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Introduction To And Bibliography Of Central European Women's Holocaust Life Writing In English, Louise O. Vasvári Mar 2009

Introduction To And Bibliography Of Central European Women's Holocaust Life Writing In English, Louise O. Vasvári

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her "Introduction to and Bibliography of Central European Women's Holocaust Life Writing in English," Louise O. Vasvári discusses aspects and perspectives of women's life writing, including her criteria of selection, the problematics of sourcing, issues of translation, and processes of publication. While the authors listed in the bibliography are overwhelmingly Jewish and from Central and East Europe, there are works listed by others whose experiences also offer important testimony not only on the camps but also on other aspects of the Holocaust. The bibliography suggests that women have written as much and, especially during the last decades, more than …


"Ideologically Incorrect" Responses To The Holocaust By Three Israeli Women Writers, Rachel Feldhay Brenner Mar 2009

"Ideologically Incorrect" Responses To The Holocaust By Three Israeli Women Writers, Rachel Feldhay Brenner

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "'Ideologically Incorrect' Responses to the Holocaust by Three Israeli Women Writers" Rachel Feldhay Brenner examines the departure from the accepted literary response to the Holocaust in the works of three Israeli women writers: the play Lady of the Castle (1954) by Lea Goldberg (1911-1970), Ruth Almog's (1936-) novel Exile (1971), and Shulamith Hareven's (1930-2003) short stories "The Witness" and "Twilight" (1980). While the writers recognized the historical bonds of the European destruction and the Zionist Jewish revival, their literary responses deviated from the mainstream which tended to concur with contemporaneous ideological positions. Feldhay Brenner begins with a …


Narrative Silences Between History And Memory In Schumann's Being Present: Growing Up In Hitler's Germany, Anne Rothe Mar 2009

Narrative Silences Between History And Memory In Schumann's Being Present: Growing Up In Hitler's Germany, Anne Rothe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Narrative Silences Between History and Memory in Schumann's Being Present: Growing Up in Hitler's Germany" Anne Rothe analyzes Willy Schumann's 1991 memoir as an instance of a growing sub-genre among autobiographical writing on the Third Reich and the Holocaust, the Hitler Youth Generation memoir. Written in English for US-American college students, the memoir constructs a reactionary counter-memory to Holocaust discourse in order to exculpate ordinary Germans like himself not only from any responsibility for but any association with nazi crimes. In order to do so, Schumann not only largely omits the Holocaust but recasts the perpetrator/victim dichotomy …


Emigrée Central European Jewish Women's Holocaust Life Writing, Louise O. Vasvári Mar 2009

Emigrée Central European Jewish Women's Holocaust Life Writing, Louise O. Vasvári

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "Emigrée Central European Jewish Women's Holocaust Life Writing," Louise O. Vasvári analyzes voices of women survivors from a gendered perspective in order to provide insights for both Holocaust studies and gender studies. Vasvári considers whether it can be claimed that there is a specifically female style of remembering and of testifying about these traumatic experiences. Vasvári's selection includes the writings of some two dozen Central European emigrée survivors, all native speakers of Hungarian, later writing and publishing in languages of their adopted countries. The first group of women consists of adult survivors who must bear witness in …


Figurative Language In Delbo's Auschwitz Et Après, Elizabeth Scheiber Mar 2009

Figurative Language In Delbo's Auschwitz Et Après, Elizabeth Scheiber

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Figurative Language in Delbo's Auschwitz et après" Elizabeth Scheiber exeamines the use of figurative language in Charlotte Delbo's trilogy Auschwitz et après. Aucun de nous ne reviendra and shows how metaphors and symbols in the texts not only establish a means of imagining the concentration camps, but also how they create a community between author and reader. In Delbo's work, the ironic symbol of the stretcher as a means of conveying corpses gives the reader insight into the author's psyche at roll call as she witnesses the grim sight of the indignity of death in the concentrationary …


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 …


Selected Bibliography Of Studies On The Fantastic In Literature, Terri Ochiagha Dec 2008

Selected Bibliography Of Studies On The Fantastic In Literature, Terri Ochiagha

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Entropy And The Fantastic In Pynchon's Narratives, María Rosa Burillo Gadea Dec 2008

Entropy And The Fantastic In Pynchon's Narratives, María Rosa Burillo Gadea

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Entropy and the Fantastic in Pynchon's Narratives" María Rosa Burillo Gadea postulates that dealing with Pynchon's fiction one is not sure if paranoia is presented as an alternative way of grasping other possible spheres, a more comprehensive vision of the world, or merely a joke. Pynchon's stories try to reproduce reality in different fictional grounds. He uses the notion of entropy, the level of molecular disorder of a thermodynamic system when heated as a metaphor for a disorderly and chaotic universe, necessary, however, in order to avoid the fatality of system exhaustion or death. A kind of …


