Digital Commons Network^™

A Study Of The Effect Of Reception Of Works Of Art Through An Interactive Cd-Rom, László Halász, Károly Hantos, Balázs Faa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article, "A Study of the Effect of Reception of Works of Art through an Interactive CD-ROM," Halász, Hantos, and Faa collected data on the aesthetic impact of art objects through multimedia. They constructed a CD-ROM out of various images, sounds and text. Items were offered to 135 secondary school subjects in the framework of directed interactive polychrome variations. The effect was studied partly by measuring viewing (reading) times for each item, and partly by semantic differential and attitude scales. The data for viewing time and phases, and of items of the semantic differential and attitude scales were analyzed …

Bibliography Of Contextual (Systemic And Empirical) Approaches In The Study Of Literature And Culture, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

About Art, Baruch Blich

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "About Art," Baruch Blich investigates why is art -- and especially modern art -- so difficult to understand? Why do art objects raise questions as to their status? Why scrutinizing art involves semiotics, philosophy of language, linguistics, epistemology, ontology, and even metaphysics? Why art is interpreted by psychoanalysis as well as by behaviorism and psychology of perception? What anthropology and sociology have to do with art and why do we witness art debated in the courtroom concerning copyright issues? In short -- what makes art a crossroad for many and sometimes conflicting disciplines? Is there something in …

Introduction To Art, Literature, And The Empirical Paradigm, Aldo Nemesio

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Literary Careers: Breaks And Stalls, W. Ray Crozier

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Literary Careers: Breaks and Stalls," W. Ray Crozier argues that biographical evidence points to considerable individual variation in writers' output over the life span even when allowance is made for longevity and length of writing career. This issue has been neglected by psychological accounts of creativity. Crozier outlines a theoretical framework for understanding variation in terms of an "artistic career." This is conceptualised as a sequence of projects, the success of which are influenced by intra-project factors such as the rewardingness and difficulties of literary projects and extra-project factors such as work pressures, poverty, and competing demands …

A Psychological Outline Of "Yerma's Dream", Antonio Fusco, Rosella Tomassoni

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "A Psychological Outline of 'Yerma's Dream'" Fusco and Tomassoni examine the world of Lorca in his play. Fusco and Tomassoni present an examination of the psychological characteristics of this world, and focus their attention upon a dream of one its female protagonists. Yerma is observed to be a heroine of "sterility" -- or rather, the heroine of an impossibility to love. The heroics of this impossibility is interpreted according to the social constraints made upon women within a male dominated society. These constraints are said to surface symptomatically within her own dream world -- as a heroine …

The Perception Of The Song And Its Video Clip, Mariselda Tessarolo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "The Perception of the Song and Its Video Clip," Mariselda Tessarolo examines the relationship between image and music within promotional video clips. Tessarolo observes that images underline the music, where the song marks the rhythm to be given over (and into) the images. As a consequence, emotion prevails over narration within video clips: Affect is their desired effect. The Schwichtenberg typology is used to determine the nature of the relation between emotional and perceptual response. Video clips were classified according to the way they enact this relation, and 100 university students provided the responses to be evaluated. …

The Boundary-Spanning Role Of A Cooperative Support Organization: Managing The Paradox Of Stability And Change In Non-Traditional Organizations, Lynn M. Harter, Kathleen J. Krone

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This project provides an interpretation of how one cooperative support organization, the Nebraska Cooperative Council, discursively functions to help its constituent cooperatives consolidate resources in order to better intersect with organizations in a larger bureaucratic system. In analyzing qualitative data collected through in-depth interviews, surveys, and organizational documents, we found the paradox of stability and change a revealing prism through which to make sense of participants’ experiences. We work toward locating and describing how the Council, through its boundary-spanning activities, helps cooperatives manage the paradox of stability and change while protecting their core participatory ideologies. By providing networks of learning, …

“Becoming A Family”: Developmental Processes Represented In Blended Family Discourse, Dawn O. Braithwaite, Loreen N. Olson, Tamara D. Golish, Charles Soukup, Paul Turman

