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

Digital Commons Network™

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

Articles 361 - 390 of 487

Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network

Mahfouz Between Lukácsian And Brechtian Approaches To Realism, David F. Dimeo Sep 2010

Mahfouz Between Lukácsian And Brechtian Approaches To Realism, David F. Dimeo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Mahfouz between Lukácsian and Brechtian Approaches to Realism" David F. DiMeo compares the interpretations of realism by the leading Arabic author of socially committed fiction to the theories of Bertolt Brecht and György Lukács. The early works of novelist Najib Mahfouz feature a Lukácsian approach, embracing critical realism to present a totalizing view of the social system, as experienced by credible, sympathetic characters. By the 1960s, disillusioned with this method, Mahfouz turned to a more Brechtian approach, seeking to highlight social injustices by alienating the audience from identification with the characters or particular situations through ambiguous narratives …


Photography In Wang's Chang Hen Ge (The Song Of Everlasting Sorrow), Hong Zeng Sep 2010

Photography In Wang's Chang Hen Ge (The Song Of Everlasting Sorrow), Hong Zeng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Photography in Wang's Chang Hen Ge (Song of Everlasting Sorrow)" Hong Zeng analyzes Wang's novel in the context of imagery following the theoretical framework of photography as proposed in the work of Xun Lu and Roland Barthes. According to both Xun Lu and Roland Barthes, the spectacle of photography is tied to the notion of the "the theater of the dead." Further, according to Walter Benjamin, photography is linked with the motif of exile: it is the estrangement between self and image under the spotlight, the daily enlarged disparity between the perennial life preserved by the photograph …


Do Medieval And Renaissance Androids Presage The Posthuman?, Kevin Lagrandeur Sep 2010

Do Medieval And Renaissance Androids Presage The Posthuman?, Kevin Lagrandeur

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Do Medieval and Renaissance Androids Presage the Posthuman?" Kevin LaGrandeur analyzes the relationships between literary images of artificial humans associated with medieval alchemists and alchemy, their modified reemergence in the Renaissance, and how such androids may forecast the idea of a posthuman subjectivity that is connected with their present-day descendents. For example, the talking brass heads in Robert Greene's two Renaissance plays, The Honorable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Alphonsus, Prince of Aragon have their roots in Arabic sources, and the former derives specifically from legends concerning the thirteenth-century alchemist and philosopher Roger Bacon. …


Sapphic Consciousness In H.D. And De Noailles, Catherine O. Clark Sep 2010

Sapphic Consciousness In H.D. And De Noailles, Catherine O. Clark

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Sapphic Consciousness in H.D. and de Noailles" Catherine Clark discusses how female modernists, like their male counterparts, re-evaluated their artistic position in relation to the Greeks and Romans as they explored experimental modes of aesthetic and literary expression. However, many women writers at the turn of the century developed a unique palimpsest with their predecessors, specifically Sappho, that deconstructed and destructed conventional approaches to classical legacy and myth. Clark analyzes selected poems by modernists H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Anna de Noailles in which they evoke a Hellenistic past and that collapses the artificial constructions of a largely …


A Consilient Science And Humanities In Mcewan's Enduring Love, Curtis D. Carbonell Sep 2010

A Consilient Science And Humanities In Mcewan's Enduring Love, Curtis D. Carbonell

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "A Consilient Science and the Humanities in McEwan's Enduring Love" Curtis D. Carbonell provides a reading of a Third Culture novel that foregrounds the relationship of the sciences and the humanities. In Ian McEwan's novel we see a perfect example of how literary thinkers are listening to the world of science and speaking to it in return. This article responds to Stephen Greenberg's ideas about how Neo-Darwinian themes in the novel point to social themes by arguing that what underlies both of these is a deeper structure: the tension between C.P. Snow's Two Cultures, which is only …


Pain And Mourning In Vogel's Baltimore Waltz And Lavery's Last Easter, Catalina Florina Florescu Sep 2010

Pain And Mourning In Vogel's Baltimore Waltz And Lavery's Last Easter, Catalina Florina Florescu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Pain and Mourning in Vogel's Baltimore Waltz and Lavery's Last Easter" Catalina Florina Florescu argues that there is something of a contrapuntal, contradictory nature when a person lives with or visits someone who spends most of his days in bed. Sitting next to a patient, his attendee faces the burdensome ticking of clocks, the ache of waiting, and the dagger-piercing questions of one's meaning. In other words, it is not only the pain of the other that intrigues and baffles us. It is also narrating and performing our reactions to that pain. In Florescu's reading, the focus …


