Comparative Literature Commons^™

Willy Loman’S Desperate Affair Challenges The Iranian Censorship: Asghar Farhadi’S The Salesman, Adineh Khojastehpour

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This study examines resistance in cross-cultural adaptations, focusing on Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman (2016), an adaptation of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949). This research investigates how Farhadi's rewriting of Miller's play within post-revolutionary Iran engages in a dialogue with the Islamic Republic and its dominant discourses. It explores how this adaptation addresses Iran's social, cultural, and ideological complexities by reframing Miller's narrative of 1950s societal change and the failure of the American Dream within the context of post-revolutionary Iran. This analysis uses Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope to reveal how The Salesman uses Miller's unique concept of a …

Cineture: The Trans(Inter)Mediality And Socio-Cultural Mobility Between Iran And The Us, Naghmeh Esmaeilpour

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Literature and film have proven to be influential socio-cultural mediums, facilitating interactions and counteractions between nations where politics often fail to do so. Introducing cineture as a transmedial genre, this article is situated at the intersections of glocalized culture, and Iranian-American studies by considering literature and film as the contact zone between Iranians and Americans. Cineture, the combination of cinema and literature, refers to the circulation of cultures through its specification of film-text transmediation. The application of cineture demonstrates the combination and blending of literary and cinematic works leading to cross the “center and periphery dichotomy.” To study cineture …

Cineture: Shared Narratives And Cultural Exchanges Between Iran And The Us (Introduction), Naghmeh Esmaeilpour

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The Romantic Imagination Of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer And J.R.R. Tolkien, Mariana Rios Maldonado, Andoni Cossio

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Studies on the presence of Romantic elements in J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary production have steadily risen to prominence, especially since the publication of Julian Eilmann’s landmark monograph J.R.R. Tolkien: Romanticist and Poet (2017) and, more recently, the edited collection The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R Tolkien (2024). Our paper seeks to contribute to this scholarly upsurge by presenting a comparative analysis of Tolkien’s works and those penned by one of the most noteworthy authors of Spanish Romanticism, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836–1870). Akin to the Kunstmärchenof German Romanticism and Tolkien’s Fairy-stories, Bécquer’s Leyendas—e. g. “El monte de las …

The Alembic - International Literary Journal, Sara Mackinnon, Finn Heller, Sarah Debian, Kate Blackwell

English Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

“Das Muttermal” - “The Birthmark” - “דער מוטער־צײכן”, Kristin K. Mlay-Kuhns

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

“Das Muttermal / The Birthmark / דער מוטער־צײכן” is a trilingual work of transcreative poetry that stages translation as a method of mourning, cultural memory, and feminist inheritance. Composed first in German and then translated into English and Yiddish, the poem explores the catastrophic rupture of maternal loss and the slow transformation of trauma into understanding. The central metaphor of the birthmark—Muttermal, the “mother-mark”—figures the maternal body as both wound and connective tissue, binding ancestors and descendants through a physical trace that persists across generations, geographies, and languages. Formally, the project demonstrates how translation unveils the layered meanings embedded in …

When The Metamorphosis Turns White: Kafka Reimagined In Igoni Barrett’S Blackass, Bisola J. Ajibade

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

Igoni Barrett’s Blackass (2015) has frequently been described as a “race-rewrite” of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915). This framing has shaped much of the critical conversation surrounding the two texts. While these approaches productively illuminate questions of identity and biopolitics, less attention has been paid to situating both texts across the intersecting contexts of German modernism and Nigerian postcolonial literature. This article provides a close comparative reading of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Igoni Barrett’s Blackass in order to examine how Kafkaesque elements are reconfigured within a contemporary postcolonial Nigerian context. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of minor literature, alongside …

Honors In Focus: A Study Of Public University Programs With New Course Proposals For Arkansas Tech University, Haley Greer, Payton Mccain, Hannah Melton

ATU Scholars Symposium

This project evaluates the structure and effectiveness of honors programs at Arkansas Tech University and five comparable public institutions—University of Central Arkansas, Arkansas State University, Truman State University, Northeastern State University, and the University of Central Missouri—to identify best practices that support student achievement, engagement, and retention. The study was designed to assess how honors programs influence academic rigor, curricular flexibility, community development, and access to high-impact educational opportunities. Using a mixed-methods approach, the researchers collected data through student and faculty surveys, follow-up interviews, and a comparative review of institutional materials, including honors curricula, housing models, scholarship structures, and program …

"Black History Is Black Horror": Hauntology And Cultural Trauma In 20th And 21st Century Black Women's Gothic Horror, Destini S. Beckwith

Theses

Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturistic, gothic horror, neo-slave narrative Kindred (1979) vividly illustrates the story of a woman, Dana, involuntarily time-traveling from her home in 1976 Los Angeles, California, to a plantation in 19th-century Maryland. The interactions that she has with her ancestors, such as Alice, a free Black woman, and Rufus, a white man who enslaves Alice, leave Dana mentally and physically scarred. The 20th-century novel is meant to graphically reflect on the horrors of enslavement and the mental and physical effects that Black people endured/still endure because of it (i.e., grief, racial violence, and post-traumatic stress disorder). Furthermore, the novel’s …

The Nabokovian Looking-Glass Of Igor Prikhozhay, Victor Fet

Biological Sciences Faculty Research

A Russian translation of the Looking-Glass was completed in 2020 by Ukrainian poet and translator Igor Prikhozhay (Ігор Прихожай). Born in 1987, Igor was killed in action on November 12, 2025, defending his country.

