Digital Commons Network^™

Racism And Identity In Onwueme's Riot In Heaven, Onyeka F. Iwuchukwu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Racism and Identity in Onwueme's Riot in Heaven" Onyeka Iwuchukwu explores Tess Osonye Onwueme's acclaimed play in the context of the Black diaspora in the U.S. Iwuchukwu posits that because of Onwueme's exploration of the theater of the absurd in the play, audience's attention is directed to the illogical presentation of dialogue and action. However, the technique with textual properties suggesting unmotivated and meaningless references in fact carries profound meaning. Further, the said "absurd" presentation and narration results in a strong ideological and political message akin to the practice of littérature engagée. Iwuchukwu's analysis of …

Achebe's Work, Postcoloniality, And Human Rights, Eric Sipyinyu Njeng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Achebe's Work, Postcoloniality, and Human Rights" Eric Sipyinyu Njeng argues that Chinua Achebe exposes failings in the fabric of African society and engages with violations of human rights. Achebe is careful not to hurt the pride of Africans who in the Zeitgeist of the nationalist ferment of the 1950s were wary of European powers. Achebe does not "write back" to the empire: he writes the empire in and he lays bare the weaknesses in African culture grounded in the father-son-grandson trajectory he narrates. Achebe presents what may be termed a cultural dialectics: the thesis (flawed African customs …

Cross-Cultural Interpretation And Chinese Literature: A Book Review Article On Owen's Work In Sinology, Qingben Li, Jinghua Guo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Literature And The Study Of Intermediality: A Book Review Article On New Work By Grishakova And Ryan And Carvalho Homem, Ioan-Flaviu Patrunjel, Asunción López-Varela

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

A Cognitively Enabling Approach: Cognitive Diversity In Composition Studies, Crystal June Starkey

Wayne State University Dissertations

ABSTRACT

A COGNITIVELY ENABLING APPROACH: COGNITIVE DIVERSITY IN COMPOSITION STUDIES.

by

CRYSTAL STARKEY

August 2013

Advisor: Dr. Jeff Pruchnic

Major: English (Composition Studies)

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

My dissertation project investigates the rhetoric of cognitive disability in relation to the theory and teaching of rhetoric and composition in entry-level writing courses. Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), who frequently struggle with generalizing as well as feeling and expressing emotions, are often perceived to have a decreased intellectual ability and thus not often considered part of the traditional student body of higher education classrooms. Yet, as ASD diagnostic criteria has changed …

Cross-Cultural And Multilingual Encounters: Composing Difference In Transnational Contexts, Tika Lamsal

Rhetoric and Language Faculty Publications and Research

A rapid increase in the population of cross-cultural and multilingual students and faculty in the U.S. universities has spurred the need to develop a culturally and linguistically more inclusive pedagogy in the teaching of writing. By analyzing the writing of a couple of multilingual and multicultural students from a freshman composition class in a U.S. university, this article explores the ways that help facilitate the writing process of such students. Stressing the value of students’ previous experiences based on their social, cultural, and language differences, the essay argues for the need to recognize and promote the use of multilingual and …

Immigration Reform Opponents Framing Propaganda As Fact To Influence Public Opinion, Christopher Barr

Communication & Leadership Dissertations and Theses

Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist (Jowett & O’Donnell, 2005). This study is to see how propaganda is used by a anti-immigrant special interest organization to frame the debate and assist the televised press to set the agenda on the topic. Specifically, the attention of the study was on the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation. The research explored in this thesis was founded on Shaw’s and McComb’s (1972) agenda-setting theory and Entman’s (1993) process of framing. The study applied …

Without Content: Rhetoric, American Anarchism, And The End(S) Of Radical Politics, Michael John Ristich

Wayne State University Dissertations

My study suggests there is a homology between the Platonic critique of rhetoric and the critique of anarchism made by both Marxism and liberalism. I investigate this problematic by taking up a genealogical examination of anarchism in America that begins with America's founding and concludes with a discussion of the resurgence of populist/anti-Statist rhetoric(s) in the early twenty-first century. In doing so, I argue that anarchism is a politics "without content;" it is a rhetorical politics that challenges the (re)turns to metaphysics and Marxism in the wake of poststructuralist and postmodern thought. Specifically, in light of the contemporary Tea Party …

“‘Gulag’—Slavery, Inc.”: The Power Of Place And The Rhetorical Life Of A Cold War Map, Timothy Barney

