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Articles 391 - 420 of 602

Full-Text Articles in Comparative Literature

Harry Potter And The Susceptible Child Audience, Kara Lynn Andersen Jun 2005

Harry Potter And The Susceptible Child Audience, Kara Lynn Andersen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Kara Lynn Andersen, in her paper "Harry Potter and the Susceptible Child Audience," argues for a rethinking of assumptions of child audiences as passive readers and viewers through an analysis of the Harry Potter phenomenon. Andersen argues that instead of categorizing children as passive and homogenous subjects of analysis, they should instead be incorporated as participants in the discourse about children's books and films. Although frequently figured as especially susceptible to the affects of advertising and other media, young Harry Potter fans are particularly visible as not only consumers of the texts, but creators of new texts. Using work done …

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Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz In Seventeenth-Century New Spain And Finding A Room Of One's Own, Deborah Weagel Mar 2005

Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz In Seventeenth-Century New Spain And Finding A Room Of One's Own, Deborah Weagel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Seventeenth-Century New Spain and Finding a Room of One's Own," Deborah Weagel examines the life of the seventeenth-century nun and compares her life with the ideals Virginia Woolf portrays in A Room of One's Own. Woolf asserts that in order for a woman to develop innate gifts, she needs a certain degree of financial freedom and private space in which to create. The concept of having one's own room, or space, that can be segregated from the activities of home and public life can be considered both literally and metaphorically. …

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An Introduction To The Work Of Elfriede Jelinek, Nobel Laureate In Literature 2004, Andrea Bandhauer Mar 2005

An Introduction To The Work Of Elfriede Jelinek, Nobel Laureate In Literature 2004, Andrea Bandhauer

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In her paper, "An Introduction to the Work of Elfriede Jelinek, Nobel Laureate in Literature 2004," Andrea Bandhauer explores reactions of the press to the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek after she received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature. Bandhauer discusses how the extreme irritation following this announcement was frequently directed at the author's public persona rather than at her work. Against this background, Bandhauer explores the ambivalent relationship of the public towards a politically and socially engaged and outspoken public figure who in her literary work produces highly hermetical texts. As a writer, Jelinek is preoccupied with language and form …

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The Arachne Myth In Oral And Written Literature, José Manuel Pedrosa Mar 2005

The Arachne Myth In Oral And Written Literature, José Manuel Pedrosa

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In his paper, "The Arachne Myth in Oral and Written Literature," José Manuel Pedrosa explores the folktale about a person who prides himself being the most intelligent individual and whom the gods punish with a metamorphosis into spider. Pedrosa discusses similar myths in existence in modern oral traditions and in literary works such as the Bible, Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Quran, and García Márquez's masterpiece Cien años de soledad. The universality of the myth is underlined by the existence of a folktale registered among the Bubi people of Equatorial Guinea. Not known about it until the twentieth century, the oral transmission …

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Generic Identity And Intertextuality, Marko Juvan Mar 2005

Generic Identity And Intertextuality, Marko Juvan

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In his paper, "Generic Identity and Intertextuality," Marko Juvan proposes that an anti-essentialist drive -- a characteristic of recent genology -- has led postmodern scholars to the conviction that genre is but a system of differences and that its matrix cannot be deduced from a particular set of apparently similar texts. Juvan argues that the concept of intertextuality may prove advantageous to explain genre identity in a different way: genres exist and function as far as they are embedded in social practices that frame intertextual and meta-textual links/references to prototypical texts or textual series. In Juvan's view, genres are cognitive …

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Modernism And The Issue Of Periodization, Leonard Orr Mar 2005

Modernism And The Issue Of Periodization, Leonard Orr

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In his paper, "Modernism and the Issue of Periodization," Leonard Orr describes how literary theorists, historians, and anthology editors have put forward many conflicting models for literary periodization, while simultaneously expressing their doubts about the categories they have created. They are caught between intellectual despair and pragmatic necessity, scholarly journals and presses and academic departments imagine they are working at the cutting edge of thinking about their subjects but period concepts remain in place, even while every article focused on the subject expresses strong objections to the terms. Orr traces in his paper these problems and issues through the twentieth …

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Exilic Perspectives On "Alien Nations", Sophia A. Mcclennen Mar 2005

