Digital Commons Network^™

Race, Slavery, And The Re-Evaluation Of The T'Ang Canon, Gregory E. Rutledge

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Race, Slavery, and the Revaluation of the T'ang Canon" Gregory E. Rutledge re-evaluates—from the purview of African Diaspora literary studies—historiography that considers the place of East African slave lore in T'ang Dynasty fiction. Julie Wilensky's "The Magical Kunlun and 'Devil Slaves': Chinese Perceptions of Dark-skinned People and Africa before 1500" (2002), a revision of Chang Hsing-lang's "The Importation of Negro Slaves to China Under the T'ang Dynasty (A.D. 618-907)" (1930), is pivotal since it occupies the nexus between European-American, East-Asian, and African-Diasporic canons and policies. Rutledge situates Wilensky's and Chang's works in the context of Edward W. …

The Relevance Of Culture In Politics: The Application Of Cultural Studies Using The Strategic Culture Method, Elizabeth G. Wilson

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

American Studies scholars have long been aware that their interdisciplinary studies reach far beyond Americana. The fields of folklore, English, history, political science and anthropology have all been enveloped under the American Studies umbrella. Public perceptions tend to assume that scholars engaged in these fields are limited to work within academia.

Bibliography For Work In Ecocriticism, Zümre Gizem Yılmaz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Ecocriticism And National Image In 舌尖上的中国 (A Bite Of China), Mingwen Xiao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Ecocriticism and National Image in 舌尖上的中国 (A Bite of China)" Mingwen Xiao examines the multi-faceted contents of the popular 2012 television series. Instead of exhibiting delicacies made by professional chefs in luxury restaurants, A Bite of China displays local food and dishes made by ordinary people. By focus on every-day food preparation, the show constructs a performance where class, ethnicity, gender, age, and other social markers are blurred and the geographically and ethnically diverse ways of food preparation and consumption appear as a cohesive Chinese culinary identity. Xiao argues that A Bite of China plays a role …

Bilingual Typography: Study Of The Linguistic Landscape Of Jeddah, Kingdom Of Saudi Arabia, Shayna Tova Blum

Faculty and Staff Publications

Abstract: With the rise of globalization and the spread of Western culture across the globe, the use of English as an “international” language is often represented in bilingual and multilingual typographic signage. Throughout the Middle East North Africa and the Gulf region, the integration of Arabic and Latin letterforms is commonly viewed within the signage of storefronts, street signs, advertising billboards, and informational materials. This paper explores the use of bilingual/multilingual typography within the linguistic landscape of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Conscience's De Leeuw Van Vlaanderen (The Lion Of Flanders) And Its Adaptation To Film By Claus, Gertjan Willems

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Conscience's De Leeuw van Vlaanderen (The Lion of Flanders) and Its Adaptation to Film by Claus" Gertjan Willems discusses Hugo Claus's 1984 filmic adaptation of Hendrik Conscience's 1838 historical novel, a landmark in the history of the Flemish Movement. Willems's analysis is executed by means of a textual film analysis and archival research. Willems pays special attention to the Flemish-Dutch coproduction's complex relations with the national question. Despite various difficulties concerning Flemish nationalist sensitivities of the project, the producers wanted the film to be as faithful as possible to Conscience's novel. This resulted in an …

Literature And Science In Nineteenth-Century Realist Novels: A Book Review Article About Ambrière's And Bender's Work, Anne-Marie Reboul

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Time, Photography, And Optical Technology In Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Tetyana Lyaskovets

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Time, Photography, and Optical Technology in Nabokov's Speak, Memory" Tetyana Lyaskovets discusses how Vladimir Nabokov narrates time in his autobiography by invoking photography and optical instruments. Photography and optical technology function in Speak, Memory as metaphors and probe the limits of chronological time. Nabokov portrays time as personal and reversible time that collapses the past and the present and allows one to glimpse the future. Because this temporal collapse is not possible physically but, as Nabokov believes, can be achieved through one's will, he engages optical technologies which provide a spatial form for his project to …