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

In 1951, the American Federation of Labor produced a map of the Soviet Union showing the locations of 175 forced labor camps administered by the Gulag. Widely appropriated in popular magazines and newspapers, and disseminated internationally as propaganda against the U.S.S.R., the map, entitled “‘Gulag’—Slavery, Inc.,” would be cited as “one of the most widely circulated pieces of anti-Communist literature.” By contextualizing the map’s origins and circulation, as well as engaging in a close analysis of its visual codes and intertextual relationships with photographs, captions, and other materials, this essay argues that the Gulag map became an evidentiary weapon in …

Muslim Science As The Source Of The Portuguese Age Of Discoveries, Joseph Abraham Levi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Muslim Science as the Source of the Portuguese Age of Discoveries" Joseph Abraham Levi analyses the Jewish, mostly Sephardic, and Islamic contributions to science and their legacy in Iberia, particularly present-day Portugal. Using as a springboard the countless contributions to the sciences brought by Muslims to the Iberian Peninsula, southern France (mainly Provence), Sardinia, Sicily, and the rest of southern Italy, as well as other parts of the Mediterranean, Levi concentrates on the key role that Muslim scholars had, oftentimes assisted by their Sephardic Jewish counterparts, in training the scientific researchers of the then-burgeoning young Portuguese nation, …

Reading Wordsworth With Hegel And Deleuze, Douglas Berman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Reading Wordsworth with Hegel and Deleuze" Douglas Berman reexamines Wordsworth poem, The Ruined Cottage, in terms of the importance of the Pedlar, who serves as the witness and singular moral authority in the text. Berman focuses on the inherent tension between impermanence, as exemplified by the trope of wandering, and the redemptive vision which shapes the ending of the second version of the poem (1798). While recognizing the strength of earlier critics, particularly the New Historicists, who emphasized Wordsworth's displacement of social and material reality into nature, Berman argues that wandering, both in its physical form, and …

Nádas's A Book Of Memories And Central European Journeys, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Nádas's A Book of Memories and Central European Journeys" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek discusses theoretical, literary, political, social, etc., aspects of travel in Péter Nádas's novel. "Travel" in the novel represents both a conceptual and lived experience at a time when travel between the East and the West in Europe was restricted and when a person hailing from the "East" considered a journey to the West a complex and ideological matter. Further, the aspect of urbanity, that is, cultural and social spaces and the journey and what such entails in terms of ideology, points of origin, knowledge, …

Artaud's Journey To Mexico And His Portrayals Of The Land, Tsu-Chung Su

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Artaud's Journey to Mexico and His Portrayals of the Land" Tsu-Chung Su examines Artaud's visions, visualizations, descriptions, and conceptualizations of Mexico. Su argues that Artaud's writings about Mexico were his textual appropriations and cartographical remappings of the land. They embodied both the geographic wandering of his itinerary and the bodily spasms of his thought. At once geographical and psycho-physiological embodiments, they were not only texts of a questing spirit but also words of a schizophrenic mind. While tracing and mapping Artaud's deterritorialized wanderings in cultures, religions, and rituals of Mexico, Su aims to explore the interlinking relationships …

Mental Travel And Memory Mapping In Sebald's Work, Jonathan White

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Mental Travel and Memory Mapping in Sebald's Narratives" Jonathan White analyses several of the journeys — real and by means of the mind — by which W.G. Sebald follows what he once called "invisible connections that determine our lives." These connections are often although not always between the living and the dead "on the far side of time." In reaction against what Sebald interpreted as a conspiracy of silence in his youth over the destruction that Germany had caused and that which had been done in turn to it, Sebald attempted to reconstruct worlds and people destroyed …

The Life Writing Of Hart, Inspector-General Of The Imperial Maritime Customs Service, Henk Vynckier, Chihyun Chang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "The Life Writing of Hart, Inspector-General of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service" Henk Vynckier and Chihyun Chang analyze the life and writing of Sir Robert Hart (1835-1911). Hart arrived in China in 1854 and served as Inspector-General of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service 1863-1911. Although Hart disparaged his own role, Jonathan Spence views him as a key adviser to the Qing government. Despite of the historical importance of Hart's texts, of his seventy-seven volume diary only eight of the volumes have been published and the remaining volumes remain largely unexamined. Vynckier and Chang examine the complex transmission …

