Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Persistence Of "Cathay" In World Literature, Eugene Eoyang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Persistence of 'Cathay' in World Literature" Eugene Eoyang argues that China has only recently begun to occupy a place in world literatures as evidenced by the absence of Chinese literature from the early editions of the widely adopted Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces and its token representations in subsequent editions. "Orientalized" images of China still persist partly stemming from the continuing currency of stereotyped images of the Chinese promoted by publishers, by Western Sinologists, and even by expatriate Chinese. A cottage industry has developed which privileges the study of images of China (however distorted and oversimplified) …

Monomedial Hybridization In Contemporary Poetry, Jan Baetens

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Monomedial Hybridization in Contemporary Poetry" Jan Baetens argues that the debate on hybridization tends to overemphasize the blurring of boundaries between signs and sign types in all possible forms: combination of types within a given work (multimodal "image-texts," comics and photo-novels, sound poetry, etc.), adaptation and remediation of one sign type by another one (filmic adaptations of novels or novelizations of films, for instance), and, more generally, the simultaneous elaboration of works in various media (the phenomenon that Jenkins called "convergence" or trans-media storytelling). While all these hybridizations have become mainstream today, if we take into account …

Complexity, Hybridity, And Comparative Literature, Marina Grishakova

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Complexity, Hybridity, and Comparative Literature" Marina Grishakova discusses "implied hybridity" in discourses, aesthetic systems, and media as a form of emergent complexity — as distinct from hybridity resulting from the mixture or blending of heterogeneous elements. Grishakova argues that complexity theories widely used in social sciences and, to a lesser extent, in literary and cultural studies, suggest a possibility to avoid dualistic thinking and offer a flexible conceptual framework for comparative literature studies. Aesthetic systems, as part of society's "imaginary," respond to, and reorganize in response to, impulses received from other domains, but also modify their environments …

Transcultural Literature And Contemporary World Literature(S), Arianna Dagnino

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Transcultural Literature and Contemporary World Literature(s)" Arianna Dagnino argues that within the emerging field of transcultural literary studies and despite the inevitable issues raised by categorization, we may classify transcultural literature within the wider domain of world literature(s). Dagnino presents a brief overview of the growing importance of a transcultural perspective in the fields of (comparative) cultural studies and literary studies and proceeds by outlining the main contours of transcultural literary theory and its main differences in respect to (im)migrant and postcolonial literary theories. Further, Dagnino analyzes the contemporary understanding of the field of world literature(s) and …

Translation, Cross-Cultural Interpretation, And World Literatures, Qingben Li, Jinghua Guo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Translation, Cross-cultural interpretation, and World Literatures" Qingben Li and Jinghua Guo discuss how to make what is national literature become part of world literatures and posit that there are at least two ways by this can be done: translation and cross-cultural interpretation. Translation covers not only the conversion of language, but also the selection and variation of culture. In the context of modern Chinese literature, cross-cultural interpretation often emerges in the form of applying Western theories to explain Chinese texts in order to facilitate appreciation by Western audiences and to support the need of the internationalization of …

Can Women Have It All?: Hesitant Feminism In American Women's Popular Writing, Anne Aramand

Graduate Masters Theses

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins are two of the bestselling series of our generation. These series are meeting widespread popularity just as the contemporary feminist debate of: "Can women have it all?" is occurring around the country. Although Twilight and The Hunger Games are not considered overtly feminist texts, they have emerged in a time when women are reexamining the possibility of empowering themselves both in the public and the domestic sphere. Meyer and Collins have introduced female protagonists that deal with precisely this issue.

First, I will be outlining why cultural studies are …

The Pan-Asian Empire And World Literatures, Sowon S. Park

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Pan-Asian Empire and World Literatures" Sowon S. Park argues that world literature studies have been limited to "Europe and its Others." That is to say, while there has been an increasing preoccupation with literary networks beyond the Western canon since the middle of the last century, the investigations have been restricted to the colonial world and the postcolonial states of the Western powers. The non-Western colonial field of the Pan-Asian empire (1894-1945) — Imperial Japan, colonial Korea, semi-colonial China, and Taiwan — has been not so much relegated to the margins as just passed over. Park …

World Literatures, Comparative Literature, And Glocal Cosmopolitanism, Paolo Bartoloni

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "World Literatures, Comparative Literature, and Glocal Cosmopolitanism" Paolo Bartoloni reflects on the topos of the crisis of literature and the humanities. An urge to question the status and the relevance of literature; to investigate the relation between literature and literary studies; and the location of literature within the context of a transforming world has emerged in the last three decades. Assuming that a bond exists between literature and the world, what is its nature? Is it possible to take an interest in literature without knowing its potential relevance or its world? These questions are related to the …

World Literatures In Temporal Perspective, David Damrosch

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "World Literatures in Temporal Perspective" David Damrosch discusses the vexed problem of how to shape a literary history into definable and meaningful periods without simply projecting old Western patterns onto new ages and distant areas of the world. This problem becomes acute when one seeks to create a genuinely global literary history. Damrosch surveys some early periodizations according to patterns of infancy, growth, maturity, and decline, and discusses the often unrealized persistence of biblical and classical models in modern accounts of the literary histories of Egypt, Mesoamerica, and India.