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

We adopted a process-focus in order to gain a deeper understanding of how (step) blended family members experiencing different developmental pathways discursively represented their processes of becoming a family. Using a qualitative/interpretive method, we analyzed 980 pages of interview transcripts with stepparents and stepchildren. We studied the first four years of family development, using the five developmental pathways developed by Baxter, Braithwaite, and Nicholson (1999). Three salient issues identified in the family experiences were boundary management, solidarity, and adaptation. While the negotiation of these issues varied across the five trajectories, there were commonalities across family experiences that helped determine whether …

The Role Of The Internet In Chinese Foreign And Domestic Affairs, Jean Bowman Leedy

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

Problem: Rapid dissemination of Internet technology and the free access to information it affords poses a threat to non-democratic states that rely on control of information to maintain power and stability. This is of substantial concern to the Communist regime in The People's Republic of China due to the fact that its repressed population constitutes the fastest growing body of Internet users in the world.

Methods: This paper examines the potential impact of the Internet on Chinese foreign and domestic policy through interpretation of existing literature as it applies to the Internet, interviews with experts studying the emergence of China's …

Roots Of Identity: The National And Cultural Self In Présence Africaine, Marga Graf

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Roots of Identity: The National and Cultural Self in Présence Africaine," Marga Graf investigates some of the difficulties African, American, Brazilian, and Caribbean Blacks of the mid-twentieth century encountered in their attempts to voice their cultural and racial self-understanding, a self-understanding struggling to a large extent to challenge the established dichotomy between black racial inferiority versus white superiority. After the Second World War, black intellectuals meeting at the Sorbonne in Paris founded the journal Présence Africaine, a journal that became the voice of blacks investigating their history and culture throughout the different regions of Africa as well …

El Gran Viejo: Walt Whitman In Latin America, Josef Raab

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "El gran viejo: Walt Whitman in Latin America," Josef Raab examines the role and relevance of Walt Whitman within Latin American poetry. It is observed that since the publication of José Martí's essay of 1887, "El Poeta Walt Whitman," Whitman has been a prominent figure in the literary imagination of Latin America. While Martí lauded Whitman as a prophet, his reception in the Americas is far from homogeneous, however. Raab's study addresses ways in which some of the more prominent Latin American poets -- José Martí, Rubén Darío, Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Vinícius de Moraes, Jorge Luis …

On The Comparison Of Interliterary Configurations, Armin Paul Frank

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "On the Comparison of Interliterary Configurations," Armin Paul Frank proposes to draw conceptual and methodological conclusions from what comparatists know but do not always act upon, namely that comparison is essential to an understanding of literature because most authors of primary literature write comparatistically. They inscribe in their texts similarities or differences or both to extant international (and national) texts and sources. This is how literary meaning is produced, this is how status is implicitly but effectively ascribed to works, authors, and literatures, and thus resulting in (inter)cultural work including the enriching of a national literature. From …

Canadian Feminist Writing And American Poetry, Eugenia Sojka

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Canadian Feminist Writing and American Poetry," Eugenia Sojka explores contemporary English-Canadian feminist avant-garde and language-focused writing and its intertextual linkages with American Language Poets. Texts of English-Canadian feminist writers such as Lola Lemire Tostevin, Daphne Marlatt, Betsy Warland, Erin Mouré, and Gail Scott are read with reference to ideas and hniques inscribed in the writing of Ron Silliman, Charles Berstein, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and Carla Harryman. Sojka focuses first on the socio-historical dimension of the writing and proceeds to the exploration of several discourses inscribed in the texts of writers associated with both groups. Their texts …

Living Together As An Intercultural Task, Roland Hagenbüchle

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Living Together as an Intercultural Task," Roland Hagenbüchle explores the multi-faceted challenges we face in a multicultural world. At the same time, he refers the reader to a survey of recent studies indispensable to an informed investigation of this topic. After analyzing the various options for coming to terms with life in multicultural societies and paying special attention to John Rawls' global model of justice as fairness and Martha C. Nussbaum's concept of a good life (based on the capability model), Hagenbüchle advances the transcultural concept of personhood as a non-hegemonic starting point for a dialogic intercultural …

