technology promotes the country's economic development, which includes a rapidly growing private educational sector, digital humanities education helps citizens to adjust to critical democratic exchange, to facilitate and …

Plotting The Pixel In Remediated Word And Image, Sarah Wyman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Plotting the Pixel in Remediated Word and Image" Sarah Wyman argues that art's historic negotiation of culture continues into the new digital media age as it both asserts the materiality of the medium and acknowledges the impact of embodied perception. She demonstrates that however revolutionary, the new digital media still relate to many traditional paradigms of aesthetic expression. Problems of representation and simulation continue to catch on questions of time, space and human perception. The contingent relationships between categories and entities once kept separate — word/image, observer/observed — determine and define the process of globalization. The new …