Intermedial Serial Metarepresentation In Dickens's The Pickwick Papers, Asunción López-Varela, Camila Khaski Gaglia

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Abstract: In their article "Intermedial Serial Metarepresentation in Dickens's The Pickwick Papers" Asunción López-Varela and Camila Khaski Gaglia employ a semiotic perspective in order to establish the intermedial features of the genre of the serial novel. Drawing on Marina Grishakova's distinction between "metaverbal" (an attribute of verbal texts which evoke images) and "metavisual" (an attribute of images which reflect on the incomplete nature of visual representation) the authors explore self-reflexive references as threads to storylines which capture the entire series in one emblematic recurrent image.

Western And Oriental Worlds Of Literature And Modern Greek Literature, Maro Kalantzopoulou

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Western and Oriental Worlds of Literature and Modern Greek Literature" Maro Kalantzopoulou explores the extent to which modern Greek literature can be seen as linked to Western and Oriental literary cultures. She discusses examples of literary phenomena featuring Western influences, as well as works which are linked in different ways to Southeastern Europe in general, the Ottoman world, and Oriental literary cultures. Kalantzopoulou's claim is that scholarship tends to associate modern Greek literature with Western literary cultures and dismisses non-Western contributions and influences. Kalantzopoulou suggests that by acknowledging the historical situatedness of such assumptions and by examining …

Periodization, Comparative Literature, And Italian Modernism, Donata Meneghelli

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Periodization, Comparative Literature, and Italian Modernism" Donata Meneghelli discusses why periodization is one of the most problematic issues in literary studies. Following a discussion of literary history and comparative literature, Meneghelli focuses on the notion of Italian modernism which has recently begun to circulate in literary studies referring to Italian literature of the beginning of the twentieth century. Meneghelli argues that Italian modernism is a paradoxical and contradictory notion which calls into question the relationships between literary history, geography (literary, cultural, political), and comparative literature while at the same time challenging the new framework of world literature(s) …

Major Histories, Minor Literatures, And World Authors, Theo D'Haen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Major Histories, Minor Literatures, and World Authors" Theo D'haen discusses how the idea of world literature has made a remarkable comeback in literary studies. A major feature of this revival has been increased attention from a "world perspective" to literatures until recently little studied beyond disciplinary boundaries, particularly so some "major" literatures such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and various Indian-language literatures. As such, these literatures have come to join what has usually been thought of as "European" world literature. What this move, however to be welcomed in itself, obscures is the even further peripheralization of a number …

Interculturality And World Literary System(S), Jola Škulj

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Interculturality and World Literary System(s)" Jola Škulj proposes a new framework for studying planetary exchanges of literatures, one that subverts the systemic distinction between centers and peripheries. She advocates a model that can yield the analytical conceptualization and hermeneutic understanding of literary phenomena and their historical reality in the complexity of semiotic traces, in actual distinctiveness of formal and textual deposits, and in interconnections of poetological impacts. She argues that literary facts seen in such intricate networks of mutual intertextual phenomenology and reaccentuations attest to their character of permanent mobility, evident instability, and constant inventive reformulation of …

Greek, Latin, And The Origins Of "World Literature", Alexander Beecroft

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Greek, Latin, and the Origins of 'World Literature'" Alexander Beecroft argues that while it is hardly new that the models of contemporary comparative and world literature(s) are Eurocentric in their origins and structures, the precise nature of Eurocentrism is less discussed. Beecroft argues that far from representing (as Goethe had wished) the end of national literature, the era of comparative and world literatures has, from its beginnings, been structured specifically around the notion of "national literatures." Beecroft explores the national basis for the study of comparative and world literatures in the nineteenth century with particular attention to …

March's Poetry And National Identity In Nineteenth-Century Catalonia, Alice E. Popowich

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "March's Poetry and National Identity in Nineteenth-century Catalonia" Alice E. Popowich investigates the role Ausiàs March's (1397-1459) oeuvre played in the creation of a distinct national identity of nineteenth-century Catalonia. The sociopolitical implications of renaixença and the romantic notion of Volksgeist are employed to situate renewed interest in March's poetry, while the study of reprints from the period allow reflections on the manipulation of March's celebrity in order to move political agendas forward in the establishment of the identity and culture of Catalonia. Popowich postulates that March's poetry influenced nineteenth-century literary rhetoric and politics whereby a regional …

Fiction, Film, Painting, And Comparative Literature, Ramona L. Ceciu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Fiction, Film, Painting, and Comparative Literature" Ramona L. Ceciu proposes a view of comparative literature as a "language in a process of ascertaining its proper grammar." She argues that like any language in order to survive, comparative literature must allow for a constant rejuvenation of its vocabulary and methods it must keep an "open" structure that would accommodate fresh extra-methodological approaches through a procedure of re-invention and expansion. Ceciu posits that in this process the comparatist's "objective creativity" plays a crucial role and draws on Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek's concept of a "new comparative literature" and applies …

