American Studies Commons^™

Suffering And Coping In The Novels Of Anne Tyler, Camden Story Hastings

Honors Theses

Through an exploration of the causes of the characters' suffering and their mechanisms for coping, this thesis shows that by developing the perseverance necessary to navigate ordinary, everyday obstacles, Tyler's characters cope with extraordinary circumstances causing them pain. They also realize that victories in the little things lead to discoveries about themselves and the sources of their distress. The six novels discussed here include The Accidental Tourist, Saint Maybe, The Beginner's Goodbye, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ladder of Years, and Breathing Lessons. Nine major characters from these six novels are explored and, while various causes lead to their individual …

In Another Day: The Historical And Cultural Relevance Of Gone With The Wind, Cody Rentz

Honors Theses

Although it was a massive success in its time and won a Pulitzer Prize, critics today tend to discard Gone with the Wind as a piece of low-quality, racist, historically inaccurate literature. However, the novel, through no intent of its author, parallels the Great Depression in many ways, a fact that likely contributed to its popularity. As such, the novel can be a useful tool in studying the culture of the 1930s. To study the cultural connections, I began by reading the novel, watching the film, and speculating as to the connections to Depression-era culture. I then researched the author, …

Chapter Four Of Overcoming Adversities: Resilience In Rural Southeastern Montana, Kristie Knows-His-Gun, Rodger K. Bufford, Winston Seegobin

Faculty Publications - Doctor of Psychology (PsyD) Program

The current study evaluated the amount of adverse childhood experiences the employees of St. Labre Indian School, St. Charles Mission School, and · Pretty Eagle Catholic School (collectively called St. Labre) experienced, along with their religious functioning, and current levels of resilience. We will examine childhood adversity, spiritual wellbeing, and resilience, in turn, and then will address overall conclusions.

Research Brief: "Suicides In The Military: The Post-Modern Combat Veteran And The Hemingway Effect", Institute For Veterans And Military Families At Syracuse University

Institute for Veterans and Military Families

This brief is about current suicide prevention interventions within the military. In policy and practice, practitioners should monitor the wellness of aging veterans and ensure that a support system exists for their veteran patients, while veterans should participate in social events with other veterans; the VA and DoD should implement programs to ensure that veterans have feelings of belongingness and the VA should monitor veterans' well-being for 2-3 years after service during transitions. Suggestions for future research include examining the communities and veteran service organizations that produce the most useful support for veterans with mental health problems.

Fred Kabotie, Elizabeth Willis Dehuff, And The Genesis Of The Santa Fe Style, Jessica W. Welton

Theses and Dissertations

Those scholars who have overlooked the relevance of Fred Kabotie and the Santa Fe Style he developed have missed an important historical segment of early Native American painting. This dissertation underscores the convergence of diverse intellectual, artistic and cultural backgrounds, especially those of Kabotie and Elizabeth Willis DeHuff, his first art teacher, which led to the formation of the Santa Fe Style in 1918. This style was formative for Dorothy Dunn’s later Studio School at the Santa Fe Indian Boarding School.

This first generation of the Santa Fe Style of watercolor painting was empowered by highly educated men and women, …

Rhetorical Ripples: The Church Of The Subgenius, Kenneth Burke & Comic, Symbolic Tinkering, Lee A. Carleton

Theses and Dissertations

Humor has long been an effective way to engage difficult sociopolitical topics in a way that avoids polemical confrontation and provides opportunity for pleasure, catharsis and self-knowledge. In the context of today’s polarized politics and protest, creative satirical performance that deploys “symbolic tinkering” can provide a “comic frame of reference” that, according to Kenneth Burke, more effectively conveys its message while providing reflexive insight. The satirical Church of the SubGenius naturally practices this rhetorical frame in their multimedia creations. Using the lens of Burke’s Attitudes Toward History, this essay is an analysis of SubGenius rhetoric with a focus on …

The China Dream And The American Dream, William A. Callahan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Since Xi Jinping invoked “The China Dream” as a key concept in November 2012, this phrase has come to dominate discussions of China’s future. This paper will examine the China dream phenomenon first by placing it in the context of debates that have been raging in Chinese civil society over the past few years. It will analyze the works of 20 prominent “China dreamers” in terms of debates over the proper relationship between (1) politics and economics, (2) equality and hierarchy, (3) civilization and civility, and (4) nationalism and statism. The other main context for the China dream concept is …

On World Literatures, Comparative Literature, And (Comparative) Cultural Studies, Ning Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "On World Literatures, Comparative Literature, and (Comparative) Cultural Studies" Ning Wang argues that cultural studies is characterized by being opposed to (elite) literary studies not only because it points to popular or non-elite literature, but also because it challenges the discipline of comparative literature. On the other hand, (comparative) cultural studies complements literary studies in that it contributes a great deal to the reconstruction of a sort of new comparative literature. Wang illustrates how some of the representative Anglo-American comparatists are now doing cultural criticism while still engaging in comparative literature and they paved the way for …

Interdisciplinary Studies And Comparative Literature In China And The West, Aaron Lee Moore

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Interdisciplinary Studies and Comparative Literature in China and the West" Aaron Lee Moore addresses the arguments on the part of Chinese and Western scholars against and for the full inclusion of interdisciplinary studies within the discipline of comparative literature. Interdisciplinary studies, in general, have been resisted in Chinese scholarship as it once was in the U.S. and other Western countries. Moore discusses the major Chinese arguments for and against interdisciplinary studies in general and interdisciplinary studies within comparative literature. Moore's main argument is that the study of literature by necessity must always cross disciplinary boundaries and the …

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 …

Introduction To New Work About World Literatures, Graciela Boruszko, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

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 …

Positive Uncertainty And The Ethos Of Comparative Literature, Brigitte Le Juez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Positive Uncertainty and the Ethos of Comparative Literature" Brigitte Le Juez examines the continuous difficulty comparatists have with the lack of definition of the discipline and explores possible new avenues for tackling the problem. Le Juez argues that "uncertainty" recognized as a tenet of comparative literature should not be unheeded, but embraced in order to shift the focus from the idea that comparative objects and methods are the defining elements of the discipline and envisage them as the aims and results of an ethos. Le Juez posits that when "indiscipline" and "serendipity" are added to the notion …

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.

