Comparative Literature Commons^™

Potentiality, Resistance And Bare Life: Giorgio Agamben On Melville’S Bartleby, Yanjun Wang, Yaping Wang

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

The idea of potentiality runs through Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy. In his analysis of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, Agamben thoroughly interprets potentiality and bare life through Bartleby’s “I prefer not to”. Agamben believes that Bartleby’s inoperativeness is the highest form of resistance, which exists as pure potentiality against the power apparatuses in modern society. Agamben considers Bartleby’s inoperativeness as the exact way to redeem bare life in modern society, where the state of exception already becomes normality. This article starts with Agamben’s reading of Bartley, focuses on potentiality, resistance and bare life to analyze the pure and thorough way …

Moons, Maths, And Middle-Earth: Misconceptions About Tolkien’S Scientific And Mathematical Prowess, Kristine Larsen

Journal of Tolkien Research

Tolkien's use of real-world science in fleshing out his secondary world of Middle-earth is well-known, including errors he made in the process. With the recent publication of The Nature of Middle-earth, additional attention has been paid to Tolkien's use of mathematics in the same vein. However, reviews of the volume tend to reflect misconceptions about the level of Tolkien's mathematical ability.

A Tautology Or Two While We Translate Chinese Classics, Sabina Knight, Kidder Smith

World Literature: Faculty Publications

What is a Chinese classic, and why do we translate one? These innocent questions lead Sabina Knight and Kidder Smith into a mandala of paradox, metaphor, and tautologies. En route they must negotiate a field of errant nouns, shifty images, and undisclosed participants. Relying on maps drawn by Borges, A. A. Milne, Quine, and Zeno, they find themselves in a landscape where little is certain and much is in transit—from here to here. The generic passports of poetry, prose, and philosophy have been stamped Invalid. So everyone acts like a resident alien. The authors discover that what they don't know …

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Allen D. Breck Award Winner

Quidditas

The Breck Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a junior scholar at the annual conference.

Recipient of the Breck Award 2022

Katharine Davidson Bekker

Communication And Social Interactions In The Late Middle Ages: The Fables By The Swiss-German Dominican Ulrich Bonerius, Albrecht Classen

Quidditas

There are many possible and useful approaches to the study of literature. One very effective way proves to be to study literary texts as platforms to explore the meaning, relevance, and workings of human communication, or the very opposite, miscommunication. Such an approach proves to be rather productive both for medieval and modern texts, from the western and the eastern tradition, whether we are reflecting on entertaining, moral, didactic, religious, or political texts. The literary work consists of words exchanged, and thus here we encounter the perfect example of a theoretical platform to discuss human interactions in many different contexts …

How To Teach With Shakespeare: James Baldwin, The Liberal Arts, And The Progymnasmata, Steven Hrdlicka

Quidditas

This review essay addresses pedagogical principles found in Scott Newstok’s recent book How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education (2020). Specifically, the essay discusses the progymnasmata exercises of paraphrase and êthopoeia and provides real-life applications and examples. The essay also suggests how such study aims at “fruitful” effects, as well as providing distinctions between “fruitful” and “useful” study. Other points relevant to the fruitful ends of the study of the liberal arts, such as freedom and empathy, are discussed as they pertain to a student’s ability to think creatively and to express thoughts with clarity and originality. …

Linguistic Failure And The “Trembling Parole” In Alain Chartier’S Belle Dame Sans Mercy, Alani Hicks-Bartlett

Quidditas

At first blush, Alain Chartier’s late medieval poem, the Belle Dame sans mercy seems to recount a story that is quite similar to narrations of other frustrated affairs in the courtly love tradition, as it tells of a devoted lover who relentlessly, yet unsuccessfully, begs for the euphemistic “mercy” of his lady. Plying the lady with compliments, assailing her with threats, and attempting to verbally manipulate her, the lover endeavors to force the lady to love him through various unsuccessful linguistic strategies. Although he commits to the lady and presents her with countless arguments about why she should cede to …

In Memoriam: Paul Roger Thomas (1940-2021), Darin Merrill

Quidditas

The Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association announces with great sadness the passing of Paul Thomas, a long-time member of the RMMRA and president ex officio whose unflagging organizational support, irrepressible good humor, unqualified collegiality, and thoughtful scholarship provided an important part of the RMMRA meetings for over three decades.

Elizabethan Technology: Thomas Watson’S Steam Bath For The Relief Of Gout, James Alsop

Quidditas

Thomas Watson (1513-84), Doctor of Divinity and deprived Marian bishop of Lincoln, developed an expertise in the treatment of gout. In his practice of experiential medicine in East Anglia, he used an innovative steam chest: the patient sat in a cut-open empty wine pipe, surrounded by heated bricks, and covered with a sheet. This device, with its method of enclosed steam heat, contrasts sharply with prevailing renaissance therapeutic philosophy.

La Máquina Está En Movimiento. Reseña De Recalibrando Los Circuitos De La Máquina: Ciencia Ficción E Imaginarios Tecnológicos En La Narrativa En Español Del Siglo Xxi. Jonatán Martín Gómez, Patricio Sullivan (Eds.). Albatros Ediciones, 2022. 404 Págs., Ariela Parisi

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

Reseña de Recalibrando los circuitos de la máquina: ciencia ficción e imaginarios tecnológicos en la narrativa en español del siglo XXI. Jonatán Martín Gómez, Patricio Sullivan (eds.). Albatros Ediciones, 2022. 404 págs. Un volumen que reúne ensayos de escritores, críticos y editores al respecto de la ciencia ficción contemporánea.

