Comparative Literature Commons^™

Hermeneutics Of The Crossroads, Jacqueline S. Farritor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The main question posed in my thesis is whether or not the crossroads is a paradigm that might open the event of reading and interpretation. I believe this profound place of possibility is a valid intellectual model for innovative and uninhabited modes of understanding. The hermeneutics of the crossroads is an imaginative approach that keeps us open to the transformative power of literature transpiring when we bring to the text our working scholarly knowledge, but also allow ourselves to receive what it has to offer us.

Using the crossroads theory of surrendering and receiving, I have interpreted Gayl Jones's novel, …

Modern Migration In Two Arabic Novels, Ikram Masmoudi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Modern Migration in Two Arabic Novels" Ikram Masmoudi proposes that twentieth-century Arab fiction is marked by the theme of the journey in literal and figurative ways. This motif features the theme of departure and arrival through characters crossings borders from East to West and from the periphery to the center (i.e., the metropolis) in order to acquire knowledge, understanding, and empowerment and to get a sense of Western modernity. The departure and arrival of the main characters becomes the central aesthetic preoccupying with a focus on their arrival back home and their rediscovery of their own idea …

Introduction To New Modernities And The "Third World", Valerian Desousa, Jennifer E. Henton, Geetha Ramanathan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Modernizing The Colonial Labor Subject In India, Valerian Desousa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Modernizing the Colonial Labor Subject in India" Valerian DeSousa discusses how the colonial project in India sought to counter the labor movement's evolving anti-colonial consciousness through law, the primary signifier of British dominance. DeSousa argues that colonial labor law was an instrument of "governmentality," a way of deploying the authority of the state, both in India and in Africa where the law encoded meanings of property and subjectivity. In India, labor law was the means to "reconstruct" the "traditional" worker and to constitute a "modern" and "efficient" labor subject to fit into the new industrial vision taking …

Aesthetics, Nationalism, And The Image Of Woman In Modern Indian Art, Kedar Vishwanathan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Aesthetics, Nationalism, and the Image of Woman in Modern Indian Art" Kedar Vishwanathan discusses how developments in visual culture impacted India's configuration as nation. Between 1880-1945 in Bombay (Mumbai) and Calcutta (Kolkata) a burgeoning visual culture developed in service of anti-colonial nationalism. Used as a method to imagine a nation free of colonial rule, in particular images of women proliferated in private and public spaces. Crucial to this development was the reformulations of modernity based on an ambivalent combination of British and Indian vernacular art. Vishwanathan focuses on how the female was appropriated for the cause of …

Robert Clive And Imperial Modernity, Nigel Joseph

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Robert Clive and Imperial Modernity" Nigel Joseph analyzes the work of Robert Clive by postulating the questions of why Clive would be emblematic of the bleak modernity of Tocqueville, Weber, and Foucault? Rapacious yet docile, personally ambitious yet capable of curbing ambition in others, Clive seems to be an anomalous figure. Joseph posits that Clive's career is a metaphor for both the trajectory of the imperial state and for the imperial subject. In order to retain his Indian-derived wealth, Clive is forced into a series of paradoxical postures: beginning as the archetypal private marauder, he transforms himself …

Nordestina Modernity In The Novels Of Freitas, Queiroz, And Lispector, Fernanda Patricia Fuentes Muñoz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Nordestina Modernity in the Novels of Freitas, Queiroz, and Lispector" Fernanda Patricia Fuentes Muñoz discusses aspects of the Nordeste — the northeastern region of Brazil — in Emília de Freitas's A Rainha do Ignoto (1899), Rachel de Queiroz's O Quinze (1930), and Clarice Lispector's A Hora da Estrela (1977; The Hour of the Star, 1992, Trans. Giovanni Pontiero). The region has traditionally been seen as located on the margins of modernity and as a site of underdevelopment in the Brazilian imaginary in opposition to the affluent Southeastern region. The construction of this binary opposition suggests a model …

Modernity In Márquez And Feminism In Ousmane, Geetha Ramanathan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Modernity in Márquez and Feminism in Ousmane" Geetha Ramanathan analyzes Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Sembène Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood. Ramanthan argues that if Márquez presents the semblance of the signs of modernity as fantasy and delusion, Ousmane's investment in the train as an instrument of the future in realist terms seems to challenge the modernist dictum that imperialism can be challenged only through modernist decenterings and through tricking and trumping. Yet, Ousmane's refusal to engage in the hallucination of the modern in his novel offers us a version of modernity that …

Danticat's The Dew Breaker, Haiti, And Symbolic Migration, Jennifer E. Henton

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Danticat's The Dew Breaker, Haiti, and Symbolic Migration" Jennifer E. Henton analyzes Edwidge Danticat's novel with Lacanian thought. It is assumed frequently that literatures of the non-West "arrive" when they move from political and didactic traditions to the "aesthetic" and experimental models that delve into the terrain of the psyche. In The Dew Breaker, the Haitian family's move to the U.S., executed self consciously, indicates loss in a different sense than lack. In the case of Denticat's novel, loss or lack represent not a source of anxiety that evokes matters read in a psychoanalytical framework; instead, Henton …

