Digital Commons Network^™

The Cognitive Construction Of The Self In Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Patrick S. Bernard

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "The Cognitive Construction of the Self in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God," Patrick S. explores the conception and representation of the self as a cognitive construct in Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. By this approach, Bernard proposes that cognitive paradigms, such as knowing, seeing, thinking, and speaking, for example, and their capacities to engender knowledge and perception, identity and consciousness, memory and narrative, language and speech, are central to the novel's exploration of the self as an epistemological and ideological product. Using tools of interpretation adapted from cognitive psychology and radical constructivism, …

Reading South African Media Representations Of Islam After 11 September 2001, Gabeba Baderoon

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Reading South African Media Representations of Islam after 11 September 2001," Gabeba Baderoon probes the resonances of news representations of 11 September 2001. Baderoon examines the events of that day from the perspective of South Africa, arguing that the international media became located and embodied through the representations of the highly visible and grievable deaths of just under three thousand people in the United States. Her analysis reveals a complex view that derives from the legacy of legislated racial discrimination crafted under the policy of Apartheid as well as the presence of Muslims brought as slaves during …

Textual Strategies To Resist Disappearance And The Mothers Of Plaza De Mayo, Alicia Partnoy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "Textual Strategies to Resist Disappearance and the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo" Alicia Partnoy draws attention to the ways the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo use literature as both a form of protest and as a way to build solidarity. Focusing on four texts written by the Mothers, Partnoy attempts to correct the lack of attention that this literary work has drawn. Partnoy suggests that in addition to the forms of public protest engaged by the Mothers, their literary activities also play a central role in their efforts. In fact, their use of the literary form …

The Logic And Language Of Torture, Jonathan H. Marks

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "The Logic and Language of Torture," Jonathan H. Marks explores the tragic temptation of torture in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks. Emotive responses to terrorism fueled by ticking bomb scenarios and other narrative constructs caused the U.S. to reconsider torture and the boundaries of permissible interrogation tactics in the aftermath of 9/11. While many in the media and the academy debated the necessity of "interrogational torture," the government decided that something more than moral reconstruction was required. For that reason, it embarked on a campaign of legal exceptionalism. While affirming its commitment to the …

Landmines, Hiv/Aids, And Africa's New Generation, Barbara Harlow

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Landmines, HIV/Aids, and Africa's New Generation," Barbara Harlow asks the question what do "humanitarianism" and "human rights" have to do with the humanities? In a globalizing culture, how do personal stories contribute to political histories? What might be the effect of literature on these pressing questions? Harlow focuses in her essay on the work of Swedish writer and Maputo theater director Henning Mankell through particular attention to Secrets in the Fire and Playing with Fire: Two novels about a young Mozambican named Sofia. Harlow shows how Mankell's linking of the experiences of Sofia to the legacy of …

Introduction To Representing Humanity In An Age Of Terror, Sophia A. Mcclennen, Henry James Morello

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Collateral Damage And The "Incident" At Haditha, Tom Engelhardt

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Collateral Damage and the 'Incident' at Haditha," Tom Engelhardt provides a comparative analysis of the massacres of innocent civilians in the Viet Nam and Iraqi wars. Focusing on the events of My Lai, Haditha, Abu Ghraib, and Fallujah, Engelhardt traces the uncanny resemblance between the ways that the military attempted to contain the flow of information about these atrocities. Engelhardt analyzes the rhetorical tropes of media coverage via the favored terms of "collateral damage" and "incident" and the preferred statistics that always claim that 99.9% of the military conducts itself professionally. The fact that the media not …

A Monk's Tale, Sam Hamill

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "A Monk's Tale," Sam Hamill recounts his ongoing commitment to using poetry as a form of protest and explains how poetry bridges the personal and the public, weaving together the life of one poet and that of an entire globe. In late January 2003, in response to an invitation to a symposium by Laura Bush to celebrate "Poetry and the American Voice," Hamill declined to participate; a longtime pacifist, he could not in good faith visit the White House following the recent news of George W. Bush's plan for a unilateral "Shock and Awe" attack on Iraq. …

The Tortured Body, The Photograph, And The U.S. War On Terror, Julie Gerk Hernandez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Julie Gerk Hernandez, in her article "The Tortured Body, the Photograph, and the U.S. War on Terror," engages in an analysis of the institutional mechanisms that lead to dehumanizing violence as a result of the ongoing allegations of torture of detainees at U.S. military bases at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, and at Guantánamo. Hernandez conducts her investigation by examining the photographed torture at Abu Ghraib as an atavistic resurgence of the representational practices at work in post-Civil-War racial lynching. Hernandez also explores the historical and visual parallels between the photographs at Abu Ghraib and the photographs of post-Civil-War lynchings in …

The Black Body And Representations Of The (In)Human, Li-Chun Hsiao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Li-Chun Hsiao, in his article "The Black Body and Representations of the (In)human," takes cues from the theoretical insights of Agamben's "bare life" as well as Laclau's and Mouffe's "social antagonism" and explores how the slave can be considered a constitutive element which is nevertheless foreclosed from Western democracies. Hsiao also analyzes the various ways the term "slave" functions as trope in the founding discourses of Western democracy. "Bare life" remains included in politics "in the form of the exception," as "something that is included solely through an exclusion." Such an "inclusive exclusion" is represented not in its differential relationship …