Exilic Perspectives On "Alien Nations", Sophia A. Mcclennen

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Sophia A. McClennen's paper, "Exilic Perspectives on 'Alien Nations'," is an excerpt from her book, The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language and Space in Hispanic Literatures (Purdue UP , 2004). In the paper, McClennen summarizes her theory that exile writing is inherently dialectical. Focusing on writers working in the latter part of the twentieth century who were exiled during a historical moment of increasing globalization, transnational economics, and the theoretical shifts of postmodernism, McClennen proposes that exile literature is best understood as a series of dialectic tensions about cultural identity. Through a comparative analysis of Juan Goytisolo (Spain), Ariel …

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Separatist Nationalism In Gilbert Imlay's The Emigrants, Karsten H. Piep Dec 2004

Separatist Nationalism In Gilbert Imlay's The Emigrants, Karsten H. Piep

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Karsten H. Piep, in his paper "Separatist Nationalism in Gilbert Imlay's The Emigrants," argues that only recently rediscovered among American scholars and still awaiting much critical work, Gilbert Imlay's The Emigrants offers an intriguing case study in the complex relationship between fictional representation and late eighteenth-century nation formation. Tracing briefly the novel's reception history, Piep locates The Emigrants within the socio-political context of eighteenth-century discourses on revolution, emancipation, and independence. Taking Benedict Anderson's study on the rise of nationalism as a point of reference, Piep argues that Imlay's novel offers an example of a perhaps uniquely American separatist nationalism that …

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Czech Literature, The King With The Horse's Ears, And Its Translations By Karel Havlícek Borovský And Milan Uhde, Michelle Woods Dec 2004

Czech Literature, The King With The Horse's Ears, And Its Translations By Karel Havlícek Borovský And Milan Uhde, Michelle Woods

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Michelle Woods, in her paper "Czech Literature, The King with the Horse's Ears, and Its Translations by Karel Havlícek Borovský and Milan Uhde," analyses the adaptation and "translation" of the Irish legend into the Czech language in Karel Havlícek Borovský's 1854 epic poem Král Lávra and in Milan Uhde's 1964 play Král Vávra. The translation of Irish language myths and legends into English functioned as way of constructing and disseminating the notion of a great literary and heroic past within the language of the colonizer but also in dissent to the constructions imposed by that language. Woods focuses on how …

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Literary Cosmotopia And Nationalism In Ariel, Camilla Fojas Dec 2004

Literary Cosmotopia And Nationalism In Ariel, Camilla Fojas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Camilla Fojas, in her paper "Literary Cosmotopia and Nationalism in Ariel," argues that turn-of-the-century cosmopolitan literary texts encoded political interests and that they were concerned with the proper way of being cosmopolitan and national at the same time, of forging literary and diplomatic parity between national and international interests. Unfortunately, this search for balance was beset by rhetorical and ideological prejudices manifest in phobic language about the corrupting forces of cosmopolitan effeminacy on national character. The conflict of cosmopolitanism with nationalism was played out as a kind of war between the sexes, as a gendered battle for dominance. This tension …

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Hellenism, Hebraism, And The Eugenics Of Culture In E.M. Forster's Howards End, Seth Jacobowitz Dec 2004

Hellenism, Hebraism, And The Eugenics Of Culture In E.M. Forster's Howards End, Seth Jacobowitz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Seth Jacobowitz, in his paper "Hellenism, Hebraism, and the Eugenics of Culture in E.M. Forster's Howards End," explores how the culturalist principles of Hellenism and Hebraism theorized by Matthew Arnold as the basis of Englishness in Culture and Anarchy (1869) were incorporated into the text of E.M. Forster's Howards End (1910) to show the close institutional and conceptual linkages Forster shared with Arnold. Further, Jacobowitz seeks to bring Howards End into dialog with Forster's only major work of science fiction, The Machine Stops (1928), to address their mutual themes of eugenics, the racialization of class difference, and concerns over the …

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The New Woman In Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction, Jin Feng Dec 2004

The New Woman In Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction, Jin Feng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Jin Feng, in her paper "The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction," proposes that the representation of the "new woman" in Chinese fiction was paradoxically one of the ways in which male writers of the era explored, negotiated, and laid claim to their own emerging identity as "modern" intellectuals. Previous scholarship on fiction of the period probed occasionally the thematic implications of female characters in specific works but has not engaged in systematic study of the "new woman" as a figure through a discussion of the politics of the narrative form. Feng addresses aspects of audience in early-twentieth-century Chinese …

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Reading Ondaatje's Poetry, Eluned Summers-Bremner Sep 2004

