Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Digital Commons Network

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Comparative literature

Discipline
Institution
Publication Year
Publication
Publication Type
File Type

Articles 421 - 450 of 504

Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network

About The Literatures Of The Americas: A Review Article Of New Work By Castillo And Mcclennen, Deborah N. Cohn Sep 2008

About The Literatures Of The Americas: A Review Article Of New Work By Castillo And Mcclennen, Deborah N. Cohn

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Twain's A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court And U.S. Imperialism, Jennifer A. O'Neill Sep 2007

Twain's A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court And U.S. Imperialism, Jennifer A. O'Neill

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Twain's novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and U.S. Imperialism," Jennifer A. O'Neill argues that while it Twain's text is commonly viewed as an attack on monarchy and the Catholic church, one of the book's primary focuses is U.S. imperialism. In the scholarship of Twain's text some have acknowledged the text as a discussion of colonialism, most tend to see it as an exaltation of "civilizing" efforts rather than the scalding indictment it was clearly intended to be. Indeed, Twain embraced U.S. colonial efforts in the Pacific early in his life but by the time …


Chaos Theory And Literature From An Existentialist Perspective, Yasser Khamees Ragab Aman Sep 2007

Chaos Theory And Literature From An Existentialist Perspective, Yasser Khamees Ragab Aman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Yasser Khamees Ragab Aman proposes in his article "Chaos Theory and Literature from an Existentialist Perspective" that in literature the relation, principles, and processes of chaos and order can be analyzed from an existentialist perspective. Chaos lies at the heart of nothingness and order is the appearance of the achievement it tries to realize, temporary it may seem. Aman argues that with the application of chaos theory to works of literature may yield new insight and applies in his paper aspects of chaos theory reading three literary works which represent three different literatures and cultures, namely Arabic, English, and French. …


The Cognitive Construction Of The Self In Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Patrick S. Bernard Jun 2007

The Cognitive Construction Of The Self In Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Patrick S. Bernard

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "The Cognitive Construction of the Self in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God," Patrick S. explores the conception and representation of the self as a cognitive construct in Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. By this approach, Bernard proposes that cognitive paradigms, such as knowing, seeing, thinking, and speaking, for example, and their capacities to engender knowledge and perception, identity and consciousness, memory and narrative, language and speech, are central to the novel's exploration of the self as an epistemological and ideological product. Using tools of interpretation adapted from cognitive psychology and radical constructivism, …


Language In Modern African Drama, Isaiah Ilo Dec 2006

Language In Modern African Drama, Isaiah Ilo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "Language in Modern African Drama" Isaiah Ilo proposes alternative criteria for language choice in modern African drama. The two most influential constructs on the language question are Fanon's essentialism that rejects Western languages as instruments of subjugation and Achebe's hybrid approach which entails subversion of the foreign languages by infusing them with African verbal characteristics. The constructs, which emphasise indigenised language and content, stem from the idea that consciousness of the colonial experience should determine language choice and usage in post-colonial African literary creativity. In building a case for a post-indiginist aesthetic, Ilo argues that present reality …


The Politics Of Recognition And Comparative Literature: New Works By Dale And Yu, Bol, Owen, And Peterson, Alexander C.Y. Huang Dec 2006

The Politics Of Recognition And Comparative Literature: New Works By Dale And Yu, Bol, Owen, And Peterson, Alexander C.Y. Huang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Subverting Literary Allusions In Eliot And Özdamar, Walter Rankin Sep 2006

Subverting Literary Allusions In Eliot And Özdamar, Walter Rankin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Subverting Literary Allusions in Eliot and Özdamar," Walter Rankin explores the opposing ways allusion can be used in the works of major and minority authors. While Eliot is a canonized author whose The Waste Land is characterized by allusions to Eastern and Western works supplemented with his own comprehensive endnotes, Özdamar is a Turkish-German author whose A Cleaning Woman's Career subjects Western literary and historical figures -- including Medea, Hamlet and Ophelia, Nathan the Wise, Julius Ceasar, an Hitler and Eva Braun -- to the interpretive powers of a Turkish cleaning woman working as a guest worker …


A Bakhtinian Perspective On Feminist Lesbian Crime Writing, Sarah Posman Sep 2006

