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CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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Trauma, History, And Terror In The Poetry Of Yusef Komunyakaa And Sinan Antoon, Reema Binghadeer Jun 2022

Trauma, History, And Terror In The Poetry Of Yusef Komunyakaa And Sinan Antoon, Reema Binghadeer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her comparative study “Trauma, History, and Terror in the Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa and Sinan Antoon,” Reema Binghadeer considers the work of the African American poet Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1941) and the (Arab) Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon (b. 1967) through the lens of trauma theory of some notable theorists including; Freud, Cathy Caruth, Jean Laplanche, Roger Luckhurst, and Shoshana Felman—have negotiated in this field. The article explores the literary manifestations of trauma in two distinct historical periods and geographical settings to show the specificities of each prototype and how the historical-cultural significance and textual meanings of trauma have intertwined …


The Extinction Race: Techniques Of The Human In Proust, Via Houellebecq, James Dutton Jun 2022

The Extinction Race: Techniques Of The Human In Proust, Via Houellebecq, James Dutton

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, “The Extinction Race: Techniques of the Human in Proust, via Houellebecq” James Dutton “reads” identity and race from the point of view of technics. Namely, he does so through the work of two nominally “Eurocentric” authors, Marcel Proust and Michel Houellebecq, observing how familial and racial resemblance is a living inscription of “lost time.” This inscription comes about through the technical means available to and constitutive of the categories which bind them. Thus, instead of furthering unfinishable racial distinctions which only serve to support discourses of racism, this article follows assertions made in the novels of …


Extending The Frontiers Of The Detective Novel In Adaora Ulasi’S The Man From Sagamu, Onyeka Odoh Jun 2022

Extending The Frontiers Of The Detective Novel In Adaora Ulasi’S The Man From Sagamu, Onyeka Odoh

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Part of the beauty of detective literature is the mental engagement and psychological contest it stages between the author and the readers, as well as its fascinating probe into the nature and dynamism of crime. However, of greater import are the formulaic structural elements that define the genre—a crime, the detection of the crime, an omniscient detective who intelligently investigates the crime, and a justified resolution of all. Though the structure of Adaora Ulasi’s The Man from Sagamu does not exactly fit into the above model, it is still a detective novel. Therefore, this essay aims to propose a new …


Ethical-Reparative Reconfigurations Of The Literary Today, André Cechinel Mar 2022

Ethical-Reparative Reconfigurations Of The Literary Today, André Cechinel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay aims to debate the evidence of an ethical-reparative function for literature and literary studies today. Therefore, it is divided into two fundamental moments, two argumentative channels that, without a totalizing intention, point out the general perspective of the current, changing, stuation. On the one hand, the literature of the 20th century is presented through the image of a supposed negativity or radical intransitivity, capable of “undoing the work” in its “aesthetics of suppression.” On the other hand, from an introductory debate around some of the places of transitivity envisioned for literature at the beginning of the 21th century, …


“Passive Revolutions” After The Crisis Of Globalization: Gramsci And The Current Culture Of Populism, Yuri Brunello Mar 2022

“Passive Revolutions” After The Crisis Of Globalization: Gramsci And The Current Culture Of Populism, Yuri Brunello

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article compares the ways in which two scholars, the anthropologist Kate Crehan and the philosopher Diego Fusaro, analyze Gramsci’s thought, verifying its current relevance and effectiveness in interpreting populism. In Crehan’s recent Gramscian studies the categories of senso comune and buon senso become crucial. Crehan utilizes categories such as “culture” and senso comune to explain both the Tea Party experience and Donald Trump’s election. Fusaro, on the contrary, is an Italian public intellectual who declares himself a sovereignist and who often includes, among the theoretical references of Italian contemporary sovereignism, the author of Quaderni del carcere. In the …


The Logic Of "Social Enterprise": The Big Issue Organization And New Labour Policy At The Millennial Juncture, Suman Gupta Mar 2022

The Logic Of "Social Enterprise": The Big Issue Organization And New Labour Policy At The Millennial Juncture, Suman Gupta

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper explores the emergence of and policies and practices underpinning ‘social enterprise’ in Britain: that is, the concept that businesses could provide social services and benefits while returning profits to those who have invested in them. This paper argues that, in Britain, the concept was massaged into existence and adopted as a business and policy model at a particular historical juncture, in the later 1990s and early 2000s. The process involved a careful interweaving of linguistic maneuvers with financial calculations both at the level of specific businesses and at that of political regimes. This process is traced here with …


Poetic Explorations In Bill F. Ndi’S Worth Their Weight In Thorns: (De)Constructing Hegemonic National Integration And Debating Francophonecentric National Governance., Hassan Mbiydzenyuy Yosimbom Feb 2022

Poetic Explorations In Bill F. Ndi’S Worth Their Weight In Thorns: (De)Constructing Hegemonic National Integration And Debating Francophonecentric National Governance., Hassan Mbiydzenyuy Yosimbom

