Digital Commons Network^™

Representation Of Terror And Terrorism In Two Arab Films: Paradise Now (2005) By Hany Abu-Assad And Horses Of God (2012) By Nabil Ayouch, Mustapha Hamil

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Middle Eastern violence and terrorism are not novel subjects in world cinema, especially American cinema. The Arab or Muslim other in these films is always presented as someone who epitomises a culture of violence, directed mostly against innocent civilians. Against the backdrop of Hollywood’s stereotypical representation of Middle-Easterners as advocate of indiscriminate terror and terrorism, Arab filmmakers have turned in recent years to the representation of terror and religious extremism. Paradise Now (Abu Assad 2005) and Horses of God (Ayouch 2012) address the controversial issue of suicide bombing with the same motivation: to examine the choice of suicide bombing within …

Looking Back, Or Re-Visioning: Contemporary American Jewish Poets On “Lot’S Wife”, Anat Koplowitz-Breier

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Although mentioned only twice in Genesis (19:17, 26), Lot’s wife has been a topic of much discussion amongst both traditional and modern commentators and exegetes. The traditional midrashim seek to explain why she chose to disregard the instructions she was given and the nature of her punishment. In doing so, they follow two principal directions, representing her a) negatively as a wicked sinner, a Sodomite who acted as such even before disobeying the divine decree not to look backwards—thus linking her disobedience with her intrinsic character (e.g., curious, greedy, inhospitable, faithless); or b) positively as a loving mother and daughter. …

Resisting Pacification: Locating Tension In G'Ebinyo Ogbowei's Poetry, Niyi Akingbe, Paul Ayodele Onanuga

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Where Are The Women?: An Ecofeminist Reading Of William Golding’S Lord Of The Flies, Hawk Chang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The absence of female characters and their voices in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) has been previously examined. On the surface, this fiction focuses on the struggle and survival of a group of boys who are left alone on a Pacific island against the background of nuclear warfare. The only presence of women in the story seems to be the aunt via a boy’s narration. However, when approaching the fiction through the lens of ecofeminism, we can find a range of feminized entities which are metaphorically embodied in the natural surroundings of the secluded island. The boys’ interactions …

Vulgarity As Springboard For High Art—A Comparative Study Of Vladimir Nabokov And Qian Zhongshu’S Notions Of Vulgarity, Derong Cao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The discussion of vulgarity features prominently in both Nabokov and Qian’s creative writing. In this essay, their notions of vulgarity will be compared and contrasted. Nabokov and Qian have surprisingly similar understandings of vulgarity. To be more specific, both identify pretense/ affectation and triteness/ mediocrity as its fundamental characteristics. Moreover, both authors believe that the quintessential feature of vulgarity lies in its downplay of individual consciousness. The two authors’ understandings of vulgarity also differ in major ways. Qian’s Fortress Besieged, though showing deep social and moral concerns, did not seem to suspect a direct causal link between vulgarity and …

Strange Genre-Related Loops In A Novel-Short Story: The Tension Between The Genres And Their Cultural Context, Orna Levin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The goal of the current study was to examine the strange genre-related loops in the novel The Short Story Master, by Maya Arad (2009), through the tension between the two genres represented in the text and their cultural contexts. The plot of the novel tells of the professional and personal crisis of the master of the short story, who failed in his mission to write a novel. The text hints to the reader that the central conflict that moves the plot along is neither romantic nor existential, but rather genre-related, and thus the entire work is a manifestation of …

‘Convicted Of Patricide?’: Robert Frost’S Nationalism In The Eyes Of Contemporary Arab-American Women Writers, Eman K. Mukattash

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Given the culturally expansive nature of the American literary tradition of today, the question of the relevance of Robert Frost’s poetry to the poetry of contemporary Arab-American women writers is an issue worth digging into. Writing almost one hundred years ago does not make Frost’s poetry out of date. Frost’s poetry is as relevant to today’s America as it has been to the America of his days. And this can be ascribed to the multiplicity of perspectives he presents in his poetry as he examines crucial questions lying at the core of America’s “grand narrative of national development.” (Westover 2004: …

2021 Seccll Conference Program, Seccll Conference

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

Conference program for the 2021 SECCLL.

The Representation Of Moroccan Otherness In Edith Wharton's In Morocco, Khadija Belhiah

Dirassat

Edith Wharton's In Morocco, written in 1920, is considered one of the classics of American travel literature. It is Wharton's account of her one-month journey through Moroccoin1917.In this book, which relies on colonial French historiography, Wharton explores Morocco and its people, recording her encounter with and impressions of a non-Western culture. She describes Moroccan cities and architecture, provides accounts of religious ceremonies and ritual dances, and depicts the Sultan's palaces and the "mysterious» world of his harem. As a travel narrative dealing with Morocco, Wharton's In Morocco is representative of Orientalist discourse and is informed by an intent to see …

New Materialism’S Second Phase, Tobias Skiveren

Criticism

Influx and Efflux. Writing up with Walt Whitman by Jane Bennett. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 224 pp. $25.95

Postcolonial Narrative And The Dialogic ImaginatioN: An Analysis Of Early Francophone West African Fiction And Cinema, Seydina Mouhamed Diouf

Theses and Dissertations

Francophone West Africa, in the aftermath of colonization, found itself at a crossroads between the necessity to address the problems of neo-colonialism while affirming its cultural identity and the need to embrace a universal message. That dilemma is not shared by literary critics who regard the work of early generation writers merely as an “empire writing back.” In the many classifications of West African literature, the emphasis is oftentimes put either on the importance of a counter-discourse that also rejects Western aesthetics or on the effects of post-independence disillusionment. This study argues that early francophone West African literary productions took …

Writing Gender In Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction, Li Guo

Comparative Cultural Studies

Women’s tanci, or “plucking rhymes,” are chantefable narratives written by upper-class educated women from seventeenth-century to early twentieth-century China. Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women’s Tanci Fiction offers a timely study on early modern Chinese women’s representations of gender, nation, and political activism in their tanci works before and after the Taiping Rebellion (1850 to 1864), as well as their depictions of warfare and social unrest.

