Digital Commons Network^™

Cineture: Shared Narratives And Cultural Exchanges Between Iran And The Us (Introduction), Naghmeh Esmaeilpour Apr 2026

A Review Of Alberto Toscano’S Late Fascism, Clint Burnham Jan 2026

Exploring The Relationship Between Man And Nature In A Postmodern Context：A Review Of Ecocriticism And Chinese Literature: Imaginary Landscapes And Real Living Spaces, Jiyong Geng, Jie Yang Jan 2026

A Review Of Zahi Zalloua's The Politics Of The Wretched: Race, Reason, And Ressentiment, Benjamin Davis Jan 2026

Exploring Chinese Elements In J.D. Salinger’S Works: A Response To Mccarthyism In The Early Cold War Era, Yixin Lu Jan 2026

Ginsberg’S China Experience And Its Influence On His Series Of Poems On China, Xiankai Ren Jan 2026

Cyborg Feminism And Toxic Colonialism In Chen Qiufan’S Waste Tide, Yuan Yuan Jan 2026

In Memoriam Gwangju: Transnational Memoryscapes Of Gwangju And Buenos Aires In The Works Of Han Kang And Im Heung-Soon, Heewon Chung Jan 2026

“I Have Got Rid Of, For Good, Eastern Backwardness”: Ra’Fat’S Guilty Assimilation In Al Aswany’S Chicago: A Novel, Rimun Murad Jan 2026

Daoist Philosophy And Stephen Mitchell’S The Frog Prince: A Fairy Tale For Consenting Adults, Yunfei Yu, Senlin Yu Jan 2026

Las Filipinas: The Persistence Of Spain In Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters, Blake Seana Locklin Jan 2026

A Review Of The Cambridge History Of The Australian Novel (2023), Tiping Su Jul 2025

A Review Of The Cambridge History Of The Australian Novel (2023), Tiping Su

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel offers thorough coverage of 200 years of writing, yet its broad scope in a single volume results in certain limitations. With 39 thematic chapters, some eras appear underrepresented, and there is a need for greater examination of popular genres and marginalized voices to provide a more comprehensive portrayal. The transnational approach helps to balance the persistent focus on canonical figures. Despite the limitations of this overview, the book serves as a crucial basis for further in-depth research.

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Derrida In Mesopotamia: On The Import Of The Cuneiform Inscriptions In Of Grammatology, Will Greenshields Jul 2025

Derrida In Mesopotamia: On The Import Of The Cuneiform Inscriptions In Of Grammatology, Will Greenshields

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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Cuneiform writing has a small but privileged position in Derrida’s Of Grammatology – providing the text with its first two epigraphs. By elucidating the source and import of these inscriptions and evaluating Derrida’s understanding of the cuneiform writing system in reference to more recent grammatological studies, this paper explains the significance of these references to the ancient Near East for Derrida’s arguments regarding the origins of Western metaphysics and logocentrism. In the first part, I analyze Derrida’s brief paragraph on cuneiform writing in Of Grammatology as evincing a “fundamental synaesthesia” of phonetic and non-phonetic elements that problematizes the phonocentric definition …

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Ancient Chinese Poetry As A Trans-Lingual And Cross-Cultural Textual Resource In Gustav Mahler’S Das Lied Von Der Erde, Jun He Jul 2025

Ancient Chinese Poetry As A Trans-Lingual And Cross-Cultural Textual Resource In Gustav Mahler’S Das Lied Von Der Erde, Jun He

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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This article analyzes the use of classical Chinese poems in Gustav Mahler’s song cycle The Song of the Earth, which is almost unanimously deemed as a musical work with a number of Chinese motifs. After elaborating on these texts, especially the original poem in the second and third movement, the author examines the background to Mahler’s adaptation. This includes his personal physical and mental crisis, the context of the prevailing Chinese cultural influences in Europe, especially the utilization of Taoism in light of the epistemology of death, and the social context of anti-Semitism in fin-de-siècle Vienna.