Self Enlightenment In Woolf, Joyce, And Nietzsche, Gabriel V. Rupp Sep 2010

Self Enlightenment In Woolf, Joyce, And Nietzsche, Gabriel V. Rupp

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Self Enlightenment in Woolf, Joyce, and Nietzsche" Gabriel V. Rupp analyzes texts drawn from late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a critical period of change characterized by an explosive set of dramatic, historically unique, and complicated transformations in society and technology. Rupp argues that in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, in James Joyce's Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and in Friedrich Nietzsche's last three "strangely beautiful but mad" letters (Kaufmann), these writers' self enlightenment of a unified and discrete self is disrupted, calling into question simultaneously the constructed nature of that unity of …


Nordestina Modernity In The Novels Of Freitas, Queiroz, And Lispector, Fernanda Patricia Fuentes Muñoz Jun 2010

Nordestina Modernity In The Novels Of Freitas, Queiroz, And Lispector, Fernanda Patricia Fuentes Muñoz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Nordestina Modernity in the Novels of Freitas, Queiroz, and Lispector" Fernanda Patricia Fuentes Muñoz discusses aspects of the Nordeste — the northeastern region of Brazil — in Emília de Freitas's A Rainha do Ignoto (1899), Rachel de Queiroz's O Quinze (1930), and Clarice Lispector's A Hora da Estrela (1977; The Hour of the Star, 1992, Trans. Giovanni Pontiero). The region has traditionally been seen as located on the margins of modernity and as a site of underdevelopment in the Brazilian imaginary in opposition to the affluent Southeastern region. The construction of this binary opposition suggests a model …


Modernity In Márquez And Feminism In Ousmane, Geetha Ramanathan Jun 2010

Modernity In Márquez And Feminism In Ousmane, Geetha Ramanathan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Modernity in Márquez and Feminism in Ousmane" Geetha Ramanathan analyzes Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Sembène Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood. Ramanthan argues that if Márquez presents the semblance of the signs of modernity as fantasy and delusion, Ousmane's investment in the train as an instrument of the future in realist terms seems to challenge the modernist dictum that imperialism can be challenged only through modernist decenterings and through tricking and trumping. Yet, Ousmane's refusal to engage in the hallucination of the modern in his novel offers us a version of modernity that …


Modern Migration In Two Arabic Novels, Ikram Masmoudi Jun 2010

Modern Migration In Two Arabic Novels, Ikram Masmoudi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Modern Migration in Two Arabic Novels" Ikram Masmoudi proposes that twentieth-century Arab fiction is marked by the theme of the journey in literal and figurative ways. This motif features the theme of departure and arrival through characters crossings borders from East to West and from the periphery to the center (i.e., the metropolis) in order to acquire knowledge, understanding, and empowerment and to get a sense of Western modernity. The departure and arrival of the main characters becomes the central aesthetic preoccupying with a focus on their arrival back home and their rediscovery of their own idea …


Danticat's The Dew Breaker, Haiti, And Symbolic Migration, Jennifer E. Henton Jun 2010

Danticat's The Dew Breaker, Haiti, And Symbolic Migration, Jennifer E. Henton

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Danticat's The Dew Breaker, Haiti, and Symbolic Migration" Jennifer E. Henton analyzes Edwidge Danticat's novel with Lacanian thought. It is assumed frequently that literatures of the non-West "arrive" when they move from political and didactic traditions to the "aesthetic" and experimental models that delve into the terrain of the psyche. In The Dew Breaker, the Haitian family's move to the U.S., executed self consciously, indicates loss in a different sense than lack. In the case of Denticat's novel, loss or lack represent not a source of anxiety that evokes matters read in a psychoanalytical framework; instead, Henton …


Literary Studies From Hermeneutics To Media Culture Studies, Siegfried J. Schmidt Mar 2010

Literary Studies From Hermeneutics To Media Culture Studies, Siegfried J. Schmidt

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Literary Studies from Hermeneutics to Media Culture Studies" Siegfried J. Schmidt discusses aspects of hermeneutics, the systemic and empirical (contextual) approach to literature and culture, radical constructivism, and his postulates for the field of media culture studies. Schmidt describes his understanding of the transformation of literary studies towards media culture studies in the context of overall developments of society. His argumentation with regard to move from hermeneutics to media culture studies offers the postulate that research ought to be empirical and contextual in order to foster intuition, invention, innovation, and socially relevant scholarship. He concludes that the …


