Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Comparative Literature Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Critical and Cultural Studies

Institution
Keyword
Publication Year
Publication
Publication Type

Articles 271 - 300 of 602

Full-Text Articles in Comparative Literature

Translating And (Re)Creating (Cultural) Identities: A Review Article Of New Work By López Sáenz And Penas Ibáñez And Vidal Claramonte, Nuria Brufau Alvira Sep 2008

Translating And (Re)Creating (Cultural) Identities: A Review Article Of New Work By López Sáenz And Penas Ibáñez And Vidal Claramonte, Nuria Brufau Alvira

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


About The Literatures Of The Americas: A Review Article Of New Work By Castillo And Mcclennen, Deborah N. Cohn Sep 2008

About The Literatures Of The Americas: A Review Article Of New Work By Castillo And Mcclennen, Deborah N. Cohn

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Narrative Politics In Historical Fictions For Children, John Streamas May 2008

Narrative Politics In Historical Fictions For Children, John Streamas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "Narrative Politics in Historical Fictions for Children," John Streamas points out that narrative theory and ethnic studies need to ask each other basic questions before a reading of race in children's literature can be useful. Is the literature merely a reflection of the experience of adult writers and parents? That is, must we read the literature as nostalgic, reflecting a developmental bias? Or does it engage children on their own contemporary terms? Are children themselves capable of racism, even if only as extensions of adult racial imaginations? Certainly the growing number of children's books written by writers of color …


Natives, Nostalgia, And Nature In Children's Popular Film Narratives, C. Richard King May 2008

Natives, Nostalgia, And Nature In Children's Popular Film Narratives, C. Richard King

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "Natives, Nostalgia, and Nature in Children's Popular Film Narratives," C. Richard King offers a critical reading in an effort to appreciate the entanglements of nature, natives, and nostalgia in children's narratives. In this context, an analysis of Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron Spirit affords an ideal occasion for such a reading because it centers on the relations between Native Americans, Euroamericans, and the natural world as it tells the story of a wild mustang living in western North America in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, as close examination reveals, the film uses race, gender, civilization, and wildness …


Race And Gender Representations In Advertising In Cable Cartoon Programming, Debra L. Merskin May 2008

Race And Gender Representations In Advertising In Cable Cartoon Programming, Debra L. Merskin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "Race and Gender Representations in Advertising in Cable Cartoon Programming," Debra L. Merskin explores what children see and what they learn about racial, ethnic, and gender identity in television advertisements. Merskin examines race and ethnicity in commercials on cable television, specifically on the Turner Cartoon Network, an environment devoted entirely to cartoons and to children. Her content analysis of 381 advertisements reveals that while White and African American children are overrepresented in relationship to their percentage of the U.S. population, other minority group children are rarely portrayed. In only one instance were children of color shown alone, …


Polly Bemis, Pedagogy, And Multiculturalism In The Classroom, Katy Fry May 2008

Polly Bemis, Pedagogy, And Multiculturalism In The Classroom, Katy Fry

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

As Katy Fry suggests in her paper "Polly Bemis, Pedagogy, and Multiculturalism in the Classroom," the history of the US-American West is too often taught in mythological terms. This is especially true in grade school classrooms, where children are told that the West was settled by courageous men and women who dared to come to and conquer a wild, untamed place. The notion of what it meant to be a pioneer remains simple and uncomplicated. As Fry points out, however, there were pioneers of a different sort, such as the Chinese immigrant Polly Bemis. Fry's article examines the various pedagogic …


Introduction To Racialized Narratives For Children, C. Richard King May 2008

Introduction To Racialized Narratives For Children, C. Richard King

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


The Politics Of Childhood In Ellis's Three Wishes, Wafaa Hasan May 2008

The Politics Of Childhood In Ellis's Three Wishes, Wafaa Hasan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "The Politics of Childhood in Ellis's Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak," Wafaa Hasan outlines the recent controversy in Canada over the restrictions that shape children's literature. Using Neil Postman's and John Locke's conceptions of childhood, Hasan unpacks the ways in which Ellis's Three Wishes has threatened popular conceptions of childhood. Specifically, as her analysis shows, Ellis's work redefines the boundaries of children's fiction by heterogenizing childhood experience and by affording its readers -- limited but consequential -- authorial agency. Further, Hasan asserts that Three Wishes liberates the idea of childhood as a developmental stage of ignorance by …


Children's Film As Social Practice, J. Zornado May 2008

Children's Film As Social Practice, J. Zornado

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "Children's Film as Social Practice," J. Zornado argues that the animated feature is a genre distinct in its own right, and, although overlooked by film criticism up to now, deserves rigorous, scholarly attention. Zornado employs the term "iconology" to develop a foundation for a critical methodology indebted to Althusser, Foucault, and Lacan as well as contemporary film criticism. Iconology of the animated feature film is the study of the meaning systems of the dominant culture and the ways in which such systems are inscribed into all kinds of social practice geared, specifically, to seduce and inform the …


