Digital Commons Network^™

The Indirect Path To The Literary Canon Exemplified By Shelley's Frankenstein, David Fishelov

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Indirect Path to the Literary Canon Exemplified by Shelley's Frankenstein" David Fishelov examines the indirect path of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to the literary canon. Fishelov offers a multi-dimensional model for describing the dynamic process of acquiring, maintaining, and changing canonical status. The model emphasizes the important role played by artistic dialogues and echoes that certain works initiate or inspire in other authors and artists in the form of allusion, homage, parody, and adaptation. The data introduced in the article suggest that the popular cinematic versions of Frankenstein probably not only played a mediating role but …

Methodological Reflections On Investigating The Reception Of Fiction In Public Spaces, Katarina Eriksson Barajas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Methodological Reflections on Investigating the Reception of Fiction in Public Spaces" Katarina Eriksson Barajas discusses how to find and approach research participants in public spaces. Eriksson Barajas's study is based on tenets of the empirical study of literature. Reader response and reception theories and discursive psychology are both employed in the analysis. This approach, called discursive reception studies, enables researchers to analyze the role of social interaction in the co-construction of the experience of, in this case, a film or a play. Eriksson Barajas discusses the following methodological issues: 1) how to gain access to "naturally" occurring …

Audience Response And From Film Adaptation To Reading Literature, Klaudia H.Y. Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Audience Response and from Film Adaptation to Reading Literature" Klaudia H.Y. Lee analyses results from 3000-plus interview conducted across university campuses in Hong Kong in order to investigate the roles of screen adaptations and their intertextual relationship for developing students' critical textual practice. Lee combines reader-response theory (Iser and Rosenblatt) with empirical data to explore students' actual encounters and experience with texts. While the data suggests an influence of screen adaptations on students' choice and motivation of reading, this interest can potentially be developed into a critical awareness of the various intertextual possibilities that exist in different …

Paratexts In Travel Blogs, Travel Books' Hypertextuality, And Medial Format Usage, Stefano Calzati

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Paratexts in Travel Blogs, Travel Books' Hypertextuality, and Medial Format Usage" Stefano Calzati compares a number of contemporary travel books and travel blogs. Calzati's objective is to promote a bridging approach between the digital and the analogue that goes beyond their differences. He posits a critique socio-linguistics where online multimodal texts are analyzed by identifying layers of analysis. Against these compositional models, Calzati suggests a double move: on the one hand, he applies Gérard Genette's notion of "paratext" to travel blogs and on the other he extends the concept of "hypertextuality" to travel books. From his analyzis …

政商夾縫中的右傾文人 : 五、六○年代黃思騁文學活動研究 = A Right-Wing Writer Trapped In Politics And Business : A Study Of Huang Sicheng's Literary Activities In The 1950s And 1960s, Yuen Mei, Fanny Li

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

本文首先介紹黃思騁的生平，上半部以「香港中國筆會」及《當代文藝》等刊物為主，探討黃氏在其中的活動及角色，分析它們和「美援文化」的關係，管窺這些文學刊物和組織，如何使右傾文人在政治化的夾縫中得到開拓視野、實踐文學理想、推動文學發展的機會。下半部以女性形象為切入點，分析黃思騁「三毫子小說」的文本特點，以見嚴肅作家和通俗小說互為他者的現象，考察商業化的文學工業中作家主體的影響力。最後總結在五、六○年代的香港，黃思騁作為右傾文人和嚴肅小說家，其生存狀態有何特點，並帶來怎樣的結果。

Notes On Contributors = 客席編輯及作者簡介

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

No abstract provided.

Disillusionment With Chinese Culture In The 1880s : Wang Tao's Three Classical Tales, Xiaoling Shi

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

Leading scholars of modern Chinese literature have long discussed how the May Fourth became a hegemonic force and have sought to uncover the “burdens of May Fourth”; that is, those discourses eclipsed by the May Fourth intellectuals as they promoted the goal of openness and pluralism in the New Culture Movement. They have discovered Chinese modernity in the Late Qing writings as early as the mid-nineteenth century, decades before the May Fourth movement. Particularly, some scholars have argued that features of modernity might have stemmed from indigenous genres or classical language. My study of how the West is portrayed in …

Transculturating The Modern : Zhang Ruogu's Literary Life In 1930s Shanghai, Shuo Win Chen