An Introduction To Intercultural Negotiations In The Americas And Beyond, Barbara Buchenau, Marietta Messmer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

British Travel Writing About The Americas, 1820-1840: Different And Differentiating Views, Frank Lauterbach

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "British Travel Writing about the Americas, 1820-1840: Different and Differentiating Views," Frank Lauterbach analyzes representations of the United States and South America in British travel writing of the post-Monroe years. His analysis rests on examples from two travelogues by Basil Hall, written in 1824 and 1829, respectively. Lauterbach discusses three related points: 1) Intent on overcoming the colonial affiliation with Anglo-American culture, British travelers try to establish a clear (romance of) difference between themselves and the United States, they employ a post-colonial rhetoric that stresses the strangeness rather than likeness of America; 2) Ironically, US-American responses to …

The Socio-Cultural Function Of Media In Nineteenth-Century Latin America, Annette Paatz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "The Socio-Cultural Function of Media in Nineteenth-Century Latin America," Annette Paatz explores the function of the review genre in the context of Latin American nation building. Paatz focuses, on the one hand, on the genre's nationalist purposes and, on the other, on the appropriateness for intercultural communication. Drawing on the concept of mediated communication as social practice in the context of media cultural studies, Paatz analyses the reviews as representations of nineteenth-century Latin America's negotiations of transatlantic and thus intercultural relationships. She highlights the pragmatic ways in which Latin America utilized European media products in order to …

Twentieth-Century American Literary Historiography, Marietta Messmer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Twentieth-Century American Literary Historiography," Marietta Messmer analyzes the ways in which contemporary histories of American literature -- members of a discursive formation that has traditionally privileged a nationalist paradigm -- position themselves in the context of current debates on constructions of post-national cultural identity. Concentrating on the changing conceptualizations of the term "American" employed in these literary histories, Messmer traces briefly the major shifts in historiographical negotiations of American interliterary and intercultural relations throughout the twentieth century. Messmer discusses the ways in which American histories of literature move from an earlier -- albeit reductionist -- interest in …

Comparativist Interpretations Of The Frontier In Early American Fiction And Literary Historiography, Barbara Buchenau

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Comparativist Interpretations of the Frontier in Early American Fiction and Literary Historiography," Barbara Buchenau points towards problematic processes of selection and narrative positioning at work in historiographical studies when analyzing and synthesizing early American frontier fiction. Apart from selecting only a small number of literary texts from the large pool of frontier fiction, these over-arching narratives tend to reduce the meaning of the literary works selected to those characteristics that are understood to be of importance for the emerging national literature. Concentrating on two novels long excluded from the American canon, Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827) …

Vargas Llosa's La Ciudad Y Los Perros And The European Novel Of Adolescence, John Neubauer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Vargas Llosa's La Ciudad y los perros and the European Novel of Adolescence," John Neubauer investigates Mario Vargas Llosa's 1962 novel about cadets in a military school located just outside of Lima, Peru. The life of a gang (the dogs) in the city and on the premises is described from constantly changing perspectives. Neubauer's article looks at Vargas Llosa's work in terms of features one finds in narratives about adolescents in European literatures around 1900 and where these texts can be read with three main foci found in them. Thematically, the texts focus on the city and …

Regional And National Identities In Robert Frost's And T.S. Eliot's Criticism, Angela M. Senst

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her essay, "Regional and National Identities in Robert Frost's and T.S. Eliot's Criticism," Angela M. Senst analyzes Robert Frost's and T.S. Eliot's criticism in order to explore their different concepts of culture and to determine their respective regional and national identities: While both poets stress the necessity of unified cultural entities, Frost is deeply committed to the American principle e pluribus unum, whereas Eliot disapproves of internally heterogeneous societies that strive to level out differences which he considers a prerequisite for the mutual revitalization of cultures. Instead, Eliot promotes the idea of intercultural exchange, whereas Frost credits the experience …

Southern American Regional Sensibility Versus The North, Krzysztof Kowalczyk-Twarowski

