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Video Games Are Where The Detective Story Has Always Belonged: The Progression Of Detective Stories Into Video Games, Robert Palmour 2021 Georgia College

Video Games Are Where The Detective Story Has Always Belonged: The Progression Of Detective Stories Into Video Games, Robert Palmour

English MA Theses

From its inception, the detective genre has always tried to challenge the reader with a mystery. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of the various traditional mediums this is a challenge that is largely unmet as the mystery is revealed to the reader regardless of their ability to actually solve what was presented. With the more recent medium of video games however this challenge to a reader can finally be met. A detective story can now be presented to a player who must then solve it themselves in order to progress through the game. This thesis is divided up into multiple …


Time Decay: Assets, Authoritarianism, And Anxiety About The Future, Jack Davies 2021 University of California, Santa Cruz

Time Decay: Assets, Authoritarianism, And Anxiety About The Future, Jack Davies

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article identifies a basic formula in the Freudo-Marxist take on twentieth-century authoritarianism. This is the incommensurability of inherited past development with the pace and demands of industrial social life, damming up a tremendous excess that seeks reactionary outlet. Authoritarianism, here, breeds in the contradiction between the symptoms of the Oedipal drama and the commodity form. The implicit “repressive hypothesis” for sexuality and developmentalist teleology make this theorization of authoritarian formations untenable today. This article, however, identifies moments of promise in this literature, and turns to materials available to these thinkers—specifically interwar psychoanalytic theory on anxiety and economic theory on …


Defending “Western” Values: Reactionary Neoliberalism In The Americas, Gabriela Segura-Ballar 2021 University of California, Santa Cruz

Defending “Western” Values: Reactionary Neoliberalism In The Americas, Gabriela Segura-Ballar

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Right-wing populism and authoritarianism are on the rise globally after the financial crisis of 2008. This reactionary trend has widely channeled anxieties created by neoliberal insecurities into cultural and nationalistic backlash against the ostensible enemies of “Western” values (e.g., immigrants, racial and sexual minorities, feminists, and leftists). President Jair Bolsonaro’s “Brazil above everything, God above everyone” and President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” are the most conspicuous examples of the resurgence of a populist reactionary right in the Americas. This continental trend promotes ultra-nationalism and more coercive neoliberalization processes combined with a reactionary authoritarianism that celebrates essentialized “Western” values, …


Incipient Fascism: Black Radical Perspectives, Alberto Toscano 2021 Goldsmiths, University of London

Incipient Fascism: Black Radical Perspectives, Alberto Toscano

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The sordid twilight of the Trump presidency raised the stakes of the debate on fascism. While much of the discussion has been magnetised by the legitimacy of analogies with the 1930s, this article argues that a rich and complex tradition of Black radical critique of right-wing authoritarianism provides a vital resource for thinking through the problem of US fascism beyond analogy – beginning with the DuBoisian insight that a racial fascism forged by chattel slavery and settler-colonialism anticipated the ascendancy of European fascisms. The article homes in on Black radical theories of fascism developed in the wake of the movements …


Neo-Authoritarianism And The Contestation Of White Identification In The Us, Justin Gilmore 2021 University of California, Santa Cruz

Neo-Authoritarianism And The Contestation Of White Identification In The Us, Justin Gilmore

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Justin Gilmore’s article "Neo-Authoritarianism and the Contestation of White Identification in the US" examines how the political forces around Donald Trump are often interpreted as an external attack on American democracy, and how the dynamism of these attacks is thought to emanate from various sites of white chauvinism. This article argues that such an interpretation is partial. The upsurge associated with “Trumpism” represents a distinctive contestation of an alternative type of white identity, one that has been elemental for a progressive form of neoliberalism. Although the neoliberal construction of white identification is distinctive, and indeed kinder, its material basis rests …


Neo-Authoritarianism Without Authority, Massimiliano Tomba 2021 University of California, Santa Cruz

Neo-Authoritarianism Without Authority, Massimiliano Tomba

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article examines two aspects of neo-authoritarianism. The first is mainly diagnostic and concerns the nature of authoritarianism as a phenomenon of transition. The article investigates tensions and conflicts between temporalities. It pays attention to the asynchronous nature of change which, alongside the social structural level of changes, also the psycho-social level, intervene politically in different forms. There are social strata that are strangers in their own country and do not share the same present with others. For them, looking to the past is the only way to imagine a different future. If they are looking for values and authority, …


A Trumpian Mechanism, Emmett Peixoto 2021 University of California, Santa Cruz

A Trumpian Mechanism, Emmett Peixoto

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In 2016, a liar made a hypocrite appear worse and thereby won the US presidency. How did a liar, which is traditionally deemed something worse than a hypocrite, manage to do this? This article offers an answer. It does so by uncovering a peculiar mechanism, a Trumpian mechanism, at the heart of Trump’s relations with his critics. The mechanism explains how Trump benefited from wrong-footing his critics and is thus essential for understanding Trump’s success. The article offers a few key examples of this mechanism working against Trump’s political opponents, e.g., Trump’s (first) impeachment. It then shows how the mechanism …


