Comparative Literature Commons^™

Satirizing Empire: Comparing Ancient China And Rome, Di Wang

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Comparative scholars of the ancient Mediterranean and East Asian worlds have recently taken a serious interest in the unprecedented and simultaneous emergence of two classical empires: Rome and China. The trend, invigorated by the contemporary geopolitical development of China’s rise as a world empire challenging the post-World War II Western hegemony, has yielded new insights into the many divergences and convergences of the world’s two most enduring political and cultural systems. However, preoccupied with describing the political, cultural institutions and grand narratives of empire, scholarship has largely ignored the detractors of empire, whose ingenious expressions are as enduring as these …

Yumiko Ōshima’S The Star Of Cottonland: A Translation, Sheena Woods

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This is a translation of Volume 1 of Yumiko Ōshima’s The Star of Cottonland.

The Spooky Vein: The Reparative Gothic-Modern In The Works Of Richard A.W. Hughes, Corwin R. Baden

English Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores the dual nature of Richard A.W. Hughes as a marginalized Gothicist and modernist. This duality facilitated the development of the author’s reparative vision for a 20th-century world traumatized by planetary war. The present study utilizes close readings—both surface and symptomatic—combined with archival research to assert that Hughes fashions this reparative imperative consistently across his corpus: in his short stories, poems, novels, stage plays, and screenplays. In his short stories, this vision includes an embrace of the Stranger, a shadowy Gothic figure whose possessions, power, difference, and familiarity lead the human subject from contestation, through representation, and toward …

My Antonia: A Retrospective On An Immigrant Narrative, Sydney Werner

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

Beginning with the early days of American literature, this work explores where the immigrant narrative has existed, and what said narrative may look like. When reading immigrant literature, there are typically three or four themes that present themselves among the immigrant characters and their community. Those themes are: a feeling of nostalgia towards, or affinity to the culture and of the immigrant’s home country, the theme of inclusion or exclusion by the larger society in the new country, and the theme of resilience, that is, how immigrants overcome adversities and bounce back challenge after challenge. A novel in particular where …

"توسديد والتاريخ من خلال مؤلفه "الحرب البيلبونيزية, عبد السلام التايب

Dirassat

Tusdeed and History through his Book The Peloponnesian War

This research deals with the life, production, and historical method of the historian Tusdeed by standing at the historical truth, his philosophy of history, and the art of writing that distinguished him.

Chistes Y Juegos De Palabras En La Tesis De Nancy De Ramón J.Sender (Aproximación Semiótica), El Hassane Boutakka

Dirassat

In this paper we propose to study the serniotic structure of some of these humorous passages, to discover what makes their humor, from a perspective of serniotic analysis of its narrative component, and to examine, later, some of the ludic manipulations that Sender makes of language to produce comic effects.

La Teoría De La Imaginación Poética En La Greguería De Ramómez De La Serna, Mohamed Abrighach

Dirassat

The Theory of Poetic Imagination in La Grégueria de Romanmez de la Serna

The article deals with how Ramon Gomez sees Gregueria as a theory that breaks with the poetic imagination linked to avant-garde movements, and celebrates the irrational, the ambiguous, the arbitrary and above all the functional symmetry. . In both cases, this theory is an invitation to deviate from the everyday norm towards an exceptional poetic sense of things

Humanizing The Colonial Other: The Engaged Reader In Shakespeare, Swift, Conrad, And Barghouti, Rasha Amr Ahmed Malek

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Humor As A Defense Mechanism In 19th-Century Women's Writing, Hannah Mae Shelby

Student Theses and Dissertations

Women in Western societies have been repeatedly placed into inferior, gendered roles by their patriarchal societies, which often left them with little hope of autonomy apart from a male companionship. Women writers during the nineteenth century, especially, were chastised for daring to write beyond the sentimental because many male critics and writers believed that women were not capable of complex writing. The women featured in this thesis weaponized humor—such as irony, sarcasm, and narrative quips—to create intriguing narratives while also commenting on gendered oppression. Works by women from the British Regency era to the American fin-de-siècle center on female characters …

Crossings Of Heritage, Memory And Archives: A History Of Moroccan Cinema In The Bouanani Archives, Sarah Dornhof

Regards

This article interrogates archival forms and practices in relation to remembering the “lost archives” of Moroccan cinematographic history.
It presents the Bouanani Archives — a private, fragmented, and still largely uncatalogued collection located in the Bouanani family apartment in Rabat, comprising a variety of texts, visuals, and objects connected to Morocco’s cinematographic and cultural memory.
The archive is the personal legacy of filmmaker, writer, and artist Ahmed Bouanani (1938–2011), his wife Naïma Saoudi (1947–2012), and their daughter Batoul Bouanani (1969-2003), all of whom worked for Moroccan cinema.
Today, it is preserved and cared for by his daughter Touda Bouanani and …

Towards A Decentered History Of Palestinian Revolutionary Cinema? Case Study Of The Film “Tall El Zaatar” In The Audiovisual Archives Of The Italian Communist Party, Hugo Darroman

Regards

The film Tall El Zaatar (1977, Abu Ali, Pino, Chamoun, Palestine/Italy), a co-production between the Palestinian Cinema Institute and the Italian Communist Party’s (PCI) audiovisual company, was considered lost for three decades and finally rediscovered in 2011.
Beyond the dramatic stories surrounding this film, Tall El Zaatar reveals the importance of considering the transnational dimension of Palestinian militant cinema.
In this article about Tall El Zaatar, I approach the history of Palestinian revolutionary cinema through the traces left within the archives of an institution with which the Palestinian filmmakers collaborated.
On the basis of a set of interviews and …

