Digital Commons Network^™

Agency And Political Engagement In Gide And Barrault's Post-War Theatrical Adaptation Of Kafka's The Trial, Yevgenya Strakovsky

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Agency and Political Engagement in Gide and Barrault's Post-war Theatrical Adaptation of Kafka's The Trial" Yevgenya Strakovsky considers the political themes of André Gide and Jean-Louis Barrault's Le Procès (The Trial, 1947), the first theatrical adaptation of Franz Kafka's Der Prozess (The Trial, 1914). Strakovsky demonstrates that Le Procès, written and staged in the immediate aftermath of World War II, levels a critique against the passive complicity of citizens in unjust persecution in both its script and its staging. The paper also considers the elements of Kafka's prose that lend themselves to …

Typography And The Evolution Of Hebrew Alphabetic Script: Writing Method Of The Sofer, Shayna Tova Blum

Faculty and Staff Publications

Typography is the study of language letterforms, phonographic alphabetic characters that, when combined with additional characters, form words and/or sentences to express an idea and communicate a message to an audience. The history of typographic design dates back to early civilization and the invention of alphabetic writing systems, formulated and processed through the literary skills of the Hebrew Scribe Ezra whose knowledge and practice offered a significant contribution within a predominantly oral society. By examining the history of Hebrew typography through the discourse of biblical writing systems and alphabetic design, the article addresses the development of Hebrew scripts evolving from …

Masculinidades Peligrosas: Monstruosidad, Vampirismo, Canibalismo Y Homosexualidad En La Literatura Mexicana De Los Siglos Xx Y Xxi, Jorge Estrada

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

This dissertation examines public and institutional perceptions of homosexuality in Mexico from the time of Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship (c. 1880-1910) through the early twentieth-first century. In my introduction, I study diverse representations of the male homosexual as a monstrous figure in Western culture, taking as models gothic images that emerged in the late nineteenth-century as a response to the rise of scientism, industrialization, and urbanization. The models that I utilize include the literal and metaphorical cannibal, the anxiety-causing vampire, and the dehumanized depiction of those who transgress social boundaries of gender and race.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical …

Acts Of Provocation: Popular Antiracisms On/Through The Twenty-First Century New York Commercial Stage, Stefanie A. Jones

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is an abolitionist feminist study of the role of liberalism in the twenty-first century political economy. It takes as its object New York City bourgeois cultural productions (in particular Broadway theatre and the New York Times) from approximately 1984 to 2009. It offers insights into important yet widely-misunderstood features of turn-of-millennium US society: class, art, political practice, and war. In order to understand liberalism’s political and economic agenda, I look at how these objects are pitched in the struggle over racism. Sometimes when we say “liberal” we mean it in the philosophical sense, with particular attention to liberal …

Memory And Identity-Focused Narratives In Tănase's 'Lived Book', Nicoleta D. Ifrim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Memory and identity-focused narratives in Tănase's 'lived book'" Nicoleta Ifrim analyses România mea (My Romania), Virgil Tănase's first book published after the fall of Ceausescu's regime, a collection of interviews in which personal history is fictionalized according to the narrative rules of a "spoken book." The text is representative for the Eastern intellectual travelling to the West, carrying out his own personal post-totalitarian traumas now mirrored in a self-oriented narrative.

Urhobo Folklore And Udje Aesthetics In Tanure Ojaide's In The House Of Words And Songs Of Myself, Mathias I. Orhero

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Urhobo Folklore and Udje Aesthetics in Ojaide's In the House of Words and Songs of Myself" Mathias Orhero argues that Ojaide's poetry incorporates Urhobo folkloric contents and Udje style. Using African New Criticism as its theoretical anchor, this paper reveals that Ojaide amply deploys Urhobo folkloric contents and Udje aesthetics in both the form and contents of his poetry and thus, he continues as a modern Urhobo Udje maestro of the hybrid tradition. This paper also brings Ojaide's recent collections to critical lenses, especially as masterpieces of his Urhobo folkloric and Udje adaptations. Orhero concludes by …

A Comparative History Of Resurrection Plants, John Charles Ryan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "A Comparative Literary History of Resurrection Plants" John Charles Ryan assembles a comparative history of resurrection plants through textual analysis of early botanical commentaries, herbal references, prose, poetry, and other sources. Resurrection plants include a diverse range of botanical species, typically of arid regions, that appear to come back to life after complete desiccation. Historical and contemporary observers—from sixteenth-century herbalist John Gerard to contemporary Australian poet John Kinsella—have expressed an abiding fascination for resurrection plants' capacity to survive harsh environmental conditions. The plants court their own deaths by paring down—then restoring—physiological processes in relation to shifting ecological …