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Inappropriate Attire: Fashion, Nationality, And Shame In Quicksand And Pachinko, Minyoung Park Jul 2025

Inappropriate Attire: Fashion, Nationality, And Shame In Quicksand And Pachinko, Minyoung Park

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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In her article, Minyoung Park examines how fashion in Quicksand by Nella Larsen and Pachinko by Min Jin Lee functions not simply as a visual strategy for passing but as a site where the wearers’ conflicting feelings—shame, desire, and defiance—emerge and persist. Rather than evaluating the success or failure of passing, the article shifts focus to the process of dressing—selecting, maintaining, and reflecting on clothing—through which identity is negotiated and feelings are embodied. The protagonists, Helga and Sunja, often dismissed as failures, are reconsidered as figures whose attention to their inappropriate or excessive fashion reveals their emotional labor and strenuous …

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"El Corregidor" At The Crossroads: Desire, Law, And Coloniality In Martel's Zama, Leisa Kauffmann Jul 2025

"El Corregidor" At The Crossroads: Desire, Law, And Coloniality In Martel's Zama, Leisa Kauffmann

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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In "'El Corregidor at the Crossroads: Desire, Law and Coloniality in Martel's Zama" Leisa Kauffmann discusses Lucrecia Martel's filmic adaptation of Antonio DiBenedetto's 1952 novel, Zama. Highlighting the director's emphasis on the psychoanalytic (as opposed to the existentialist) dimensions of the novel, the essay follows the titular characater's unravelling and shows how Martel's film allegorizes colonial(ist) subjectivity. In Kauffmann's essay, various psychoanalytic theories (such as the work of Bhabha, Fanon, and Žižek), and critiques centering the notion of race in the Lacanian tradition are applied. In addition, differences between the novel and film, particularly regarding Zama's mutilation and …

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Race And Nation In Three Canonic Texts Of Puerto Rican Literature: Luis Palés Matos’S Tom-Tom Of Kinky Hair And Black Things, José Luis González’S La Llegada, And Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’S Cortijo’S Wake, Luis R. Galanes Jul 2025

Race And Nation In Three Canonic Texts Of Puerto Rican Literature: Luis Palés Matos’S Tom-Tom Of Kinky Hair And Black Things, José Luis González’S La Llegada, And Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’S Cortijo’S Wake, Luis R. Galanes

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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In this essay we propose a critical reading of three politically-charged canonic texts of Puerto Rican literature that uphold and vindicate an African heritage for Puerto Rican culture, highlighting their role in moving discussions about blackness at the center stage of debates about national identity and culture, and assessing their contribution to the emergence and development of an Afro-Puerto Rican identity and literature. These texts are: Luis Palés Matos’s Tom-Tom of Kinky Hair and Black Things, José Luis González’s La llegada; and Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’s Cortijo’s Wake. Moreover, a debate about the racial background of the authors …

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Dispositions And Dispossessions: Interwar Left-Wing Literary Writing In Vienna And Zagreb, Ivana Perica Jul 2025

Dispositions And Dispossessions: Interwar Left-Wing Literary Writing In Vienna And Zagreb, Ivana Perica

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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In her article Dispositions and Dispossessions: Interwar Left-wing Literary Writing in Vienna and Zagreb, Ivana Perica examines how political fiction in Vienna and Zagreb during the interwar period reflected competing narratives of emancipation and liberation. She argues that while both cities engaged with left-wing political thought, their literary scenes diverged significantly due to differing socio-political contexts. The article juxtaposes the Austro-Marxist cultural project of Red Vienna, which sought to reconcile class divisions through socialist cultural policies, with the more fragmented leftist movements in Zagreb, where political fiction often expressed disillusionment with the failure of revolutionary change. Through a …

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Compilation As Narrative Art In Medieval Islam: The Redemption Of Kuthayyir In The Book Of Songs, Kirsten Beck Jul 2025

Compilation As Narrative Art In Medieval Islam: The Redemption Of Kuthayyir In The Book Of Songs, Kirsten Beck

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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This article examines the narrative art of Abū ‘l-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī’s Kitāb al-Aghānī through a close reading of the chapter on the poet Kuthayyir ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (d. 723). Though Kuthayyir is mocked throughout for his short stature, unorthodox beliefs, and supposed insincerity, the chapter ends with a surprising scene: his death is mourned by the people of Medina in a large public funeral, suggesting a reevaluation of his character. I argue that this tonal shift is not incidental but the result of Iṣbahānī’s deliberate narrative arrangement. By analyzing the structure of the chapter—including the juxtaposition of genealogical accounts, the gradual …

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Haunting Pasts, Cancelled Futures: Polish And Argentinian Experiences Of Postdependency, Ewa Kobyłecka-Piwońska Jul 2025

Haunting Pasts, Cancelled Futures: Polish And Argentinian Experiences Of Postdependency, Ewa Kobyłecka-Piwońska

