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Articles 1 - 30 of 50
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Ambiguity, The Literary, And Close Reading, David G. Brooks
Ambiguity, The Literary, And Close Reading, David G. Brooks
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Ambiguity, the Literary, and Close Reading" David G. Brooks approaches the matter of literary ambiguity from two directions: firstly by presenting the question of what we might learn if we look at ambiguity not so much from the angle of the author as that of the reader, a question which may appear obvious and inoffensive on the surface, but which becomes intricate and captivating as Brooks, arguing that literary ambiguity cannot be discussed without attention to the idea of close reading, peels layer upon layer of commonsensical assumptions away from reading practice, to arrive at the point …
Introduction To Ambiguity In Culture And Literature, Paolo Bartoloni, Anthony Stephens
Introduction To Ambiguity In Culture And Literature, Paolo Bartoloni, Anthony Stephens
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Silence, The Utmost In Ambiguity, Mario Perniola
Silence, The Utmost In Ambiguity, Mario Perniola
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Silence, the Utmost in Ambiguity" Mario Perniola presents a historical perspective on the meanings and development of the term "ambiguity" from ancient Greek to the modern age. Perniola's perspective is not a review of different approaches and schools of thought; instead, he presents an alternative philosophical and aesthetic discourse he counter-poses to modern and contemporary cultural positions which he considers useful in order to explain the state of today's art and intellectual discourse. Perniola does so by stressing the significance of silence as the aesthetic attitude that combines contemplation and action. Drawing on the work of Pascal …
Ambiguity Now, Martin Harrison
Ambiguity Now, Martin Harrison
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Ambiguity Now" Martin Harrison focuses on the pivotal place which modernist critical theory ascribed to ambiguity in the definition of meaning and structure in poetry. In particular, Harrison considers the way in which the category of experience is deployed in the discourse of ambiguity but is limited to only certain narratives of so-called experience. Harrison argues for a contemporary practice less focused on ambiguity and more on notation and provisional structure, demonstrating key elements of such practice in the work of modern poets Leslie Scalapino and Frank Bidart and the poet-artist Alex Selenitsch.
Ambiguity, Children, Representation, And Sexuality, Catharine Lumby
Ambiguity, Children, Representation, And Sexuality, Catharine Lumby
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Ambiguity, Children, Representation, and Sexuality" Catharine Lumby considers current and historical scholarly and popular debates about the representation of children, including concerns about their sexualisation in such representations. The article begins by examining images taken by photographers in the Victorian era, including Charles Dodgson and Julia Cameron, and asks not only how the gaze of the photographer frames the child but how the child returns the adult gaze. Lumby seeks to problematize our understanding of the ways in which images "sexualize" children. Drawing on the work of James Kincaid, it examines discourses that frame children as, on …
The Rhetoric Of Dilemma And Cavafean Ambiguity, Anthony Dracopoulos
The Rhetoric Of Dilemma And Cavafean Ambiguity, Anthony Dracopoulos
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "The Rhetoric of Dilemma and Cavafean Ambiguity" Anthony Dracopoulos examines the techniques of expression developed in Cavafy's poem "Young men of Sidon." By the beginning of the twentieth century, Cavafy, like other modernist poets, had become acutely aware of the human inability to grasp essence in its entirety and developed various techniques of expression to accommodate the polyphony of perspectives and the ambiguity inherent in modern society. The article argues that Cavafy structures a number of his poems in the form of binary oppositions or dilemmas. However, contrary to expectation, this form of expression does not aim …
Ambiguity And Morality In Jelinek's Bambiland, Andrea Bandhauer
Ambiguity And Morality In Jelinek's Bambiland, Andrea Bandhauer
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Ambiguity and Morality in Jelinek's Bambiland" Andrea Bandhauer begins by noting that the language of Elfriede Jelinek's play Bambiland (2004) is characterized by experimentation and a propensity for complex and ambiguous word plays. In this play, her critique of the media is directed against the international, or rather, Western press and its role in the Iraq war. The text of Bambiland, conceptualized as a "work-in-progress," in which Jelinek posed as an "embedded writer," started to appear on her website at the beginning of the war and Jelinek continued writing it through 2003. In the text of the …
Ambiguity, The Artist, The Masses, And The "Double Nature" Of Language, Elizabeth Rechniewski
Ambiguity, The Artist, The Masses, And The "Double Nature" Of Language, Elizabeth Rechniewski
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Ambiguity, the Artist, the Masses, and the 'Double Nature' of Language" Elizabeth Rechniewski discusses the function of the European intellectual elite through a close reading of two very different yet related books, John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses, and Pierre Bourdieu's Les Règles de l'art. Through a contrapuntal reading of the arguments of these two critics, she argues that Symbolist experiments may actually be read as reactionist; in celebrating art's supposed conquest of independence and refinement, they are replete with nostalgia for a time when the artist and the intellectual were able to ignore the pressure …
On Ambidextrousness, Or, What Is An Innovative Action?, Brett Neilson
On Ambidextrousness, Or, What Is An Innovative Action?, Brett Neilson