The Indian Empire And Its Colonial Practices In South Asia, Yubraj Aryal

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The India, Empire and its Colonial Practices in South Asia" Yubraj Aryal claims that Bharatiya discourse supports colonization in South Asia. This discourse justifies oppression of institutions, practices, of the non-Bharatiya colonized. The article examines Indian Empire's colonialism toward the weaker, smaller nations along its border and the Bharatiya ideology at the heart of the repressive empire, which is taken to represent the South Asian subcontinent. The article looks at the way in which Bharatiya is perhaps a more oppressive ideology than Orientalism and gives a glimpse into how society, culture, history, and textuality work around power …

Canvases Of Representation: Addressing The Cultural Politics Of Black Male Superhero Identity In Graphic Narratives, Danielle L. Cochran

Theses and Dissertations

Canvases of Representation: Addressing the Cultural Politics of Black Male Superheroes Identity in Graphic Narratives is an analytical literary mixtape dedicated to Black male superheroes Black Panther, Luke Cage, and Black Lightning. Cochran draws out how superheroes play a role in the socio-political, identity, and cultural representations Black identity. The work argues that what is not just the symbolic/cultural destruction of the Black image in popular culture but how such representations provide a template for how the Black body is actively managed, controlled, surveilled, and contained in the material world. Examining these figures through the blended genres of Afrofuturism, film, …

Adopting A Third Gender In The United States, Anna K. Self

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

The United States should consider adopting a third gender in order accommodate all of its citizens comfortably. The concept of a third gender has existed in past societies such as the Inuit and the Yoruba, but has not been accepted in Western societal structures. By examining how the third gender was integrated into other societies, the United States will be able to learn how to properly adapt the idea for modern times including deciding which aspects are important for modern use. The United States must also consider how to classify its intersexed individuals, as they do not fit within either …

Colonial Shame And Its Effect On Puerto Rican Culture, Alison Torres Ramos

English Dissertations - Archive

I explore how American influence affects Puerto Rican culture through colonial shame. My dissertation is informed by the following questions: (1) In what ways does Puerto Rican culture attempt to move away from colonial shame? (2) What underlying desires and fears are present in Puerto Rican cultural productions? (3) How does colonial shame create agency in the struggle to achieve cultural currency within the wider American society? (4) How does colonial shame affect transculturation between Puerto Rico and the United States? The second chapter of my dissertation explores Puerto Rican attempts at moving away their colonial shame to subvert it. …

The Art Of Sex, Emily Mccarter

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

No abstract provided.

Fantastical Body Narratives : Cosplay, Performance, And Gender Diversity., Tiffany M. Hutabarat-Nelson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation aims to explore how the phenomenon of cosplay has been able to produce and sustain a diversity of gender expression due to its emergence from an activity-based community that emphasizes creative play. This creative energy is manifested through cosplay as an active, ritualized practice in which gender diversity is invited to be realized as a distinct possibility, resulting in a display of a full range of masculinities and femininities as well as crossplays and genderbend cosplays. I argue that cosplay can therefore be understood as a phenomenon that destabilizes the gender binary—its active practice promotes the production and …

Networks Of Collaboration And Creation In Latin American Digital Literature, Carolina Gainza

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Networks of Collaboration and Creation in Latin American Digital Literature" Carolina Gainza examines how production and reception of literature have been affected by digital technology, with special emphasis on issues related to Latin American digital literature. Gainza analyzes Jaime Alejandro Rodriguez's Narratopedia, Doménico Chiappe's La Huella de Cosmos, and Leonardo Valencia's and Eugenio Tiselli's El Libro Flotante in order to highlight collective practices of creation involved in digital productions. Through the discussion of these issues, Gainza offers an overview of ongoing changes wrought by digital technology in contemporary Latin American digital culture.

