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Articles 181 - 210 of 667

Full-Text Articles in American Studies

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.


Poetry In Response To The “Disengagement Plan”: Identity, Poetics And Politics, Tamar Wolf-Monzon Apr 2020

Poetry In Response To The “Disengagement Plan”: Identity, Poetics And Politics, Tamar Wolf-Monzon

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article will examine the corpus of poems written in the years 2004-2005, in response to the Israeli government’s Disengagement plan that unilaterally evacuated all Israeli communities from Gush Katif in the southern Gaza Strip. These poems are explored as a political speech act, whose purpose is to bring about an extra-linguistic outcome: to impact upon the feelings and thoughts of the addressees, as well as to influence them in relation to issues of identity and social affiliation. Indeed, these poems are part of a long and complex tradition of Hebrew political poetry, characterized not only by a response to …


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 …


A Thin Line Between Sovereign And Abject Agents: Global Action Thrillers With The Sci-Fi Mind-Game War On Terror, Seung-Hoon Jeong Feb 2020

A Thin Line Between Sovereign And Abject Agents: Global Action Thrillers With The Sci-Fi Mind-Game War On Terror, Seung-Hoon Jeong

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Seung-hoon Jeong discusses in his paper global action thrillers about the war on terror. He highlights the biopolitical abjection of counterterrorist agents from their state agencies. This abjection ends up either self-reaffirming in the manner of a sovereign agent (the Bond series) or terrorizing their sovereign system (the Bourne series), while both are trapped in the vicious cycle of terror and counterterror. More notable is the “mind-game” sci-fi genre. Source Code, among others, stages a loop of a traumatic counterterrorist mission with retroactive causality, a closed circuit of neoliberal productivity and pathological abjection in a video-game narrative. The time-travel …


"The Headwaters Of A River Of Failure": Detroit As An Icon Of American Decline, Jae H. Roe Feb 2020

"The Headwaters Of A River Of Failure": Detroit As An Icon Of American Decline, Jae H. Roe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay analyzes films (8 Mile, Gran Torino, It Follows) and television series (Hung, Low Winter Sun) that use the setting of Detroit to depict characters who are dealing with deteriorating socioeconomic conditions and whose choices and relationships reflect their difficulties in, and anxieties about, adjusting to such conditions. While the familiar icons of Detroit's decline appear in all of these texts, the narratives evolve from working class realism to satire and ultimately horror, or from anxieties about white working class displacement to the displacement of such anxieties. The history of Detroit illustrates the complex ways …


Monstrous Accumulation: Topographies Of Fear In An Era Of Globalization, Robert T. Tally Jr. Feb 2020

Monstrous Accumulation: Topographies Of Fear In An Era Of Globalization, Robert T. Tally Jr.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The predominance of the horror genre, broadly conceived, in recent years attests to the profound sense of anxiety and dread permeating late capitalist societies. As the processes and effects of globalization become more viscerally experienced, they are also often rendered invisible or unknowable, and individuals and groups find themselves subject to an immense array of forces beyond their control. The contemporary scene is crowded with monsters, from alien invaders to the zombie apocalypse, set against the backdrop of darkly fantastic landscapes and dystopian visions. Drawing upon a variety of Marxist cultural theory, Robert T. Tally Jr. explores the topographies of …


Introduction To The Monstrous Global: The Effects Of Globalization On Cultures, Ju Young Jin, Jae Roe Feb 2020

Introduction To The Monstrous Global: The Effects Of Globalization On Cultures, Ju Young Jin, Jae Roe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This special issue on “The Monstrous Global: The Effects of Globalization on Cultures” explores representations of the monstrous effects and products of globalization. The monstrous (as in The Monstrous Feminine by Barbara Creed) in this sense alludes to the ways in which local or national displays of fear and anxiety about the Other are embedded in struggles and tensions of global scale; the inability to cognitively map the effect of such global forces on local/national problems produces monstrous representations of the global. Global forces such as neoliberalism and reactionary nationalism, technology, climate change, migration and displacement lead to accelerating instability …


A Deconstructive Reading Of Taoist Influenced Chinese And American Poetry, Hong Zeng Feb 2020

A Deconstructive Reading Of Taoist Influenced Chinese And American Poetry, Hong Zeng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “A Deconstructive Reading of Taoist Influenced Chinese and American Poetry” Hong Zeng attempts to deconstruct the logos status of "Nature" in Chinese natural philosophy and explore the tragic potentiality of such philosophy and poetry under its influence. It also analyzes its aesthetic strategies used to overcome historical tragedy, and how such tragic potentiality in classical Chinese philosophy and poetry break out into the imagery of death and fragmentation in modern Chinese and American poetry under its influence, including poetry by such poets as Hai Zi, Gu Cheng, Robert Bly and Wallace Stevens, and how it sometimes leads …