A Bakhtinian Perspective On Feminist Lesbian Crime Writing, Sarah Posman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "A Bakhtinian Perspective on Feminist Lesbian Crime Writing," Sarah Posman discusses how the Bakhtinian concepts "ethos" and "chronotope" add to the discussion of feminist lesbian crime writing. She sets out from a Bakhtinian typology of action stories and situates recent crime writing as a curious mixture of mission stories and transformation stories. Focusing on the innovative potential of feminist lesbian crime writing, Posman explores how such stories tackle the iconically masculine and heterosexual conventions of the detective story and manage to balance tradition and subversion successfully. Posman infuses her analysis with issues central to feminism and queer …


Affect, History, And Race And Ellison's Invisible Man, Alan Bourassa Jun 2006

Affect, History, And Race And Ellison's Invisible Man, Alan Bourassa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Affect, History, and Race and Ellison's Invisible Man" Alan Bourassa explores the implications of the Deleuze and Guattarian concept of "affect" for a reading of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. In the novel's most problematic relationship -- that between race and history -- there is a third term that transforms the problematic. Invisible Man is simultaneously a conventional novel that establishes emotional individuality as the third term between history and race, and an "underground" novel that sets up "affect" as the third term. If Invisible Man is only about the emotional movements of the individual, race becomes merely …


National Conflict And Narrative Possibility In Faulkner And Garro, Kristin E. Pitt Jun 2006

National Conflict And Narrative Possibility In Faulkner And Garro, Kristin E. Pitt

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "National Conflict and Narrative Possibility in Faulkner and Garro" Kristin E. Pitt explores two twentieth-century narratives of the Americas set during and after civil war. Both William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Elena Garro's Los recuerdos del porvenir suggest that the historical narratives of the national community which have been celebrated by the U.S. South and Mexico have resulted in untenable contemporary social systems. Seizing the opportunity presented by national crisis, the central female characters of both novels attempt to rewrite the narratives of their imagined communities and reinscribe themselves within these revisions, doing so primarily by renegotiating …


Nabokov And World Literature, Charles Stanley Ross Jun 2006

Nabokov And World Literature, Charles Stanley Ross

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "Nabokov and World Literature" Charles Stanley Ross thinks through the relationship between comparative literature and cultural studies by considering the absence of Nabokov's work in The Norton Anthology of World Literature. The problem seems to be that Nabokov's works are not susceptible to the kind of varying interpretations favored by the Norton's editors, although in practice, Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, for example, shows that even Nabokov's tightly controlled fiction can generate diverse responses. The more complex modes of reading that form the basis of David Damrosch's What is World Literature? are used to interrogate just …


Literary Emergence As A Case Study Of Theory In Comparative Literature, César Domínguez Jun 2006

Literary Emergence As A Case Study Of Theory In Comparative Literature, César Domínguez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Literary Emergence as a Case Study of Theory in Comparative Literature," César Domínguez constructs an interdisciplinary theoretical model which sheds new light on literary emergence, a phenomenon that defies literary, artistic, and cultural boundaries. Domínguez opens his discussion with a synthesis regarding the state of the question, paying particular attention to the contradictions provoked when an inventory of emerging literatures is attempted and goes on to develop a theoretical framework in which the dynamic processes which define emerging literature are seen relative to world literature. He understands world literature as a mega-system in which emergence finds itself …


Us-American Comparative Literature And The Study Of East-Central European Culture And Literature, Letitia Guran Mar 2006

Us-American Comparative Literature And The Study Of East-Central European Culture And Literature, Letitia Guran

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "US-American Comparative Literature and the Study of East-Central European Culture and Literature," Letitia Guran begins with a short overview of the state of the discipline of comparative literature based on the ACLA Report 2003 (ACLA: American Comparative Literature Assiociation) by Haun Saussy and its responses in order to focus on a recent comparative project of large dimensions, the ICLA: International Comparative Literature Association project History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, organized and its volumes edited by Marcel Cornis Pope and John Neubauer. The thesis of Guran's paper is that there are many alternatives to the …


Taiwan, China, And Yang Mu's Alternative To National Narratives, Lisa L.M Wong Mar 2006