The Dramatization Of Cultural Hybridity And The "In-Between" Turkey In Fazıl's Künye, Önder Çakırtaş

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Dramatization of Cultural Hybridity and the "In-Between" Turkey in Fazıl's Künye" Önder Çakırtaş addresses Turkey's historical context and exposes how political, social and cultural changes were expressed in Turkey's public sphere. Using Niyazi Berkes's theory of secularism as proceeding of modernism Çakırtaş discusses different examples of stylistic strategies of cultural hybridity in the playwright's historical-based play, Künye. He investigates how political changes in pre-Turkey times signify Turkey's national striving, and how the Ottoman-conservative past metamorphoses into Turkic-secular. The study juxtaposes the perceptions of 'introduction to Westernization' and 'departure from Islamic past' in a period …

The Oxford Handbook Of Environmental History Edited By Andrew C. Isenberg, Lorelei L. Hanson

The Goose

Review of Andrew C. Isenberg's The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History.

The Duende Of Tetherball By Tim Bowling, Gillian Harding-Russell

The Goose

Review of Tim Bowling's The Duende of Tetherball.

Hebrew Typography: A Modern Progression Of Language Forms, Shayna Tova Blum

Faculty and Staff Publications

Influenced by studies in traditional Ashkenazi and Sephardi scripts. The typeface had been designed for the printing of the Koren Tanakh, a first edition printed Jewish Bible processed through an all-Jewish collaboration for the first time in centuries. Koren’s project was inspired by the revival of Hebrew initiated by Haskalah writers in the 18th century. Haskalah writers utilized the language and scripts of written and printed literary texts. Influenced by philosophical and political ideologies of the European Enlightenment, the Haskalah explored Jewish identity through language by defining the secular context through traditional Jewish symbolism and narratives. The Zionist movement of …

Infancia (In)Visible: La Subjetividad De La Niñez Como Transgresión A La Marginalidad En Las Películas Conducta Y Pelo Malo, Tania Carrasquillo Hernández

Faculty Publications

Tania Carrasquillo Hernández's research on race, gender, and sexuality has led her to develop a more specific interest in the study of childhood and sexuality in literature and cinema. This article, based on a presentation given at the Hispanic Literatures Across Cultures Conference (October 6–8, 2016 at Fresno Pacific University), analyzes the representation of boyhood and masculinity in contemporary Cuban and Venezuelan cinema via the films Conducta (2014, directed by Ernesto Daranas) and Pelo Malo (2013, directed by Mariana Rondón).

In the case of Chala (Armando Valdes Freire, Conducta), Carrasquillo Hernández explores how his masculinity is related to the …

"If You Want To Be The Man, You've Got To Beat The Man": Masculinity And The Rise Of Professional Wrestling In The 1990'S, Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

This paper traces the relationship between the shifting representations of masculinity in professional wrestling programs of the 1990s and the contemporaneous shifts in conceptions of masculinity, examining the ways each of these shifts impacted the other. Most important among these was a growing sense that the biggest enemy in wrestling and in day-to-day life is one’s boss. Moreover, the corporate corruption theme continues to underscore the WWE’s on-screen and off-screen coverage, well into the second decade of the twenty-first century. Thus, the paper provides a template for considering a widely consumed popular cultural form in ways that challenge the determinism …

Beat Contenders (Micheline, Sanders, Kupferberg), A. Robert Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Beat Contenders (Micheline, Sanders, Kupferberg)" A. Robert Lee asks if we are in danger of too fixed a Beat canonization. That is, do the Usual Suspects—Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs, with Corso, Ferlinghetti, Cassady, and Snyder in the frame—assume too presiding a role? There is, for sure, rightly, increased recognition of Beat women writers and attention has been given to the Afro-Beat circuit and, indeed, to a wider multicultural roster to include Latino/a and Asian American authorship. Beat's international reach has won its place, from the United Kingdom and Continental Europe to Japan and Australia. Even so, other …

The Cultural Translation Of Ginsberg's Howl In Turkey, Erik Mortenson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Cultural Translation of Ginsberg's Howl in Turkey" Erik Mortenson examines three Turkish translations of Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl in order to explore the ways in which Ginsberg's poem becomes redeployed in new cultural contexts. Orhan Duru and Ferit Edgü's 1976 translation presents a more politicized Ginsberg that draws on his anti-establishment credentials as a social activist. This comes as little surprise, since in pre-1980 coup Turkey rebellion was thought in purely political terms of right verses left. Hakan Arslan's 1991 update provides a less political and more familiar Ginsberg, in keeping with a society that left …