Queering Masturbation In Lorde's Life And Writing, Eric Sipyinyu Njeng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Queering Masturbation in Lorde's Life and Writing" Eric Sipyinyu Njeng discusses masturbation in Audre Lorde's life and works to signal an important aspect of her oeuvre often neglected in scholarship. Lorde stands out among prominent queer queens by demonstrating theory corporeally thereby going beyond mere theory and positing her body as a space of complex sexual passions. When Judith Butler speaks of gender as performative rather than embodied, Lorde theorizes and foregrounds this in her works and self and celebrates a sexual matrix that ranges from heterosexuality to homosexuality to auto-sexuality. Lorde places masturbation between the binary …

Threatening Others : Nicaraguans And The Formation Of National Identities In Costa Rica, Carlos Sandoval-Garcia

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

During the last two decades, a decline in public investment has undermined some of the national values and institutions of Costa Rica. The resulting sense of dislocation and loss is usually projected onto Nicaraguan “immigrants.”
Threatening Others: Nicaraguans and the Formation of National Identities in Costa Rica explores the representation of the Nicaraguan “other” in the Costa Rican imagery. It also seeks to address more generally why the sense of national belonging constitutes a crucial identification in contemporary societies. Interdisciplinary and based on extensive fieldwork, it looks critically at the “exceptionalism” that Costa Ricans take for granted and view as …

Digital Play: The Challenge Of Researching Young Children’S Internet Use, Donell Holloway

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Children’s Internet use is rapidly changing. Tweens' (9–12) usage patterns now resemble those of teenagers five to six years ago, and younger children’s (5–8) usage is approaching that of tweens. Primary school aged children are increasingly engaging in virtual worlds with social network functions (game sites such as Club Penguin, Minecraft or Webkinz). These digital public spaces carry with them opportunities as well as risk. With policy resources often targeting high school children, there is a need to map the benefits, risks and competencies associated with these trends, and develop recommendations for parents and policy makers. This paper analyses the …

Literary Adaptations Of James In Roth's, Ozick's, And Franzen's Work, John Carlos Rowe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Literary Adaptations of James in Roth's, Ozick's, and Franzen's Work" John Carlos Rowe posits that Henry James continues to exert a powerful influence on contemporary writers. Given the dramatic social, economic, and political changes from modern to postmodern eras, his continuing influence requires explanation. Rowe considers three US-American novelists—Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Jonathan Franzen—who are influenced by James and presents an interpretation of James's continuing impact. Despite James's reputation as a cosmopolitan modern who influenced global literature in significant ways, US-American writers attempt to "Americanize" him. Their effort expresses the problem of contemporary US-American literary practice …

From Hip To Hypocrisy : An Exploration Of The Hipster And The Cooptation Of Style., Melissa Rothman

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

Lost In Translation: Impediments To The Homogenous Interpretation Of Ifrs Translations, Addison N. Scott

Accounting Undergraduate Honors Theses

In order to satisfy the financial needs of an increasingly globalized world, regulators and accounting professionals have pursued the harmonization of national accounting standards through International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). These standards have been adopted in more than 100 countries and are currently available in 47 languages. When financial information is prepared in accordance with IFRS, users of that information may assume that the application of the accounting rules is consistent across countries. In actuality, many differences in interpretation and application can occur because of the difficulties inherent in translating the standards from one language to another. Inconsistent application of …

Television News: A Man’S World, Alexandra Sanchez

Whittier Scholars Program

This paper will be presenting to you my findings of the news industry in relation to gender and stereotypical fulfillment. I have compared the role of women reporters to that of men. I will also be using my personal experiences from my four internships within the KTLA News Station in Los Angeles, California to further support the claims gathered through my research. This paper is taking the stance that female journalists need their equal chance to succeed and prove their legitimacy in order to compete with men in the male-dominated industry of television news. This can happen with the stop …

About Paternal Voices In Adoption Narratives, Fu-Jen Chen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "About Paternal Voices in Adoption Narratives" Fu-jen Chen examines the emerging voices of fathers in adoption discourse. Breaking the reticence and challenging the stereotypical profile of birth fathers and the father overall, birth fathers in narratives resort to essentialism or victimhood, a cultural imagination in adoption discourse. Further, Chen examines adoption narratives by adoptive fathers arguing that their reluctance to call for a father-to-father relationship — either rivalry or alliance — indicates a sign of disavowal of both subjective splitness and the structural deadlock. Chen argues that in paternal adoption narratives writing does not emerge as a …