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper explores “hegemonic national integration” and “Francophonecentric national governance” in The Cameroons (TC) poetic scape. The former refers to La République du Cameroun (LRC)-British Southern Cameroons (BSC) or Southern Cameroons (SC) interconnectedness dominated by Francophones. The latter is governance that promotes a Francophone cultural superiority that refuses to see the Cameroonian world through Southern Cameroonians’ eyes. Cameroonians live in a time of enormous fragmenting “Francophonizing” and “Anglophonizing” processes. To flesh this argument out, this paper borrows critical perspectives from Benhabib’s “democratic iterations” and “deliberative democracy” and Rosenau’s “six-governance typology’ as requisites for good governance. It contends that …


Language And Betrayal: Posthuman Ethics In Kazuo Ishiguro’S Never Let Me Go, Netty Mattar Feb 2022

Language And Betrayal: Posthuman Ethics In Kazuo Ishiguro’S Never Let Me Go, Netty Mattar

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Netty Mattar discusses in her article “Language and Betrayal: Posthuman Ethics in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go” the complexities of ethical compassion in this biotechnological age. Mattar highlights how genetic technology creates new forms of life that dissolve the line between ‘human’ and ‘technology.’ In spite of this, contemporary ethical discussions do not take into account changing conceptions of human subjectivity and instead reinstate older assumptions about what ‘human’ is. Mattar argues that speculative fiction (SF), as a self-conscious play on signs and signification, can draw attention to how ethical responses are determined by the language we use. …


The Symbolism Of Clothing: The Naked Truth About Jacques Lacan, Peter D. Mathews Feb 2022

The Symbolism Of Clothing: The Naked Truth About Jacques Lacan, Peter D. Mathews

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In the work of Jacques Lacan there exists an extended metaphor of clothing, whereby the ‘naked’ truth is always ‘clothed’ in deception. For Lacan, clothing functions at the intersection of the symbolic and the imaginary, with outward appearance shaping what we imagine to be underneath in order to determine the landscape of symbolic desire. Joan Copjec considers the political implications of this metaphor, arguing that utilitarianism, in particular, divides desire into a false dichotomy of rational, naked desire, and the ornamental clothing of irrationality, a mindset woven into both capitalism and French colonialism. The article then examines two examples from …


Returning To East Africa Via India: On M. G. Vassanji’S And Home Was Kariakoo, Shizen Ozawa Feb 2022

Returning To East Africa Via India: On M. G. Vassanji’S And Home Was Kariakoo, Shizen Ozawa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Returning to East Africa via India,” Shizen Ozawa examines how M. G. Vassanji further develops his diasporic aesthetics in his latest travel book/ memoir And Home Was Kariakoo: A Memoir of East Africa (2014) from two perspectives. First, the essay explores some possible influences of his earlier travelogue A Place Within: Rediscovering India (2008). It seems partly because of his deepening relationship with his land of ancestral origin that in And, Vassanji emphasizes the cross-continental connections between East Africa and India more strongly than in his earlier works. Especially, he characterizes the very presence of …


Identity Reconfigurations, Memory And Personal History In Norman Manea And Saul Bellow’S ‘Spoken Book’, Simona Antofi, Nicoleta D. Ifrim Feb 2022

Identity Reconfigurations, Memory And Personal History In Norman Manea And Saul Bellow’S ‘Spoken Book’, Simona Antofi, Nicoleta D. Ifrim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their paper, “Identity Reconfigurations, Memory and Personal History in Norman Manea and Saul Bellow’s Spoken Book, ”Simona Antofi and Nicoleta Ifrim analyze the book of interviews Settling My Accounts Before I Go Away: A Words & Images Interview, a two-authored mirror-like writing in which two biographical courses and two scriptural identities engage in dialogue. Their aim is to define a double reading effect embedded into the self-oriented narrative: a collective history of the Jewish exile from the communist totalitarian space (Soviet and Romanian) towards the “promised land,” with literary, cultural and political insertions; then, the legitimation of an …


Confucianism And Folklore In Vietnamese Fantasy Short Stories: The Case Of Ghost Stories , Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan Feb 2022

Confucianism And Folklore In Vietnamese Fantasy Short Stories: The Case Of Ghost Stories , Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Truyền kỳ, which is a genre of fantasy short stories, was formed and developed in the historic period of medieval literature of Vietnam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Despite being derived from a similar Chinese genre, the truyền kỳ of Vietnam was the work of the endogenous development of the national fantasy short story, which was closely associated with folk literature and historical prose. However, at the time of its inception, as well as at the glorious top of this genre, truyền kỳ had never been accepted as an official genre. It was rather a metaphor for unorthodox discourse …