Children's Video Games As Interactive Racialization, Cathlena Martin May 2008

Children's Video Games As Interactive Racialization, Cathlena Martin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Cathlena Martin explores in her paper "Children's Video Games as Interactive Racialization" selected children's video games. Martin argues that children's video games often act as reinforcement for the games' television and film counterparts and their racializing characteristics and features. In Martin's analysis the video games discussed represent media through which to analyze racial identities and ideologies. In making the case for positive female minority leads in children's video games, Martin examines the games and franchises of Rugrats and Dora the Explorer. She argues that the influx of games with a greater diversity of minority female characters has only been a …


The Ambiguous Nature Of Multiculturalism In Two Picture Books About 9/11, Jo Lampert May 2008

The Ambiguous Nature Of Multiculturalism In Two Picture Books About 9/11, Jo Lampert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "The Ambiguous Nature of Multiculturalism in Two Picture Books about 9/11," Jo Lampert looks at how some of the Western discourses of multiculturalism and cultural diversity have shifted since 11 September 2001 by discussing two exemplar picture books about 9/11. Lampert begins with a general discussion of children's books as significant cultural producers of knowledge and provides brief summaries of Patel's On That Day: A Book of Hope for Children and Carlson's There's a Big, Beautiful World Out There! Lampert discusses how the imagined readers of these books are positioned problematically in order to embrace racial tolerance, …


A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Representation Of Asian Indian Folk Tales In Us-American Children's Literature, Sudeshna Roy May 2008

A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Representation Of Asian Indian Folk Tales In Us-American Children's Literature, Sudeshna Roy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "A Critical Discourse Analysis of Representation of Asian Indian Folk Tales in US-American Children's Literature," Sudeshna Roy explores the representation of India in U.S. children's picture books by interpreting prevailing images of the subcontinent and its peoples and their impact on children's understandings. Roy analyzes three key elements -- titles, illustrations, and text -- identifying a set of predominant themes: nature and wild animals, poverty and hardship, spiritual hermits, and wit and common sense wisdom. From these findings, Roy suggests that Eurocentric imperial ideologies continue to inform the formulation of race, gender, and nation in U.S. children's …


A Bibliography Of Work On Racial Narratives For Children, Marie Drews May 2008

A Bibliography Of Work On Racial Narratives For Children, Marie Drews

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Racism, Disable-Ism, And Heterosexism In The Making Of Helen Keller, Andy Prettol May 2008

Racism, Disable-Ism, And Heterosexism In The Making Of Helen Keller, Andy Prettol

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "Racism, Disable-ism, and Heterosexism in the Making of Helen Keller" Andy Prettol offers an analysis of prevailing narratives about Helen Keller. Prettol focuses on the dynamic interplay of race, (dis)ability, sexuality, and gender inherent to all Keller stories of triumph that are so popular in elementary schools across the U.S. He examines three specific works: William Gibson's playscript The Miracle Worker, written in 1956; the film of the same title directed by Arthur Penn in 1962; and the compiled letters of Anne Sullivan in Helen Keller's The Story of Life. Prettol's analysis works to unpack the articulations …


Into The Void: Danielewski And The Uncanny Novel, Chad Bebee May 2008

Into The Void: Danielewski And The Uncanny Novel, Chad Bebee

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mark Danielewski's novel. House


Marx, Postmodernism, And Spatial Configurations In Jameson And Lefebvre, Arina Lungu Mar 2008

Marx, Postmodernism, And Spatial Configurations In Jameson And Lefebvre, Arina Lungu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Marx, Postmodernism, and Spatial Configurations in Jameson and Lefebvre," Arina Lungu discusses the connection between Marxist sociology and postmodernist theory. Lungu examines Fredric Jameson's volume Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism under the light of the spatial theory developed in the 1970s by Marxian theoretician Henri Lefebvre. For Jameson, the spatial turn is a consequence of the gap between the limited abilities of the human perceptive apparatus and the unrepresentability of the multinational hyperspace. In Lungu's view, Jameson reaches his definition of "culturally-dominant" sensibility by disregarding the rich body of spatial criticism outside postmodern theory. …


Nation Building, Utopia, And The Latin American Writer/Intellectual, María Odette Canivell Mar 2008

Nation Building, Utopia, And The Latin American Writer/Intellectual, María Odette Canivell

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Nation Building, Utopia, and the Latin American Writer/Intellectual," María Odette Canivell discusses the role of utopia in the foundational myths of Latin American cities and its nations. Nation building, in Latin America, Canivell claims, is tied to European myths regarding the New World, as well as to the function of writers' (escribidores) and intellectuals' (letrados) re-formulation of these myths along with their own desires/dreams as to what the ideal of Latin America means. Escribadores and letradas, who make history while re-writing the story/history of their nations, have a direct effect on the policy making and construction of …