Duvakin's Oral History And Bakhtin In His Own Voice, Slav N. Gratchev, Tatevik Gyulamiryan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Duvakin's Oral History and Bakhtin in His Own Voice" Slav N. Gratchev and Tatevik Gyulamiryan examine Mikhail Bakhtin's notions of literary theory based on interviews recorded by Victor Duvakin in 1973. The collection is now held in the library of Moscow State University. As it so often happened in the Soviet Union, these unique interviews only became known many years later and Gratchev's and Gyulamiryan's analysis of the interviews sheds light on Bakhtin's thought not available when reading his published work.

Sisyphus In Kertész's Fatelessness, Eric Beck Rubin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Sisyphus in Kertész's Fatelessness" Eric Beck Rubin discusses Imre Kertész's novel in relation to the philosophy of eternal recurrence, namely the notion that an individual inhabits a universe made of finite possibilities experienced and re-experienced without variation or end. Early explorations of eternal recurrence by Friedrich Nietzsche were taken up by Albert Camus, and Beck Rubin argues that certain works by both authors are fundamental to any reading of Fatelessness. Further, Beck Rubin argues that Kertész's contribution to the debate can be viewed from two perspectives: one sees Kertész as an author in conversation with …

Sabbatical Leave Proposal & Report, Heidi Leuszler

Sabbaticals

I propose moving to Costa Rica for the entirety of Spring 2014 and possibly Summer 2014 semesters in order to accomplish the following goals:

1. Learn to live more sustainably by moving outside of my country into one in which a culture of sustainability inherently exists.
2. Investigate what obstacles impede, and what drives people toward more sustainable behaviors.
3. Work or volunteer with a humanitarian organization focused on the social equity aspect of maintaining ecological balance.
4. Challenge myself personally to do three things:

a. Learn to speak Spanish.
b. Work with impoverished peoples.
c. Live in a foreign country.

Thrillology: Affective Intensities And The Everyday-Spectacular In American Literature And Culture, Peter James Pappas

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

“Thrillology: Affective Intensities and the Everyday-Spectacular in American Literature and Culture” presents thrill as a powerful thematic component centered on immediate affective gratification informing character development and narrative. This perspective rethinks theme as always having an affective dimension that accompanies its conceptual articulations, with the former, in many cases, being the more important element. Thrilled psycho-emotional states emerge, in their own right, as legitimizations of individuality and cultural autonomy from the perspective of the passional subject. Engaging with a broad spectrum of literary and cultural sources spanning the last hundred years, this project investigates various ways in which the self-fulfilling …

Digital Play: The Challenge Of Researching Young Children's Internet Use, Donell Holloway

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Children’s Internet use is rapidly changing. Tweens' (9–12) usage patterns now resemble those of teenagers five to six years ago, and younger children’s (5–8) usage is approaching that of tweens. Primary school aged children are increasingly engaging in virtual worlds with social network functions (game sites such as Club Penguin, Minecraft or Webkinz). These digital public spaces carry with them opportunities as well as risk. With policy resources often targeting high school children, there is a need to map the benefits, risks and competencies associated with these trends, and develop recommendations for parents and policy makers. This paper analyses the …

Staying Alive: Dynamic Equivalence Theory And Film Adaptation, Sarah Welch

Honors Projects

Translation is a task that must be done every day in order for the world to function. A perfect translation is impossible, because there is no way to provide exact equivalents of meaning in different languages. However, methods such as dynamic equivalence focus on conveying the message of a text in terms that a new recipient audience can understand. Dynamic equivalence could apply to all textual translations, not just Bible translation. If this is the case, then dynamic equivalence may be applied to adaptations of different types of text, such as book to film adaptations. Film adaptations are popular, largely …

The Point Of Everyday Aesthetics, Kevin Melcionne

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The point of everyday aesthetic activity is well-being