The Goddess Of Love In Sadomasochistic Costume: Roman Polanski's Venus In Fur, Alan P. Barr Feb 2020

The Goddess Of Love In Sadomasochistic Costume: Roman Polanski's Venus In Fur, Alan P. Barr

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Throughout his career as a filmmaker, Roman Polanski has circled the subject of sex, its aberrations, its delights, and its risks. His twenty feature films are remarkably varied, yet characteristically probe the compelling, contradictory, and enchanting nature of human sexual behavior. He develops a cluster of images or tropes that appear across his films—from knives to claustrophobic settings—that advance his enquiry. Venus in Fur is Polanski’s most comprehensive portrayal of the intricacies of sexual conduct, employing a theatrical setting (rehearsing an adaptation of a notorious classic novel), amplified with cultural allusions and exploring the limits of role-playing. Normality and contentment, …


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 …


Weaving Social Change(S) Or Changes Of Weaving? The Ethnographic Study Of Andean Textiles In Cusco And Bolivia, Cristian Terry Dec 2019

Weaving Social Change(S) Or Changes Of Weaving? The Ethnographic Study Of Andean Textiles In Cusco And Bolivia, Cristian Terry

Artl@s Bulletin

Through a comparative and multi-sited ethnography in Cusco (Peru) and Bolivia, the article shows how, by mobilizing Andean textiles, local actors are weaving social change(s) while also changing the way of weaving. These two ideas are interwoven: 1) Andean textiles contribute to local population to weave social change(s) by bringing alternative economic opportunities; 2) weaving practices are changing, since new fashionable, industrial, and “hybrid” production has been created and adapted to an urban-oriented/tourist-oriented market which provides money to make the social change(s) possible.


How U.S. Government Policy Documents Are Addressing The Increasing National Security Implications Of Artificial Intelligence, Bert Chapman Oct 2019

How U.S. Government Policy Documents Are Addressing The Increasing National Security Implications Of Artificial Intelligence, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Artificial intelligence is affecting many areas of our lives and governmental policy. National security is one arena in which artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly important and controversial role. U.S. Government and military agencies are producing a steadily expanding corpus of publicly available literature on this topic. This literature documents how these agencies have this topic's national security implications historically and currently while also addressing potentially emerging national security issues where artificial intelligence will intersect with national security. This presentation demonstrates examples of the growing variety of publicly available national security artificial intelligence literature while also addressing the implications of …


Linguistic Ideologies In The Performance Of Bulgarian Identity, Chelsey Norman Sep 2019

Linguistic Ideologies In The Performance Of Bulgarian Identity, Chelsey Norman

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

Since the end of Communism in 1989 and joining the European Union in 2007, Bulgarians have experienced much greater mobility and access to the global community. Despite this more global perspective, Bulgarians maintain a strong sense of national identity. Given this interplay between global and national identities, Bulgaria is an apt location to conduct this ideological research. Using a combination of ethnographic observations (June-July 2018) and semi-structured interviews with bilingual Bulgarians in Sofia, this study examines how large-scale phenomena like nationalism and globalization are found in the micro-scale interactional construction of identity. Results show that a great deal of ideological …


The Acquisition Of Diminutives In Moroccan Heritage Speakers In France, Amal El Haimeur Sep 2019

The Acquisition Of Diminutives In Moroccan Heritage Speakers In France, Amal El Haimeur

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

This study addresses the acquisition of diminutive forms by Moroccan heritage speakers in France. Diminutive formation depends on stem modification. 15 Moroccan-French participants took part in this study. In a production experiment, participants were asked to form diminutives for 6 types of stems, since the stem type determines the diminutive pattern. The findings of this study show that the mean percentage of source-like use of the diminutive forms is 38%. The results revealed that just two patterns that were acquired by a significant number of participants: CCiCa and CCiCjCjəC. Diminutive forms that do not require complex processes are acquired by …


Exploring The Emotional Language In The Twilight Novel As A Literary Discourse: An Appraisal Theory Analysis, Susan Ataei Sep 2019

Exploring The Emotional Language In The Twilight Novel As A Literary Discourse: An Appraisal Theory Analysis, Susan Ataei

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

Emotions have always been a mysterious realm of human beings gaining an understanding of which requires the collaboration of scholars from multiple disciplines. This study employed the Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005) of evaluations and emotions to explore the manifestation of emotions in a popular modern prose fiction, the first book of the twilight series by Stephenie Meyer (2009) - Twilight. The objective of the study was to gain a deep understanding of how a bestselling literary prose fiction, Twilight, employs human emotions, and thus “affect”, to impose its “effect” on the reader. I applied the affect sub-system of …