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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The aim of this article is to compare Polish and Argentinian experience of democratic transitions of the 1980s and 1990s. Establishing new political and economic orders in both countries did not entail a change in their citizens’ post-dependent mentality. In the first part of the paper, a connection is drawn between Polish and Argentinian collective memories in line with the methodology of transcultural memory studies (Erll, Rothberg). The post-dependent condition is articulated twofold: through the remembrance of the disappearance (of the Jews, the victims of the Argentina’s state terrorism, the indigenous peoples), and through the confusion in grasping the sense …

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Melodramatic Joy In Ibrahim Nasrallah’S Trilogy Of The Bells, Adam V. Spanos Jul 2025

Melodramatic Joy In Ibrahim Nasrallah’S Trilogy Of The Bells, Adam V. Spanos

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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This essay argues that absurdist humor, so often theorized as a challenge to metaphysical and identitarian claims, in fact supports such claims within the context of anticolonial nationalist melodrama. In his Trilogy of the Bells [2019], Palestinian writer Ibrahim Nasrallah uses the conventions of melodrama to make an epistemological claim specific to Palestinian experience. Confronting a regime that has been largely successful in determining the internationally accepted common sense about the conflict, Nasrallah aims to present the external world with a narrative of Palestinian history, experience, and aspirations. The Manichean distinctions, spectacular displays of pathos, and manifestations of suppressed secrets …

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Prison Sentences: Spaces Of Liberation In Arab Prison Writing, Joseph Farag Jan 2025

Prison Sentences: Spaces Of Liberation In Arab Prison Writing, Joseph Farag

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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Spatial and temporal motifs predominate throughout the extensive corpus of Arabic prison writing. However, far from establishing the prison as an exceptional space, and periods of imprisonment as “time outside time,” this paper argues that modern Arabic prison literature tends instead to blur the distinction between “inside” and “outside” prison space and time. In place of a rigid spatial demarcation, dramatically exemplified by images of towering, razor wire-tipped walls, Arabic prison writing consistently seeks to create continuity between the punishment meted out to those within the prison’s walls and the repression endured by those beyond it. Consequently, these texts figuratively …

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Punish Yet Cannot Discipline: Two Iraqi Prison Novels, Hanan Jasim Khammas Jan 2025

Punish Yet Cannot Discipline: Two Iraqi Prison Novels, Hanan Jasim Khammas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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Al-Munāḍil (The Militant) (1972) by ʿAzīz al-Sayyid Jāsim, and Iʿjām (Iʿjaam) (2004) by Sinan Antoon are two prison novels about the historical turning points which mark the rise and fall of the Baʿth regime in Iraq. While the first employs imprisonment as a lens through to expose the corruption and injustice exercised by the monarchy against the emergent revolutionary power, the second shows the Baʿthist government applying similar methods of surveillance, and of physical and psychological torture. Reading these texts by al-Sayyid Jāsim, who died in the Baʿth prisons, and by Antoon who wrote Iʿjaam …

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Hold Fast The Rope Of God: Space, Authority, And Speech In Muslim Prison Narratives, Basit Kareem Iqbal, Walaa Quisay Jan 2025

Hold Fast The Rope Of God: Space, Authority, And Speech In Muslim Prison Narratives, Basit Kareem Iqbal, Walaa Quisay

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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Scholarship about Muslims in prison has been overwhelmingly dominated by security studies’ radicalization thesis and by a superficial reading of incarcerated Muslims’ “religious resilience.” Such approaches caricature the force of Islam in prison and indeed in Muslim prison narratives. This essay draws on interviews with survivors of prisons in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Syria in order to develop other terms for analysis. Across our textual and ethnographic engagements, we read for varied permutations of carceral space, formations of religious authority, and an intimate (witnessing) relation between speech and violence. Muslim prison narratives see a broad emphasis on the …

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The Networks Of Prison Narrative: Imagining Sociality And Making Narrative In Assad’S Syria, Anne-Marie Mcmanus Jan 2025

The Networks Of Prison Narrative: Imagining Sociality And Making Narrative In Assad’S Syria, Anne-Marie Mcmanus

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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This article argues for a new reading of collectivity – in both narrative voice and scenes of shared experience – in works of Syrian prison literature. Although these texts were published and are interpreted as the products of single author figures, the wider narrative field from which they emerge is shaped by numerous collective practices, from the oral and written to the digital. Breaking disciplinary boundaries around prison literature, this article introduces the term “prison narrative” and foregrounds diverse efforts by Syrian writers and former prisoners to imagine alternative formations of national experience and community under the Assad regime (1970-2024). …