New Modernity, Transnational Women, And Spanish Cinema, Maria Van Liew

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "New Modernity, Transnational Women, and Spanish Cinema" Maria Van Liew discusses aspects of migration to Spain in the context of histories of colonialism, racism, and sexism as represented in Spanish filmic narration. The flow of human traffic defies two aspects of European modernity: Non-linear time is reflected in the cycle of arrival/return/return as the nation relies on liminal subjects to determine its status as a progressive "First World" nation and in the effort to align representations of these cultural encounters accordingly, illusions of autochthonous national identity formations become dependent on practices of inclusion and, at times, cooptation …

Political Modernism, Jabrā, And The Baghdad Modern Art Group, Nathaniel Greenberg

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Political Modernism, Jabrā, and the Baghdad Art Group" Nathaniel Greenberg discusses how the art and literature of the late Palestinian novelist Jabrā Ibrahīm Jabrā challenged the normative perception of Arab modernism both within and outside the Middle East. Greenberg evaluates the influence of French existentialism on Jabrā's political vision of modernism and discusses the impact and nature of existentialism on Jabrā and on the Middle East. Educated in Europe, Jabrā returned to the Middle East in 1948 to live permanently in Baghdad where he was a member of the influential Baghdad Modern Art Group, established in 1951 …

Haitian Zombie, Myth, And Modern Identity, Kette Thomas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Haitian Zombie, Myth, and Modern Identity" Kette Thomas analyzes texts by Zora Neale Hurston, Alfred Metraux, and Wade Davis. In these narratives we are re-introduced to the zombie not as a metaphor for lost consciousness, but, rather, as a common system that replaces personal subjectivity with an influence alien to our natural development. The discourse on subjectivity has become a central focus in the modern era but attention to fiction in "third world" cultures is neglected because they are studied almost exclusively through historical, political, sociological, or anthropological lenses or because their collective identities leads scholars to …

Bibliography Of Work In Modernity And "Third World" Studies, Valerian Desousa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The Anti-Colonial Revolutionary In Contemporary Bollywood Cinema, Vidhu Aggarwal

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Anti-Colonial Revolutionary in Contemporary Bollywood Cinema" Vidhu Aggarwal discusses several contemporary films including Rakesh Omprakash Mehra's Rang de Basanti with focus on the figure of the revolutionary hero. The Bollywood film is a cultural form that combines several aesthetic styles, from within India and from the outside. With its formal heterogeneity and as a product of one of India's largest cities, Mumbai Bollywood has had an ongoing fascination with "arrival," that is, with India's status as a contemporary nation-state. While some Bollywood films seem to celebrate fantasy scenarios of India's arrival on the global scene, at …

Philosophy Of Modernity And Development In Jamaica, Novella Z. Keith, Nelson W. Keith

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Philosophy of Modernity and Development in Jamaica" Novella Z. Keith and Nelson W. Keith postulate that a combined philosophico-practical inquiry is necessary to reduce the systemic asymmetries found in the North-South divide and to promote global interdependence. Proceeding from a deconstruction of European-inflected modernity, Keith and Keith sketch an alternative epistemology of uncertainty and unknowability and illustrate aspects of these epistemologies in theories and practices of modernization and its counter movements, dependency, and underdevelopment while also using them to discuss current practices of an NGO they created, Edu-Tourism , to bridge global divides as experienced in Jamaica. …

Bibliography For The Study Of Cultural Discourse In Taiwan, Yu-Chun Chang, I-Chun Wang, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Selected Bibliography Of Work On Identity, Migration, And Displacement, Li-Wei Cheng, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Review Of Aguecheek’S Beef, Belch’S Hiccup, And Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, And Food Among The Early Moderns By Robert Appelbaum, Elizabeth Spiller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Histories of food have traditionally emerged out of the fields of structural anthropology, ethnology, and historical sociology. More recent scholarship has emphasized the idea of foodways, those networks by which foods are produced, prepared, and consumed within different food communities. Rather than seeing rituals of culture in food, such scholarship has instead sought to understand food in terms of a circulation of physical resources and values that involves questions of economics, ecology, biology, and ethnobotany. The first approach has tended, broadly speaking, to produce scholarship that is concerned with the ritual, symbolic, and social qualities to our acts of sustenance. …

Frente Conjetural: Escritores Brasileños De Izquierda Y El Estado Novo, Luiza Franco Moreira

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

En el diario oficial del Estado Novo, la dictadura liderada por Getúlio Vargas en Brasil entre 1937 y 1945, un grupo de intelectuales organizaron una sección cultural, «Pensamento da América», dedicada a publicar traducciones de escritores de toda América. Basado en trabajo de archivo, este artículo reconstruye la trayectoria de esta sección cultural, desde un antifascismo y latinoamericanismo más bien en sordina durante 1941, hasta su papel de apoyo a la política exterior de Vargas durante la guerra, de 1942 en adelante. El artículo se ocupa, sobre todo, de explorar los contextos que abrieron el camino y establecieron los límites …

Kajian Metafora Dalam Puisi Tradisional Bahasa Cina., Liew Foot Yuen

Student Works (2010-2019)

In recent years, the reading of Chinese traditional poems has become more popular in the Chinese society in Malaysia. Traditional Chinese philosophical poems have even been incorporated into the Chinese language syllabus in primary as well as secondary schools. However, students still encounter difficulty in understanding the real meaning of the poems because of the artistic language of the poems which contain numerous metaphors.  This is a descriptive study which aims to identify the kinds of metaphor used and the reasons for using such metaphorical items in traditional Chinese philosophical poems. In this research, 122 lexical metaphors from 30 traditional …