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Confucianism And Folklore In Vietnamese Fantasy Short Stories: The Case Of Ghost Stories , Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan Feb 2022

Confucianism And Folklore In Vietnamese Fantasy Short Stories: The Case Of Ghost Stories , Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Truyền kỳ, which is a genre of fantasy short stories, was formed and developed in the historic period of medieval literature of Vietnam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Despite being derived from a similar Chinese genre, the truyền kỳ of Vietnam was the work of the endogenous development of the national fantasy short story, which was closely associated with folk literature and historical prose. However, at the time of its inception, as well as at the glorious top of this genre, truyền kỳ had never been accepted as an official genre. It was rather a metaphor for unorthodox discourse …


Representation Of Terror And Terrorism In Two Arab Films: Paradise Now (2005) By Hany Abu-Assad And Horses Of God (2012) By Nabil Ayouch, Mustapha Hamil Oct 2021

Representation Of Terror And Terrorism In Two Arab Films: Paradise Now (2005) By Hany Abu-Assad And Horses Of God (2012) By Nabil Ayouch, Mustapha Hamil

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Middle Eastern violence and terrorism are not novel subjects in world cinema, especially American cinema. The Arab or Muslim other in these films is always presented as someone who epitomises a culture of violence, directed mostly against innocent civilians. Against the backdrop of Hollywood’s stereotypical representation of Middle-Easterners as advocate of indiscriminate terror and terrorism, Arab filmmakers have turned in recent years to the representation of terror and religious extremism. Paradise Now (Abu Assad 2005) and Horses of God (Ayouch 2012) address the controversial issue of suicide bombing with the same motivation: to examine the choice of suicide bombing within …


Looking Back, Or Re-Visioning: Contemporary American Jewish Poets On “Lot’S Wife”, Anat Koplowitz-Breier Oct 2021

Looking Back, Or Re-Visioning: Contemporary American Jewish Poets On “Lot’S Wife”, Anat Koplowitz-Breier

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Although mentioned only twice in Genesis (19:17, 26), Lot’s wife has been a topic of much discussion amongst both traditional and modern commentators and exegetes. The traditional midrashim seek to explain why she chose to disregard the instructions she was given and the nature of her punishment. In doing so, they follow two principal directions, representing her a) negatively as a wicked sinner, a Sodomite who acted as such even before disobeying the divine decree not to look backwards—thus linking her disobedience with her intrinsic character (e.g., curious, greedy, inhospitable, faithless); or b) positively as a loving mother and daughter. …


Vulgarity As Springboard For High Art—A Comparative Study Of Vladimir Nabokov And Qian Zhongshu’S Notions Of Vulgarity, Derong Cao Oct 2021

Vulgarity As Springboard For High Art—A Comparative Study Of Vladimir Nabokov And Qian Zhongshu’S Notions Of Vulgarity, Derong Cao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The discussion of vulgarity features prominently in both Nabokov and Qian’s creative writing. In this essay, their notions of vulgarity will be compared and contrasted. Nabokov and Qian have surprisingly similar understandings of vulgarity. To be more specific, both identify pretense/ affectation and triteness/ mediocrity as its fundamental characteristics. Moreover, both authors believe that the quintessential feature of vulgarity lies in its downplay of individual consciousness. The two authors’ understandings of vulgarity also differ in major ways. Qian’s Fortress Besieged, though showing deep social and moral concerns, did not seem to suspect a direct causal link between vulgarity and …


Nationalist Allegories In The Post-Human Era, Siqi Zhang Mar 2021

Nationalist Allegories In The Post-Human Era, Siqi Zhang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

As China’s expansion of influence now takes up the spotlight of the world stage, Chinese science fiction, a relatively little known genre, reaches a global audience. In 2015, Liu Cixin received the Hugo Award for Best Novel for his trilogy The Three-Body Problem, as the first Asian science fiction writer to receive the Hugo Award. A year later, Hao Jingfang’s Folding Beijing was awarded the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. The recent world-wide recognition of Chinese science fiction begins with English translation, U.S. publication and promotion. The New York Times cited The Three-Body Problem as having helped popularize Chinese …


Trans-Atlantic Interrogation: Fabienne Pasquet’S La Deuxième Mort De Toussaint Louverture, Mariana F. Past Mar 2021

Trans-Atlantic Interrogation: Fabienne Pasquet’S La Deuxième Mort De Toussaint Louverture, Mariana F. Past