Taiwan, China, And Yang Mu's Alternative To National Narratives, Lisa L.M Wong

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Taiwan, China, and Yang Mu's Alternative to National Narratives," Lisa L.M. Wong examines the ways Yang Mu's poetry acts as an echo and a dissent to the mainstream national narratives in Taiwan between the late 1970s and early 1980s. During this decade, identity discourse has developed from othering Westernism to preserve Chinese cultural-national integrity to espousing a native Taiwanese identity against the Chinese one. Each of Yang's poems in Wong's analysis is a field of contention, peopled by different subjects such as the colonizers, the native Taiwanese, the female, and the diasporant, who articulate contested stories of …


Chaos Theory, Hypertext, And Reading Borges And Moulthrop, Perla Sassón-Henry Mar 2006

Chaos Theory, Hypertext, And Reading Borges And Moulthrop, Perla Sassón-Henry

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "Chaos Theory, Hypertext, and Reading Borges and Moulthrop," Perla Sassón-Henry presents a multidisciplinary perspective to the study of Jorge Luis Borges's and Stuart Moulthrop's works. Sassón-Henry argues that there exists a tripartite relationship among Borges's texts, Moulthrop's Victory Garden, and chaos theory. The dialogue among these texts via chaos theory, bifurcation theory, and noise is what separates this analysis from former studies. Sassón-Henry concludes that by underscoring the reciprocal interconnectedness among Borges's stories, Victory Garden, scientific theory, and new media technology we also acknowledge the intricate connections among print literature, digital literature, and science, and thus move …


Modernism, Joyce, And Portuguese Literature, Carlos Ceia Mar 2006

Modernism, Joyce, And Portuguese Literature, Carlos Ceia

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Carlos Ceia, in his article, "Modernism, Joyce, and Portuguese Literature," discusses parallels between James Joyce's work and texts by modernist and contemporary Portuguese novelists such as Antunes, Brandão, Negreiros, Pessoa, Saramago, Sá-Carneiro, Silva Ramos, and Velho da Costa. In his analysis, Ceia focuses on the role of myth, the notion of the (anti-)hero, the solipsism of interior consciousness, narrative techniques, and linguistic experimentation. Ceia argues that while it is impossible to detect direct influence by Joyce on Portuguese writers, it is in the context of the parallel paradigms of modernism we are able to discover the Joycean impact on both …


An Introduction To The Work Of Elfriede Jelinek, Nobel Laureate In Literature 2004, Andrea Bandhauer Mar 2005

An Introduction To The Work Of Elfriede Jelinek, Nobel Laureate In Literature 2004, Andrea Bandhauer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "An Introduction to the Work of Elfriede Jelinek, Nobel Laureate in Literature 2004," Andrea Bandhauer explores reactions of the press to the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek after she received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature. Bandhauer discusses how the extreme irritation following this announcement was frequently directed at the author's public persona rather than at her work. Against this background, Bandhauer explores the ambivalent relationship of the public towards a politically and socially engaged and outspoken public figure who in her literary work produces highly hermetical texts. As a writer, Jelinek is preoccupied with language and form …


The Arachne Myth In Oral And Written Literature, José Manuel Pedrosa Mar 2005

The Arachne Myth In Oral And Written Literature, José Manuel Pedrosa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "The Arachne Myth in Oral and Written Literature," José Manuel Pedrosa explores the folktale about a person who prides himself being the most intelligent individual and whom the gods punish with a metamorphosis into spider. Pedrosa discusses similar myths in existence in modern oral traditions and in literary works such as the Bible, Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Quran, and García Márquez's masterpiece Cien años de soledad. The universality of the myth is underlined by the existence of a folktale registered among the Bubi people of Equatorial Guinea. Not known about it until the twentieth century, the oral transmission …


Literary Cosmotopia And Nationalism In Ariel, Camilla Fojas Dec 2004

Literary Cosmotopia And Nationalism In Ariel, Camilla Fojas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Camilla Fojas, in her paper "Literary Cosmotopia and Nationalism in Ariel," argues that turn-of-the-century cosmopolitan literary texts encoded political interests and that they were concerned with the proper way of being cosmopolitan and national at the same time, of forging literary and diplomatic parity between national and international interests. Unfortunately, this search for balance was beset by rhetorical and ideological prejudices manifest in phobic language about the corrupting forces of cosmopolitan effeminacy on national character. The conflict of cosmopolitanism with nationalism was played out as a kind of war between the sexes, as a gendered battle for dominance. This tension …