The Global Phenomenon Of "Humanizing" Terrorism In Literature And Cinema, Elaine Martin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "The Global Phenomenon of 'Humanizing' Terrorism in Literature and Cinema" Elaine Martin presents -- following a discussion of two early examples, Schiller's The Robbers and Heinrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas (1810) -- an analysis of several contemporary works that model different ways of representing terrorism: Heinrich Böll's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975) and its 1976 filmic adaptation by Volker Schlöndorff, Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist (1985), Santosh Sivan's film The Terrorist (1999), and Tom Tykwer's film Heaven (2002). Edward Said provided a critique of the battle against terrorism, saying that it is selective ("we" are …

Mass-Mediated Social Terror In Spain, Nicholas Manganas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Mass-Mediated Social Terror in Spain," Nicholas Manganas explores mass-mediated narratives associated with social terror. Manganas posits that one approach to understanding social terror is to conceptualize it as a process of narrativization. Manganas takes a global view while at the same time applying that approach to the contemporary Spanish political and cultural context following the 11 March 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid. He views the current social and political panorama of Spain as an example of social terror in dialogue with both current and historical national discourses. Manganas details the events surrounding the March 11 attack in …

The Humanities, Human Rights, And The Comparative Imagination, Sophia A. Mcclennen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "The Humanities, Human Rights, and the Comparative Imagination" Sophia A. McClennen argues that understanding the relationship between culture and human rights depends on humanist perspectives attentive to the relationship between storytelling and identity, mass culture and ideology, text and audience, critical thinking and engaged citizenship. After briefly considering how the divide between the humanities and human rights advocates developed and how it might best be overcome, she suggests that comparative cultural studies grounded in an ethical commitment to study the relationship between culture and society offers an indispensable perspective on the ties between culture and identity integral …

Poetry And The Aesthetic Of Morality, Michael Mcirvin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "Poetry and the Aesthetic of Morality," Michael McIrvin charts the fall of language from its mythologized acquisition through its use in communal history and ritual to its present diminished function as advertiser's tool and means of control by those in power. The partial exegesis of a poem written in response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the subsequent US response illustrates that the assignation of otherness on the present grand scale is emblematic of this diminishment. McIrvin argues that President Bush's misspeak leading up to the war and to the last presidential election is …

The Terrorist Event, Bill Nichols

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Terrorist Event," Bill Nichols examines how the US media attempted to make meaning of the events of 9/11. How were news anchors and producers to explain an event that escaped their comprehension? Without context or historical equivalence in the US, news outlets groped for a narrative in which to frame the event even if that meant creating the meaning themselves. In their attempt to create meaning, what sorts of fetishes and fantasies did they draw-on and in turn create? The result is that the US excuses itself from its own past and future barbarism as it …

Bearing Witness Through Fiction, Carolina Rocha

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Bearing Witness through Fiction," Carolina Rocha explores the ways in which three Argentine writers grappled with their roles as public intellectuals and witnesses to acts of terror, undeniable violence, and human rights abuses during the most recent military dictatorship. By examining three narrative texts written from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s Aquí pasan cosas raras (Strange Things Happen Here) (1975) by Luisa Valenzuela, La casa y el viento (The House and the Wind) (1984) by Hector Tizón, and El árbol de la gitana (The Tree and the Gypsy) (1997) by Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, she argues that …

Dorfman, Schubert, And Death And The Maiden, David Schroeder

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Dorfman, Schubert, and Death and the Maiden," David Schroeder suggests that the selection of the play's title Death and the Maiden (1991) by Ariel Dorfman is a careful one. Schroeder proposes that it is not only that the title of the piece comes directly from Franz Schubert's String Quartet in D minor, so named because it uses material from the song of the same name as the theme for the second movement. Schroeder argues that Dorfman's thoughtful choice is as much related to the strong parallels between Schubert's Maiden and Dorfman's character Paulina Salas, as to Dr. …

Narration In International Human Rights Law, Joseph R. Slaughter

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Narration in International Human Rights Law," Joseph R. Slaughter argues that the prohibitions and entitlements articulated in international human rights law presume and promote an image of the human being as a self-narrating subject. He proposes that human rights law enshrines commitments to the human voice and to the ability of the individual to construct narratives of identity. In this sense, human rights violations can be understood as assaults on the human voice and on the socio-cultural structures that make certain kinds of narratives and narration possible. This narratological reading of the law offers a way to …

Media In A Capitalist Culture, Barbara Trent

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Media in a Capitalist Culture," Barbara Trent looks at the negative effects that capitalism has on the media and how those effects may be overcome. Trent intertwines personal experience with socio-historical context to give the reader a genuine feel for political filmmaking in a Hollywood dominated world. She describes how her Academy Award winning film The Panama Deception was removed from a Cineplex, even after out-grossing all of the other films there, because Warner Brothers wanted the screen. After an examination of the impact a dominant Hollywood has on local culture around the world, Trent offers three …

Artists In Times Of War, Howard Zinn

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Artists in Times of War," Howard Zinn examines the role of the artist during war time and finds that the transcendent nature of art not only shows us the beauty of everyday life, but can also go beyond everyday politics and media hype to critically address the problems of the day. In fact, Zinn suggests that it is the job of artists to "to think outside the boundaries of permissible thought and dare to say things that no one else will say." For Zinn, this is especially important given the intensity of the events of 9/11 where …

Selected Bibliography Of Comparative Studies On Human Rights Culture, Henry James Morello

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

有關胡金銓電影的參考資料 = References On King Hu Cinema

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.