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Trans-Atlantic Interrogation: Fabienne Pasquet’s La deuxième mort de Toussaint Louverture,” Mariana Past situates the Haitian-Swiss novelist’s understudied narrative within the context of Caribbean letters and the Haitian literary tradition, then discusses the broader, intertextual implications of Toussaint Louverture’s “second” death for Haiti and the trans-Atlantic world. To what end does Pasquet deploy the aged ghost of a Haitian revolutionary icon being invoked by German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist in the Fort de Joux castle-cum-prison within France’s remote, mountainous Jura region? What is at stake when the diasporic writer reincarnates a legendary German poet as protagonist, placing him …


From Franz Kafka To Franz Kafka Award Winner, Yan Lianke: Biopolitics And The Human Dilemma Of Shenshizhuyi In Liven And Dream Of Ding Village, Melinda Pirazzoli Mar 2021

From Franz Kafka To Franz Kafka Award Winner, Yan Lianke: Biopolitics And The Human Dilemma Of Shenshizhuyi In Liven And Dream Of Ding Village, Melinda Pirazzoli

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

To date, many studies have exhaustively explained how and why Yan Lianke deals with both the intimate relationship between disease and biopolitics and the relationship between utopia and dystopia. These are certainly the most important themes in Liven (2004) and Dream of Ding Village (2006). However, biopolitical discourses cannot fully account for the complexity, depth and humanity of these novels, which in addition to exploring the complex and protean meaning of life also represent shenshizhuyi, an expression coined by Yan Lianke to describe his human dilemma in representing the complex relationship between shen 神 (soul, spirit, mind and myths) …


Speculative Epistemologies Of Resistance In Hombres De Maíz And Bandarshah, Haifa S. Alfaisal Mar 2021

Speculative Epistemologies Of Resistance In Hombres De Maíz And Bandarshah, Haifa S. Alfaisal

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his two-part “The literary history of world-systems” Matthew Eatough utilizes world systems theory to examine literary studies. He makes use of Baucom’s “speculative epistemologies” to explore the connection between the global economy speculative financial instruments and the rise of the novel in 18th century. But Eatough is interested in tracing the history of literary studies and world systems theory. In this paper, I use speculative epistemologies to indicate ways of knowing that are speculated in fiction. My starting point is the decolonial critique of world system theory, which I use to formulate border reading; a reading strategy that is …


Politics Of Evasion And Tales Of Abjection: Postmodern Demythologization In Angela Carter And Ghazaleh Alizadeh, Narges Montakhabi Bakhtvar, Hoda Niknezhad-Ferdos Mar 2021

Politics Of Evasion And Tales Of Abjection: Postmodern Demythologization In Angela Carter And Ghazaleh Alizadeh, Narges Montakhabi Bakhtvar, Hoda Niknezhad-Ferdos

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Angela Carter and Ghazaleh Alizadeh as the prophetesses of postmodern fairy tales in British and Persian literature re-narrativize these tales as a loophole from socio-political stagnation and cultural paralysis. Evading direct contact with the political jargons of their eras, they seek gender generativity via the fairy tale machine. Alizadeh finds refuge in modernizing Persian fairy tales. Carter chants her frustration at Thatcherism through gender subversion. Carter’s and Alizadeh’s revulsion at the politics of gender in their eras can be read via the duet between the abject and the chora in Kristeva’s thought. It is through the encounter with the external …


Problems With Perceptual And Cognitive Idiosyncrasies In Li Wenjun’S Translation Of The Benjy Section Of Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury, Aaron L. Moore Mar 2021

Problems With Perceptual And Cognitive Idiosyncrasies In Li Wenjun’S Translation Of The Benjy Section Of Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury, Aaron L. Moore

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Problems with Perceptual and Cognitive Idiosyncrasies in Li Wenjun’s Translation of the Benjy Section of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury,” Aaron Lee Moore conducts a close explication of a 2014 English-Chinese edition of part of The Sound and the Fury. Li Wenjun’s translation of the Benjy section of The Sound and the Fury is certainly admirable in its graceful rendering of Faulkner’s complex, idiosyncratic prose style into accessible Chinese—and particularly laudable in its meticulous tracking of the a-chronological sequence of Benjy’s stream of consciousness narrative. However, problems arise in the translation due to an …


“No Roses, White Nor Red, Glow Here”: The Motif Of The Garden In Two Proserpine Poems By A. Swinburne And D. Greenwell, Cristina Salcedo González Mar 2021

“No Roses, White Nor Red, Glow Here”: The Motif Of The Garden In Two Proserpine Poems By A. Swinburne And D. Greenwell, Cristina Salcedo González

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this article, I discuss Algernon Swinburne’s and Dora Greenwell’s engagement with the myth of Proserpine through an analysis of the motif of the garden, which takes central stage in both accounts. The examination will illustrate how the authors’ outlined images of the garden challenge the dominant representation of the motif within Western literary tradition, offering a re-interpretation of the myth as social commentary.