Iraqi Cinema Beyond The Screen And The Archives Of Leisure, Pelle Valentin Olsen

Regards

The emergence of new forms of leisure in Iraqi urban landscapes, such as cinemas, nightclubs, and theaters, unleashed debates about the dangers and potentials of leisure.
The result of this process is a vast, albeit scattered, archive of texts that deal with practices and institutions of leisure.
The archive of leisure, as it pertains to cinema, can be located across a variety of texts including memoirs, short stories, student essays, police records, official discourse, medical texts, and works by Iraqi historians.
Given the limited access to Iraqi film and cinema archives, the archive of leisure can offer an important addendum …

Ciné-Archivistes And The Metaleptic Archive Of Lebanese Cinema, Claire Launchbury, Marilyn Matar, Max Silverman

Regards

The article considers three Lebanese films – Il était une fois, Beyrouth (1995) by Jocelyne Saab, the short Le Liban à travers le cinéma (2003) and the documentary Cinéma de guerre au Liban (2003), both by Hady Zaccak – to explore the archival impulse in their composition.
We suggest that this impulse takes two major forms: the use of a montage of sequences from Lebanese films, or films about Lebanon, and crossovers between narrative thresholds and between fact and fiction.
We draw on Gérard Genette’s version of metalepsis to analyze the nature of these crossovers, and on the notion of …

سيميولوجيا جمالية الفضاء في فيلم: "السنونو لا يموت في القدس" لرضا الباهي, Abdel Salam Shaaban

Regards

In this study, we aim to conduct a perceptual experiment and a semiological reading of the aesthetics of space in the film El Sounounou La Yamoutou Fil Kods by Tunisian director Ridha Behi.
This film, produced in 1994, came as a response to the accusation that Tunisian cinema ignored the Palestinian cause. It also combines three genres of cinematic practice: fiction, documentary, and political.
The film tells the story of the search for a mother who has been lost since 1948. A daily newspaper publishes a recent photo of this mother. The director takes her story as a starting point …

Le Cinéma Maghrébin Entre Traçabilité Coloniale Et Déterminations Nationales, Malika Gueddim

Regards

This article focuses on the beginnings of cinema in the Maghreb countries (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia), which suffered the same process of enculturation in favor of the culture of the French occupier.
From the end of the Second World War, the colonial authorities understood the importance of cinema, through fiction or newsreels, and the urgency of creating cinematographic centers: in Morocco in 1944, and in Tunisia in 1946.
Algeria, considered a French department rather than a protectorate, was provided with a cinematographic service by the Algerian governorate in 1947.
Then comes the period of independence, in which directors from these …

“Ore-Ganisms”: The Myth And Meaning Of ‘Living Rock’ In Middle-Earth, Kristine Larsen

Journal of Tolkien Research

This paper, presented at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference, New Orleans, LA, April 3, 2015, surveys Tolkien's use of the term "living rock" and related language in both a literal and metaphorical sense. Topics discussed include the origins of the trolls, dwarves, orcs, and ents.

Smaug’S Hoard, Durin’S Bane, And Agricola’S De Re Metallica: Cautionary Tales Against Mining In Tolkien’S Legendarium And The Classical Tradition, Kristine Larsen

Journal of Tolkien Research

This conference talk discussed depictions of mining in Tolkien's legendarium, drawing comparisons to Agricola’s De Re Metallica.

Who Maketh Morwinyon, And Menelmacar, And Remmirath, And The Inner Parts Of The South (Where The Stars Are Strange): Tolkien’S Astronomical Choices And The Books Of Job And Amos, Kristine Larsen

Journal of Tolkien Research

Tolkien’s use of specific stars and constellations within the legendarium has been well-studied. There remain two related questions to be tackled: firstly, why did Tolkien use these specific real-world stars and constellations, and what was behind the seemingly sudden expansion of the celestial population in the legendarium in 1951? Given his well-demonstrated interest in and knowledge of astronomy, Biblical passages that describe the heavens may have piqued his interest and may have influenced his choices of astronomical references in creating Middle-earth. Popularized works published during Tolkien’s youth on the astronomy of the Old Testament may have also played a role …

Gabi Martínez, El Último Cronista De Marruecos Del Último Milenio, Mohamed Abrighach

Dirassat

Gabi Martinez the Last Moroccan Chronicler of the Last Millennium

In this article we attempt to analyze the representation by Gabi Martinez of Morocco and all that is Moroccan. His vision stands in midway thorough textual researches of typical stories to tell an exotism which exalts the sensuality which the country evolves in people. In both cases, the indifference of the author towards the culture, the history and the reality of Morocco remains considerable.

Le Relativisme Culturel Dans La Littérature Féminine Contemporaine: Mernissi, Djebar, Et Carter, Touria Nakkouch

Dirassat

Culture Relativism in Contemporary Feminine Literature: Mernissi, Djebar, and Carter

One of the literary phenomena which keenly attract the attention of researchers drawing on contemporary feminine literature is the very articulate return on the part of the woman writer to the origins of her culture. This return is addressed in particular to the fundamental components of a culture namely art, history, religion, and myth. Just to name some examples, one finds in the Maghreb feminine literature of the quotations of Koranic verses or passages of the Hadith as in Fatima Mernissi; adaptations of writings on art, theology or history as …