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "On the Ambiguity of Ambidextrousness, or, What is an Innovative Action?" Brett Neilson explores the significance of the fact that the technical equality of the hands is realized above all in the act of manual labor, revisiting an influential essay by Robert Hertz, a student of Emile Durkheim and associate of Marcel Mauss, published in 1909 and entitled "The Pre-Eminence of the Right Hand." In his text, Hertz argued that the basic spatial distinction between the left and right hand acquires the polarity of a social hierarchy owing not to the physiology or psychology of motor asymmetry …
Blanchot And Ambiguity, Paolo Bartoloni
Blanchot And Ambiguity, Paolo Bartoloni
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Blanchot and Ambiguity" Paolo Bartoloni investigates the enigmatic and ambiguous turn of the famous Blanchotian statement "existence without Being." The intention of the article is to locate Blanchot's remark in the context of a discussion on history and its possible end, famously initiated by Alexandre Kojève in a lecture on 4 December 1937 at the College of Sociology in Paris; and provide insights into the difference that distinguishes Kojève's reflection on the end of history, Bataille's subsequent interpretation of it, and Blanchot's original conceptualization of a state of being suspended between nature and culture, history and the …
Disambiguating The Sublime And The Historicity Of The Concept, Vrasidas Karalis
Disambiguating The Sublime And The Historicity Of The Concept, Vrasidas Karalis
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Disambiguating the Sublime and the Historicity of the Concept" Vrasidas Karalis explores the notion of sublime or sublimity as the field of colliding signifiers and of experiential frameworks in conflict. Instead of treating the traditional notion as a structural element of style of ideology, he analyses it from the point of its contextual validation and its very historicity: what makes sublimity emerge is the extra-lingual unease, the existential dysphoria of the world outside the text, as refracted through specific works of art. Such dysphoria is expressed through ungrammatical language or/and through the attempt in specific moments in …
The Chi Complex And Ambiguities Of Meeting, Paul Carter
The Chi Complex And Ambiguities Of Meeting, Paul Carter
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "The Chi Complex and Ambiguities of Meeting" Paul Carter develops a discussion of interpersonal encounters by mobilizing an apparatus of references, ranging from Jean Genet to Lévinas, Derrida, Bachmann, Merleau-Ponty, and Arendt. The hypothesis is that meeting another person entails and subsumes a non-meeting; a resistance and a refusal. The article pursues the ambiguity at the heart of encountering the other through an investigation of the urban spaces that are allegedly designed to invite and facilitate meetings. The argument put forward is that these spaces are paradoxically designed to avert encounters. This is especially true in the …
The Stereotyped Image Of Christ In Villiers's "Les Amants De Tolède", Graciela Susana Boruszko
The Stereotyped Image Of Christ In Villiers's "Les Amants De Tolède", Graciela Susana Boruszko
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "The Stereotyped Image of Christ in Villiers's 'Les Amants de Tolède'" Graciela Susana Boruszko discusses images in Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's text. The embedding of icons of foreign cultures, histories, and religions into a literary narrative results in a work of art enriched by the images fashioned by the "foreign eye." The narrative strategy of Villiers creates a kaleidoscopic representation of themes and images that merge the fields of religion, literature and history. These themes and images — transposed into the domain of littérature fantastique — follow the initiation of the reader to a supernatural world that …
Self Enlightenment In Woolf, Joyce, And Nietzsche, Gabriel V. Rupp
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 …
Erotic Mourning And Post-Traumatic Sexual Desire, Gila G. Ashtor
Erotic Mourning And Post-Traumatic Sexual Desire, Gila G. Ashtor
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, "Erotic Mourning and Post-traumatic Sexual Desire" Gila Ashtor investigates the ways Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 2000 memoir contains an alternative logic of affectivity that locates possibilities for mourning in the ambivalent directionalities of post-traumatic sexual desire. Ashtor links dominant conceptualizations of post-traumatic working-through and regimes of heteronormative sexual reproductivity in order to argue that Eggers's self-exhibitionistic spectacle of failed post-traumatic healing, precisely as a drama of undoing that replaces the cumulative acquisition of psychic cohesion with survival incoherent gestures, produces a version of what this paper will call "radical mourning." To particularize the …
Sapphic Consciousness In H.D. And De Noailles, Catherine O. Clark
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 …
Authorship, Collaboration, And Art Geography, Martin De La Iglesia
Authorship, Collaboration, And Art Geography, Martin De La Iglesia
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Authorship, Collaboration, and Art Geography" Martin de la Iglesia explores the connection between geographical spaces and works of art, a connection often made, but hardly theorized, by scholars in the field of art geography. He suggests that the link between space and object is established by the creator of the object. A feasible method is devised to determine the creator's geographical identity, which in turn determines which space is assigned to the object. Particularly, the implications of multiple authorship for such a methodology are considered. The procedure is exemplified by a geographical analysis of the comic book …
The Metaphysics Of Electronic Being, Michał Ostrowicki [Aka Sidey Myoo]
The Metaphysics Of Electronic Being, Michał Ostrowicki [Aka Sidey Myoo]