Looking Back, Or Re-Visioning: Contemporary American Jewish Poets On “Lot’S Wife”, Anat Koplowitz-Breier Oct 2021

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 Oct 2021

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 Oct 2021

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 …


Strange Genre-Related Loops In A Novel-Short Story: The Tension Between The Genres And Their Cultural Context, Orna Levin Oct 2021

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 Oct 2021

‘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: …


Defending “Western” Values: Reactionary Neoliberalism In The Americas, Gabriela Segura-Ballar May 2021

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, …


Review Of The Journey To The West, Vol. 1, Translated And Edited By Anthony C. Yu, Radovan Škultéty Mar 2021

Review Of The Journey To The West, Vol. 1, Translated And Edited By Anthony C. Yu, Radovan Škultéty

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This is a critical review of volume 1 of the 2012 revised translation of the classical Chinese vernacular novel Xiyou ji (The Journey to the West) by the late Dr. Anthony Yu (1938 - 2015), former Professor Emeritus in Humanities and in the Divinity School at The University of Chicago. It represents the first of four volumes of a thorough overhaul of the first edition, published originally from 1977 to 1983; this complete edition in 4 volumes and almost 1,900 pages (including extensive introduction, endnotes and index) appeared simultaneously on December 17, 2012. It is a result of …


Trans-Atlantic Interrogation: Fabienne Pasquet’S La Deuxième Mort De Toussaint Louverture, Mariana F. Past Mar 2021

Trans-Atlantic Interrogation: Fabienne Pasquet’S La Deuxième Mort De Toussaint Louverture, Mariana F. Past

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Trans-Atlantic Interrogation: Fabienne Pasquet’s La deuxième mort de Toussaint Louverture,” Mariana Past situates the Haitian-Swiss novelist’s understudied narrative within the context of Caribbean letters and the Haitian literary tradition, then discusses the broader, intertextual implications of Toussaint Louverture’s “second” death for Haiti and the trans-Atlantic world. To what end does Pasquet deploy the aged ghost of a Haitian revolutionary icon being invoked by German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist in the Fort de Joux castle-cum-prison within France’s remote, mountainous Jura region? What is at stake when the diasporic writer reincarnates a legendary German poet as protagonist, placing him …


Speculative Epistemologies Of Resistance In Hombres De Maíz And Bandarshah, Haifa S. Alfaisal Mar 2021

Speculative Epistemologies Of Resistance In Hombres De Maíz And Bandarshah, Haifa S. Alfaisal

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his two-part “The literary history of world-systems” Matthew Eatough utilizes world systems theory to examine literary studies. He makes use of Baucom’s “speculative epistemologies” to explore the connection between the global economy speculative financial instruments and the rise of the novel in 18th century. But Eatough is interested in tracing the history of literary studies and world systems theory. In this paper, I use speculative epistemologies to indicate ways of knowing that are speculated in fiction. My starting point is the decolonial critique of world system theory, which I use to formulate border reading; a reading strategy that is …


Hanay Geiogamah’S Body Indian And Foghorn As “Plays With A Purpose”, Danica Čerče Mar 2021

Hanay Geiogamah’S Body Indian And Foghorn As “Plays With A Purpose”, Danica Čerče

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Hanay Geiogamah’s Body Indian and Foghorn as ‘Plays with a Purpose,’” written against the backdrop of critical whiteness studies, Danica Čerče discusses how Geiogamah’s theatrical rhetoric intervenes in the assumptions about whiteness as a static, privilege-granting category and system of dominance. By focusing on various techniques and strategies mobilized to define and affirm Native Americans’ authentic rather than imposed identities, the article shows that humor is one of the prime textual devices in Geiogamah’s plays to renegotiate what Walter Mignolo calls “the racist structure of power.”


Politics Of Evasion And Tales Of Abjection: Postmodern Demythologization In Angela Carter And Ghazaleh Alizadeh, Narges Montakhabi Bakhtvar, Hoda Niknezhad-Ferdos Mar 2021

Politics Of Evasion And Tales Of Abjection: Postmodern Demythologization In Angela Carter And Ghazaleh Alizadeh, Narges Montakhabi Bakhtvar, Hoda Niknezhad-Ferdos

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Angela Carter and Ghazaleh Alizadeh as the prophetesses of postmodern fairy tales in British and Persian literature re-narrativize these tales as a loophole from socio-political stagnation and cultural paralysis. Evading direct contact with the political jargons of their eras, they seek gender generativity via the fairy tale machine. Alizadeh finds refuge in modernizing Persian fairy tales. Carter chants her frustration at Thatcherism through gender subversion. Carter’s and Alizadeh’s revulsion at the politics of gender in their eras can be read via the duet between the abject and the chora in Kristeva’s thought. It is through the encounter with the external …


Strategies Of (In)Visibility And Resilience: Women Writers In A Digital Era, Miriam Borham-Puyal, Daniel Escandell-Montiel Mar 2021

