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Commodity And Waste As National Allegory In Recent South African And Post-Soviet Fiction, Alla Ivanchikova

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Commodity and Waste as National Allegory in Recent South African and Post-Soviet Fiction" Alla Ivanchikova analyzes the issue of commodity in its relation to identity. The article contains a reading of two novels: The Quiet Violence of Dreams by K. Sello Duiker and Dukhless. Povest o nenastoiaschem cheloveke (Douh-Less: The Tale of an Unreal Person) by Sergey Minaev. Rapid political changes, both in South Africa and the former Soviet Bloc were accompanied both by rapid changes in the practices of consumption and also by often inconsistent cultural efforts to establish the meaning of these practices. Ivanchikova …

Eliot's The Waste Land And Surging Nationalisms, Pouneh Saeedi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Eliot's The Waste Land and Surging Nationalisms" Pouneh Saeedi analyzes T.S. Eliot's poem in the context of the impact of World War I and the emergence of nationalisms. In the midst of the ruins of both his personal life and Europe, Eliot expresses the loss of a universal understanding delineated in the fragmentation of language and a disassociation of sensibility. In The Waste Land, the West and the East — represented in their respective canonical texts — commingle and cohere to present an image of oneness that goes beyond oppositional binaries and leads the egotistical self …

Comparative Literature In Chinese And An Interview With Yue, Hui Zhang, Daiyun Yue

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Comparative Literature in Chinese and an Interview with Daiyun Yue" Hui Zhang and Daiyun Yue present a review of the discipline of comparative literature based on an interview with Yue (2010). Because Yue's work with comparative literature is intertwined with her personal journey, the interview sheds light on other Chinese scholars and their work who would not be known audiences outside China. The interview also touches on the academic and political reasons why the joint dualisms of "ancient/modern" and "Chinese/foreign" continue to be major structuring principles of the discipline in China, as well as how the development …

Autoethnography And Garcia's Dreaming In Cuban, Samantha L. Mcauliffe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Authoethnography and Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban" Samantha L. McAuliffe positions Cristina Garcia's novel as a text of self-discovery and cultural reconciliation. McAuliffe examines multilingualism and hybridity in Dreaming in Cuban and postulates that the novel represents what Marie Louise Pratt calls the "contact zone" where cultures meet and clash. As autoethnography, Dreaming in Cuban allows an insider view of what being Cuban American really means. The reader is able to experience the conflict those with a hybrid identity experience through the eyes of one in the midst of that conflict. Further, McAuliffe suggests in her analysis …

Fernández And Cinematic Propaganda In The U.S. And Mexico, Renae L. Mitchell

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Fernández and Cinematic Propaganda in the U.S. and Mexico" Renae L. Mitchell discusses the competing ideologies on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. As one of the foremost filmmakers of the Mexican Golden Age of cinema, Emilio Fernández established what would is recognized as "Mexicanness" by means of Indigenous characters in his films, most apparent in the film María Candelaria. RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) Pictures, as the principal purveyor of US-American propagandist cinema, led Hollywood into the cinematic market of Mexico revealing its intentions by means of the RKO film The Falcon in Mexico. Fernández sought to …

Dante's Linguistic Detail In Shelley's Triumph Of Life, Anita O'Connell

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Dante's Linguistic Detail in Shelley's Triumph of Life" Anita O'Connell analyzes Shelley's attention to detail in Dante's poetic style and presents a close textual analysis of the ways Shelley draws on the beauty of Dante's texts. When Dante's Divine Comedy re-emerged into the public sphere in Britain through Henry Cary's 1814 translation, his reputation was as a stern, dark, Medieval poet and readers and writers alike shared a love of the perceived gothicism particularly of The Inferno. Shelley, however, differed from this general view of Dante: despite the grotesque descriptions in his Triumph of Life …

About Society: A Book Review Article Of Work On Roth And Kundera By Shostak And Ivanova, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Intermediality, Translation, Comparative Literature, And World Literature, Erin Schlumpf

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Intermediality, Translation, Comparative Literature, and World Literature" Erin Schlumpf postulates that the study of literature today is best performed in a framework of comparative literature and world literature including intermediality particularly in the case of translated texts. Schlumpf contends that working in comparative and world literature today demands a reexamination of translation and the teaching of works in translation. Following her theoretical postulates, Schlumpf analyzes two films, Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise (1966) and Xiaolu Guo's She, a Chinese (Zhongguo guniang) (2009).