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "The Metaphysics of Electronic Being" Michał Ostrowicki discusses the electronic environment as a sphere of being. To this end, the notion of the "electronic sphere" is used as a subject of ontological analysis. Ostrowicki postulates that the problematics of the electronic sphere represents a part of ontology and designates it as "ontoelectronics." He makes a distinction made between an electronic image and an electronic being, thus indicating that they differ from each other in their existential status and thereby deny any metaphysical equivalence between the two. This distinction between an electronic image and an electronic being is …
Japanese Science Fiction And Conceptions Of The (Human) Subject, Maria Poulaki
Japanese Science Fiction And Conceptions Of The (Human) Subject, Maria Poulaki
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Japanese Science Fiction and Conceptions of the (Human) Subject" Maria Poulaki discusses the crisis that almost all essentialist categorizations have been facing in late modernity, in the context of which science fiction texts offer fertile ground to investigate the transitions brought about with the intensified invasion of the "human self" by its "nonhuman other." The analysis of a Japanese science fiction film draws a seemingly paradoxical connection between the Japanese version of modernity and self-identity with the relevant "Western" articulations found in the work of Bruno Latour and Alain Badiou. This connection points at a broader re-conceptualization …
Gender In Winterson's Sexing The Cherry, Paul Kintzele
Gender In Winterson's Sexing The Cherry, Paul Kintzele
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Gender in Winterson's Sexing the Cherry" Paul Kintzele examines the ways in which Jeanette Winterson's 1989 novel explores and critiques aspects of gender and sexuality. While acknowledging the importance of the performance theory of gender that derives from the work of Judith Butler, Kintzele contends that such an approach must be complemented with a psychoanalytic approach that insists on a particular distinction between sex and gender. Although some scholars map the sex/gender distinction onto the perennial nature/nurture binary and thus reduce sex to biology or anatomy, scholars of psychoanalysis such as Joan Copjec and Charles Shepherdson, read …
Mahfouz Between Lukácsian And Brechtian Approaches To Realism, David F. Dimeo
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 …
About Intermedialities: A Review Article Of New Work By Paech And Schröter, Chapple And Kattenbelt, And Ellerström, Arno Gimber, Asunción López-Varela Azcárate
About Intermedialities: A Review Article Of New Work By Paech And Schröter, Chapple And Kattenbelt, And Ellerström, Arno Gimber, Asunción López-Varela Azcárate
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
A Consilient Science And Humanities In Mcewan's Enduring Love, Curtis D. Carbonell
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 …
Do Medieval And Renaissance Androids Presage The Posthuman?, Kevin Lagrandeur
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. …
Photography In Wang's Chang Hen Ge (The Song Of Everlasting Sorrow), Hong Zeng
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 …
Nationhood And Women In Postcolonial African Literature, Elda Hungwe, Chipo Hungwe
Nationhood And Women In Postcolonial African Literature, Elda Hungwe, Chipo Hungwe
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In their article "Nationhood and Women in Postcolonial African Literature" Elda Hungwe and Chipo Hungwe, through an analysis of Pepetela's Mayombe, Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah, and Ngugi's Petals of Blood discuss nationhood and nation in postcolonial African literature within the framework of the postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory negates master narratives of nation and nationhood, hence it deconstructs such narratives as problematic. Hungwe and Hungwe discuss problems associated with definitions of nation where groups or members are peripheralized. While Hungwe and Hungwe acknowledge that nationalism served a critical role during decolonization, their conclusion is that in postcolonial Africa notions of …
Pain And Mourning In Vogel's Baltimore Waltz And Lavery's Last Easter, Catalina Florina Florescu
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 …
Nordestina Modernity In The Novels Of Freitas, Queiroz, And Lispector, Fernanda Patricia Fuentes Muñoz
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 …
Modernizing The Colonial Labor Subject In India, Valerian Desousa
Modernizing The Colonial Labor Subject In India, Valerian Desousa
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Modernizing the Colonial Labor Subject in India" Valerian DeSousa discusses how the colonial project in India sought to counter the labor movement's evolving anti-colonial consciousness through law, the primary signifier of British dominance. DeSousa argues that colonial labor law was an instrument of "governmentality," a way of deploying the authority of the state, both in India and in Africa where the law encoded meanings of property and subjectivity. In India, labor law was the means to "reconstruct" the "traditional" worker and to constitute a "modern" and "efficient" labor subject to fit into the new industrial vision taking …
Aesthetics, Nationalism, And The Image Of Woman In Modern Indian Art, Kedar Vishwanathan
Aesthetics, Nationalism, And The Image Of Woman In Modern Indian Art, Kedar Vishwanathan
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Aesthetics, Nationalism, and the Image of Woman in Modern Indian Art" Kedar Vishwanathan discusses how developments in visual culture impacted India's configuration as nation. Between 1880-1945 in Bombay (Mumbai) and Calcutta (Kolkata) a burgeoning visual culture developed in service of anti-colonial nationalism. Used as a method to imagine a nation free of colonial rule, in particular images of women proliferated in private and public spaces. Crucial to this development was the reformulations of modernity based on an ambivalent combination of British and Indian vernacular art. Vishwanathan focuses on how the female was appropriated for the cause of …