Reading Ondaatje's Poetry, Eluned Summers-Bremner Sep 2004

Reading Ondaatje's Poetry, Eluned Summers-Bremner

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Eluned Summers-Bremner pursues in her paper "Reading Ondaatje's Poetry" a psychoanalytic reading of Ondaatje's poetry based on Lacan's thought, highlighting occasions where nature and culture meet. Focusing on the volumes Secular Love and The Man with Seven Toes, Summers-Bremner explores how nature's troubled regions are navigated through the structural estrangement of looking for a name. In Lacanian terms, a proper name signals the contradiction of one's belonging to a biological or other kind of family, whence one's name often arises, and being a user or respondent of language, which produces meaning through its infringement or exceeding of its users' intentions, …


Touching The Language Of Citizenship In Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Sandeep Sanghera Sep 2004

Touching The Language Of Citizenship In Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Sandeep Sanghera

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Sandeep Sanghera, in her paper "Touching the Language of Citizenship in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost" discusses questions which make Ondaatje's novel a text about postmodern identity: who is this woman Anil who lives mostly in the West, travels on a British passport, works for an international organization, and no longer has any real ties to her first home? In the paper, these questions are examined via the languages Anil adopts and abandons in the novel. Sanghera elaborates on the question of foreign-ness represented by the protagonist of the novel; however, this foreign-ness is examined in the particular context concerning the substance …


Oral History And The Writing Of The Other In Ondaatje's In The Skin Of A Lion, Winfried Siemerling Sep 2004

Oral History And The Writing Of The Other In Ondaatje's In The Skin Of A Lion, Winfried Siemerling

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Winfried Siemerling argues in his paper "Oral History and the Writing of the Other in Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion" that the simulation of oral narratives in the novel imagines the conveyance of oral histories of immigrant experiences obscured by historiography. The narrative device of simulated orality -- the written text casts itself as the outcome of serial story-telling -- serves here to introduce erstwhile anonymous societal actors as makers of history, and emphasizes the collective production of story and history. Oral narratives emerge dreamlike like light out of darkness in this text; yet light, like writing, creates …


Representations Of Buddhism In Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Marlene Goldman Sep 2004

Representations Of Buddhism In Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Marlene Goldman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Marlene Goldman suggests in her paper "Representations of Buddhism in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost" that at first glance Ondaatje appears to promote the idea of a Sri Lankan Buddhist faith as transcending history. Ondaatje introduces the subject of Buddhism early on in the novel, emphasizing initially the devastation wrought by imperial and colonial forces. Goldman, however, argues that subsequent references to Buddhism undermine the initial portrayal of a religion besieged by external imperialist forces. For example, at one point, the character Palipana refers to the assassination of his brother, Narada, a Buddhist monk. Narada was possibly the victim of a "political …


The Motif Of The Collector And History In Ondaatje's Work, Jon Saklofske Sep 2004

The Motif Of The Collector And History In Ondaatje's Work, Jon Saklofske

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Jon Saklofske, in his paper "The Motif of the Collector and History in Ondaatje's Work" recognizes that Ondaatje rescues Buddy Bolden from historical obscurity by elevating and complicating the musician's largely forgotten history with a self-conscious and largely fictional synthesis of memory and imagination. The liberties Ondaatje takes in Coming Through Slaughter with his subject to achieve this re-presentation and the ownership of the portrait that results exposes this type of authorial activity as a problematic appropriation. Saklofske suggests that to understand the implications of Ondaatje's activity it is useful to compare his efforts with Walter Benjamin's "collector" figure, who …


Ondaatje's The English Patient And Altered States Of Narrative, Beverley Curran Sep 2004

Ondaatje's The English Patient And Altered States Of Narrative, Beverley Curran

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Beverley Curran argues in her paper "Ondaatje's The English Patient and Altered States of Narrative" that Ondaatje reconfigures in his novel the "romantic" figure of the father/artist as a clandestine lover, a drug addict, or an eccentric translator, all figures with dependencies. In The English Patient, the father or artist's sense of source, continuity, or authority are translated into a narrative which rejects the perverse captivity demanded of the lover and the translator by fidelity or by the tenets of realistic representation. Using sex, drugs, and translation, Ondaatje deranges both time and space to reconfigure the role of the artist …