Deconstructing Feminine And Feminist Fantastic Through The Study Of Living Dolls, Raquel Velázquez Mar 2021

Deconstructing Feminine And Feminist Fantastic Through The Study Of Living Dolls, Raquel Velázquez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her "Deconstructing Feminine and Feminine Fantastic through the Study of Living Dolls," Raquel Velázquez analyzes the treatment of one idiosyncratic image within the fantastic genre, and one that also has a special impact on the configuration of the feminine: the doll. On the one hand, she examines the evolution of this fantastic motif in order to determine whether it involves a transformation of how the feminine fantastic is represented. On the other hand, she establishes some correlations between the image of the fantastic doll, and the development of processes such as the dollification of women or the humanization of …


The Inappropriate/D Fantastic: A Proposal Beyond Feminism, Teresa López-Pellisa Mar 2021

The Inappropriate/D Fantastic: A Proposal Beyond Feminism, Teresa López-Pellisa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Teresa López-Pellisa’s article “The Inappropriate/d Fantastic: A Proposal Beyond Feminism” discusses a type of narration that goes beyond the feminist fantastic. These are fantastic texts permeated not only by a feminist discourse, but by intersectionality, transfeminism, ecofeminism, cyberfeminism, post-humanism, xenofeminism and/or necropolitics as well. Borrowing the term inappropriate/d others from Donna Haraway (The Promises of Monsters), who in turn takes it from the feminist theorist Trinh Minh-ha, we can analyze those fantastic stories that call into question the categories of gender, class, race and sexuality established by Western enlightened humanism. These types of non-mimetic narrations have …


A Geocritical Perspective On The Female Fantastic: Rethinking The Domestic, Patricia García Mar 2021

A Geocritical Perspective On The Female Fantastic: Rethinking The Domestic, Patricia García

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Patricia García’s article, “A Geocritical Perspective on the Female Fantastic: Rethinking the Domestic” approaches the question of the “female fantastic” from a spatial angle. Proponents of the female fantastic (for example E. Moers, S. Gilbert and S. Gubar and A. Richter) often coincide in a leitmotif that characterises this tradition: the haunted house. This leads to a great deal of studies centred on how female authors employ domestic spaces as a means to give voice to the lives of women invisibilised by patriarchy and, through the irruption of the supernatural, as a way to subvert domestic ideology. Whereas these studies …


Female Fantastic In Anthologies: Gendering The Genre And Its Discourse, Anna Boccuti Mar 2021

Female Fantastic In Anthologies: Gendering The Genre And Its Discourse, Anna Boccuti

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In the last decades, the fantastic literature written by women has been the subject of various studies, which, from different standpoints, have tried to investigate the characteristics of the female fantastic. In this essay, after a critical review of the most prominent theories about the so-called feminine fantastic and female writing, I will focus on the narrative strategies of the female fantastic. Through the close reading of the anthologies Tra due specchi. 18 racconti di scrittrici latinoamericane, and Insólitas. Narradoras de lo fantástico en Latinoamérica y España, I’ll try to draw a cartography of the Hispanic …


Transgression, Essentialism And Literary System: An Approach To The Viability Of The Female Fantastic, Alfons Gregori Mar 2021

Transgression, Essentialism And Literary System: An Approach To The Viability Of The Female Fantastic, Alfons Gregori

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The main aims of this article are firstly to find out whether the concept of “fantastic female” is a contradictory and ambiguous construct, and secondly to challenge the feasibility of applying it to literary studies. The matter of the existence of the “female fantastic” refers to the theoretical approaches made to undertake a double-edged task in the 1970s and 1980s: the conceptualization of a dual scheme establishing a female aesthetic opposed to the dominant patriarchy on the one hand, and on the other, the promotion of non-mimetic narrative modes as formulas for transgressing the patriarchal system. However, the crystallization of …


China Question Of Us-American Imagism, Qingben Li Dec 2020

China Question Of Us-American Imagism, Qingben Li

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper investigates first the influences of ancient Chinese culture on Ezra Pound, and then Pound’s influence on the New Culture Movement of modern China (1917). It is a kind of circular journey of literary texts and theories from ancient China to the West and then back to China. This journey, or “circle model,” involves textual appropriation, variation, transformation and misunderstanding in every stage.