Gender And Emotion In Comparative Perspective, Raili Marling

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Gender and Emotion in Comparative Perspective" Raili Marling argues that although the study of affect is anything but new, literary studies can benefit from the creative tension between affect and (feminist) politics. Building on the work of Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant, Marling engages with the debates within affect theory and then fleshes out the idea of literature as a gendered intimate public sphere and investigates the political effects of emotions as cultural practices. The resulting — largely Anglophone — theoretical apparatus is then tested in a cross-cultural context by discussing Elo Viiding's negotiation of "happiness duty" …

National Literatures As Intimate Expression And The Problem Of Teaching World Literatures, Kette Thomas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "National Literatures as Intimate Expression and the Problem of Teaching World Literatures" Kette Thomas analyzes the fundamental tension embedded in the discourse on teaching world literatures. Thomas focuses on models which contextualize the problem around the subject of allegiance either to the reader or the author rather than the commonly limited geographical, national, and politically defined complex. Focus on the reader or author is often made at the expense of the "other," but it is the tension and communication between them that offers possibilities for the development of the discipline of comparative literature (against Eurocentrism and the …

Variation Theory And Comparative Literature: A Book Review Article About Cao's Work, Ning Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Introduction To World Literatures From The Nineteenth To The Twenty-First Century, Marko Juvan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

From Cultural Third-Worldism To The Literary World-System, Jernej Habjan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "From Cultural Third-Worldism to the Literary World-System" Jernej Habjan links the debate on Franco Moretti's distant reading to the debate on Fredric Jameson's "third world culture." In and around this debate, Aijaz Ahmad both critiqued close reading and rejected Jameson's "Third-Worldism." What Jameson's and Ahmad's interventions into literary theory meant at the end of the real-socialist alternative and what Moretti's meant at the end of the US-American alternative to real-socialism, a synoptic reading of all three interventions might help achieve at the end of what seemed the European alternative to the US-American alternative.

World Literature(S) And Comparative Literature: A Book Review Article Of Books Published In English And German 2011-2013, Elke Sturm-Trigonakis

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Comparative Literature, Ancient Rome, And The Crisis Of Modern European History, Lucia Boldrini

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Comparative Literature, Ancient Rome, and the Crisis of Modern European History" Lucia Boldrini considers Edward Said's and Jacques Derrida's arguments about the centrality of romania to the European philological tradition and the contemporary understanding of literature and discusses in this light a selection of twentieth-century novels set at the time when literature, empire, Europe, Latinity, and Christianity were coming together: Broch's The Death of Virgil, Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, Horia's God Was Born in Exile, and Malouf's An Imaginary Life. Linking the Roman past to the present of historical destruction and colonialism, these …

Limits To Transculturality: A Book Review Article Of New Work By Kimmich And Schahadat And Juvan, Hrvoje Tutek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Comparative Literature And Cultural Studies: A Book Review Article About Wang's Work, Tian Zhang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Comparative Literature, (Comparative) Cultural Studies, Aesthetic Education, And The Humanities, Sonja Stojmenska-Elzeser

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Comparative Literature, (Comparative) Cultural Studies, Aesthetic Education, and the Humanities" Sonja Stojmenska-Elzeser discusses comparative literature in the context of cultural studies and aesthetic education. Her starting point is the complexity of comparative literature as an academic discipline propelled by intellectual curiosity for what lies across the barriers which stand in the way of understanding and enjoying creative acts of all kinds everywhere and at all times. Literary and artistic investigations which focus on aesthetic values lead us towards general aesthetics, analyses which situate the arts and literature in context with little regard for aesthetic criteria take us …

Literary Aspects In New Media Art Works, Narvika Bovcon

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Literary Aspects in New Media Art Works" Narvika Bovcon discusses examples of new media literature in the works of new media artists Jaka Železnikar and Srečo Dragan. While Železnikar is primarily a net artist who authors new media poetry and online linguistic interventions, the literary segments in Dragan's work are based in conceptual art and video art and he uses them to initiate a happening. Bovcon argues that studies of new media literature — of those works which require a readerly perception — should take time and attempt to capture the general flavor of such works which …

On Some Worlds Of World Literature(S): A Book Review Article On Ďurišin's, Casanova's, And Damrosch's Work, Anton Pokrivčák

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Generative Translation In Spicer, Gelman, And Hawkey, Lisa Rose Bradford

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Generative Translation in Spicer, Gelman, and Hawkey" Lisa Rose Bradford examines the practice of generative translation — a concept she designated — in Jack Spicer's After Lorca (1957), Juan Gelman's Com/positions (1986), and Christian Hawkey's Ventrakl (2010) to show how this strategy revives the original articulation as a continuation of the seminal frisson while producing an entirely new work of art and one that reflects the genius of both the original and translating authors. While generative translation represents a renovative strategy that has provided historically a constant creative force in literature, in recent years it has established …