Strategies Of (In)Visibility And Resilience: Women Writers In A Digital Era, Miriam Borham-Puyal, Daniel Escandell-Montiel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Women’s presence in literary history has been particularly conditioned by their place in society and by the limited spheres in which their production was expected to appear (e.g. the sentimental novel, romances or children’s literature). In today’s digital, open and connected society, women continue to face visibility problems in the publishing industry and in the online spaces that grant presence and agency. Their role in cultural creations is still hindered by vertical powers that operate as main censors. This circumstance takes place even in a rhizomatic and decentralized virtual space, where dissident discourses have highlighted it, although without enough discursive …


Female Fantastic In Anthologies: Gendering The Genre And Its Discourse, Anna Boccuti Mar 2021

Female Fantastic In Anthologies: Gendering The Genre And Its Discourse, Anna Boccuti

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In the last decades, the fantastic literature written by women has been the subject of various studies, which, from different standpoints, have tried to investigate the characteristics of the female fantastic. In this essay, after a critical review of the most prominent theories about the so-called feminine fantastic and female writing, I will focus on the narrative strategies of the female fantastic. Through the close reading of the anthologies Tra due specchi. 18 racconti di scrittrici latinoamericane, and Insólitas. Narradoras de lo fantástico en Latinoamérica y España, I’ll try to draw a cartography of the Hispanic …


Transgression, Essentialism And Literary System: An Approach To The Viability Of The Female Fantastic, Alfons Gregori Mar 2021

Transgression, Essentialism And Literary System: An Approach To The Viability Of The Female Fantastic, Alfons Gregori

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The main aims of this article are firstly to find out whether the concept of “fantastic female” is a contradictory and ambiguous construct, and secondly to challenge the feasibility of applying it to literary studies. The matter of the existence of the “female fantastic” refers to the theoretical approaches made to undertake a double-edged task in the 1970s and 1980s: the conceptualization of a dual scheme establishing a female aesthetic opposed to the dominant patriarchy on the one hand, and on the other, the promotion of non-mimetic narrative modes as formulas for transgressing the patriarchal system. However, the crystallization of …


The Female Fantastic Vs. The Feminist Fantastic: Gender And The Transgression Of The Real, David Roas Mar 2021

The Female Fantastic Vs. The Feminist Fantastic: Gender And The Transgression Of The Real, David Roas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Since Ann Richter coined the term “fantastique féminin” in 1977, many works in different languages have postulated a “female” way of writing fantastic texts, depending on the selection of themes, language, characters, supernatural elements, and the portrayal of the uncanny and the monstrous. This claim on the existence of a "female fantastic" reflects central issues in Feminist Literary Theory: on the one hand, the will to identify an aesthetic mode opposed to the dominant patriarchal discourse (female writing, the use of specific themes, etc.); on the other hand, the argument that there are marginal genres, forms and styles voluntarily removed …


Print Culture, Digital Culture, Poetics And Hermeneutics: Discussion With J. Hillis Miller, Liyuan Zhu Dec 2020

Print Culture, Digital Culture, Poetics And Hermeneutics: Discussion With J. Hillis Miller, Liyuan Zhu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper is a response to Hillis Miller’s query on the author’s essay “Hillis Miller on the End of Literature.” The author basically agrees with Miller’s view on the shift from print culture to digital culture, explaining the special cultural context under which Chinese scholars emphasize the visual turn. Based on the rapid development of Chinese online literature, the author points out that print culture does not rival but coexists with digital culture. On the other hand, drawing on Aristotle’s Poetics and insights of several leading figures of contemporary hermeneutics, the author contends that Miller’s dichotomy of poetics (form) and …


China Question Of Us-American Imagism, Qingben Li Dec 2020

China Question Of Us-American Imagism, Qingben Li

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper investigates first the influences of ancient Chinese culture on Ezra Pound, and then Pound’s influence on the New Culture Movement of modern China (1917). It is a kind of circular journey of literary texts and theories from ancient China to the West and then back to China. This journey, or “circle model,” involves textual appropriation, variation, transformation and misunderstanding in every stage.


China Question Of Western Postcolonial Translation Theory, Zhijie Wu, Yuping Wang Dec 2020

China Question Of Western Postcolonial Translation Theory, Zhijie Wu, Yuping Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

“China Question of Western Postcolonial Translation Theory” deals with how western postcolonial translation theory is read, interpreted and applied in China, as well as how the reception in China influences revision and development of the theory. Western postcolonial translation theory, though frequently quoted and highly influential in China, is sometimes incapable of effectively explaining Chinese translation practice and convincing Chinese readers. Based on the analysis of the encounter between postcolonial translation theory and China, three suggestions are proposed to revise translation theory so as to build a “greener,” healthier hetero-generative ecology of languages and cultures.