Notes On Contributors = 作者簡介

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.

Context, Translator And History : A Study Of Three Translations Of Luotuo Xiangzi In The Usa, Ying Jun Li

Lingnan Theses

Three different English translations of Lao She’s (老舍) Luotuo Xiangzi (骆驼祥子) were marketed in the USA from 1945 to 2005. What are the major historical occurrences and trends from the late 19th to the early 21st century that define the contexts of these translations? Beginning with an analysis of the stylistic features of each translation, the present study explores how each of the three translators and the corresponding historical context impacted on the production of the translated text, its marketing orientation and its reception in the USA.

With a comparison of the three translated texts and their meta-textual features, the …

Displacement And The Text: Exploring Otherness In Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, Maryse Condé'S La Migration Des Coeurs, Rosario Ferré'S The House On The Lagoon, And Tina De Rosa's Paper Fish, Melody Boyd Carriere

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a study of how some displaced Caribbean and Italian American women examine identity within a literary tradition that considers them "Other." I have chosen four culturally diverse novels to explore, each one written by a different female author: Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, Maryse Condé's La migration des cœurs, Rosario Ferré's The House on the Lagoon, and Tina De Rosa's Paper Fish. I identify the causes of the protagonists' displacement, and analyze the actions they take to make themselves heard in a tradition that has formerly silenced them. The role of the mother is especially important in …

Neo Romance: Gender Renegotiation In Harlequin Romance Novels, Amanda L. Breeden

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Mass-market romance novels remain top sellers among popular fiction and paperback in the American market; however, academic scholarship examining the popular romance novel is dated. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the gender roles of the heroine and hero characters within the novels. This thesis is a content analysis that examines seventy-two Harlequin romance novels, publication dates 1971-2006. The findings in this thesis suggest that the gender roles of the heroine and hero deviate drastically from those analyzed in the 1980's and 1990's, specifically regarding sexuality and gender performance. Neo Romance emerges, characterized by a sexually aggressive, autonomous …

Language In Modern African Drama, Isaiah Ilo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "Language in Modern African Drama" Isaiah Ilo proposes alternative criteria for language choice in modern African drama. The two most influential constructs on the language question are Fanon's essentialism that rejects Western languages as instruments of subjugation and Achebe's hybrid approach which entails subversion of the foreign languages by infusing them with African verbal characteristics. The constructs, which emphasise indigenised language and content, stem from the idea that consciousness of the colonial experience should determine language choice and usage in post-colonial African literary creativity. In building a case for a post-indiginist aesthetic, Ilo argues that present reality …

Globalization And Christopher Columbus In The Americas, Elise Bartosik-Vélez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "Globalization and Christopher Columbus in the Americas," Elise Bartosik-Vélez considers the responses of scholars working in colonial and early modern studies to recent exponential increases in the transnationalization of capital and the resulting changes in the role of the nation-state. The case of Christopher Columbus and his appropriation by US-American nationalists during the early modern period is particularly instructive with regard to this discussion because Columbus exemplifies not only the drive to globalization of early modern European colonialism, but also the limits of nation-centric thinking in understanding the intersections and overlappings between empire and nation. Columbus in the Americas …

Media, Communication, And The Relevance Of Caragiale's Work Today, Cristian Stamatoiu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Cristian Stamatoiu discusses in his paper "Media, Communication, and the Relevance of Caragiale's Work Today" media structures in the corpus of Romanian writer and thinker Ion Luca Caragiale (1852-1912). Stamatoiu argues that in addition to the artistic sophistication of his work, Caragiale anticipated the impact of new media revolution and its forms as an imitation of "pathological situations" of public discourse and communication per se. Caragiale is, therefore, a writer of surprisingly up-to-date relevance today because, despite his air of the belle époque, in his grotesque farces and in his short stories we discover mental structures found in and characteristic …

His/Tory And Its Vicissitudes In Álvarez's In The Time Of The Butterflies And Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Luz Angélica Kirschner

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "His/tory and Its Vicissitudes in Álvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale" Luz Angélica Kirschner argues that in Julia Álvarez's In the Time of the Bautterflies and in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, although with certain limitations and differences in their approaches, in a complementary way, their texts exemplify, as Joan Wallace Scott suggested, the need to consider gender "a useful category of historical analysis" to overturn the monological and well-organized version of official history that, in the process of history writing, has tended to obliterate "insignificant" narratives and voices. At the …