Monénembo's L'Aîné Des Orphelins And The Rwandan Genocide, Lisa Mcnee Jun 2004

Monénembo's L'Aîné Des Orphelins And The Rwandan Genocide, Lisa Mcnee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Monénembo's L'Aîné des orphelins and the Rwandan Genocide," Lisa McNee discusses Tierno Monénembo's L'Aîné des orphelins, a novel that offers a double discourse and a dual memory of the genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994. McNee argues that L'Aîné des orphelins presents us with an extraordinary kind of fictional testimonial to genocide. Although Monénembo is not from Rwanda and did not participate in the tragedy, only someone who has paid the price of the clarity needed to distinguish between good and bad faith could have written a novel like L'Aîné des orphelins. Monénembo's characterization of …


Asian-American Literature And A Lacanian Reading Of Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey, Fu-Jen Chen Jun 2004

Asian-American Literature And A Lacanian Reading Of Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey, Fu-Jen Chen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Asian-American Literature and a Lacanian Reading of Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey," Fu-jen Chen explores the protagonist's subjective progression into the post-Symbolic Real in Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey -- from subject as Demand, through subject as Desire, to subject as jouissance. Tripmaster Monkey records Ah Sing's transformation from a racial paranoiac at the beginning of the novel through a subject as demand to a subject as desire who is learning to target new desires via his engaging in real myth and staging real theater, and finally to a subject as jouissance -- one who is oriented to his …


Negotiating Boundaries In Divakaruni's The Mistress Of Spices And Naylor's Mama Day, Susana Vega-González Jun 2003

Negotiating Boundaries In Divakaruni's The Mistress Of Spices And Naylor's Mama Day, Susana Vega-González

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Negotiating Boundaries in Divakaruni's The Mistress of Spices and Naylor's Mama Day," Susana Vega-González analyzes the intertextual connections between these two novels. In Vega-González's view, the texts discussed transcend their authors' different ethnic and ethno-cultural backgrounds and appeal to universalisms found in literature. Vega-González proposes that writing from a bi-cultural perspective, Indian American Chitra B. Divakaruni and African American Gloria Naylor share both content and stylistic features in their acclaimed novels. Their conscious effort to dissolve established boundaries as well as their ethno-cultural legacies leads these authors to a magic realistic approach, an apt means to reflect …


Corpi, Murakami, And Contemporary Hardboiled Fiction, Cathy Steblyk Jun 2003

Corpi, Murakami, And Contemporary Hardboiled Fiction, Cathy Steblyk

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Corpi, Murakami, and Contemporary Hardboiled Fiction," Cathy Steblyk discusses comparatively texts by contemporary detective fiction writers, one an ethnic-minority US-American and the other Japanese. Steblyk proposes that in detective fiction since the late 1980s, morally or ethically contestable sites of history have been given a postmortem by contemporary authors who are interested in restoring the lost parts of cultural histories. Detective fictions by feminist US-Chicana author Lucha Corpi and Japanese writer Murakami Haruki show how recent fiction from around the globe uses the hardboiled genre for the purposes of exploring past injustices and offering revisionist histories. The …


Nobel In Literature 2000 Gao Xingjian's Aesthetics Of Fleeing, Mabel Lee Mar 2003

Nobel In Literature 2000 Gao Xingjian's Aesthetics Of Fleeing, Mabel Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Nobel in Literature 2000 Gao Xingjian's Aesthetics of Fleeing," Mabel Lee explores the aesthetic dimensions of Gao Xingjian's play Taowang (Fleeing 1990), and its significance in establishing the recurring motif of "fleeing" in Gao's later writings on literature. Lee argues that the intensely emotional times during which Gao wrote Fleeing were comparable to those seventy years earlier confronting May Fourth writers. Urging his compatriots not to be "bystanders," Lu Xun, the most influential of May Fourth writers, had chosen to allow his creative self to suicide, as shown in the prose-poems of Yecao (Wild Grass 1927). For …