(Inter)Mediality And The Study Of Literature, Werner Wolf

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "(Inter)mediality and the Study of Literature" Werner Wolf elaborates on the "intermedial turn" and asks whether this turn ought to be welcomed. Wolf begins with a discussion about the definitions of "medium" and "intermediality" and the impact these concepts and practices exert on scholarly, as well as student competence. He argues that despite of the fact that literary studies ought not simply turn into media or cultural studies, mediality and intermediality have become relevant issues for both teaching and the study of literature especially in the fields of comparative literature and (comparative) cultural studies. Following his postulate …

Bibliography Of Scholarship On Indigenous Literatures And Cultures, Angeline O'Neill, Albert Braz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Indigenous Literature And Comparability, Katherine Durnin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Indigenous Literature and Comparability" Katherine Durnin discusses some of the barriers to the comparative study of Indigenous literature alongside non-Indigenous literature. These barriers include the Eurocentrism of traditional comparative literature, certain aspects of postcolonial theory and, above, all the assumption that Indigenous and Western epistemologies belong to separate and incommensurable worlds. Durnin examines some recent theoretical and critical approaches that offer ways to bridge the two worlds and make comparative literature an ethical space of mutual respect and understanding.

On Reading Grace's Potiki, Eva Rask Knudsen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "On Reading Grace's Potiki" Eva Rask Knudsen takes as her point of departure the critical impasse of postcolonial analyses of Indigenous literatures and the claim made by some (Indigenous) commentators that non-Indigenous scholars and critics often re-colonize the texts they deem to be "postcolonial" because — in their theoretical concern with issues of marginalization and resistance — they overlook (and so overwrite) the specific indigenous knowledges and ontologies that the literatures draw on. Through an analysis of the 1986 novel Potiki by Māori writer Patricia Grace, Rsak Knudsen looks in other directions than those catalogued by …

Collaborative Authorship And Indigenous Literatures, Albert Braz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Collaborative Authorship and Indigenous Literatures" Albert Braz discusses the duality of the writer. As suggested by Roland Barthes in his "The Death of the Author," the distinction between writer and author — the first being the historical person behind the text and the second a figure in the text — the duality of the author remains a paradigm of contemporary critical analysis. Braz argues that this new emphasis is not germane when it comes to Indigenous literatures, a field in which one often cannot determine who are the material producers of texts and/or their writers. Braz postulates …

Towards Transnational Native American Literary Studies, Hsinya Huang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Towards Transnational Native American Literary Studies" Hsinya Huang discusses how Native American literature can be adapted, translated, articulated, and interpreted in a transnational/trans-Pacific context, using the recently emerging Native American scholarship in Taiwan as a point of departure. Through collaboration across institutional lines, exploration of the community production of local knowledge, and our obligation and desire to participate meaningfully as intellectuals in the international initiatives in Native Studies, can we conceive of an expansive indigenous region across the Pacific? How can indigeneity be both rooted in and routed through particular places and articulated? Through envisioning an expanding …

Politics Of Indigeneity In Fogarty's Poetry, Sean Gorman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Politics of Indigeneity in Fogarty's Poetry" Sean Gorman discusses Indigenous themes and issues with regards to the poetry of Murri writer Lionel Fogarty. As Fogarty is seen as a poet who writes complex prose, his material challenges non-Indigenous readerships by subverting Standard English and conventional reading practices. Gorman suggests strategies by which to engage with Fogarty's material and, employing the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, namely heteroglossia and dialogism, to arrive at a better understanding of the rich and complex nature of Fogarty's work. Gorman executes his analysis in relation to the political debates that have arisen since …

Voices In Australia's Aboriginal And Canada's First Nations Literatures, Kim Scott, Eden Robinson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Kim Scott suggests in his text "I Come from Here" by means of "yarning" that the authority of Indigenous people and language is primary to an authentic "sense of place." Scott uses an accumulative, episodic, and personal narrative style to argue that the return "to," and consolidation of cultural material "in," a "community of descendants of the informants" must be founded upon principles of community development. Collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people by sharing of ancestral material with ever widening, concentric circles is how this process results in respect and partnership that empowers community life.