Those Who Weep: Tears, Eyes, And Blood In The Boussu Hours, Katharine Davidson Bekker

Quidditas

Simon Marmion and the Master of Antoine Rolin’s Boussu Hours (ca. 1490-95) is resplendent with imagery of suffering in its unusual marginal decorations. Holy effluvia—blood and tears—flow from golden pages covered in wounds and weeping eyes. These decorations, surrounding the Hours of the Passion, pictorially enact a theological notion of tears as wounding agents, and spiritually prompt the reader’s contrition. Notable wear on the “bloody” page indicates a pattern of tactile interaction between book and reader; this physical engagement with the marginals represents a quasi-liturgical manifestation of guilt and efforts made to abate it. The gestural touching of the page …

Me Veo A Mi Mismo Leyendo : Ricardo Piglia’S Aesthetic Education In Los Diarios De Emilio Renzi, D. Bret Leraul

Faculty Journal Articles

This article examines Ricardo Piglia’s relationship to the literary field as an aesthetic education that emerges from the encounter between his field-shaping poetics and its reflection among critics, or critical mimesis. Piglia’s field poetics are exemplified by the disjunctive “I” that narrates the diaries, the misattribution of their authorship to Piglia’s longtime alter ego Emilio Renzi, and a constant representation of acts of self-observation. The architecture of the diaristic subject is wedded to its institutional inscription; that is, the form of this subject is the communion of readers and writers in the autobiographical and autofictive genres. Similarly, material inscription not …

The Case For Hildeburg: Beowulf And Ethical Subjectivity, Wendolyn Weber

Quidditas

This essay argues for a reading of Beowulf, and the female peaceweaver figures therein, in contemporary philosophical terms of Levinasian ethical subjectivity. Such a reading illuminates the peaceweaver, often caught between action and passivity and viewed as a victim of death-driven masculinist heroic culture, as an exemplar rather of the radical destabilization experienced through ethical subjection and an important key to the complexities of the heroic ethos. It illustrates the enduring value of texts such as Beowulf to inform our understanding of often oversimplified concepts like that of the “warrior ethos” in contemporary culture.

Luigi Pulci’S Fifteenth-Century Verse Parody Of Moses: A Denunciation Of Marsilio Ficino’S Neoplatonic Christianity, Michael J. Maher

Quidditas

In early 1470s Florence, popular poet Luigi Pulci, author of the celebrated epic poem Morgante, wrote a sonnet of religious parody. In Poi ch’io parti’ da voi, Pulci satirizes biblical miracles, immediately earning himself the label of heretic, still attached to his name to this day. A close examination of Pulci’s sonnet, with specific attention given to his treatment of Moses, reveals Pulci’s motivation and the circumstances surrounding composition. Pulci’s scandalous sonnet was in fact an attempt at underscoring the maltreatment of biblical miracles in a first-century Greek text by the Romano-Jewish historian Jospehus. Renowned philosopher Marsilio Ficino, with …

Introduction – Whither The Spiritual? Rethinking Secularism’S Legacy In Post-Ottoman Art, Hannah Feldman, Kirsten Scheid

Regards

This dossier seeks to pinpoint hazards emerging on the globally redrawn map of art and culture. It was conceived to expose and navigate the mines laid when the ostensibly methodologically secular discourse of art history turns to art made outside Euro-American cultural centers – art often considered out of sync with Euro-American modernity.¹ As commonly approached, the pinnacle of that modernity corresponds roughly to what one of us has referred to as the “decades of decolonization,” in an effort to avoid reaffirming the Eurocentrism inherent in labeling the period as ‘post-war’...

The Textual Gutter: How Gene Luen Yang Redefines The Gutter In Boxers & Saints To Tell A Transnational Tale, David Lucas Jr

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This paper attempts to provide a new understanding of the gutter and how it is used to significant effect in Gene Luen Yang's, Boxers & Saints. This research draws upon the work of Scott McCloud to establish a framework for the theoretical applications of the gutter. Most prior research focuses on the gutter within the page. This article demonstrates how Yang pushes the concept of the gutter further by creating a new type of gutter that moves beyond the pages and across texts. Then the research attempts to demonstrate how the idea of the textual gutter heightens the transnational elements …

William Shakespeare’S All Is True, Lord Chamberlain’S “Truth,” And Civil Religion, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The first title for Shakespeare’s Henry VIII—All Is True—may reflect standard early modern usage signifying that all is an aspect of ‘troth’ or loyalty, all is common understanding, or all is received from a divine source. In the play, the Lord Chamberlain, Shakespeare’s only character so named, serves the Henrician monarchy’s “truth” by serving Henry’s religious and monarchic goals as the Jacobean Lord Chamberlain similarly served James I’s goals, assuring audiences of the integrity, truth, and legitimacy of the monarchy and its faith. The play shows the Lord Chamberlain working to strengthen the loyalty of Henry’s realm …

Book Review: Hans-Joachim Gehrke, Ed. Making Civilizations: The World Before 600, Robert Bedeski

Comparative Civilizations Review

Studying ancient civilizations is not a precise enterprise, and many statements are approximations, subject to validation or dispute. Several key concepts describe the flow and progress of collective human development. Individuals, families, clans, and tribes precede formation of civilization, which provides the foundation for states. Governments are managerial organizations of more complex societies, providing concentrated focus on defense, currency and infrastructure. Civilizations improve life security as urbanization, innovation, and division of labor increase, requiring more complex and powerful governing institutions.