Subject, Subjugation, And Subjectivity,
2019
Tel-Aviv University
Subject, Subjugation, And Subjectivity, Raef Zreik
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This paper analyzes the ways in which complicity and dissent feed and subvert one another, or the ways in which the subjugated self becomes a political subject. The formative event of Palestinian collective identity is the loss of home and homeland in the aftermath of the Nakba of 1948. “The Catastrophe” divided the Palestinian community to two: Those who remained within the borders of the Israeli state and became Israeli citizens, and the Palestinian refugees, who came to establish the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and led an armed struggle. While examining the two narratives, I also explore two communal modes …
Family Affairs: Complicity, Betrayal, And The Family In Hisham Matar's In The Country Of Men And Nadine Gordimer's My Son's Story,
2019
Princeton University
Family Affairs: Complicity, Betrayal, And The Family In Hisham Matar's In The Country Of Men And Nadine Gordimer's My Son's Story, Lital Levy
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This essay undertakes a comparative reading of the dynamics of complicity and resistance in two contemporary Anglophone novels, Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story (1990) and Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men (2006). My analysis pursues three main lines of inquiry: the ostensible public/ private and political/ personal divides; loyalty and betrayal in the family; and the ambiguous status of the child as a witness and a political subject. I argue that in their respective portrayals of the protagonists’ struggles against South African apartheid and authoritarian rule in Libya, both authors use the device of the child narrator to expose …
Facing The Ruler, Facing The Village: On The Roads To Complicity Following Mengzi And Benda,
2019
New York University
Facing The Ruler, Facing The Village: On The Roads To Complicity Following Mengzi And Benda, Zvi Ben-Dor Benite
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, “Facing the Ruler, Facing the Village,” Zvi Ben-Dor Benite seeks to broaden the boundaries of the discussion about complicity by taking it away from late 20th-century and contemporary debates about it. At the same time, he wishes to highlight the many faces that the problem of complicity could have in different historical moments. Following Czesław Miłosz, this article understands that there are many roads to complicity that have been articulated in different ways across time and space. This article is, therefore, an integrated meditation on complicity bringing together two radically distant approaches to the question. Reading the …
Remnants Of Dissent,
2019
University of Warwick, UK
Remnants Of Dissent, Thomas Docherty
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, “Remnants of Dissent,” Thomas Docherty explores the relation of dissent to guilty complicity in post-war Europe. The article opens with a consideration of the position of Karl Jaspers in 1945 and examines how Jaspers worked through the various modes of guilt that flowed from diverse modes of living under Nazism. Of particular interest is the status of silence in the face of tyrannical Nazi oppression and murders. The essay explores how the workings of language, and its manipulations by the Nazis, helps to normalize such tyranny and to make resistance to it both dangerous and difficult. The …
Introduction: Complicity And Dissent, Or Why We Need Solidarity Between Struggles,
2019
Lehigh University
Introduction: Complicity And Dissent, Or Why We Need Solidarity Between Struggles, Nitzan Lebovic
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Growing pressure from politicians and corporations has thrown into question the very legitimacy of opposition and critique. A language of political affirmation has confused and misled the public, driving many to adopt a cynical attitude to politics. The result has been a rapid decline of legitimate critique, the rise of populism, and a growing tendency to squelch civil disobedience with a militarized police force. The introduction to the special issue considers the role of the complicit/dissenting intellectual in history and literature, politics and law. It explores the genealogy of the terms, as well as conditions for their appearance in our …
Where Is God In Symbolic Exchange? A Theo-Semiological Analysis Of The Sons Of Anarchy,
2019
Liberty University
Where Is God In Symbolic Exchange? A Theo-Semiological Analysis Of The Sons Of Anarchy, Alex Justin Holguin
Masters Theses
This thesis attempts to uncover the religious nature of communication by re-visioning and situating French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s theory of communication within a Christian theological context. By critically engaging Lacan’s theoretical concepts of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real within this context, the thesis is able to access the intersection of rhetorical semiotics, psychoanalysis, and Christian theology to have a more fruitful understanding of how meaning is exchanged between subjects. Lacan’s inter-disciplinary affirmation of rhetoric and psychoanalysis has been able to produce incredible explanatory potential for how meaning, as the bedrock of speech and communication, operates through the psyche …
Class, Capital And Colonies In India And Palestine/Israel,
2019
University in Waterloo, Ontario
Class, Capital And Colonies In India And Palestine/Israel, Amir Locker-Biletzki
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