Is First, They Killed My Father A Cambodian Testimonio?, John Maddox

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Is First, They Killed My Father a Cambodian testimonio" John T. Maddox discusses aspects of the testimonial. Dialoguing with leading Latin Americanists, Maddox argues that Cambodian writer Loung Ung's First, They Killed My Father (2000) challenges this uniqueness and opens studies on the testimonio to new possibilities for intellectual reflection and political activism. In Maddox's view, the continued use of the term testimonio would serve as a reference to this long-standing tradition of writing and thinking about political violence in Latin America. After a discussion of the debate of the definition and function of testimonio and …

Mcsweeney's And The Challenges Of The Marketplace For Independent Publishing, Katrien Bollen, Stef Craps, Pieter Vermeulen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "McSweeney's and the Challenges of the Marketplace for Independent Publishing" Katrien Bollen, Stef Craps, and Pieter Vermeulen argue that the artistic projects of the US-American author, activist, and editor Dave Eggers are marked by a tension between the desire for independence and the demands of brand-building. The article offers a close analysis of the materiality and paratexts of one particular issue of McSweeney's, the literary magazine of which Eggers is the founding editor. Both the content and the apologetically aggressive tone of Eggers's editorial statements betray a deep unease with the inability to inhabit a …

Toward Understanding The Subcultural Mosaic: Fragmentation Of The Culture And The Symbiotic Interplay Of The Market And Subcultures, Emre Ulusoy

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This study brought to light the need for a more nuanced analysis and approach for understanding the observed tendency toward eclectic, fragmented, and paradoxical subcultures in contemporary society. It was critical to explore the impact of market hegemony and the response of subcultures to this hegemony leading to the development of contemporary subcultural sensibilities. The central purpose of this research was to develop a theory of subculture that accounted for the fragmentation observed in contemporary culture, and how this fragmentation influences subcultures leading to fragmentation within subcultures. To this end, using in-depth interviewing, netnography, and participant observation, I investigated the …

The Art Of Perl: How A Scripting Language (Inter)Activated The World Wide Web, Norberto Gomez Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

In 1987, computer programmer and linguist Larry Wall authored the general-purpose, high-level, interpreted, dynamic Unix scripting language, Perl. Borrowing features from C and awk, Perl was originally intended as a scripting language for text-processing. However, with the rising popularity of the Internet and the advent of Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web (Web), in the 1990s, Perl soon became the glue-language for the Internet, due in large part to its relationship to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). Perl was the go-to language for on the fly program writing and coding, gaining accolades from the likes …

Comic Book Fandom And Stigma Consciousness, Dennis R. Gagliardo

Masters Theses

This research project explores the concept of stigma consciousness as applied to the subculture of comic book fandom. Integrating the disciplines of social psychology and cultural studies, this study examines the dynamic and socially constructed nature of the stigma process as applied to the specific cultural form of the American comic book, while identifying and measuring several variables of potential influence on perceptions of the hierarchy of American cultural values. The purpose is to address an existing gap in the academic literature of fan studies in regards to the marginalization and stigmatization of fan cultures as experienced by the members …

Liminal Losers: Breakdowns And Breakthroughs In Reality Television's Biggest Hit, Caitlin Rickert

Masters Theses

This study explores how The Biggest Loser, a popular television reality program that features a weight-loss competition, reflects and magnifies established stereotypes about obese individuals. The show, which encourages contestants to lose weight at a rapid pace, constructs a broken/fixed dichotomy that oversimplifies the complex issues of obesity and health.

My research is a semiotic analysis of the eleventh season of the program (2011), focusing on three pairs of contestants (or “couples” teams) that each represent a different level of commitment to the program’s values. Specifically, I focus on dramatic “breakdown” moments in which these contestants are disciplined by …

Cultural Identity, Deafness And Sign Language: A Postcolonial Approach, Steven Loughran

LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University

Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks describes the experience of the recently de-colonized members of the Negro (as he refers to those of African descent) population living in Europe, particularly France, in the 1960s. A little over a decade later, Edward Said published Orientalism, thus adding to a growing discipline of scholarship in the fields of art, literature, and cultural studies called “Postcolonialism.” My essay attempts to show that Deaf persons who communicate with each other using sign language can be viewed as a colonized group, and that applying postcolonial theory to the study of their culture is appropriate.