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

Zhang Ruogu 張若谷(1905-1967), now known primarily as an urban writer,2 began his literary career by translating and commenting on French literature in newspapers and journals and subsequently published several urban stories. He was also an active advocate of urban life and played an important role in the introduction of the ideas of the French-style café gathering and European cultural trends. Zhang Ruogu’s literary activities, his admiration of French literature and culture, and his works inspired by the French literary works that he admired or translated, are the focus of investigation of this paper. From Paris to Shanghai and from 19th-century …

“Between The Yes And The No”: Alternative Ontologies And Literary Depictions Of Mysticism In Borges And Mahfouz, David Shane Elder

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since the advent of the modern era and the subsequent age of Enlightenment, the rational tradition has enabled the West to assert command of a large area of the globe and its population. While advancing the conditions of living for many, rational structures have also been used to control and repress others. The theosophy of the medieval Islamic mystic Ibn al-ᶜArabī, with its basis in irrational thought, offers a counterpoint to the rational and empirical traditions, the Social orthodoxies to which these epistemologies contribute, and the ontologies with which these epistemologies and orthodoxies are correlated. Yet mystical expression is very …

Inhabiting The Discourses Of Belonging; Franz Kafka And Yoko Tawada, Aviv Hilbig-Bokaer

Scholarly Undergraduate Research Journal at Clark (SURJ)

Inhabiting the Discourses of Belonging; Franz Kafka and Yoko Tawada examines the role of language in creating the identity of the foreigner in German prose. Writing at opposite ends of the 20^th century, Kafka and Tawada serve as harbingers for a broader sense of alienation that comes with writing as an Other. Using lenses provided by Spivak, Butler, Said and Deluze, this essay surveys the broader cultural concepts and theoretical implications of the notion of the metaphorical subaltern that can be created in prose, and the particularities presented by the German language in creating and articulating this identity. This …

Reconsidering The Emergence Of The Gay Novel In English And German, James P. Wilper

Purdue University Press Books

In Reconsidering the Emergence of the Gay Novel in English and German, James P. Wilper examines a key moment in the development of the modern gay novel by analyzing four novels by German, British, and American writers. Wilper studies how the texts are influenced by and respond and react to four schools of thought regarding male homosexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first is legal codes criminalizing sex acts between men and the religious doctrine that informs them. The second is the ancient Greek erotic philosophy, in which a revival of interest took place in the …

Notes On Contributors

Transference

No abstract provided.

World War I And The Idea Of Progress In Powers's Three Farmers On Their Way To A Dance, Karsten H. Piep

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "World War I and the Idea of Progress in Powers's Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance" Karsten H. Piep reads Powers's 1985 novel as a critical reexamination of the dynamics and iconography of the early twentieth century that challenges the technological positivism espoused by many U.S. neoconservatives during the 1980s, while insisting on the individual's interpretive powers to discern and release the ever present transformative potentials of history. Situating Three Farmers in the postmodernism debates of the 1980s, Piep argues that the novel succeeds in challenging the idea of history conceived as linear progression, …

Said And The Mythmaking Of Auerbach's Mimesis, Hyeryung Hwang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Said and the Mythmaking of Auerbach's Mimesis" Hyeryung Hwang revisits critical debates on Edward W. Said's unwitting participation in the mythmaking of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis and analyzes the degree to which critical discourse overlook what Said actually wanted to revive, namely the spirit of philological methodology. Hwang argues that before Said worked on Mimesis, the book already acquired a sort of myth. Hwang attempts to go beyond the commonly held understanding of philology and suggest it as a methodology for historical synthesis whose dialectical tension between texts and history amounts to the synthesis of "fact" …

Digital Humanities And Publishing A Learned Journal, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Digital Humanities and Publishing a Learned Journal" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek discusses digital humanities and the publishing scholarship online in the context of the politics of publishing scholarship specifically as it pertains to humanities. Funding for the publishing of humanities scholarship remains constricted worldwide whether in print or digital and the standard remains to publish journals by subscription fees. Based on his argumentation against the "colonialism of knowledge," Tötösy de Zepetnek argues for the publishing of humanities scholarship against subscription-based or author-pay models. Further, he presents suggestions as to the how-s of the founding of a digital …