Embodied Horror: Women And Medical Authority In Video Games, Jocilynn Denise Colombo

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

Through a critical analysis of interactive horror, this paper argues that video games can function as ethical diagnostic narratives that uniquely expose systemic failures surrounding women’s bodies and medical authority. Focusing on Silent Hill 3 (2003) and Alice: Madness Returns (2011), I examine how these games render harm legible through player participation. By requiring players to move characters through hostile environments and make decisions within systems that simultaneously grant and restrict control, these games foster identification and complicity by positioning players directly within the structures they critique.

While feminist horror scholarship—notably from Julia Kristeva and Barbara Creed—has explored societal anxieties …

The Transparent Crypt: Temporal Stratification, Materiality, And The Affective Archive In Jenny Erpenbeck’S "Kairos", Mallory Wooldridge

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

For Germany, the process of reckoning with the past is not a new one. Termed Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the post-war period and envisioned as a project extending beyond the academy into public consciousness, “dealing with the past” was first envisioned in response to the Nazi regime and its horrors. While already a disjointed project in the Nazi context, the question of how reunified Germany reckons with the former German Democratic Republic’s past remains unresolved.

In her 2021 novel Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck proposes a different model of historical consciousness. Drawing on Theodor Adorno’s post-war theory of working through the past ( …

Wood Lands: Forest As Site Of National Memory In Germany And Italy, Clarissa Melendez

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

Arguing that the rich symbolic associations of trees become a medium to synthesize shared identity during a country’s formative moments, this paper theorizes the image of the forest as a site of national memory. By tracking representations of the natural landscape during nation-building to representations that attempt to recover and reclaim dignity postwar, this paper lays bare the potential of the national symbol to transform as history progresses. The paper’s author reads three genres–fairy tales, a novel, and a work of public art–from three authors–the Brothers Grimm, Italo Calvino, and Joseph Beuys–across time to interrogate the role of the forest …

Icarus’S Fall: Villainization In Wicked, Star Wars, And The Untamed, Laura Renfroe

Honors Theses

When looking back on the most beloved, yet infamous, villains of popular culture, one can note an abundant rise of prequels and backstory-driven media exploring the paths that villain characters take that lead them to their tragic fall. Some of those stories include John M. Chu’s Wicked, George Lucas’s Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, and Chen Jialin and Zheng Weiwin’s The Untamed, each of which explores protagonists who are labeled as “wicked” and depicted as fallen to the “dark side.” While these characters are often studied in existing literary research, there have yet to be explicit ties …

Gregor Samsa’S Pagkagimata (Awakening) In Bikol: A Becoming-Minor In Translation, Victor John M. Loquias

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

Kristian Cordero’s translation of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis instantiates what the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call minor literature. Preferring the Bikol term Pagkagimata—the literal event of Gregor Sama’s becoming-animal in the novel as title of the translation and the utilization of the Rinconada Bikol language for the transformed Samsa—Cordero has typified a perspective of translation that challenges the popular view of fluent translation from the source text to the target language. Exemplifying the concept of becoming-minor of Deleuze and Guattari and deploying Lawrence Venuti’s notion of the “remainder,” An Pagkagimata ni Gregor Samsa exhibits a deterritorialization of Bikol …

Temporalities Of Translation In Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Rumi Coller-Takahashi

Living in Languages

Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia features two fictional worlds, Urras and Anarres, with distinct political structures and languages. Anarres is created by the revolutionaries who departed capitalistic Urras to create a new anarchist community, and its language was invented so as to have no word for “property” or “class.” However, the artificial distinction in the languages do not hold up the binary of possession and non-possession in these worlds, as the word “possession” permeates interpersonal relationships even on Anarres. To replace the binary approach of the revolution, the novel proposes an alternative mode of …

A Street Singer’S Homage To A Father Of The Nation, Denish Raja Durai K

Living in Languages

Background Note:

Introduction to Mu. Metha

Mu. Metha was a renowned Tamil poet and songwriter, born in Periyakulam, Theni, Tamil Nadu. He taught Tamil at Presidency College, Chennai, until his retirement. A key figure in modern Tamil poetry (Pudukavithai). Metha played a crucial role in popularizing the form in the 1970s and 1980s. He authored over 30 works, including novels, short stories, and essays, and was an integral part of the ‘Vannampaadi’ literary movement, which aimed to write poetry from a Marxist and global perspective. His celebrated work, Agayathil Aaduthaveedu, won him the Sahitya Akademi Award (a …

Translation As Divination: Translating Naomi Sím’S Emerald Orchid Love Letter, Will Buckingham

Living in Languages

Naomi Sím’s Taiwanese (Tâi-gí) language short story, "Emerald Orchid Love Letter" (Chhùi-Lân ê Chêng-Phoe 翠蘭ê情批) engages deeply with the questions of politics, language and religion in contemporary Taiwan. The plot of the story pivots around the central question of what language the gods speak. In the story, the narrator—caught between Taiwanese, Mandarin and English languages—finds a strange growth on her inside lip. The cure turns out to involve the sea goddess Má-chó͘, and a renewed commitment on the part of the narrator to the Taiwanese language. In this paper, I read the process of translating Sím’s story from Taiwanese to …

On Translating Jean Giono’S “Possession Des Richesses”, Christopher J. Monier

Living in Languages

No abstract provided.

Feather And Freedom: A Fabled Land In The Mind, Yuan Tao

Living in Languages

Set in the deceptively tranquil Honest Town, “The Feather of Sister Zandan” is narrated from the perspective of Zaan, a younger brother, revealing his complicated feelings toward his sister. Written in a fable-like style infused with magical realism, the story explores the tension between restraint and longing, culminating in an abrupt and poignant ending that evokes the emotional sting of an O. Henry-style twist. The short story won the Gemini Prize for Short Fiction of China in 2021. According to the award citation, Lan Du’s writing demonstrates emotional depth, dazzling imagination, and striking narrative tension. Her storytelling defies conventional …