Eden Robinson explores in her …

Textual Fantasies And Culturality In Native American Fiction: A Review Article Of New Books By Treuer And Justice, Angeline O'Neill

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Aboriginal Australian And Canadian First Nations Children's Literature, Angeline O'Neill

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Aboriginal Australian and Canadian First Nations Children's Literature" Angeline O'Neill discusses Canadian First Nations and Australian Aboriginal children's picture books and their appeal to a dual readership. Inuit traditional storyteller and writer Michael Kusugak, Nyoongar traditional storyteller and writer Lorna Little, and Wunambal elder Daisy Utemorrah are cases in point. Each appeals to Indigenous and non-Indigenous, child and adult readerships, thus challenging two assumptions in Western scholarship on literature that 1) the picture book genre is necessarily the domain of children and 2) that traditional Indigenous stories are, similarly, best suited to children. O'Neill considers the ways …

Tropologies Of Tradition And (Post)Modernity In Nwagwu's Forever Chimes, James Tar Tsaaior

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Tropologies of Tradition and (Post)modernity in Nwagwu's Forever Chimes" James Tar Tsaaior explores Mark Nwagu's novel and postulates that the author succeeds in constructing a novelistic universe both concrete and fluid in its re-invention or re-fabrication of cultural traditions and identity formation processes. This universe is simultaneously traditional/indigenous and (post)modern. However, rather than to delineate these cultural formations through difference as oppositional categories, Nwagu suggests grounds for multicultural interactions and transactions. In this cultural schema, none of the cultures claims exclusive preserve or pre-eminence over the other as what exists is a democratic space for the …

Science Fiction And A Rhetorical Analysis Of The 'Literature Myth', Kris Rutten, Ronald Soetaert, Geert Vandermeersche

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Science Fiction and a Rhetorical Analysis of the 'Literature Myth'" Kris Rutten, Ronald Soetaert, and Geert Vandermeersche discuss what we can learn from science fiction about cultural literacy in general and literary culture in particular. From a theoretical and methodological perspective the authors start from the work of rhetorician Kenneth Burke. First, the authors conceptualize literature as "equipment for living" followed by a discussion of science fiction as "equipment for living" based on a description of the genre as "satire by entelechy." Second, they analyze a selection of science fiction narratives using the "dramatistic pentad" as …

Globalization, Pedagogical Imagination, And Transnational Literacy, Ezra Yoo-Hyeok Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Globalization, Pedagogical Imagination, and Transnational Literacy," Ezra Yoo-Hyeok Lee explores the juncture of comparative literature, globalization and postcolonial studies as to how creative writers, literary critics, and cultural theorists respond to globalization and its challenges. Arjun Appadurai expounds that globalization has demanded new research conceptualization and invention in academia. Subsequently, Lee investigates methods through which educators and scholars in comparative literature take up such a demand. In turn, Lee proposes a transnational literacy which offers a responsible form of cultural explanation, through which to explore the interrelations between the national and the postcolonial or global paradigms, both …

Motherhood In African Literature And Culture, Remi Akujobi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Motherhood in African Literature and Culture" Remi Akujobi analyzes the place and the role of women in African Religion and tradition and also interrogates the place of Motherhood in the production, circulation and consumption of items in African tradition. Akujobi examines Motherhood as a sacred as well as a powerful spiritual component of the woman's life. Emphasis is put on literary discourse where motherhood is a recurrent theme, where motherhood is also a lifelong commitment. The article particularly explores motherhood as a discourse in African women creative efforts. A key intention of the article is to explore …

