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Shelley’S Frankenstein As A Book Of Love And Despair, Shun-liang Chao 2019 National Chengchi Univeresity

Shelley’S Frankenstein As A Book Of Love And Despair, Shun-Liang Chao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Influenced by Enlightenment philosophes like Rousseau and Smith, Romantic writers, such as Coleridge and Percy Shelley, celebrate the sublime power of sympathetic love to merge the self and the other (be it human or inhuman) into a wondrous whole, thereby precluding the dangers of solitude and solipsism. Not all Romantic writers, however, share the same sanguine view of love. In Frankenstein, for instance, Mary Shelley offers an alternative to the optimistic perspective on the capacity of (mutual) sympathy. She shapes the novel into tales of bitter solitude, one caused by the lack of sympathetic understanding between Victor and nature, …


Salam Neighbor: Syrian Refugees Through The Camera Lens, Lava Asaad 2019 Middle Tennessee State University

Salam Neighbor: Syrian Refugees Through The Camera Lens, Lava Asaad

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper examines the documentary Salam Neighbor (2015), which celebrates the will of Syrian refugee women who are displaced in Jordan. The collective experience of the refugees portrayed in the documentary solicits a reaction from the Western viewer. To counteract the images of refugees in the media, documentaries can be a good alternative for mass media, which has been perpetuating a binary of the West and the Rest. The argument tackles the issue of this new representation of refugees in documentaries within a postcolonial paradigm of how we represent or speak to/with the Other in our technological age, as well …


Introduction To Suffering, Endurance, Understanding: New Discourses Within Philosophy And Literature, Douglas S. Berman 2019 Hong Kong Baptist University

Introduction To Suffering, Endurance, Understanding: New Discourses Within Philosophy And Literature, Douglas S. Berman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Literature is generally seen as depicting the lives of human subjects through their unique narratives. And that, while its endpoint may be universal, it is typically grounded in the specificity of a human being (or, occasionally, an animal). Philosophy is tasked with providing the foundational cognitive tools to grasp the meaning of experience for the whole. In Hegelian terms, it unfolds the history of the concept. Yet, as George Steiner, Jacques Derrida, and other recent authors have shown, both philosophy – along with its agonistic cousin, religion -- evoke literary themes, rhetorics, and struggles. Over the past fifty years, Continental …


Infidelity As Reality: Re-Staging The Global South With Abbas Kiarostami’S Close-Up, Sinan Richards 2019 University of Oxford/ École normale supérieure

Infidelity As Reality: Re-Staging The Global South With Abbas Kiarostami’S Close-Up, Sinan Richards

Artl@s Bulletin

In this article, we contend that, in the fields of art and visual culture, the Global South is both an elaborate lie and a radical opportunity for transformation. We investigate Kiarostami’s Close-up alongside Lacan’s psychoanalysis to show how Close-up’s filmic narrative evokes the same ‘polyvalence’ and ‘slipperiness’ as the notion of the Global South. We argue that Kiarostami’s Close-up retroactively changed Sabzian’s fate, and in so doing, Kiarostami’s re-staging actively overwrites History itself. We read the same narrative move in the concept of the Global South to suggest that the Global South adopts the Kiarostamian strategy of infidelity as reality …


The Ends Of Plot: Rupture And Entanglement In L’Amica Geniale, Victor X. Zarour Zarzar 2019 CUNY Graduate Center

The Ends Of Plot: Rupture And Entanglement In L’Amica Geniale, Victor X. Zarour Zarzar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation employs narrative theory to contextualize Elena Ferrante’s successful saga, L’amica geniale, within the larger tapestry of European novelistic discourses. It engages with conceptions of narrative structure put forth by critics like Ortega y Gasset, Brooks, and Winnett to understand how L’amica geniale offers cutting commentary on our exegetic practices and advances a geometry of narrative entanglement. I contend that Ferrante recuperates and italicizes nineteenth-century modes of storytelling, displaying a form of epistemological tension rooted in a movement away from a belief in plot’s semantic potentialities and into the postulation of a poetics of smarginatura or rupture. I …


Never Look Away (Werk Ohne Autor), Frederick Ruf 2019 Georgetown University

Never Look Away (Werk Ohne Autor), Frederick Ruf

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Never Look Away (Werk ohne Autor) (2018) directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.


Contradictions Of Freedom In The Tempest And The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Menaka Serres 2019 CUNY Hunter College

Contradictions Of Freedom In The Tempest And The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Menaka Serres

Theses and Dissertations

In William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610-1611) and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) the character negotiate contradictions of freedom: the entitlements that justify violence as well as oppression on the one hand and rights that grant access to emancipation from violence and imposition on the other.