Alexander The Great, Prester John, Strabo Of Amasia, And Wonders Of The East, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Alexander the Great, Prester John, Strabo of Amasia, and Wonders of the East" I-Chun Wang analyses the wonders referred to the realm of Prester John and the imagination of India as exemplified in the pseudo-letter of Alexander the Great. The pseudo letters attributed to Prester John and Alexander demonstrate imagination and identity construction. Throughout history, terra incognita suggested a longing to discover new lands and utopia. Cathay, India, Timbuktu, and El Dorado have drawn the imagination of Westerners in different periods are represented in legends, folktales, literary texts, and travel and pseudo-travel texts. Including the said pseudo-letters, …

On Naipaul's Cultural Positions In The Middle Passage, Shizen Ozawa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "On Naipaul's Cultural Positions in The Middle Passage" Shizen Ozawa discusses V.S. Naipaul's first travel writing. An account of his "returning" journey to the five Caribbean "colonial societies," The Middle Passage constitutes a major turning point in Naipaul's long literary career. Whereas his earlier novels depict his homeland of Trinidad ironically, although with a certain warmth and sympathy, from The Middle Passage on the world depicted both in his fictions and non-fictions turns bleaker. Correspondingly, his authorial persona changes from that of a West Indian writer to a controversial chronicler of chaotic postcolonial conditions. Ozawa analyses …

Introduction To New Work About The Journey And Its Portrayals, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

China As The Other In Odoric's Itinerarium, Dinu Luca

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "China as the Other in Odoric's Itinerarium" Dinu Luca discusses the various ways in which the otherness of China is approached and integrated in the fourteenth-century travel text associated with Franciscan friar Odoric of Pordenone. Luca explores the multiple ways in which the text can be examined in relation to Odoric, his travels, and his text. Luca takes vision as a unifying trope and explores the meanings it acquires (sight, concept, projection) as Odoric abandons the familiar space of wonder and confronts the otherness of China. Several well-known episodes are discussed and one particular exchange (known …

Cannibalism, Ecocriticism, And Portraying The Journey, Simon C. Estok

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Cannibalism, Ecocriticism, and Portraying the Journey" Simon C. Estok discusses the ways early modern preoccupation with cannibalism is at once rooted in and reflective of an ecophobic environmental ethics. Looking both at descriptions of metaphoric and literal cannibalism, Estok shows that imagining cannibalism was central to the travel narrative and to its investments in writing the center and the periphery, the human and the nonhuman, the acceptable and the repugnant — binaries which reveal ethical positions, not only toward people, but, more broadly, toward the natural environment. Estok argues that it is relevant to discuss the discourse …

Evans's And Cheevers's Quaker Missionary Travels, Hui-Chu Yu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Evans's and Cheevers's Quaker Missionary Travels" Hui-chu Yu investigates Katharine Evans's and Sarah Cheevers's account of their experiences as Quaker missionaries in Malta between 1658-1662. For Evans and Cheevers traveling was a mission ordained by god and thus their journey is less a trip for the gratification of exploration than spiritual and physical trials. With a purpose to spread Quaker texts, Evans and Cheevers traveled to different lands such as Ireland and Malta. Although they perceived the hostility toward their belief, they still claimed to be god's handmaids with an aim to preach their religious belief. Their …

Gulliver, Travel, And Empire, Claude Rawson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Gulliver, Travel, and Empire" Claude Rawson analyzes Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels as a central document of European intellectual history. Rawson focuses on the relationship between ethnicity and human identity and asks what constitutes humanity and how individual groups qualify (or not) for human status. Posing teasingly as a "parody" of travel books, it is both a series of voyages and an ethnically widening arc of moral exploration as Book Four at once expresses an ambivalent perception of the Irish under English rule and extends to what Swift/Gulliver calls "all Savage Nations" and ultimately takes in what Swift …

The Slave Trade In The Work Of Fox, Johnson, And Spielberg, Ya-Huei Lin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Slave Trade in the Work of Fox, Johnson, and Spielberg" Ya-huei Lin analyzes Paula Fox's The Slave Dancer (1973), Charles R. Johnson's The Middle Passage (1990), and Amistad, the 1997 film directed by Steven Spielberg based on the true event of 1841. Lin's examination of these three texts is an attempt to clarify the event's narration in the context of Walter Benjamin's historical materialism. Further, Lin explores what Louis Althusser proposes in "A Letter on Art" as to how the texts at hand make one see the ideology from which they are located. The authors' …

