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Full-Text Articles in American Studies

Tituba, “Dark Eve” In The Origins Of The American Myth: The Subject Of History And Writing About Salem, Junghyun Hwang Feb 2022

Tituba, “Dark Eve” In The Origins Of The American Myth: The Subject Of History And Writing About Salem, Junghyun Hwang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Recasting the Salem witchcraft trials in light of Walter Benjamin’s theses on historiography, this paper revisits the question of history by examining ways in which Tituba is dis/con-figured as the subject of American history in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. Both stories of persecution revolve around the figure of Tituba, a slave from the Caribbean to whom the beginning of the witch trials is attributed, as the nodal point of different modes of representing the Salem history. The telos in Miller’s drama coincides with the subject-formation of Proctor as the legitimate …


The Others (2001) By Alejandro Amenábar In The Light Of Valentinian Thought, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski Feb 2020

The Others (2001) By Alejandro Amenábar In The Light Of Valentinian Thought, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The article offers a Valentinian interpretation of the Hollywood film The Others (2001). A particular attention is paid to the ways in which cinematic motifs and narrative elements of the film draw on myths, ideas and symbolic imagery present in Valentinian works, especially in the Gospel of Truth (NHC I, 3) and the Gospel of Philip (NHC II, 3). In the course of the heuristic analysis, the paper argues that although the film employs Valentinian ideas, it depicts different understanding of the world. This issue is addressed in the last part of the article by situating the film within broader …


Age Troubles, Emotional Labor, And Roz Chast’S Can’T We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Shu-Li Chang Dec 2018

Age Troubles, Emotional Labor, And Roz Chast’S Can’T We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Shu-Li Chang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In the article "Age Troubles, Emotional Labor, and Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?," Shu-li Chang examines the medium—comics—Roz Chast uses to give expressions to the emotional labor involved in caregiving. The first section reads closely the Introduction of Chast’s memoir to set the stage for a critical engagement with Chast’s innovative use of comics to critique the discourse of positive aging. The next section examines the double movement of the emotional labor of caregiving: what moves the caregiving subject and how she is moved into thought. The article concludes by proposing, in the final section, …


Transnational Uses Of Mafia Imagery In Zadie Smith’S White Teeth, Andrea Ciribuco Dec 2017

Transnational Uses Of Mafia Imagery In Zadie Smith’S White Teeth, Andrea Ciribuco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Transnational Uses of Mafia Imagery in Zadie Smith's White Teeth" Andrea Ciribuco discusses the literary representation of multiculturalism in Zadie Smith's first novel, White Teeth (2000). The novel focuses on multicultural encounters in Great Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. This article focuses on one site for these encounters: the character of Millat Iqbal, who joins a gang of teenagers and subsequently a radical Islamic group in his problematic search for identity and belonging. This search is characterized by Millat's tendency to define himself by reference to well-known pop-cultural Mafia figures, whom he …


The Impact Of Burroughs's Naked Lunch On Chester's The Exquisite Corpse, Jaap Van Der Bent Dec 2016

The Impact Of Burroughs's Naked Lunch On Chester's The Exquisite Corpse, Jaap Van Der Bent

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Impact of Burroughs's Naked Lunch on Chester's The Exquisite Corpse" Jaap van der Bent posits that although Alfred Chester was critical of most Beat writing, in Tangier in the early 1960s he associated not only with Paul Bowles, but also with William S. Burroughs. Van der Bent argues that The Exquisite Corpse, the experimental novel Chester wrote in Tangier, shows the influence of the city's geography and especially the content and form of Burroughs's Naked Lunch.


The Cultural Translation Of Ginsberg's Howl In Turkey, Erik Mortenson Dec 2016

The Cultural Translation Of Ginsberg's Howl In Turkey, Erik Mortenson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Cultural Translation of Ginsberg's Howl in Turkey" Erik Mortenson examines three Turkish translations of Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl in order to explore the ways in which Ginsberg's poem becomes redeployed in new cultural contexts. Orhan Duru and Ferit Edgü's 1976 translation presents a more politicized Ginsberg that draws on his anti-establishment credentials as a social activist. This comes as little surprise, since in pre-1980 coup Turkey rebellion was thought in purely political terms of right verses left. Hakan Arslan's 1991 update provides a less political and more familiar Ginsberg, in keeping with a society that left …


Mapping Memory In Tran’S Vietnamerica, Mary A. Goodwin Sep 2015

Mapping Memory In Tran’S Vietnamerica, Mary A. Goodwin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Mapping Memory in Tran's Vietnamerica" Mary Goodwin explores the use of maps, landscape paintings, and other topographic images in Gia-Bao Tran's graphic memoir chronicling the "postmemory" of the US-American son of wartime refugees. Tran's family immigrated to the United States in 1975 following the fall of Saigon. Tran knew nothing of his parents' hardships and struggle to escape Vietnam until he returned for relatives' funerals in his 20s. Similar to Spiegelman's Maus, Vietnamerica is a mixed-media memoir containing photographs, maps, and comics in various styles. Following Hirsch's lead in demonstrating the special historical value of photographs …


New Challenges For The Archiving Of Digital Writing, Heiko Zimmermann Dec 2014

New Challenges For The Archiving Of Digital Writing, Heiko Zimmermann

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "New Challenges for the Archiving of Digital Writing" Heiko Zimmermann discusses the challenges of the preservation of digital texts. In addition to the problems already at the focus of attention of digital archivists, there are elements in digital literature which need to be taken into consideration when trying to archive them. Zimmermann analyses two works of digital literature, the collaborative writing project A Million Penguins (2006-2007) and Renée Tuner's She… (2008) and shows how the ontology of these texts is bound to elements of performance, to direct social interaction of writers and readers to the uniquely subjective …