Introduction To New Work In Comparative Literature In Europe, Lucia Boldrini, Marina Grishakova, Matthew Reynolds

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Multilingual Literature, Translation, And Crnjanski's Роман О Лондону (A Novel About London), Biljana Djorić Francuski

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Multilingual Literature, Translation, and Crnjanski's Роман о Лондону (A Novel about London)" Biljana Djorić Francuski discusses aspects of the translation of multilingual texts. Although xenisms (words in foreign languages) can often be translated and yet preserved as a part of code mixing, it is difficult to transpose what are known as nonce loans. A further obstacle arises when the author of the multilingual text is such an artist of subtle allusion that the dominant language is pervaded with words and phrases transferred from other languages so that they gain meanings which differ from the expected ones. Djorić …

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.

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) …

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.

Adiga's The White Tiger As World Bank Literature, Abdullah M. Al-Dagamseh

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Adiga's The White Tiger as World Bank Literature" Abdullah M. Al-Dagamseh reads Aravind Adiga's novel within the context of global neoliberal capitalism, especially as radical neoliberal reforms took root in India in 1991. Al-Dagamseh argues that The White Tiger read as world bank literature provides critiques of the globally hegemonic discourses of success story narratives by exposing the contradictions of different, but overlapping facets of neoliberal ideology. Further, Al-Dagamseh demonstrates that the novel serves to reveal the contradiction between mythical global narratives and the reality and nature of "success" and "development" achieved through violence, crime, and destruction …

African Literatures And Border Issues, Chimdi Maduagwu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "African Literatures and Border Issues" Chimdi Maduagwu posits that borders or boundaries are constructions which have social and symbolic implications and that they are also relevant in a variety of social processes versus class stratification. Modern Africa is a political construction from European colonialism and what we have today as countries of Africa were closely knit nation states (which colonialists identified as tribes) who had their distinct features. However, the advent of colonialism tore into the original nation state structure based on given ethnic relationships and in its place constructed sovereign states or countries, which only considered …

Comparativist Imagology And The Phenomenon Of Strangeness, Małgorzata Świderska

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Comparativist Imagology and the Phenomenon of Strangeness" Małgorzata Świderska presents an imagological-hermeneutic conception of the interpretation of national, ethnic, and/or (inter)cultural strangeness in literary works. Świderska develops her concept of comparativist imagology from the work of Paul Ricoeur's concept of multiple étrangeté and from the work of Jean-Marc Moura. Świderska applies her conceptualization of comparativist imagology to Heimito von Doderer's "Divertimento No I" and Das letzte Abenteuer. Ein Ritter-Roman.

Worlding Literatures Between Dialogue And Hegemony, Marko Juvan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Worlding Literatures between Dialogue and Hegemony" Marko Juvan claims that during its late capitalist renaissance, the Goethean idea of Weltliteratur is interpreted either in terms of intercultural dialogism or hegemony embodied in the asymmetrical structure of the world literary system. Launching the concept of Weltliteratur during the emergence of the early industrial globalization, Goethe initiated a long-lasting transnational meta-discourse that influenced the development of transnational literary practices. In his aristocratic, cosmopolitan humanism, Goethe expected world literature to open up an equal dialogue between civilizations and languages encouraging cross-national networking of the educated elite. However, his notion of …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Precarious Cosmopolitanism In O'Neill's Netherland And Mpe's Welcome To Our Hillbrow, Pier Paolo Frassinelli, David Watson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Precarious Cosmopolitanism in O'Neill's Netherland and Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow" Pier Paolo Frassinelli and David Watson propose a comparative reading of two twenty-first century novels in light of recent debates on cosmopolitanism and precarity. They examine cosmopolitan articulations within a novel dealing with immigrant communities in post-9/11 New York and within a text narrating life in the metropolis of Johannesburg. Both Netherland and Welcome to Our Hillbrow are preoccupied with economic and political precarity in cosmopolitan cities and offer a rich inventory of forms of cosmopolitan desire rooted in modes of life. By aligning and …

A Survey Of Twentieth-Century Literary Theory And Criticism In Chinese, Xiaoming Chen, Anfeng Sheng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "A Survey of Twentieth-century Literary Theory and Criticism in Chinese" Xiaoming Chen and Anfeng Sheng survey Chinese-language scholarship that for the reason of the East-West divide is less known in the West. Although heavily influenced by both Western and Soviet Marxist thought, twentieth-century Chinese literary theorization and criticism produced much incisive scholarship based on the vast knowledge existing in Chinese culture and literary scholarship. Chen and Sheng survey pioneering works by numerous Chinese literary theorists and critics who have been influential in their own time and exerted persistent modeling influences until today and the article is meant …

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.

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 …