China Question Of Western Postcolonial Translation Theory, Zhijie Wu, Yuping Wang Dec 2020

China Question Of Western Postcolonial Translation Theory, Zhijie Wu, Yuping Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

“China Question of Western Postcolonial Translation Theory” deals with how western postcolonial translation theory is read, interpreted and applied in China, as well as how the reception in China influences revision and development of the theory. Western postcolonial translation theory, though frequently quoted and highly influential in China, is sometimes incapable of effectively explaining Chinese translation practice and convincing Chinese readers. Based on the analysis of the encounter between postcolonial translation theory and China, three suggestions are proposed to revise translation theory so as to build a “greener,” healthier hetero-generative ecology of languages and cultures.


The Question Of Nation And Nationalism In Chinese Postcolonialism, Yuyu Wu Dec 2020

The Question Of Nation And Nationalism In Chinese Postcolonialism, Yuyu Wu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper examines the impact of postcolonial theory in China on the question of the nation from historical and genealogical perspectives. China first encountered Jameson’s third-world national allegory and Edward Said’s Orientalism, which were quickly assimilated into the framework of the China/West dichotomy. Then Homi Bhabha’s ideas of national identity and cultural hybridity were utilized in studying Chinese ethnic minorities and identity construction. From the earlier views of postcolonialism as cultural resistance to cultural production now, Chinese postcolonial studies have acquired new energy for growth.


Why I Write In Yiddish, Karen Alkalay-Gut Apr 2020

Why I Write In Yiddish, Karen Alkalay-Gut

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


A Hebrew Poet Writes In English About The Holocaust, Avraham Balaban Apr 2020

A Hebrew Poet Writes In English About The Holocaust, Avraham Balaban

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


The Hope Of Salman Masalha: Re-Territorializing Hebrew, Yael Dekel, Eran Tzelgov Apr 2020

The Hope Of Salman Masalha: Re-Territorializing Hebrew, Yael Dekel, Eran Tzelgov

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Israeli poetry can be depicted as a triangle composed of three elements: territory (the State of Israel); language (Hebrew); and identity (Jewish). In his Hebrew collection of poetry Eḥad Mikan (in place, 2004), Salman Masalha—a bilingual author publishing in both Arabic and Hebrew—challenges this interrelation of territory, language and identity. The debate between the literary scholars Hannan Hever and Reuven Snir explore the central expressions of this challenge. For it points, on the one hand, to the subversive potential of such work towards the Israeli canon while, on the other hand, to its connection to Arabic literature. Writing in the …


“The Poem Is What Lies Between A Between”: Mahmoud Darwish And The Prosody Of Displacement, Ayelet Even-Nur Apr 2020

“The Poem Is What Lies Between A Between”: Mahmoud Darwish And The Prosody Of Displacement, Ayelet Even-Nur

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish grew up in Israel as an internal refugee living under Israeli military rule, legally classified as a “present-absentee alien.” This article focuses on his 1995 volume of poetry, Limādhā tarakta al-ḥiṣān waḥīdan? (Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?), to study the manner in which Darwish’s cultivation of the musical and aural aspects of poetry serves as a means of poetically attending to the effects of dispossession and displacement. Through a discussion of the poems in the collection’s fourth section, Ghurfa l’il kalām maʿ al-nafs (A Room to Talk to Oneself …


Queering Identity Politics In Shimon Adaf’S Aviva-No, Yael Segalovitz Apr 2020

Queering Identity Politics In Shimon Adaf’S Aviva-No, Yael Segalovitz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article offers a queer reading of Shimon Adaf’s volume of poetry, Aviva-No (2009), analyzing it in conjunction with his recent collection of essays on identity formation, Ani aherim (I am others) (2018). Adaf’s oeuvre has been primarily studied through the lens of ethnicity and race. This article demonstrates that gender plays a key role in his body of work. Aviva-No, which is a lamentation for the poet’s sister, destabilizes the boundaries between the mourning brother and the absent sister. This ontological deconstruction stimulates in Aviva-No a broader undoing of gender as an embodied identity. The volume is replete …