Anti-Nationalism In Scott's Old Mortality, Montserrat Martínez García Mar 2010

Anti-Nationalism In Scott's Old Mortality, Montserrat Martínez García

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Anti-Nationalism in Scott's Old Mortality," Montserrat Martínez García examines national identity through war in Walter Scott's Old Mortality in order to illustrate that war was one of the main catalysts of nationhood and show, simultaneously, the disparity between the institutional and the popular attitude toward war. Martínez García pays attention to the way Scott portrayed war and identity and to what extent this literary representation coincided with or faced the uniform ideology of nationalism. Based on the historical background of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Martínez García analyses Scott's novel to uncover focus his narrative of cracks …


Myth And History In The Poetry Of Osundare, Christopher Anyokwu Dec 2009

Myth And History In The Poetry Of Osundare, Christopher Anyokwu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Myth and History in the Poetry of Osundare" Christopher Anyokwu examines the interrelation of myth and history from an African perspective. Anyokwu analyzes the poetry of one of Africa's most prolific and decorated contemporary poets, Niyi Osundare. Osundare is a third-generation Nigerian poet whose work is based on Yoruba oral tradition and informed by Marxist ideology. Osundare's poetry demonstrates the so-called "return-to-roots" neo-traditionalist ethos in modern African writing. Osundare's attitude to myth, ritual, and other African animist categories is intriguingly complex, ambivalent, and giving rise to charges of ideological irresolution and culturo-epistemic bifurcation. As a champion of …


Playwriting In Three Major Nigerian Languages, Isaiah Ilo Dec 2009

Playwriting In Three Major Nigerian Languages, Isaiah Ilo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Playwriting in Three Major Nigerian Languages" Isaiah Ilo analyzes the frequency of playwriting in Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba, the three major Nigerian languages, which together hold about a half of the country's estimated population of 140 million. Ilo uses a case study to contrast the importance of the languages, their evolution as literary languages, and their official status with a role in education. Ilo locates the significance of these factors next to an inventory of the plays and a listing of the writers to demonstrate the neglect of the mother tongue by experienced Nigerian dramatists. The study …


The Metaphor Of Assimilation In Rabéarivelo's Poetry, Yasser Khamees Ragab Aman Dec 2009

The Metaphor Of Assimilation In Rabéarivelo's Poetry, Yasser Khamees Ragab Aman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Metaphor of Assimilation in Rabéarivelo's Poetry" Yasser Khamees Ragab Aman discusses the impact of the metaphor and the policy of assimilation in the poetry of Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo, who swings between a desired image of a superior France based on a mythically archetypal symbol of a patron and a reality which, as a matter of course, distorts the image of a good-natured colonizer. Aman traces the influence of French Symbolists such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Laforgue on Rabéarivelo's poems and discusses to what extent these influences help make an assimilé of the poet. In Aman's interpretation …


Space In Cardinal's Au Pays De Mes Racines And Goytisolo's Coto Vedado, Laura Dennis Dec 2009

Space In Cardinal's Au Pays De Mes Racines And Goytisolo's Coto Vedado, Laura Dennis

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Space in Cardinal's Au Pays de mes racines and Goytisolo's Coto vedado" Laura Dennis discusses the ways in which two memoirs of the late twentieth century treat exile and diverse spaces as part of a quest for a place in which to live fully and freely. Juan Goytisolo's Coto vedado and Marie Cardinal's Au Pays de mes racines constitute particularly rich treatments of space and exile and the ways in which these intersect with questions of culture, gender, and power. Dennis uses Henri Lefebvre's theories of abstract and differential space together with Gillian Rose's feminist study of …


Russian Magical Realism And Pelevin As Its Exponent, Alexandra Berlina Dec 2009

Russian Magical Realism And Pelevin As Its Exponent, Alexandra Berlina

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Russian Magical Realism and Pelevin as Its Exponent" Alexandra Berlina seeks to enrich magical realism studies as a field of comparative literature and culture by showing that, although largely ignored in scholarship, such a thing as Russian magical realism exists and provides an interesting field for analysis. First, Berlina provides an overview of relevant scholarly works on the genre, tracing mentions (as well as striking omissions) of Russian influence, followed by a discussion of the few publications which deal with Russian magical realism, concentrating on Erika Haber's The Myth of the Non-Russian. Berlina then discusses Viktor Pelevin …