Politics Of Feminist Revision In Di Prima's Loba, Polina Mackay

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Politics of Feminist Revision in di Prima's Loba" Polina Mackay explores Diane di Prima's two-volume epic Loba (1998) and, through a comparison of di Prima to the work of Adrienne Rich, argues that Loba practices a politics of feminist revision. Further, Mackay examines the ways in which di Prima starts to move away from the recovery project of female voices in patriarchal culture, associated with late twentieth-century Feminism, towards a women's literature which need not be defined entirely through its resistance to patriarchal narratives of gender in men's literature. Here it focuses on di Prima's revisionist …

The Beat "Pad", Heike Mlakar

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Beat 'Pad'" Heike Mlakar analyzes the importance of Joan Vollmer's and Hettie Jones's Manhattan apartments as centers for the upcoming avant-garde movement of the time in order to understand the meaning of "home" in postwar bohemianism in general and specifically for female Beats. In sensationalized late 1950s films and in print media, the Beats were associated with low-rent Beat "pads" in poor urban areas, in which wild all-night parties were held—sites of drug use, destitution, and sexual promiscuity. Both Vollmer and Jones contributed greatly to the formation of the Beat Generation by providing the perfect setting …

Race, Gender, And The Beats In Tan Magazine's "I Was A Victim Of The Beat Generation", Chelsea M. Stripe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Race, Gender, and the Beats in Tan Magazine's 'I Was a Victim of the Beat Generation'" Chelsea Stripe discusses the "true to life" story of Sara Howard, a single African American mother who becomes pregnant by a white Beat and struggles to raise their child alone. On the one hand, "I Was a Victim of the Beat Generation" emphasizes the exploitative character of Beats' affinity for African American culture and of their attitudes toward women. Further, Howard's story critiques the social fluidity that Beat privilege allows. On the other hand, the story articulates conservative US-American middle class …

Theories Of Opiate Addiction In The Early Works Of Burroughs And Trocchi, Richard English

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Theories of Opiate Addiction in the Early Works of Burroughs and Trocchi" Richard English discusses William S. Burroughs's and Alexander Trocchi's representations of opiate addiction with special reference to their early writings. English examines the concept of homo heroin that can be attributed to Burroughs and lists and expounds its qualities. Among these are: immorality, criminality, mono-objectuality, self- and other-indifference, and, most importantly, the radical physical transformation into a new species, which Burroughs extends in Naked Lunch. English shows how homo heroin relates to Trocchi's conception of a heroin addict, which serves to illustrate that homo …

Traversing The Borders Of Écriture Migrante And Transnational Writing In Québec, Catherine Khordoc

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "Traversing the Borders of écriture migrante and Transnational Writing in Québec" Catherine Khordoc questions the relevance of the term écriture migrante, which has become a type of ghetto for writers who have immigrated, creating an implicit expectation that immigrant writers write exclusively about experiences of immigration and exile. She proposes a transnational approach as an alternative way of considering contemporary Québécois writing, examining works written by immigrants alongside works by non-immigrants. She discusses four novels, two by authors who have immigrated to Québec (Émile Ollivier and Dany Laferrière), and two by authors who were born and raised in …

Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The Ecological Posthuman In Lee's Tarboy And Tan And Ruhemann's The Lost Thing, Başak Ağın

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Ecological Posthuman in Lee's [BA1] Tarboy and Tan and Ruhemann's The Lost Thing" Başak Ağın analyzes the posthumanist and ecological elements in two animated short films, James Lee's Tarboy (2009) and Shaun Tan's and Andrew Ruhemann's The Lost Thing (2010). Ağın posits that the two animated short films display a disanthropocentric worldview through the enmeshed relations between humans, techno-sentient beings, and naturalcultural hybrid bodies. The intermingled fusions of these biotic and abiotic forms are inherently characterized by a sense of posthuman ecocriticism. Basing her arguments on the notions of agential realism and new materialisms, Ağın …

Circus As Idée Fixe And Hunger, Anna-Sophie Jürgens

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Circus as idée fixe and Hunger" Anna-Sophie Jürgens discusses circus fiction in which characters often display extreme, intense psychological traits. They are for example irascible, pyromaniac, sadistic, or megalomaniac. Particularly striking are protagonists with alternative psychological attitudes in fictional circus texts of the twentieth century such as Franz Kafka's hunger artist, Michael Raleigh's ringmaster Lewis Tully or Richard Schmitt's aerialist Garry, who can be seen as incubators of circus-related idées fixes. These literary circus characters develop fixations on circus that manifest themselves as a physical sensation of desiring circus like food, in other words: in circus …