Osundare's Poetry And The Yoruba Worldview, Christopher Anyokwu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Osundare's Poetry and the Yoruba Worldview" Christopher Anyokwu analyses the use of Indegienous Yoruba concepts found in Niyi Osundare's texts. Anyokwu postulates that Osundare appears to combine in his work concepts and traditions of Yoruba culture and Marxist ideology which, as Anyokwu argues, locates Osundare with other revolutionary-minded radical poets such as Pablo Neruda, Octovio Paz, Nicolas Guillén, Agostinho Neto, or Okot P'Biteke. Further, Anyokwu argues that a major aspect of the sources of Osundare's work, this perspective has either been under-theorized or examined only superficially in the critical corpus of Osundare's texts. Anyokwu both analyzes and …

Gender Performance In The Literature Of The Female Beats, Gillian Thomson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Gender Performance in the Literature of the Female Beats" Gillian Thomson examines the re-negotiation of gender boundaries within Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters and Hettie Jones's Drive poems; secondary to this is how the male Beats demonstrate a more concrete, dichotomous version of such gender categories. Thomson intend to demonstrate how the women often write themselves into Beat history and how their revised performance of gender modifies the normative tropes regarding females within the Beat enclave. The theoretical backdrop focuses on how language not only records or expresses reality, but also shapes it. This is a decidedly poststructuralist …

Early Twentieth-Century Fashion Designer Life Writing, Ilya Parkins

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Early Twentieth-century Fashion Designer Life Writing," Ilya Parkins examines memoirs of major modernist fashion designers in the, finding that the genre is characterized by a strong geographic cleavage between France and America, overlain by perceptions of epistemic difference. She compares Elsa Schiaparelli's and Paul Poiret's work, finding that despite their differences, the opposition between France as a locale of abstract knowledge and America as a site of empiricism allows them to claim, as French designers, a certain privilege in a profession characterized by an unresolvable tension between art and commerce. The encroachment of American industrial models in …

Two Traumas One Aesthetic In Walsh's Operación Masacre And Kaufman's The Laramie Project, Henry James Morello

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Two Traumas One Aesthetic in Walsh's Operación Masacre and Kaufman's The Laramie Project" Henry James Morello analyzes the stylistic similarities of Walsh's and Kaufman's texts. Walsh's 1957 testimonio Operación masacre was written as a response to the politically motivated violence perpetrated by the military government after the overthrow of Juan Perón, specifically the kidnapping and murder of a group of men thought to be Peronist sympathizers. In 1998 Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project created The Laramie Project, a play about the reactions of the people of Laramie to the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard, …

Echoes Of Sophocles's Antigone In Auster's Invisible, Kathleen Waller

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Echoes of Sophocles's Antigone in Auster's Invisible" Kathleen Waller discusses Paul Auster's Invisible, a novel that explores Deleuze's and Guattari's ontological idea of becoming in a virtual world versus merely living in the actual, physical world. Sexual and immortal desires in the protagonist's virtual world show a near achieved nothingness, or "a space which is unlimited" and filled with the being's energy, and a being who is becoming, a "univocal being" as a "free spirit" of energy. However, because these desires are only realized through a repression, Auster asks us not to go as far …

Children's Literature In South-East Europe, Milena Mileva Blažić

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Children's Literature in South East Europe" Milena Mileva Blažić begins with an introduction to Maria Nikolajeva's 2000 book From Mythic to Linear: Time in Children's Literature in which a theoretical framework of thematics is defined, systematized, and categorized. Nikolajeva's framework for children's literature suggests attention to characteristics through which the maturation process of becoming adult is accomplished. Following the introduction and application of Nikolajeva's concepts, Blažić first applies the frame to selected texts published in South-East Europe, followed by lists of children's book published in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia.

Chekhov As A Founder Of The Comedy Of A New Type, Vera Zubarev

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Chekhov as a Founder of the Comedy of a New Type" Vera Zubarev discusses Chekhov's innovations within the framework of general systems thinking and the predispositioning theory. To this end, the notion of the positional style is used as a subject of systems analysis. Zubarev postulates that Chekhov's innovative style signified a new era of thinking now known as systems thinking. The main principles of the style correspond to those offered by the positional style in chess speedily developed at the time Chekhov worked on his stories and plays. Chekhov's reconstruction of the comedic genre had nothing …

Comparativism And Cyberculture: A Review Article Of New Books By Płaszczewska And Zawojski, Michał Ostrowicki

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.