Innovation And Multimedia In The Poetry Of Cummings And Mayakovsky, Svetlana Nikitina Dec 2009

Innovation And Multimedia In The Poetry Of Cummings And Mayakovsky, Svetlana Nikitina

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Innovation and Multimedia in the Poetry of cummings and Mayakovsky" Svetlana Nikitina discusses how e.e. cummings and Vladimir Mayakovsky foreshadowed the digital revolution of today in their multimedia experiments in poetry. Although they spoke different languages and lived in different societies, the two modernist poets display similarities in their modernist aesthetics. Both are artists as well as poets who blur the line between the two forms of art. Their synesthesia inoculates them against postmodern disintegration of meaning or form. Although cummings is a staunch individualist, and Mayakovsky the tribune of the collective, they both rebel against traditional …


From Diaspora To Nomadic Identity In The Work Of Lispector And Felinto, Paula Jordão Sep 2009

From Diaspora To Nomadic Identity In The Work Of Lispector And Felinto, Paula Jordão

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "From Diaspora to Nomadic Identity in the Work of Lispector and Felinto" Paula Jordão analyzes Clarice Lispector's A Hora da Estrela (1977; The Hour of the Star, Trans. Giovanni Pontiero, 1992) and Marilene Felinto's As Mulheres de Tijucopapo (1982; The Women of Tijucopapo, trans. Irene Matthews, 1994). Despite being stylistically different, Lispector's A Hora da Estrela and Felinto's As Mulheres de Tijucopapo depict protagonists who share the same social and ethnic background and diasporic identity as women from the Northeast of Brazil. A closer look at the narrative trajectory of these two main characters shows us that …


The Geopolitics Of Amazônia In Souza's Fiction, Thomas O. Beebee Sep 2009

The Geopolitics Of Amazônia In Souza's Fiction, Thomas O. Beebee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Geopolitics of Amazônia in Souza's Fiction" Thomas O. Beebee examines the ways in which the historical fiction of Brazilian author Márcio Souza (1946-) confronts prevailing notions of Brazilianness conceived as the unity of citizens within a fixed territorial space. Souza undermines this notion by frequently using non-Brazilians as protagonists of his novels that have as their theme the struggle over control of territory "within" Brazil. Beebee reviews the role played by the concept of national territorial control in theories of nationalism and the modern state, including in the Brazilian school of geopolitics developed by Eduardo Backheuser …


Aesthetics And Ideology In Queirós's A Cidade E As Serras, Pedro Serra Sep 2009

Aesthetics And Ideology In Queirós's A Cidade E As Serras, Pedro Serra

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Aesthetics and Ideology in Queirós's A Cidade e as Serras" Pedro Serra contributes to the study of Eça de Queirós's post-naturalist fiction, offering an in-depth view of traces of utopian socialism -- a major ideological influence in Queirós's intellectual generation -- in the aesthetic fabric of A Cidade e as Serras (1901) (The City and the Mountains). According to Serra, who reads this novel in light of Oliveira Martins's socialist idearium, Queirós's post-naturalistic writing exposes a complex network of late nineteenth-century cultural predicaments: the collapse of liberalism and realism paves the way to an ideological and aesthetical …


Guimarães Rosa's "São Marcos" And Race And Class, Paulo Da-Luz-Moreira Sep 2009

Guimarães Rosa's "São Marcos" And Race And Class, Paulo Da-Luz-Moreira

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Guimarães Rosa's 'São Marcos' and Race and Class" Paulo da-Luz-Moreira analyzes a pivotal short story in João Guimarães Rosa's oeuvre. Published in Sagarana, Guimarães Rosa's first short fiction collection, "São Marcos" has an extremely complex structure in its juxtaposition of layers of idiosyncratic and careful ethnographic and literary erudition, making the story a challenge to critics and readers alike. Guimarães Rosa worked exhaustively on this unique piece that touches with disconcerting openness on issues of strained racial and class relations in Brazil and expounds on the power of language and on the delicate point upon which one's …


Rhetoric And Context In Saramago's Levantado Do Chão, David Frier Sep 2009

Rhetoric And Context In Saramago's Levantado Do Chão, David Frier

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Rhetoric and Context in Saramago's Levantado do Chão" David Frier analyses the 1980 novel by Nobel in Literature 1998 José Saramago. The novel, as-of-yet not translated to English, Risen from the Ground, achieves its success as a key text of the Portuguese post-Revolutionary period in part through its resourceful rhetorical development of textual conventions and echoes derived from a wide range of high- and popular cultural contexts, ranging from the epic poetry of Camões's Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads) of 1578, through glamorized medieval battle-scenes to popular stories and beliefs and to the Fado music of Amália Rodrigues. …