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Prison As A Living Being: ‘Assad’S Syria’ As A Model For The Imprisonment State, Jaber Baker Jan 2025

Prison As A Living Being: ‘Assad’S Syria’ As A Model For The Imprisonment State, Jaber Baker

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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The Syrian Assad regime used prisons as tools of domination. As such, prisons had the power not only of active repression but also as places of detention and disappearance for Syrians. The expansion of political detention in Syria over fifty years transformed prison into a living being in the sense that prison became a part not just of Syrians' political life, but also of their social identity. One can recognize it in voices, attitudes, lifestyles, and even written and oral culture. Syrian cities are full of weapons since a large area of the urban space is inhabited by the buildings …

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From Prison To The World: A Comparative Reading Of Naji’S Hirz Mikamkim (Rotten Evidence, 2020) And Abd El-Fattah’S You Have Not Yet Been Defeated (2021), Teresa Pepe Jan 2025

From Prison To The World: A Comparative Reading Of Naji’S Hirz Mikamkim (Rotten Evidence, 2020) And Abd El-Fattah’S You Have Not Yet Been Defeated (2021), Teresa Pepe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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This article analyses Ahmed Naji’s Hirz Mikamkim (Rotten Evidence) and Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s You Have Not Yet Been Defeated through the lens of ‘prison literature’, that is “literary works produced in, about, or through the experience of political detention” (Taleghani 13). Comparing them to previous forms of prison literature from Egypt, it shows that both books depart from the social-realistic mode that has prevailed throughout the 20^th century. Rather they renovate the genre with aesthetic traits drawn from postmodern and digital literature, exemplified by autofictional or anonymous modes of authorship and co-authorship, narrative fragmentation, and bodily exposures. These aesthetic …

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Khairy Shalaby’S Novel The City Of The Enslaved: Egyptian Prison Literature With A Russian Twist, Sarali Gintsburg Jan 2025

Khairy Shalaby’S Novel The City Of The Enslaved: Egyptian Prison Literature With A Russian Twist, Sarali Gintsburg

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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Although the interconnectedness of Russian and Arabic literatures has been demonstrated by Soviet/Russian and, to a limited extent, Western Arabists, this research remains limited to a few names. However, the role that the Russian/Soviet literary tradition had in shaping contemporary genres of Arabic literature is complex and diverse. This is, for instance, the case with prison literature—Russian/Soviet literature has a long tradition of turning to the topic of imprisonment. It was Dostoyevsky, who turned to the genre of katorzhnaya proza (prison literature) and popularized it. Later, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gorky dedicated a number of their influential literary works to further …

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Terrorists, Spies, And Diplomatic Crises: The Birth Of Morocco’S Multimedia Prison Literature, Brahim El Guabli Jan 2025

Terrorists, Spies, And Diplomatic Crises: The Birth Of Morocco’S Multimedia Prison Literature, Brahim El Guabli

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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This article captures the literary shift that accompanied the transformation of the nature of political imprisonment in Morocco in the last twenty years. Focusing on the new victims of state violence, who fall within two categories: prisoners accused of terrorism and those accused of heinous sexual crimes, this article argues that the emergence of these new criminal profiles has led to the establishment of a transnational “Multimedia Prison Literature” (MPL). Drawing on the cases of Ali Arras, a Belgian-Moroccan whom Spain delivered to Morocco for terrorist charges, and Mohamed Hajib, a German-Moroccan citizen whom Germany extradited to his country of …

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The Absurdity Of Liberation In Moroccan Prison Narratives, Hakima Choukri Jan 2025

The Absurdity Of Liberation In Moroccan Prison Narratives, Hakima Choukri

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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Moroccan prison narratives have been credited with major political and social changes, yet their existential value is equally worth acknowledging. The prison narratives of Aziz Binebine, Mohamed Raiss, Malika Oufkir, and Fatna El Bouih, to mention but a few, are fraught with existentialist patterns that are uncovered upon reading them comparatively. One pattern that persists through these narratives is the absurdity of liberation. Borrowing Camus’ concept of the absurd, this article highlights the absurdity of the post-prison chapter for being nothing more than an extension of the prison episode that makes the impossibility of freedom acutely felt. The absurdity of …

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