Fantasy Literature And The Misanthrope: A Review Article Of New Work By Cottom And Zipes, Terri Ochiagha Dec 2008

Fantasy Literature And The Misanthrope: A Review Article Of New Work By Cottom And Zipes, Terri Ochiagha

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


The Literary Fantastic In African And English Literature, Terri Ochiagha Dec 2008

The Literary Fantastic In African And English Literature, Terri Ochiagha

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Literary Fantastic in African and English Literature," Terri Ochiagha begins with pointing out that in his Introduction á la literature fantastique, Tzvetan Todorov proposed the theoretical frameworks he believed should be the basis of the identification and analysis of a literary work as fantastic. While Todorov's text is only one of the many treatises on the fantastic in literary scholarship, in most of these African prose is seldom a subject of exemplification or analysis. In the rare instances in which such texts are mentioned, they are often and hastily classified as magic realism. Ochiagha posits whether …


Death And Love In Poe's And Schwob's Readings Of The Classics, Ana González-Rivas Fernández, Francisco García Jurado Dec 2008

Death And Love In Poe's And Schwob's Readings Of The Classics, Ana González-Rivas Fernández, Francisco García Jurado

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Death and Love in Poe's and Schwob's Readings of the Classics," Ana González-Rivas Fernández and Francisco García Jurado propose that although Gothic literature usually relegates the theme of love to the background, devoting most of its attention to the supernatural and to darkness, there are also literary texts in which love is mixed with life beyond the grave. This is the case, for example, of Théophile Gautier's La Morte amoureuse (1836), the story of a vampire who comes back to life in her "undead" condition in order to seduce a priest. The theme of love and death …


Geographies Of Nation And Region In Modern European And American Fiction, Thomas O. Beebee Sep 2008

Geographies Of Nation And Region In Modern European And American Fiction, Thomas O. Beebee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Geographies of Nation and Region in Modern European and American Fiction" Thomas O. Beebee proposes that beyond using character, plot, and style, modern fiction also has entertained its readers with mental maps of heterotopias. A mental map is an imaginative representation of place derived from experience or story. Following Michel Foucault, heterotopia is defined as an "other space" both familiar as and different from the real. The "imagined communities" (Anderson) of nation and region are themselves heterotopias that receive confirmation and/or contestation through the discursive territoriality of literary prose. The mental maps of literature participate in the …


Patriarchy In Post-1989 Poland And Tokarczuk's Dom Dzienny, Dom Nocny (The Day House, The Night House), Justyna Sempruch Sep 2008

Patriarchy In Post-1989 Poland And Tokarczuk's Dom Dzienny, Dom Nocny (The Day House, The Night House), Justyna Sempruch

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "Patriarchy in Post-1989 Poland and Tokarczuk's Dom Dzienny, Dom Nocny (The Day House, the Night House)" Justyna Sempruch analyzes Tokarczuk's 1998 narrative in the context of the post-communist revival of patriarchy in Poland as well as the parallel Western feminist impact on women's writing in Poland. These two distinct socio-cultural developments, as reflected in Tokarczuk's novel, expand the concept of a subversive household into a transnational dis/order that abolishes borders between domestic (national) and foreign structures: an increasing masculinization of the power structures (political arena and "scientific" practices) impacts the management of the social and the most …


A Moral Reading Of Mahfouz's Fountain And Tomb (Hekayat Haretna), Amal Al-Leithy Sep 2008

A Moral Reading Of Mahfouz's Fountain And Tomb (Hekayat Haretna), Amal Al-Leithy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "A Moral Reading of Mahfouz's Fountain and Tomb (Hekayat Haretna)," Amal Al-Leithy analyses Naguib Mahfouz's Fountain and Tomb. In Al-Leithy's reading, Mahfouz delineates a gloomy picture of modern humanity still living in a struggle against destitution, ignorance, squalor, and the power of superstition. Society is portrayed as seeped in hopelessness as Mahfouz stresses the physical and moral degradation of his protagonists. He draws a dismal picture of life as swinging between two poles: the fountain of life and the tomb of death. In a symbolic alley in 1920s Cairo, Mahfouz describes humanity's predicament swaying between meaningfulness and …


Myth And Power Structures In Sartre's Les Mouches And La Putain Respectueuse, Martha Evans Smith Sep 2008

Myth And Power Structures In Sartre's Les Mouches And La Putain Respectueuse, Martha Evans Smith

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "Myth and Power Structures in Sartre's Les Mouches and La Putain respectueuse," Martha Evans Smith analyses Sartre's plays with regard to the relationship of the individual with the collective, the purportedly self-determinate part of an apparently universalizing whole. Seeming to illustrate an enactment of freedom and an absence thereof, the disparate outcomes of the hierarchies in the plays impose a success/failure paradigm on the concomitant reading of the two plays. Evans Smith argues that these issues in the plays read with regard to structures of classical mythology and racism in the US-American South demonstrate the close relationship …


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 …