Achebe, Conrad, And The Postcolonial Strain, Eric Sipyinyu Njeng Mar 2008

Achebe, Conrad, And The Postcolonial Strain, Eric Sipyinyu Njeng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Achebe, Conrad, and the Postcolonial Strain" Eric Sipyinyu Njeng presents an analysis of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart in a context of postcolonial thought and argues that while Achebe's text is often placed against Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a counter discourse -- thus interrogating Conrad's portraiture of Africans as savages -- Achebe's text in fact represents anti-Africanism and subservience to Occidental values. Examining Achebe's authorial intention in Things Fall Apart, especially as epitomized in the character of Okonkwo, the protagonist, Njeng argues that Achebe corroborates Conrad's portrait of the African. In writing Things Fall Apart, …


Thompson's And Acosta's Collaborative Creation Of The Gonzo Narrative Style, Shimberlee Jirón-King Mar 2008

Thompson's And Acosta's Collaborative Creation Of The Gonzo Narrative Style, Shimberlee Jirón-King

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Thompson's and Acosta's Collaborative Creation of the Gonzo Narrative Style," Shimberlee Jirón-King presents an analysis of Hunter S. Thompson's and Oscar Zeta Acosta's works and a correction about the origins of Gonzo Journalism. Jirón-King suggests that Thompson's and Acosta's writings express the authors' disillusionment about the loss of the American Dream and that their texts suggest the revolutionary movements they hoped for would transform a disintegrating culture have only fallen prey to the shortsightedness of US-American culture. The counter culture they observe simply develops its own forms of racism, classism, power-mongering, and corruption that re-inscribe hegemonic discourses …


On The Convergence Of Innis's International Political Economy And Sebald's Novels, Joseph S. Pinter Mar 2008

On The Convergence Of Innis's International Political Economy And Sebald's Novels, Joseph S. Pinter

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "On the Convergence of Innis's International Political Economy and Sebald's Novels" Joseph S. Pinter contributes to the development of an area of scholarship on Harold A. Innis and Canadian political economy which deals with issues of representation, landscape, and memory. Pinter draws attention to a specific aspect of Innis's approach to political economy and focuses on ways in which Innis was able to represent fundamental aspects of the settlement process in Canada. Pinter argues that Innis focussed on landscape as a basic element in the European experience of North America (US and Canada) that, in turn, enabled …


The Methodology Of Architectonic Truth-Finding In Grass's The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), Stephan Schaffrath Feb 2008

The Methodology Of Architectonic Truth-Finding In Grass's The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), Stephan Schaffrath

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Stephan Schaffrath, in his paper "The Methodology of Architectonic Truth-Finding in Grass's The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel)," discusses how Günter Grass's The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) negotiates the treacherous terrains that lie between positivism and nihilistic relativism by means of a truth-finding methodology. Schaffrath proposes that truth-finding methodology applies approximative, and therefore architectonic, approaches to conventional concepts of narration and history. Grass's novel breaks down and reassembles playfully the conventions of narration and history, not to negate or devalue them, but to reappraise them by means of an approximative truth-finding methodology, an approach that corresponds to Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of …


Literary And Cinematic Responses To The Crime Story In Contemporary France, Deborah Streifford Reisinger Dec 2007

Literary And Cinematic Responses To The Crime Story In Contemporary France, Deborah Streifford Reisinger

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Literary and Cinematic Responses to the Crime Story in Contemporary France," Deborah Streifford Reisinger examines society's relationship to violence in an era of increased media dominance. Reisinger's interdisciplinary approach integrates media, cinema, and literary studies to analyze how the crime story functions as a site of discursive struggle. Reisinger focuses on the sensational Paulin and Succo affairs that became mobile signifiers about crime, insecurity and the Other in France in the 1980s. By situating these crime stories in a larger historical and political context, she analyzes how media and politicians use the crime story as a tool …


Gustav Shpet's Literary And Theatre Theory, Galin Tihanov Dec 2007

Gustav Shpet's Literary And Theatre Theory, Galin Tihanov

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Gustav Shpet's Literary and Theatre Theory," Galin Tihanov introduces Shpet's theoretical work on literature and theatre, until recently little studied. Neither has been sufficient attention paid to Shpet's overall presence on the Russian cultural scene in the 1910s-1930s. As a result, our knowledge and appreciation of the scope of his writings and the variety of Russian literary and theatre life in the first third of the twentieth century have remained less rich and well-informed than they could otherwise have been. Tihanov explains that Shpet's participation in contemporary literature and theatre assumed different forms: he wrote both from …


Chinese Feminisms And Adaptation-As-Translation Readings Of Letter From An Unknown Woman, Jinhua Li Dec 2007