Authoritarianism And Ideology, Asad Haider 2021 Purdue University

Authoritarianism And Ideology, Asad Haider

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Authoritarianism and Ideology,” Asad Haider approaches the problem of authoritarianism by considering the classical question of tyranny, as framed by Spinoza, and how this can be traced to the Marxist theory of ideology. A fundamental axis of the debate over ideology in twentieth century Marxism was the phenomenon of fascism, theorized in highly influential but also markedly different ways by figures like Wilhelm Reich and Theodor Adorno. A close reading of two major texts—Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism and Adorno's contributions to The Authoritarian Personality—provides a basis for conceptually elaborating different directions that can be taken in the study …


Introduction: New Faces Of Authoritarianism, Asad Haider, Massimiliano Tomba 2021 Viewpoint Magazine

Introduction: New Faces Of Authoritarianism, Asad Haider, Massimiliano Tomba

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


The Rhetorical Mediator: Understanding Agency In Indigenous Translation And Interpretation Through Indigenous Approaches To Ux, Nora Karina Rivera 2021 University of Texas at El Paso

The Rhetorical Mediator: Understanding Agency In Indigenous Translation And Interpretation Through Indigenous Approaches To Ux, Nora Karina Rivera

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In 2018, I became involved in a collaborative community-based project to co-organize an event with the purpose of collecting resources to help in the professionalization efforts of Indigenous translators and interpreters. Drawing on Indigenous and decolonial theories, this interdisciplinary study examines the work done during this event through a user experience (UX) research lens that analyzes the various ways in which Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) and Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS) can better support Indigenous language practices. The colonization of the Americas brought a layer of issues that continue to affect the way in which Indigenous communities conduct their …


Comparing African Cultural Retention And Its Effect On Racial Attitudes In The Music And National Identities Of Cuba And The United States, Lucie Turkel 2021 University of Connecticut

Comparing African Cultural Retention And Its Effect On Racial Attitudes In The Music And National Identities Of Cuba And The United States, Lucie Turkel

Honors Scholar Theses

This project investigates to what extent the African roots of popular music in Cuba and the United States are acknowledged and examines if this level of cultural acknowledgement has any influence on the postcolonial social, cultural, and economic treatment of African Americans and Afro-Cubans. Does a greater and/or more widespread acceptance of African cultural retention and overall African heritage in a country’s national identity help alleviate racism in that country? Using primary sources from Cuban and American music and cultural periodicals, economic statistics, and political and cultural histories, I have determined that Cuba has a higher level of African cultural …


Premises And Problems: Essays On World Literature And Cinema, Luiza Moreira 2021 Binghamton University--SUNY

Premises And Problems: Essays On World Literature And Cinema, Luiza Moreira

Monographs and Open Access Books

World literature, many have stressed, is a systematic category. Both literary scholars and social scientists have argued that the prestige of the major literary languages is key to establishing the shape of the overall system. In order to critically interrogate world literature and cinema, Premises and Problems approaches this system from the perspective of languages and film traditions that do not hold a hegemonic position. This perspective raises new questions about the nature of literary hegemony and the structure of world literature: How is hegemony established? What are the costs of losing it? What does hegemony mask? How is it …


Poems And Translations, Rome Hernández Morgan 2021 University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

Poems And Translations, Rome Hernández Morgan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This document is separated into two parts, a collection of original poems and a collection of translations of the crônicas of Rubem Braga. The collection of poems, titled, “Because I Never See You,” attempt to parse the complexities of familial and intimate relationships, addiction, and BIPOC experience. The collection of translations attempts to offer a small sample of the crônicas of Rubem Braga (1913-1990), a Brazilian journalist who is known throughout Brazil for “elevating” the form of the crônica from ephemera to the literary.