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Southern American Regional Sensibility versus the North," Krzysztof Kowalczyk-Twarowski investigates some key myths underlying the culture of the American South. Kowalczyk-Twarowski discusses the issue of national versus regional sensibility in early statesmen and writers such as Thomas Jefferson, George Fitzhugh, and John C. Calhoun. Starting with the mythology that evolved about North-South relations in the wake of the Civil War, Kowalczyk-Twarowski delineates some steps in the construction of regional feeling. In his analysis of the latter, Kowalczyk-Twarowski argues that the romanticized image of the South is a product of Northern needs for an antidote to the fast …

From Redskin To Redneck: Atrocity And Revenge In American Writing, Terence Martin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "From Redskin to Redneck: Atrocity and Revenge in American Writing," Terence Martin argues that one of the basic narrative patterns in American writing is that of revenge for the violation of innocence. Martin explores in his study Robert Montgomery Bird's Nick of the Woods, Brian Garfield's Death Wish, and John Grisham's A Time to Kill, texts in which ambiguities of the pattern are expressed in a dramatic and disquieting fashion. After brutality to innocent victims precipitates the action, each of these novels identifies predators and revenge figures and thus sets in motion an escalating spectacle of retribution. …

Selected Bibliography For The Study Of Interculturality In The Americas: Theories And Practice, Barbara Buchenau, Marietta Messmer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Popular Culture, Kitsch As Camp, And Film, Benton Jay Komins

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Popular Culture, Kitsch as Camp, and Film," Benton Jay Komins argues that at the crossroads of kitsch, between the irresistibly human and total spuriousness (Milan Kundera's and Clement Greenberg's respective definitions), lies the first serious glimmer of camp. Komins evaluates the connections between the phenomenon of kitsch and the phenomenon of camp through a theoretical discussion and the cinematic language of Percy Adlon's Rosalie Goes Shopping (1989-90). Critics like Susan Sontag and Andrew Ross, as well as Adlon's film, ask us to consider if camp is a pretentious expression of kitsch that belongs to the "artsy" demimonde. …

Popular Culture And The Rituals Of American Football, Mark Axelrod

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Popular Culture and the Rituals of American Football," Mark Axelrod reflects on meanings of cultural practice in American popular culture. Before globalization -- driven by economics -- became a fact of life with profound implications, there were myths and rituals that provided a kind of insulation from the mysteries of life. These practices were ritualized by "primitive" men and women who, seemingly, did not understand the universe as well as we moderns do. But in fact one only needs to witness throngs of Baltimoreans rushing after a caravan of cars attempting to kiss the Vince Lombardi Trophy …

Perceived Stress, Religious Coping Styles, And Collectivism Of Korean-Americans, Kyung Wha So

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

The present study examined the associations among perceived stress, religious coping styles (Self-Directing, Collaborative, and Deferring), and collectivism in two generations of Korean-Americans. Three scales (Perceived Stress, Collectivism, and Religious Problem Solving) were administered to 145 first and second generation Korean-Americans who were attending Christian worship services, residing in the East and West Coasts of United States. Three hypotheses were tested. First, religious coping styles and collectivism would predict perceived stress levels. Second, Collectivism, Collaborative, and Deferring religious coping would be negatively correlated with the level of perceived stress. Third, the second generation Korean-Americans would have lower collectivism scores, higher …

The Systemic Approach And Valle-Inclán, Semiotics: A Review Article Of New Work By Iglesias Santos And De Toro, A. Robert Lauer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Translation Studies, Cultural Context, And Dante, Reuven Tsur

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Translation Studies, Cultural Context, and Dante," Reuven Tsur explores limits of legitimacy in translation studies. Tsur's approach is a critique of the theoretical assumptions and their application in Edoardo Crisafulli's cultural interpretation of Seamus Heaney's decisions in translating the Ugolino episode in Dante's Inferno. Crisafulli claims that Heaney's choices show internal consistency, and can be accounted for by appealing to "the Irish situational context." Instead, Tsur argues that Crisafulli's cultural interpretations are arbitrary and that a more satisfactory account can be offered through an analysis of constraints within a conception of the aesthetic object as an elegant …