Life Is A Story: Narrative And Identity In The War Poetry Of Dan Pagis And Charles Simic, Chanita Goodblatt Apr 2020

Life Is A Story: Narrative And Identity In The War Poetry Of Dan Pagis And Charles Simic, Chanita Goodblatt

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The use of the conceptual metaphor of “life is a story” can be conceived as reciprocally or bidirectionally transforming both life and story. Thus this metaphor structures life into a coherent narrative—with a linear, and causally-related, progression of events and relationships—while also realizing the varied interpretive potentials of “a story as life.” Such aspects of this metaphor are essential to understanding how the two poets, the Israeli Dan Pagis and the American Charles Simic, shape their identities not only as the poetic speaker or the “I” of poetry but also as that of a storyteller. The lives of both these …


"A Generation Of Wonderful Jews Will Grow From The Land": The Desire For Nativeness In Hebrew Israeli Poetry, Hamutal Tsamir Apr 2020

"A Generation Of Wonderful Jews Will Grow From The Land": The Desire For Nativeness In Hebrew Israeli Poetry, Hamutal Tsamir

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article examines the ways in which the desire for nativeness is constructed in Israeli Hebrew poetry through several historical episodes: H. N. Bialik’s poem 1896 poem “In the Field”; the poets as pioneers/immigrants in the 1920s, in contrast to the “nativist” poet Esther Raab; and the “nativist” poets of the 1950s (Statehood Generation), focusing on Moshe Dor. The desire to be native—to belong to the land in a way that is natural, self-evident, and therefore absolute and unquestionable— is one of the constitutive desires of nationalism in general, and of Zionism in particular. In Bialik’s poem, written during the …


Introduction: Poetry In Israel: Forging Identity, Chanita Goodblatt Apr 2020

Introduction: Poetry In Israel: Forging Identity, Chanita Goodblatt

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The focus of this special issue is poetry—written in Israel during (and somewhat preceding) its Statehood—perceived as reflecting the worlds of poets in their personal, communal, ideological and poetic dimensions. This issue will focus on the ways in which poetry in Israel relates the stories, and expresses the positions, of individuals and groups who arrived from different countries (Europe, North Africa, Asia), lived through different experiences (the Holocaust, war, resettlement), and who express different cultures and religions (Jewish, Muslim).


Sewing Lives: Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein And The Global Garment Industry, Sarah Garland Feb 2020

Sewing Lives: Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein And The Global Garment Industry, Sarah Garland

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper takes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and uses it as an extended metaphor to investigate the points of destructive alienation and disassociation within the globalized consumption of clothing. The promise of new clothing is a set of garments that function like Victor’s dream of creation; materials are stitched together to give objects that match our closest-held ideals. And yet, because of our quick Victor-Frankenstein-like alienation from these ‘fast fashion’ objects when they no longer please us, clothing becomes, like the monster, an abjected figure for waste and shame, moving around the globe destructively, created from the bodies of the poor …


Rethinking The Monstrous: Gender, Otherness, And Space In The Cinematic Storytelling Of Arrival And The Shape Of Water, Edward Chamberlain Feb 2020

Rethinking The Monstrous: Gender, Otherness, And Space In The Cinematic Storytelling Of Arrival And The Shape Of Water, Edward Chamberlain

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Through comparing the Hollywood films Arrival and The Shape of Water, this article explicates the films’ similar portrayals of gender, social collaboration, and monstrosity. Although the mainstream media in the United States has linked the idea of the monstrous to larger global forces, the two films suggest that “the monster” exists much closer to home. Hence, this article makes the case that monstrosity occurs in a variety of formulations such as the actions of national authorities like governmental officials that oppress and endanger a myriad of American citizens as well as newcomers. Further, this article makes the case that …


Making The Global Visible: Charting The Uneven Development Of Global Monsters In Bong Joon-Ho’S Okja And Nacho Vigalondo’S Colossal, Ju Young Jin Feb 2020

Making The Global Visible: Charting The Uneven Development Of Global Monsters In Bong Joon-Ho’S Okja And Nacho Vigalondo’S Colossal, Ju Young Jin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her essay, “Making the Global Visible: Charting the Uneven Development of Global Monsters in Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja and Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal,” Ju Young Jin examines the entanglement of the global and the monstrous in two recent films that position Korea on the cusp between Cold War politics and global capitalism: Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja and Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal. The Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho and Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo offer viewers films that challenge conventional notions of monster by fusing it with a coming-of-age plot of the female protagonist that takes place on a global scale, which contests the …