Forgács's Film And Installation Dunai Exodus (Danube Exodus), Zsófia Bán

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Forgács's Film and Installation Dunai exodus (Danube Exodus)" Zsófia Bán analyzes film maker and video artist Péter Forgács's film The Danube Exodus (1998) and compares it with the installation Dunai exodus. A folyó beszédes áramlatai (Rippling: Currents of the River) (2002). Combined with additional materials, the two works are based on footage by ship captain Nándor Andrásovits documenting two successive journeys of forced displacement aboard his vessel, the Queen Elizabeth. Bán's analysis includes the 1939 event of the Jewish exodus from Slovakia to the Black Sea with the eventual goal of reaching Palestine followed by …

Horizontality And Impossibility In Kafka's Parabolic Quests, Frank W. Stevenson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Horizontality and Impossibility in Kafka's Parabolic Quests" Frank W. Stevenson explores a horizontal-parabolic interpretation of several Kafka narratives. The key idea is that the meaning/truth of a parable is being thrown-beside-itself "on the horizontal": thus it is impossible not only to vertically reach any higher meaning/truth but even to "cross-over" to a truth which has now been horizontally "displaced." Noting that Derrida's and Agamben's reading of "Before the Law" — the narrator cannot "enter into the Law" because the latter "prescribes nothing," is nothing but an "opening" — not only excludes any vertical-hierarchical dimension but even any …

Makine's Postmodern Writing About Exile, Memory, And Connection, Mary Theis

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Makine's Postmodern Writing about Exile, Memory, and Connection" Mary Theis explores the implications of some of the many literary epiphanous moments that Andreï Makine shares with his readers in his neo-Romantic metaphysical literary quest to transcend lyrically the limitations imposed by our human condition. The analysis of this theme in Makin's literary career features several of his most important novels, his one play, and his subsequent meta-utopian reflections in Alternaissance, written under the pen name Gabriel Osmonde.

Miłosz's Quest For Affirmation And His Reflections On Us-American Culture, Joel J. Janicki

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Miłosz's Quest for Affirmation and His Reflections on US-American Culture" Joel J. Janicki discusses Czeslaw Miłosz's writings in exile devoted to his home in California. Miłosz, a Polish Lithuanian poet, essayist, and historian of literature, after experiencing five years of the nazi regime in Warsaw and six years of Stalinized rule in post-World War II Poland, threw himself "into the abyss" of exile. Miłosz's writings and translations have served as a bridge between the Polish and Anglo-Saxon cultures seldom encountered on such a scale. At the same time, his ability to look at a distance, his sensitivity …

Reimagining "Tense And Tender Ties" In García's Monkey Hunting, Yu-Fang Cho

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Reimagining 'Tense and Tender Ties' in Garcia's Monkey Hunting" Yu-Fang Cho analyses Cristina García's re-narration of transnational histories of the multi-racial, multi-generational Chinese Cuban family in Monkey Hunting (2003) as a critical project that recasts developmental immigrant narratives primarily set in the United States as part of the emerging cultural archive of global migrations. Drawing on recent scholarship on comparative racialization, especially Ann Laura Stoler's formulation of "tense and tender ties" as a method, Cho examines how García's family saga unsettles the temporal and spatial logics of Euro-American modernity through the deployment of cyclical narrative structure …

Travel And Empire In Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, Yi-Chin Shih

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Travel and Empire in Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good" Yi-chin Shih analyzes Our Country's Good from the perspective of travel in order to explore the exercise of empire and the practice of resistance. Considered as one of the luminaries in British theater, Timberlake Wertenbaker (1951-) has produced several successful works, especially Our Country's Good (1988), which won her a Laurence Olivier Award for the Best Play and solidified her reputation as an important playwright in world theater. Our Country's Good is based on real historical facts about the First Fleet's transportation of criminals from England to Australia …

Power And Representation In Anglo-American Travel Blogs And Travel Books About China, Stefano Calzati

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Power and Representation in Anglo-American Travel Blogs and Travel Books about China" Stefano Calzati presents a comparative analysis between two travel books and two travel blogs written by Anglo-American travellers about China. The assumption is that travel books and travel blogs, being two differently mediated forms of travel writing, share some similarities: they are "autodiegetic narratives" and they bear a (cross)cultural potential. Through a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis I investigate how Anglo-American travel writers represent themselves and Chinese people as to what extent the definition of travel writing is medially affected; 2) to what extent the cross-cultural …