The article “Class, Capital and Colonies in India and Palestine/Israel” studies the way Indian and Israeli Communist intellectuals conceptualized and understood European Colonialism. In contrast to present day settler-colonial theories – that disregarded Marxist critic of European expansion – Indian and Israeli Communists developed a Bolshevik colonial thinking. For Communists the triple forces of imperialism, capital and class devastated the “archaic” native way of life. In doing so they clear a path for European domination, settlement and class differentiation of both colonizers and colonized. The article traces Bolshevik colonial thinking to its origins in Marx’s and Lenin’s writings. It continuous …
Israeli Literature And The Time Of "Post-Post-Zionism",
2019
Vassar College
Israeli Literature And The Time Of "Post-Post-Zionism", Oded Nir
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In this essay, I argue that contemporary Israeli literature possesses a more “advanced” historical imaginary than that of contemporary “post-post-Zionist” Israeli historiography, and I relate this gap to the neoliberalization of the Israeli economy. I begin by arguing that contemporary literature’s historical imaginary marks a departure from its 80s and 90s postmodern predecessors. I show that this departure is evident in contemporary Israeli literature’s explicit recognition of an inability to relate subjective experience to larger history. This recognition constitutes a dialectical overcoming of Israeli postmodernism’s playful dismantling of the national historical narrative. I then argue that Israeli “post-post-Zionist” historiography constitutes …
"You Prefer Your Enemies Simple And Well Defined": Reading Anton Shammas’ Arabesques As A Novel That Strategically Resists Interpellation,
2019
Ben Gurion University
"You Prefer Your Enemies Simple And Well Defined": Reading Anton Shammas’ Arabesques As A Novel That Strategically Resists Interpellation, Yiftach Ashkenazi, Omri Grinberg
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Anton Shammas’s 1986 novel Arabesques has been the subject of much literary criticism and on-going discussions in Hebrew literature circles. This article argues that existing interpretations of this work share a fundamental similarity to the extent that they assume Arabesques to be a novel whose primary aim is to depict a certain kind of subject, in accordance with the complicated emplacement of Shammas as a Palestinian writing in Hebrew. Against such interpretations, we suggest that Arabesques is better understood as a text that resists the process of subject formation as linked to Althusser’s notion of ideology. Instead, Shammas explores the …
The Materiality And Embodiment Of Violence: Ronit Matalon’S Poetics Of Responsibility,
2019
Yale University
The Materiality And Embodiment Of Violence: Ronit Matalon’S Poetics Of Responsibility, Shiri Goren
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her essay “The Materiality and Embodiment of Violence: Ronit Matalon’s Poetics of Responsibility” Shiri Goren discusses Matalon’s novel Bliss (Sarah-Sarah, 2000) as a complex and bleak account of domestic and political decline. On the backdrop of the first Intifada, a Tel Avivian marriage falls apart and a lifelong powerful and intimate friendship between two women ends abruptly. In another geographical location and slightly different timeframe, early November 1995, a French-Jewish family prepares for the cremation of one of its sons, who died of AIDS. Rejecting potential interpretations of national allegory, Goren argues that one of the foundational …
Subjectivity, Institutions And Language In Contemporary Israeli Film,
2019
Tulane University
Subjectivity, Institutions And Language In Contemporary Israeli Film, Ari Ofengenden
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Subjectivity, Institutions and Language in Contemporary Israeli Film" Ari Ofengenden analyzes the transnational characteristics of contemporary Israeli films (from 2000 until today). He claims that a new regime of globally networked production and distribution of Israeli film has articulated a specific kind of subjectivity presented in these films. In this article, he will concentrate on two characteristics of this subjectivity: the relations of protagonist with social institutions and use of language. Relations with social institutions starts with the highly prevalent representations of a sensitive and individualist protagonist who suffers under collective and coercive institutions like the army, …
Watching Fight Club In Tel Aviv: Or The 2011 Social Protests In Israel, A Political Postmortem,
2019
San Francisco State University
Watching Fight Club In Tel Aviv: Or The 2011 Social Protests In Israel, A Political Postmortem, Eran Kaplan
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article “Watching Fight Club in Tel Aviv: Or The 2011 Social Protests in Israel, a Political Postmortem,” Eran Kaplan provides an analysis of the ideological underpinnings of the social protests that swept Israel in 2011 and the failure of these protests to bring about actual political change. The article draws on the manner by which David Fincher’s film Fight Club exposes the ideological dimensions of modern, neoliberal consumerist society as a way to understand the driving forces behind the Israeli protests and to suggest a possible way out of the ideological quagmire that the protesters and their leaders …
Coping With Fear: Frontier Kibbutzes And The Syrian-Israeli Border War,
2019
Tel Aviv University
Coping With Fear: Frontier Kibbutzes And The Syrian-Israeli Border War, Orit Rozin
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Coping with Fear: Frontier Kibbutzes and the Syrian-Israeli Border War,” Orit Rozin discusses the practices and norms of border kibbutzes coping with daily hostilities. The Israel-Syrian border was a constant point of friction. Hostilities erupted over the cultivation and the control of the demilitarized zones and over water resources. Northern Kibbutzes both took part in triggering Syrian violence and were victims of that violence. Covering the interwar period 1956-1967, Rozin traces the subjective emotional reaction of kibbutz members exposed to Syrian violence. Focusing on fear and employing Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of emotional communities, she shows that members …