Optimizing L2 Vocabulary Acquisition: Applied Linguistic Research, George H. Borawski Sep 2019

Optimizing L2 Vocabulary Acquisition: Applied Linguistic Research, George H. Borawski

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

Any acquisition in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) starts as word recognition; as such vocabulary acquisition is integral to language learning as a whole and is a precursor to fluent communication (Ellis, 1996; Moore, 1996). To maximize SLA, vocabulary acquisition must be optimized. However, vocabulary acquisition is understudied and underutilized, especially compared to other aspects of SLA (Paribakht & Wesche, 1997). Cook states, “…the vast bulk of examinations, syllabuses, and course books around the globe show little overt influence from SLA research” (1998, p.10). Courses, teachers, and students would benefit from directly addressing SLA research, rather than utilize inefficient methods (Cook, …


Ellipsis In Iraqi Arabic: An Analysis Of Gapping, Sluicing, And Stripping, Saja Albuarabi Sep 2019

Ellipsis In Iraqi Arabic: An Analysis Of Gapping, Sluicing, And Stripping, Saja Albuarabi

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

The purpose of this paper is to explore the syntax of ellipsis in Iraqi Arabic. The paper sheds light on three types of ellipsis in Arabic and English, namely: sluicing, gapping, and stripping and puts each of them in a comparison between Iraqi Arabic and English languages in addition to Arabic dialects. To the best of my knowledge, these elliptical structures have not been studied in Iraqi Arabic before. Therefore, this study offers the first description of these phenomena from a generative standpoint. The paper argues that the three types of ellipsis mentioned above can be the result of Phonological …


"A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words, And So Is An Emojis 🙂" Emojisfication Of Language: A Pragmatic Analysis Of Facebook Discourse, Alienna Kazmi, Arooj Rana, Uzma Anjum, Madiha Khan Sep 2019

"A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words, And So Is An Emojis 🙂" Emojisfication Of Language: A Pragmatic Analysis Of Facebook Discourse, Alienna Kazmi, Arooj Rana, Uzma Anjum, Madiha Khan

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

This research study aims to examine language change occurring in written discourse due to increase in the usage of emojis and the way emojis, in comparison to words, are performing communicative functions on social media platforms such as Facebook. The study focused on Pakistani Facebook users. For the study, Facebook is one of the most authentic social media platforms because 71.75 % (Internet Word Stat) of Pakistani internet users use Facebook which is the highest statistics among all social media applications. In order to investigate the recent language change and communicative functions performed by emojis, we utilized Speech act theory …


Memories Of Life On The Farm: Through The Lens Of Pioneer Photographer J. C. Allen, Frederick Whitford, Neal Harmeyer Sep 2019

Memories Of Life On The Farm: Through The Lens Of Pioneer Photographer J. C. Allen, Frederick Whitford, Neal Harmeyer

The Founders Series

John Calvin Allen, professionally known as J. C., worked as a photographer for Purdue University from 1909-1952, and operated his own photography business until his death in 1976. The J. C. Allen photographs represent a historical account of the transition from pioneer practices to scientific methodologies in agriculture and rural communities. During this major transitional period for agriculture, tractors replaced horses, hybrid corn supplanted open-pollinated corn, and soybeans changed from a novelty crop to regular rotation on most farms. During this time, purebred animals with better genetic pedigrees replaced run-of-the-mill livestock, and systematic disease prevention in cattle, swine, and poultry …


Bibliography On Suffering, Simon C. Estok Sep 2019

Bibliography On Suffering, Simon C. Estok

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


The Suffering Joker And The Cruel Joke: Nabokov's And Bellow's Dark Laughter, Gerald David Naughton, Yulia Pushkarevskaya Naughton Sep 2019

The Suffering Joker And The Cruel Joke: Nabokov's And Bellow's Dark Laughter, Gerald David Naughton, Yulia Pushkarevskaya Naughton

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article interrogates the interrelationship between cruelty, suffering, and laughter in novels by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, positing an affective reading of how bodies that suffer come to produce laughter as a confounding, unexpected, and at times inappropriate readerly affect. Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark and Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King both explore suffering as a form of excessive somatic cruelty inflicted on protagonists who, in experiencing such punishment, engender a strange, troubling, and potentially transformative form of laughter. In order to bring together a discussion of the body, suffering, cruelty, and laughter in Nabokov and Bellow, the essay …


Domestic Trauma And Imperial Pessimism: The Crisis At Home In Charles Dickens’S Dombey And Son, Katherine E. Ostdiek Sep 2019