Anthropological Inquiry And The Limits Of Dialogue, Kathleen M. Gallagher

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Anthropological Inquiry and the Limits of Dialogue" Kathleen Gallagher analyzes the epistemological and ethical implications created by representations of Self and portrayals of Other in two apparently different ethnographic texts, R.F. Fortune's Sorcerers of Dobu and Kevin Dwyer's Moroccan Dialogues. Specific attention is paid to the authors' portrayal of themselves and the observed and the ramifications of such portrayals in the construction of anthropological knowledge. Dwyer's work was a reaction to what he perceived as anthropology's traditional muting of other voices, an alternative to such denigration being the incorporation of dialogue into one's methodology. Gallagher describes …

Refiguring The Wild West: Minerva Teichert And Her Feminine Communities, Deirdre Mason Scharffs

Theses and Dissertations

Minerva Teichert (1888-1976) was a twentieth-century American artist, who spent most of her life residing in remote towns in the West, earnestly balancing the demands of family and ranching, and painting scenes of her beloved Western frontier. Her steady and significant production of art is remarkable for any artist, and particularly compelling when one considers her time constraints, inaccessibility of art supplies, distance from other artists and art centers, and lack of public attention. The success of women artists during the first half of the twentieth-century was dependent not only upon their artistic aptitude, but also upon external forces, such …

Golding's The Spire As An Architectonic Novel, Stephan Schaffrath

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Golding's The Spire as an Architectonic Novel" Stephan Schaffrath analyzes William Golding's work as an excellent example of one of Mikhail Bakhtin's early critical concepts. In contrast to most literary entertainment which thrives on the readers' suspension of disbelief, The Spire challenges readers to actively and consciously interpret its text, thus raising readers' awareness as participants in the reading act. The Spire achieves this by presenting readers with a novelistic world seen more or less through the eyes of a pseudo narrator, a third-person narration style that consistently and regularly — yet subtly — delves into the …

Visualizing Electronic Literature Collections, Urszula Anna Pawlicka

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Visualizing Electronic Literature Collections" Urszula Pawlicka discusses the development of electronic literature by visualizing material available in the Electronic Literature Collection <http://collection.eliterature.org/>. Her visualization of electronic literature presents a timeline with tag clouds of keywords related to works classified chronologically by dates of publication. Pawlicka's visualization includes also all keywords of the Collection (two date there exist three Collections) separately without division in the publication dates of works. Pawlicka argues that keywords turn out to be important data to demonstrate changes occurring in the history of electronic literature. Further, in her visualization of electronic literature …

Dostoyevsky, Bernanos, And Knowing Joy As The Unknown, Ruth Karin Lévai

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Dostoyevsky, Bernanos, and Knowing Joy as the Unknown" Ruth Karin Lévai analyzes the concept of joy in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Georges Bernanos's The Diary of a Country Priest. Lévai follows five main aspects of the experience of joy common to the characters of both novels: 1) joy as prerequisite to true freedom, 2) joy as risk, 3) joy as the ability to love, 4) joy as the ability to give and receive prosaic gifts, and 5) joy as community. Lévai argues that in both works joy is portrayed as a starting point rather than …

(Im)Migrant And Ethnic Minority Literature In Education Curricula In Slovenia, Marijanca Ajša Vižintin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "(Im)migrant and Ethnic Minority Literature in Education Curricula in Slovenia" Marijanca Ajša Vižintin argues that there is a need to develop in the educational system of Slovenia a comprehensive theoretical and applied approach for the inclusion of (im)migrant and ethnic minority students: in addition to writers who represent the Slovenian majority population, school curricula should include members of Slovenian (im)migrant and ethnic minority members of the country irrespective of the language in which they write. In accordance with this objective and recommendation, the reading and study of the cultural production of (im)migrant and ethnic minority texts ought …

Postcolonial Studies In The Twenty-First Century: A Book Review Article Of Literature For Our Times & Reading Transcultural Cities, Alejandra Moreno Álvarez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Wandering In Contemporary Literature: A Narrative Theory Of Cognition, Hillel E. Broder

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study offers a theory of wandering cognition as an animating feature of western literature, in general, and of contemporary literature, in particular. Unlike existing theories of peripatetic bodies and minds in fiction that focus primarily on political critiques, cultural practices, or pleasures of digression, this theory of wandering offers an aesthetic philosophy and ethical critique of representing cognition, memory, and narrative identity that finds affinities in the political, phenomenological, and ethical thought of Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas, and Giorgio Agamben.