The Jordanian Novel In Postmodern Context, Hamed Alalamat 2021 University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

The Jordanian Novel In Postmodern Context, Hamed Alalamat

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the Jordanian culture is gradually impacted by the globalization process of late capitalism, this study argues that many Jordanian novels exhibit a number of postmodern characteristics, such as blurring boundaries and disrupting hierarchies, the use of pastiche as a compositional technique, formal fragmentation, and the weakness of utopian imagination. Adopting Fredric Jameson’s theory of postmodernism as a framework, the study explores ten Jordanian novels written between 1986 and 2016 to demonstrate that the modernization process and the cultural changes in the Arab world, in general, and in the Jordanian society, in particular, have increased the density of postmodern features …


A World Of Infinite Possibilities: Recoding Popular Culture In Modern U.S. Ethnic Fiction, Todd Martinez 2021 University of Nevada, Las Vegas

A World Of Infinite Possibilities: Recoding Popular Culture In Modern U.S. Ethnic Fiction, Todd Martinez

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This project examines how the U.S. ethnic authors Ralph Ellison, Maxine Hong Kingston and Junot Díaz reflect the dynamic, reciprocal process of transculturation by decoding popular cultural forms. Using strategies made available by cultural studies, hemispheric theory and neoMarxism, critical attention will be directed to each author’s major literary work: Ellison’s Invisible Man, Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey, and Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This dissertation further analyzes a hitherto overlooked area of U.S. multiethnic literary studies: the ethnic subject’s relationship to encoded popular culture forms and how they impact dentity formation. Recent scholarship has focused on the ethnic …


Doppelgängers And Doubles In Literature: A Comparison Of Fyodor Dostoevsky’S Crime And Punishment And Vladimir Nabokov’S Lolita, Meghan E. Cooper 2021 College of the Holy Cross

Doppelgängers And Doubles In Literature: A Comparison Of Fyodor Dostoevsky’S Crime And Punishment And Vladimir Nabokov’S Lolita, Meghan E. Cooper

College Honors Program

This thesis is dedicated to the concept of the double character in literature and how such characters were utilized by authors Fyodor Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment (1866) and Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita (1955). First, this thesis discusses the theoretical aspects of the double—a villainous character who mirrors another character in some way, whether in appearance or in their actions— and the religious, psychological, philosophical, and societal roots of the concept of a double in literature. Then it explores how double characters in Dostoevsky and Nabokov’s works serve a crucial role in their novels by mirroring the worst traits of …


Persian Elements In Kashmiri Marsiya (Elegy): A Case Study Of Sang (Stone), Mufazil Ali Malla, Barkat Ali Latoo 2021 university of kashmir

Persian Elements In Kashmiri Marsiya (Elegy): A Case Study Of Sang (Stone), Mufazil Ali Malla, Barkat Ali Latoo

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Marsiya or elegy poetry is a literary genre that is often sung whenever a dear person has died. Marsiya has a visionary and secularist outlook. The knowledge keeps countries alive, both politically and socially, and economically. In the Shia sect of Islam, the act of writing and proposing elegy on Imam Hussain A.S. Martyrdom finds an important place, although it is not entirely restricted to it. In Northwest India, by the end of the 11th century, Persian-Arabic words were developed and the languages spoken at the time were brought to the Indian language. Kashmir has been said to have had …


The Somaesthetics Of The Multitude: The Politico-Aesthetic Logic Of Antonio Negri And Michael Hardt In Constructing The Subjecthood, Jinying Li 2021 Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

The Somaesthetics Of The Multitude: The Politico-Aesthetic Logic Of Antonio Negri And Michael Hardt In Constructing The Subjecthood, Jinying Li

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

"The Multitude", a concept reconstructed by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt after the deconstruction of the subjecthood by post-structuralism, is a combination of singularity and commonality, and physicality and affection, and it is the subjecthood of postmodern society that overthrows the control of the empire and constructs the commonwealth. In the early days, Negri began to explore social issues from the perspective of the relationship between art and the multitude. From this perspective, his logics in constructing the multitude can be summed up as aestheticization and bio-politicization, and its inner trajectory of reasoning can be summarized as a transformation from …


Nelson Goodman On Exemplification, Hui Zhang 2021 Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Nelson Goodman On Exemplification, Hui Zhang

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Nelson Goodman holds that there are two forms of symbolizing, namely, denotation and exemplification. In denotation, a symbol is used to refer to an object, while in exemplification the exemplifier has a label or is referred to by a label. Exemplification explains how abstract works perform symbolic functions and express metaphorical exemplifiers. Being highly creative and influential, Goodman's theory is valuable and can serve as a reference for Chinese scholars.


“Inaesthetics” And The “Passion For The Real”: Alain Badiou On The Avant-Garde Art, Kaifeng Xia 2021 Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

“Inaesthetics” And The “Passion For The Real”: Alain Badiou On The Avant-Garde Art, Kaifeng Xia

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Alain Badiou distinguishes between the didactic schema, classical schema and romantic schema in art, and further suggests that the avant-garde art does not create a new schema, but synthesizes the previous schemata into a didactico-romantic schema. Badiou strives to propose a new schema, the "inaesthetics" schema, which is both immanent and exclusive, that is, taking art as a truth-procedure. The inaesthetics schema is actually modeled around the avant-garde art, as Badiou believes that the avant-garde art embodies the "passion for the real" which implies two approaches of "destruction" and "subtraction." When Badiou attempts to combine these two approaches in his …


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