Domestic Trauma And Imperial Pessimism: The Crisis At Home In Charles Dickens’S Dombey And Son, Katherine E. Ostdiek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Domestic Trauma and Imperial Pessimism: The Crisis At Home in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son,” Katherine Ostdiek discusses Dickens’s representation of violence, grief, and recovery within the Victorian home as a pre-Freudian example of trauma. This comparison not only demonstrates the importance of trauma studies in the nineteenth-century, but more importantly, it thematically focuses empathy for the traumatized on the home. In this novel, Dickens dismisses topics related to the financial and social crises of mid-century Britain in favor of domestic themes that emphasize an idealized structure of the Victorian family. Through her use of trauma theory and …


Suffering And Climate Change Narratives, Simon C. Estok Sep 2019

Suffering And Climate Change Narratives, Simon C. Estok

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Suffering and Climate Change Narratives" Simon C. Estok begins with a brief survey of definitional issues involved with the term “suffering” and argues that there has been a relative lack of theoretical attention to suffering in climate change narratives, whether literary or within mainstream media. Estok shows that suffering, far from being singular, is a multivalent concept that is gendered, classed, raced, and, perhaps above all, pliable. It has social functions. One of the primary reasons for the failure of climate change narratives to effect real changes, Estok argues, is that they often carry the functions of …


The Punctum In History: Representing The M(Other)’S Death In Peter Handke’S A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Hivren Demir Atay Sep 2019

The Punctum In History: Representing The M(Other)’S Death In Peter Handke’S A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Hivren Demir Atay

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article aims to discuss how Handke’s autobiographical narrative, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972), stages the writer’s literary project through a neutral account of his mother’s suicide. Telling the story of his mother, who witnessed the Second World War and the nazi regime, Handke narrates the traumatic history of an Austrian town along with his own suffering. Concentrating on his attempt at a distanced language and his questioning of history as an objective fact, the article suggests that Handke’s perception of death and mourning parallels his understanding of the acts of writing and reading. Drawing particularly on Barthes’s concept …


The Different Representation Of Suffering In The Two Versions Of The Vegetarian, Young-Hyun Lee Sep 2019

The Different Representation Of Suffering In The Two Versions Of The Vegetarian, Young-Hyun Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “The Different Representation of Suffering in the two versions of The Vegetarian” the author examines how different the representation of suffering in the original and translated versions of The Vegetarian and explores the reasons for this difference. The author in particular refers to representative episodes which the translator’s strategy distorts even the central concepts of suffering in the original work. Her translated version results in critical misrepresentation of suffering and violence in the original version.


Salam Neighbor: Syrian Refugees Through The Camera Lens, Lava Asaad Sep 2019

Salam Neighbor: Syrian Refugees Through The Camera Lens, Lava Asaad

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper examines the documentary Salam Neighbor (2015), which celebrates the will of Syrian refugee women who are displaced in Jordan. The collective experience of the refugees portrayed in the documentary solicits a reaction from the Western viewer. To counteract the images of refugees in the media, documentaries can be a good alternative for mass media, which has been perpetuating a binary of the West and the Rest. The argument tackles the issue of this new representation of refugees in documentaries within a postcolonial paradigm of how we represent or speak to/with the Other in our technological age, as well …


Introduction To Suffering, Endurance, Understanding: New Discourses Within Philosophy And Literature, Douglas S. Berman Sep 2019

Introduction To Suffering, Endurance, Understanding: New Discourses Within Philosophy And Literature, Douglas S. Berman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Literature is generally seen as depicting the lives of human subjects through their unique narratives. And that, while its endpoint may be universal, it is typically grounded in the specificity of a human being (or, occasionally, an animal). Philosophy is tasked with providing the foundational cognitive tools to grasp the meaning of experience for the whole. In Hegelian terms, it unfolds the history of the concept. Yet, as George Steiner, Jacques Derrida, and other recent authors have shown, both philosophy – along with its agonistic cousin, religion -- evoke literary themes, rhetorics, and struggles. Over the past fifty years, Continental …


Violence, Suffering, And Social Introspection: James Baldwin's Another Country, Hollis Druhet Aug 2019

Violence, Suffering, And Social Introspection: James Baldwin's Another Country, Hollis Druhet

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

This research examines and expands on the critical outlook concerning the scope and function of identity in the literature of James Baldwin. Looking at Another Country specifically, the essay expounds on the universality of oppressive conditions shown to operate across factors of race, gender, and sexuality. Critical discussion has largely focused on Baldwin’s construction of male identities and sexual experiences; this essay argues for the importance of the novel’s female psychological depictions and how these character profiles operate in relation to male profiles. A significant universal aspect considered is the visibility of trauma: how its appearance communicates repressed pain and …