Unlike existing cognitive theories of literature that apply cognitive theory to literary study (or vice versa), this study develops …

Negotiating Gender And Sexuality In Contemporary Turkey, Jaspal Kaur Singh, Mary Lou O'Neil

Books

Turkey is often visualized as a modern nation-state having a perfect balance of Eastern and Western cultural mores and traditions within dominant ideological constructions and representations, but on closer inspection, one can detect conflicts and contradictions within various texts—particularly in regards to depictions of gender and sexual identity. Upon its foundation as a nation, Turkey embarked on a state-centered, elite-driven path toward modernization and Westernization while also seeking to produce a monolithic culture. At the time, it was widely believed that Turkey could not rank among modern,

Western countries without the emancipation of women. As a result of the founding …

Negotiating Gender And Sexaulity In Contemporary Turkey, Jaspal Kaur Singh 2508334, Mary Lou O'Neil

Books

Turkey is often visualized as a modern nation-state having a perfect balance of Eastern and Western cultural mores and traditions within dominant ideological constructions and representations, but on closer inspection, one can detect conflicts and contradictions within various texts - particularly in regards to depictions of gender and sexual identity. Upon its foundation as a nation, Turkey embarked on a state-centered, elite-driven path toward modernization and Westernization while also seeking to produce a monolithic culture. At the time, it was widely believed that Turkey could not rank among modern, Western countries without the emancipation of women. As a result of …

Epic And Genre: Beyond The Boundaries Of Media, Luke Arnott

FIMS Publications

Noting the resurgence of popular and academic interest in epics across disparate media, this essay proposes a theory of the epic genre that transcends particular media and cultures. It seeks to reconcile discussions of the epic in Aristotle, G.W.F. Hegel, Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, Erich Auerbach, and Northrop Frye, arguing that traditional definitions of epic narrative are instead subsets of a greater generic structure. The epic is, following Gregory Nagy and Franco Moretti, among others, a literary “super-genre” that encompasses as many other kinds of narrative as possible. The essay explains how epic narrative, disembedded from earlier oral poetry, is …

Course Syllabus (W16 Online) Coli 331: "Pulp Fiction And Quentin Tarantino", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Objectives and Expected Learning Outcomes:

Rejecting the standpoint of the passively entertained consumer, our shared objectives in this course will be (1) to bring our selected cinematic and written texts into interaction in such ways as to produce high-quality scholarly writing. It is hoped that, by the end of the semester, each student’s active engagement with our course material should have enabled him/her, (2) to deepen and broaden his/her knowledge base concerning the social problematics we will have treated in such ways as to inform and encourage constructive social action.

We will view Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Reservoir …

Revolution, Redemption, And Romance: Reading Constructions Of Filipino Spanish American Identities And Politics Of Knowledge In Rizal’S Noli Me Tangere And El Filibusterismo Alongside Filipino American Fiction, Steven Beardsley

Departmental Honors Projects

This project analyzes the literary works and the iconic role of Filipino nationalist José Rizal before, during, and after the Spanish American War of 1898. Rizal’s social activism and writing inspired a revolution against the Friarocracy in the Philippines. He also influenced Filipino American writers who reference Rizal’s construction of the Filipino woman in Christianity and Filipinos fighting against colonial oppression. Additionally, Filipino American writers illustrate how being Filipino in the US today is a transcultural experience rather than a simple binary of traditional Philippines and modern America. Recognizing Spain as an earlier colonizing force is critical in understanding the …

(Re)Writing History In Maryse Condé, Femi Euba, And Reinaldo Arenas, Lázara Bolton

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This comparative study asserts the centrality of spirituality to literature that explores life in the African Diaspora. Specifically, it emphasizes the importance of spirituality both to the authors and to the lives of their characters in the novels Victoire, les saveurs et les mots (2006) by the Guadeloupian author Maryse Condé, Camwood at Crossroads (2007) by Nigerian author Femi Euba, and El color del verano (1991) by Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas. A close reading of the three novels shows that they are representative of autohistoría literary works, which represent the spirituality of the writer, as well as the people written …

Hesse's Steppenwolf As Modern Ethical Fiction, Michał Koza

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Hesse's Steppenwolf as Modern Ethical Fiction" Michał Koza discusses the significance of "ethical fiction" in modern literature. Such fiction, according to Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, are not only milestones of ethical thinking, but more importantly offer a narrative for self-creation as an ethical subject. Harry Haller, the protagonist of Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, is a man living on the border of modern subjectivity embodying a cultural and existential crisis. Koza argues that "ethical reading" enables one to see the relation between philosophy and literature that not only enter in a dialogue with each other, but also share …