The Catastrophic Horizon: Contemporary Israeli Cinema's Critique Of Neo-Liberal Israel,
2019
Open University, Israel
The Catastrophic Horizon: Contemporary Israeli Cinema's Critique Of Neo-Liberal Israel, Yael Munk
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, Munk analyzes the gradual decline in social solidarity of the once-socialist Israeli society has become discernible in arts and society alike. This process has been voiced in films that described the dangers of a segregated society in a graphic manner, pointing an accusing finger at what Israeli society has become. In these films, the prolonged Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories considered by some as the source of all evil, has been removed from the intellectual foreground in order to provide by a deeper look into the catastrophic outcomes of the social dead end Zionism has reached. …
Suburban Realities: The Israeli Case,
2019
Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design
Suburban Realities: The Israeli Case, Tamar Berger
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Suburban Realities: The Israeli Case" Tamar Berger discusses the nature of the new building in Israel in the last 3-4 decades. Israel, she claims, has been going through a process of massive suburbanization, which is drastically changing the face of the country. Some of the features of the new space are similar to those of other places, globally, but it has its particularity, the result of both the local spatial history and the nature of Israeli society. Suburbs in general are hard to define. Still, a set of typical features of the Israeli suburbs can be noted: …
Irony, Revenge, And The Naqba In Yehuda Amichai’S Early Work,
2019
Yale University
Irony, Revenge, And The Naqba In Yehuda Amichai’S Early Work, Hannan Hever
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This article offers a materialist reading of the poetry of Yehuda Amichai, the most well-known Israeli poet outside Israel. The article explores the political role of irony in Amichai’s early work, situating him as a prominent member of the “State Generation” poetry. Challenging accepted readings, the essay argues that Amichai’s poems that deal with the 1948 war, should be read as a post-traumatic response, which uses irony and rich and bold metaphorical devices to distance itself from the horrors of the war, and therefore also form the political and ethical meanings of the Naqba. That Amichai’s poetry translates the language …
Introduction: Israeli Critical Reflection After Post-Zionism, Or The Opening As Interpretive Horizon,
2019
Vassar College
Introduction: Israeli Critical Reflection After Post-Zionism, Or The Opening As Interpretive Horizon, Oded Nir, Ari Ofengenden
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This essay attempts to situate this special issue as an intervention, from a materialist perspective, in the field of Israeli cultural studies. We interrogate the common periodizations of Israeli culture, and its contemporary characterization as “post-post-Zionist.” We try to show that the latter betrays an unacknowledged failure of historical narration, present throughout Israeli cultural production. We then argue that rather than being satisfied with this failure, the goal of Israeli cultural critique today should be to search for new ways to narrate “big” history, to reassert the indispensability of relating personal experience of the present, in all its details, to …
"The Chinese Animation Industry: From The Mao Era To The Digital Age",
2019
The University of San Francisco
"The Chinese Animation Industry: From The Mao Era To The Digital Age", Stephanie Jones
Master's Projects and Capstones
Since the 1950’s the Chinese Animation industry has been trying to create a unique national style for China. The national style of the 1950’s and early 1960’s was one of freedom, fantasy, and creativity. With the success of “Heroic Little Sisters of the Grassland”/草原英雄小姐妹(1965), the government administration, namely Jiang Qing of the “Gang of Four”, demanded that all animation should follow specific guidelines based on Social Realism guidelines. This in turn, ushered in a new national style of animation during the Cultural Revolution(1966-1976). During this ten-year period government policies imposed strict restrictions on animators and cause a drain of creative …
Slotus,
2019
Loyola Marymount University
Slotus, Alison F. Huntley, Michael F.X. Daley
Honors Thesis
When a paranoid, image-obsessed woman becomes Second Lady of the United States, she will protect herself and her family from the (often non-existent) eyes of the press no matter what - despite her three step-children’s protests.
Code-Switching In A Bilingual Workplace,
2019
Augustana College, Rock Island Illinois
Code-Switching In A Bilingual Workplace, Montserrat Ricossa
Honors Program: Student Scholarship & Creative Works
Bilingual people often find themselves in a situation where they switch from one language to another. As with the number of Spanish speakers exponentially increasing in the United States, “code-switching” within Spanish and English is more noticeable within work spaces. When and where does code switching occur? Why does it occur? And what does it mean about the work environment? This essay will argue that code switching can be used within any environment, regardless of class or education. First, it’s important to know the history of code switching and how it differs from Spanglish. “In-groups” can be formed with basic …