Chinese Feminisms And Adaptation-As-Translation Readings Of Letter From An Unknown Woman, Jinhua Li

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Chinese Feminisms and Adaptation-as-Translation Readings of Letter from an Unknown Woman," Jinhua Li investigates the complex cultural and political issues engendered by an increasingly popular phenomenon of transnational film adaptations. Through a comparative reading of Jinglei Xu's 2004 adaptation of Stefan Zweig's novella Brief einer Unbekannten (Letter From an Unknown Woman), Jinhua Li argues that the adaptation-as-translation approach, as a valuable theoretical model for feminist cultural studies of Eastern-Western dynamics, allows the film to be read not only as a "translated/adapted" literary discourse that functions on different narrative levels, but also as a trope for the reimagination …


Unreliable Narration Through Representations Of The Grotesque In Lagerkvist's The Dwarf, Nitya Morales Vázquez Dec 2007

Unreliable Narration Through Representations Of The Grotesque In Lagerkvist's The Dwarf, Nitya Morales Vázquez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Nitya Morales Vázquez, in her paper "Unreliable Narration through Representations of the Grotesque in Lagerkvist's The Dwarf," begins with the hypothesis that most direct expression of ideology in discourse is found in the semantics of discourse. In literature, one can analyze this ideology by examining whether the narration is reliable or whether it is unreliable. Based on these presuppositions, Morales Vázquez analyses discourse in Pär Fabian Lagerkvist's novel, The Dwarf. Morales Vázquez argues that through the use of the conceptual frames of characterization, voice, and focalization the dwarf's character offers an unreliable narration. Through representations present in the novel, Morales …


National And Regional Identities In Central And East Europe After 1989: A Review Of Books By Donskis, Foster And Wigmore, And Koczanowicz And Singer, Agata Anna Lisiak Dec 2007

National And Regional Identities In Central And East Europe After 1989: A Review Of Books By Donskis, Foster And Wigmore, And Koczanowicz And Singer, Agata Anna Lisiak

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Democracy's Promise And The Politics Of Worldliness In The Age Of Terror, Henry A. Giroux Oct 2007

Democracy's Promise And The Politics Of Worldliness In The Age Of Terror, Henry A. Giroux

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Democracy's Promise and the Politics of Worldliness in the Age of Terror," Henry A. Giroux draws attention to how the crisis in US-American democracy has been heralded and exacerbated by the nation's increasing skepticism -- or even overt hostility -- toward the educational system. Part of such a challenge means that educators, artists, students, and others need to rethink and affirm the important presupposition that higher education is integral to fostering the imperatives of an inclusive democracy and that the crisis of higher education must be understood as part of the wider crisis of politics, power, and …


Globalizing Compassion, Photography, And The Challenge Of Terror, Ariel Dorfman Oct 2007

Globalizing Compassion, Photography, And The Challenge Of Terror, Ariel Dorfman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Globalizing Compassion, Photography, and the Challenge of Terror," Ariel Dorfman reflects on the use of photography to make global violence visible and to mourn the losses caused by acts of terror. Dorfman draws on events that range from the attacks on the World Trade Center to Pinochet's dictatorship to other similar atrocities and he shows that, while these events always feel singular in the moment, they are best understood comparatively. At the core of the paper is a central question: does the shared practice of using photos to represent terror help build bridges across humanity or does …


The "Teucer Paradigm" And The Eastern Other In Western Literature, Maria Beatrice Bittarello Sep 2007

The "Teucer Paradigm" And The Eastern Other In Western Literature, Maria Beatrice Bittarello

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "The 'Teucer Paradigm' and the Eastern Other in Western Literature," Maria Beatrice Bittarello argues that modern representations of characters with mixed-blood heritage (Western and Eastern) are rooted in classical representations of the Middle East and that such representations are thematically re-cast from a literary thematic archetype elaborated on in the ancient Greek and Roman cultures. Bittarello examines how Greek and Roman authors portray the Greek mythological hero Teucer, son of Telamon and the Trojan princess Hesione. Teucer's liminal position allows him to be used in already in Greek and Roman culture both as colonizer and "bridge" between …


African Literature And The Role Of The Nigerian Government College Umuahia, Terri Ochiagha Sep 2007

African Literature And The Role Of The Nigerian Government College Umuahia, Terri Ochiagha

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Terri Ochiagha, in her paper "African Literature and the Role of the Nigerian Government College Umuahia," discusses how the college contributed towards nurturing the talent of some of the most relevant authors in African literary history. With the help of the testimonies of these authors in interviews, correspondence, essays, autobiographies, and with the aid of literary critics and scholars who realized the role the Umuahia College played in creating a literary elite, Ochiagha analyses this literary phenomenon and takes us on a journey through the school's literary ambience: its library and the novels which were later to prompt the authors' …