Final Words, Final Shots: Kurosawa, Bortko And The Conclusion Of Dostoevsky’S Idiot, Saera Yoon, Robert O. Efird 2019 UNIST

Final Words, Final Shots: Kurosawa, Bortko And The Conclusion Of Dostoevsky’S Idiot, Saera Yoon, Robert O. Efird

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Final Words, Final Shots: Kurosawa, Bortko, and the Conclusion of Dostoevsky’s Idiot" Robert O. Efird and Saera Yoon discuss film adaptations of Dostoevsky’s novel. Both in his homeland and abroad, the major works of Fyodor Dostoevsky have largely made for disappointing film adaptations. This article examines the cultural diversity and aesthetic motivations underlying two very different adaptations of his novel Idiot, with particular attention to the concluding scenes. Both Akira Kurosawa and Vladimir Bortko follow the novelist's lead by hinting at some form of hope and future redemption amidst the tragedy but, for different reasons, …


Urban Landscape In Mcewan's Narrative Representation Of Berlin, Barbara J. Puschmann-Nalenz 2019 Ruhr-University-Bochum, Germany

Urban Landscape In Mcewan's Narrative Representation Of Berlin, Barbara J. Puschmann-Nalenz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Urban Landscape in McEwan's Narrative Representation of Berlin," Barbara J. Puschmann-Nalenz discusses the image of Berlin created in Ian McEwanﹸs novel The Innocent (1990) and the chapter titled "Berlin" in Black Dogs (1992). It starts from the hypothetical statement that while British literary fiction set in Berlin is rare after 1970 the genres of spy and detective novel, where crime and violence take center stage, shape the image of the city in highbrow narratives as well. The perspectivization of the cityscape, including its monuments, through the protagonists fundamentally influences its image. In The Innocent the limited view …


Retro-Future In Post-Soviet Dystopia, Sergey Toymentsev 2019 Moscow State Pedagogical University

Retro-Future In Post-Soviet Dystopia, Sergey Toymentsev

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Retro-Future in Post-Soviet Dystopia” Sergey Toymentsev explores the vision of retrospective future in such Russian novels as Tatiana Tolstaya’s The Slynx, Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, Olga Slavnikova’s 2017, and Dmitry Bykov’s Zhd. Unlike Zamyatin’s and Platonov’s anti-Soviet satires, post-Soviet dystopias do not respond to any utopian narrative, but project the historical and ideological reality of Russia’s violent (predominantly Soviet) past into the future. Such a traumatic reenactment of the Soviet past in the dystopian future testifies to the rise of authoritarianism in contemporary Russia as well as its incomplete collective memory …


Okonkwo’S Reincarnation: A Comparison Of Achebe’S Things Fall Apart And No Longer At Ease, Mary J. N. Okolie, Ginikachi C. Uzoma 2019 Stellenbosch University

Okonkwo’S Reincarnation: A Comparison Of Achebe’S Things Fall Apart And No Longer At Ease, Mary J. N. Okolie, Ginikachi C. Uzoma

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Abstract: The reincarnation myth is a global concept, founded basically in religion and tradition. It was especially vibrant in the ancient times in places like Egypt, Greece, and in continents like Asia and Africa, which possess varying understandings of the myth. In Igbo tradition, for example, it is believed that reincarnation occurs within a family. And that some of the marks of reincarnation are usually the possession of the birthmark or certain other physical features and the exhibition of character and behavioral traits of a deceased person by a living member of his/her immediate or extended family. Thus, reincarnation entails …


Practices Of Intellectual Labor In The Republic Of Letters: Leibniz And Edward Bernard On Language And European Origins, Michael C. Carhart 2019 Old Dominion University

Practices Of Intellectual Labor In The Republic Of Letters: Leibniz And Edward Bernard On Language And European Origins, Michael C. Carhart

History Faculty Publications

For a project on the origins and migrations of the European nations, Leibniz wanted to see a comparative lexicon purporting to derive the Germanic languages from Asiatic sources. Friends in nearby Gotha were known to have the book; its author had corresponded with Leibniz a few years earlier. But actually getting the book was more difficult than one might expect. In addition to the actual logistics and manners of scholarly communication in the late seventeenth century, this essay shows what scholars were trying to accomplish by establishing the prehistoric origins of the modern nations.


Vladimir Mayakovsky’S Agit-Semitism, Ludmila Lavine 2019 Bucknell University

Vladimir Mayakovsky’S Agit-Semitism, Ludmila Lavine

Faculty Journal Articles

Images of Jewishness as ethnic, cultural, and biblical categories in Vladimir Mayakovsky’s works are both plentiful and understudied. The present article attempts to bridge this gap while exploring the mechanisms that guide the poet’s responses to anti-Semitism. I begin by focusing on the function of the Exodus story in Stikhi ob Amerike(Verses about America), and then move to Mayakovsky’s “agitational” works: his collaboration on the film Evrei na zemle(Jews on the Land, 1927), and his poems ““Evrei (Tovarishcham iz OZETa)” (“Jew [To Comrades from OZET],” 1926) and “‘Zhid’” (“‘Yid’,” 1928). I argue that, while Mayakovsky continues the established …


Poesía Y Transgresión: Figuraciones Góticas En Poeta En Nueva York De Federico García Lorca, Inés Ordiz 2019 University of Stirling, UK

Poesía Y Transgresión: Figuraciones Góticas En Poeta En Nueva York De Federico García Lorca, Inés Ordiz