Literature, Ideology, And The Imaginary, Marcello Potocco Jun 2009

Literature, Ideology, And The Imaginary, Marcello Potocco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "Literature, Ideology and the Imaginary," Marcello Potocco analyses the elusive relation between literature and ideology. The notion of the "social imaginary" -- as developed by Castoriadis -- brings the possibility to reconsider the relation between the literary structure, its reception, and ideology. While ideology is seen as a radical expression of the social imaginary in modern society, it can only manifest itself through the ideological function, which does not necessarily destruct the aesthetic experience. In a literary structure, elements may exist that enable a strong identification with the extra-textual world, but this involves primarily identifications with significations …


The Gay Artist As Tragic Hero In The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Henry Alley Jun 2009

The Gay Artist As Tragic Hero In The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Henry Alley

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Gay Artist as Tragic Hero in The Picture of Dorian Gray" Henry M. Alley discusses the central artistic figure in Oscar Wilde's novel, Basil Hallward. As the novel's tragic protagonist, he commands the most pity and fear and serves as the most dynamic member of the dramatis personae. Alley contextualizes his discussion within Aristotle's Poetics, contemporary criticism, as well as Wilde's own comments. In addition, Alley looks at Hallward's attempt to hide or censor his gay feelings as parallel to Wilde's struggle with the various versions of the novel. Nevertheless, the characterization of Hallward celebrates the …


The Meaning Of Myth In Ulysses And The Magic Mountain, Susan V. Scaff Jun 2009

The Meaning Of Myth In Ulysses And The Magic Mountain, Susan V. Scaff

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Meaning of Myth in Ulysses and The Magic Mountain" Susan V. Scaff discusses the proposition that Joyce and Mann combine in their novels myth and history and contradicts Joseph Frank's influential early view that modernist writers avoid history in favor of myth and the more recent verdict of Hayden White that this evasion amounts to an abrogation of civic responsibility mirroring fascism. Mann and Joyce recoil from the horrors of history while exploring the recovery of myth as amelioration. They realize that myths may lose their life bearing quality, and they portray a disoriented Europe lacking …


Images Of Liminality In Book Vi Of The Aeneid, Pouneh Saeedi Jun 2009

Images Of Liminality In Book Vi Of The Aeneid, Pouneh Saeedi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "Images of Liminality in Book VI of The Aeneid" Pouneh Saeedi discusses the concept of "liminality" in Virgil's The Aeneid and its potential in defying designated boundaries. The concept of liminality undercuts binarisms such as those separating winners and losers as well as heroes and monsters. In addition, an investigation of liminality as a zone of constant becoming continues to shed light on a vast array of new transitions. Aeneas's future success in the construction of a new empire and the rebuilding of a Roman nation, to a large extent, is indebted to his having ventured onto …


Report On The 9th Biennial Conference Of The Comparative Literature Association Of India, Babli Moitra Saraf Jun 2009

Report On The 9th Biennial Conference Of The Comparative Literature Association Of India, Babli Moitra Saraf

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Report on the 9th Biennial Conference of the Comparative Literature Association of India" Babli Moitra Saraf presents her perception of the intellectual trajectories of the conference and discusses a number of selected papers read. The conference in the main addressed two issues: the institutional status of Comparative Literature and Comparative Literature as an academic discipline. A close third was the agenda of Comparative Literature to construct a World Literature.


Autobiography And Fiction In Semprún's Texts, Laia Quílez Esteve, Rosa-Àuria Munté Ramos Mar 2009

Autobiography And Fiction In Semprún's Texts, Laia Quílez Esteve, Rosa-Àuria Munté Ramos

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Autobiography and Fiction in Semprún's Texts" Laia Quílez Esteve and Rosa-Àuria Munté Ramos explore aspects of narration in Jorge Semprún's literary work with regard to his experience in the concentration camp. Quílez Esteve and Munté Ramos analyze auto-novelistic mechanisms Semprún employs and reflect on the various meanings of that use by Semprún. Semprún's biographical journey is characterized by a series of experiences which would determine the form and content of his writing. The perception and experience of exile permeates Semprún's pages, the fluctuation of identities which are masked or unmasked within them, or the dissolution of the …