Women tanci authors’ redefinition of female exemplarity within the Confucian orthodox discourses of virtue, talent, chastity, and political integrity could be bourgeoning expressions of female exceptionalism and could have foreshadowed protofeminist ideals …

Writing Gender In Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction, Li Guo

Purdue University Press Book Previews

Women’s tanci, or “plucking rhymes,” are chantefable narratives written by upper-class educated women from seventeenth-century to early twentieth-century China. Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction offers a timely study on early modern Chinese women’s representations of gender, nation, and political activism in their tanci works before and after the Taiping Rebellion (1850 to 1864), as well as their depictions of warfare and social unrest.

Women tanci authors’ redefinition of female exemplarity within the Confucian orthodox discourses of virtue, talent, chastity, and political integrity could be bourgeoning expressions of female exceptionalism and could have foreshadowed protofeminist ideals …

Critical Climates: Stimmung, Voice And Mythopoesis In German Literature From 1950–1989, Marc Cesar Rickenbach

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Critical Climates examines the interest in myth among a number of literary figures from 1950 to 1989 in relation to the concurrent re-emergence of the German aesthetic concept of Stimmung. At once referring to atmosphere, milieu, mood, disposition and harmony, while carrying along its root Stimme, or voice, this dissertation shows how Stimmung informed a literary practice among German-language authors that engaged the relationship between narrative, ideology and collective moods in a way that can be spoken of in terms of a mythopoesis. This project builds upon contemporary scholarship that focuses on Stimmung as a way to refigure …

Nation(S) And Narrative(S) In Forms Of Chinese Culture, Angela Chun Ling Wei

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims to explore the difference in "forms" between literary works and their adapted films, and then examine the relationships between the narrative and subject matter both in written and motion-picture form. In the process, the artistic relationship to life narratives and changes in national culture and government will be explored, employing the backdrop of four important national crises in history: the cultural revolution in mainland China, post-civil war Taiwan, Japanese hegemony in Shanghai, and the 1997 return of Hong Kong. The works covered are novels from Modern Chinese literature and their adapted films, King of Children, A …

Color Symbols And Ethnolinguistic Aspects In English And Uzbek Folk Tales, Aziza Choliboyevna Nusratova

Scientific reports of Bukhara State University

Background. The article provides a lot of information about the commonalities between the genres of English and Uzbek folklore. In addition, in English and Uzbek fairy tales, many writers have expressed their views on the harmony of colors. There is also information about the differences between English and Uzbek fairy tales. Methods. From time immemorial, man has not only fought for his own survival, but also for the longevity of his tribe. Consequently, the content of alla, rubbish, fairy tales and riddles is primarily aimed at shaping a conscious, strong, agile and agile human upbringing. People's perceptions of the world …

Interconnection Of Language And Culture In The World Literature, Ikbol Komiljonovna Kozieva, Dilnora Zokirdjanovna Chorakulova

Scientific reports of Bukhara State University

Background. The language, reflecting the originality of the people, the national spirit, the national vision of the world, the national culture, represents the united spiritual energy of the people, which is imprinted in certain sounds. The "national spirit" is the driving force behind the development of the language. "Language is a constantly renewed work of the spirit to make the articulated sound suitable for the expression of thought." The concept of "internal form" is considered in connection with the concept of "national spirit". The most important attribute of language, Humboldt singles out the "linguistic internal form", which means the totality …

How Bojack Horseman Got Too Real: Audience Engagement And A Critique Of Capitalism, Camille Le Pioufle

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

What can a cartoon tell us about the state of capitalist societies? This study examines the case of Netflix adult animated TV show BoJack Horseman (2014-2020) with the aim of understanding the mechanisms at play in the formation of the critique of capitalism. It investigates the narrative and cinematographic devices employed by the show to construct a realistic portrayal of American capitalist system and its harmful consequences on individuals and society in general.

Through the analysis of realism, self-referentiality and intertextuality, the star system, and processes of subsumption and commodification, this work comes to the conclusion that BoJack Horseman ‘got …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

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

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 …

Post-Structural Theories And Chinese Feminist Criticism: On The Theorization Of Women's “Subjectivity” In The Cultural Studies Of Socialist China, Xi Liu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Centering on the conceptualization of "subjectivity," this article first traces the post-structural theories' impact on as well as their complex relationship with Western feminism. It then explores the development of the theorization of “women 's subjectivity" in academic research on Chinese women and gender discourses in socialist China from the 1980s. By examining the application of three influential theorists, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler, in the Chinese context, this article intends to show the complex genealogy of "appropriating" post-structural theories for different agendas of contemporary Chinese feminist criticism. Some scholars integrated post-structural ideas into liberal-humanist discourses; some employed …

Arteletra: The Sixties In Latin America And The Politics Of Going Unnoticed, Jason A. Bartles

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures

ArteletrA analyzes the Sixties in Latin America in order to revisit the core claim of literary and cultural studies to political relevancy in the contemporary world: the task of making visible the invisible. Though visibility can secure rights for the disenfranchised, it also risks subjecting them to the biopolitical and capitalist arrangements of space. What is at stake in this book is a series of aesthetic and ethical tools for engaging in politics—defined here as the potential to disagree—without first passing through visibility. These tools cohere around a practice Bartles calls “the politics of going unnoticed,” which he derives from …