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

Poeta en Nueva York refleja las impresiones que causaron en Lorca su viaje a la gran ciudad manzana y a Cuba, unos meses después. Su crisis personal se proyecta en el contexto extranjero y alienante que le rodea, para dar como resultado un texto repleto de poderosas metáforas y significados cruzados, retratos angustiosos de la vida en la gran urbe e imágenes de destrucción, muerte y violencia. Mi propuesta busca leer estas evocaciones desde la perspectiva de la literatura gótica, con el fin de iluminar los sombríos mecanismos de transgresión que propone el texto. Así, este análisis explora conceptos como …


"If They Don't Tell You, The Hair Will": Hair Narrative In Contemporary Women's Writing, Darina Pugacheva 2019 Louisiana State University

"If They Don't Tell You, The Hair Will": Hair Narrative In Contemporary Women's Writing, Darina Pugacheva

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The history of colonial and racial oppression made hair stories and testimonials fundamental to understanding hair as a unifying element particular for women of African descent in the post-slavery era. Seen as such, their hair narrations provide the first-person perspective of their life experiences while at the same time inviting a critical investigation of colonial and racial oppression. Contemporary women writers develop these types of narrations into a special language of hair that helps them tell a story that is not apparent or straightforward. This literary device that uses hair to uncover deeper social and political issues is bound up …


La Lengua Gallega En La Diáspora Latinoamericana: La Tensión Entre Nacionalismo Y Sentimentalismo Y Sus Efectos En El Habla, Luke A. Bishop 2019 University of Wisconsin-Madison

La Lengua Gallega En La Diáspora Latinoamericana: La Tensión Entre Nacionalismo Y Sentimentalismo Y Sus Efectos En El Habla, Luke A. Bishop

Nomenclatura: aproximaciones a los estudios hispánicos

En este estudio se explora el mantenimiento del gallego en las comunidades que emigraron a Latinoamérica en los siglos XIX y XX. Primero se contrastan las motivaciones de la comunidad gallega durante los periodos de emigración con el uso activo del gallego en varios centros culturales en las Américas. A continuación se analizan varios textos de la prensa gallega en La Habana y en Buenos Aires, y se comparan con revistas publicadas en los últimos años por centros gallegos en Buenos Aires y en México, DF. De este primer estudio exploratorio se propone que un factor que contribuyó al mantenimiento …


"Il Y A De La Plèbe": Figurations Of The Minor Between Complicity And Dissent, Maria Muhle 2019 Akademie der Bildenden Künste München

"Il Y A De La Plèbe": Figurations Of The Minor Between Complicity And Dissent, Maria Muhle

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this article I discuss the logic of “complicity” and “dissent” that, under current forms of ultra-neoliberal capitalism, is no longer (if it has ever been) one of opposition but rather corresponds to a logic of unrealized potentials, or “as ifs” that “manage” dissent and complicity in conjunction, and erase the dividing line between them, or their value as separate concepts. I examine the genealogy of this opposition and its dilution as a symptom of our contemporary political reality. Michel Foucault presented a paradigmatic view of this genealogy in his analysis of power and the taxonomic separation of three regimes …


Political Violence And Race: A Critique Of Hannah Arendt, Chad Kautzer 2019 Lehigh University

Political Violence And Race: A Critique Of Hannah Arendt, Chad Kautzer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Hannah Arendt’s On Violence (1970) is a seminal work in the study of political violence. It famously draws a distinction between power and violence and argues that the latter must be excluded from the political sphere. Although this may make Arendt’s text an appealing resource for critiques of rising political violence today, I argue that we should resist this temptation. In this article, I identify how the divisions and exclusions within her theory enable her to explicitly disavow violence on one level, while implicitly relying on a constitutive and racialized form of violence on another. In particular, Arendt leaves legal …


The Ambivalence Of Black Rage, Vincent Lloyd 2019 Villanova University

The Ambivalence Of Black Rage, Vincent Lloyd

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Activists associated with the Black Lives Matter movement embrace anger. Owning their rage sets these activists in opposition to an older generation of black leaders, invested in respectability, who narrate anger as an emotion to be overcome. Younger activists worry about complicity with the status quo – with white supremacy – of these older activists, yet embracing anger is no surefire way of avoiding complicity with the status quo. This essay investigates the ambivalence of black anger, drawing on philosophy and feminist theory while also locating the current eruption of black anger in an ambivalent history of black political affect. …


Complicity, Dissent, And The Palestinian Intellectual, Sa'ed Atshan 2019 Swarthmore College

Complicity, Dissent, And The Palestinian Intellectual, Sa'ed Atshan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this article, I draw on the major works of two Palestinian intellectuals—Edward Said and Hanan Ashrawi—and I compare the experiences of Palestinian intellectuals living in the United States with those living under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank. The writings of these two exemplary figures shape the conceptual underpinnings of my exploration of the way Palestinian academics navigate questions of complicity with the different hegemonic political systems that govern their lives. I argue that Said and Ashrawi model a steadfast refusal to be complicit in the state-led repression around them at the same time as they engage in …


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