Reading Ondaatje's Poetry, Eluned Summers-Bremner

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Eluned Summers-Bremner pursues in her paper "Reading Ondaatje's Poetry" a psychoanalytic reading of Ondaatje's poetry based on Lacan's thought, highlighting occasions where nature and culture meet. Focusing on the volumes Secular Love and The Man with Seven Toes, Summers-Bremner explores how nature's troubled regions are navigated through the structural estrangement of looking for a name. In Lacanian terms, a proper name signals the contradiction of one's belonging to a biological or other kind of family, whence one's name often arises, and being a user or respondent of language, which produces meaning through its infringement or exceeding of its users' intentions, …

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Touching The Language Of Citizenship In Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Sandeep Sanghera Sep 2004

Touching The Language Of Citizenship In Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Sandeep Sanghera

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Sandeep Sanghera, in her paper "Touching the Language of Citizenship in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost" discusses questions which make Ondaatje's novel a text about postmodern identity: who is this woman Anil who lives mostly in the West, travels on a British passport, works for an international organization, and no longer has any real ties to her first home? In the paper, these questions are examined via the languages Anil adopts and abandons in the novel. Sanghera elaborates on the question of foreign-ness represented by the protagonist of the novel; however, this foreign-ness is examined in the particular context concerning the substance …

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Oral History And The Writing Of The Other In Ondaatje's In The Skin Of A Lion, Winfried Siemerling Sep 2004

Oral History And The Writing Of The Other In Ondaatje's In The Skin Of A Lion, Winfried Siemerling

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Winfried Siemerling argues in his paper "Oral History and the Writing of the Other in Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion" that the simulation of oral narratives in the novel imagines the conveyance of oral histories of immigrant experiences obscured by historiography. The narrative device of simulated orality -- the written text casts itself as the outcome of serial story-telling -- serves here to introduce erstwhile anonymous societal actors as makers of history, and emphasizes the collective production of story and history. Oral narratives emerge dreamlike like light out of darkness in this text; yet light, like writing, creates …

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Ondaatje's The English Patient And Rewriting History, Stephanie M. Hilger Sep 2004

Ondaatje's The English Patient And Rewriting History, Stephanie M. Hilger

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Stephanie M. Hilger, in her paper "Ondaatje's The English Patient and Rewriting History," situates the novel within the long-standing Western tradition of writing about the cultural "Other," from Herodotus to Michel de Montaigne to Rudyard Kipling. Michel de Certeau's notion of history serves as a reference point for the analysis of Ondaatje's presentation of the "English" patient's story as well as of twentieth-century history. Hilger argues that the protagonist's physical mutilation is a metonymic representation of post-World War II and postcolonial consciousness. In the same way that the characters in the novel attempt to understand the mystery that is the …

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Selected Bibliography Of Michael Ondaatje's Texts And Studies About Michael Ondaatje's Texts, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek Sep 2004

Selected Bibliography Of Michael Ondaatje's Texts And Studies About Michael Ondaatje's Texts, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

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Post-Nationalism And The Cinematic Apparatus In Minghella's Adaptation Of Ondaatje's The English Patient, Hsuan Hsu Sep 2004

Post-Nationalism And The Cinematic Apparatus In Minghella's Adaptation Of Ondaatje's The English Patient, Hsuan Hsu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Hsuan Hsu, in his paper "Post-Nationalism and the Cinematic Apparatus in Minghella's Adaptation of Ondaatje's The English Patient," discusses Anthony Minghella's cinematic version of Ondaatje's novel. In Hsu's view, Minghella and Ondaatje (Ondaatje collaborated on the film script) emphasize in the film the visual and social implications of mapmaking in order to align imperialism with the cinematic apparatus. While the film explores the workings of visual power, it also explores their adulteration by unmapped forces of desire: Almásy's and Katherine's adulterous relationship transgresses marital and national constraints, but also reinscribes them when Almásy desires to possess her body and Katherine …

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Representations Of Buddhism In Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Marlene Goldman Sep 2004

Representations Of Buddhism In Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Marlene Goldman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Marlene Goldman suggests in her paper "Representations of Buddhism in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost" that at first glance Ondaatje appears to promote the idea of a Sri Lankan Buddhist faith as transcending history. Ondaatje introduces the subject of Buddhism early on in the novel, emphasizing initially the devastation wrought by imperial and colonial forces. Goldman, however, argues that subsequent references to Buddhism undermine the initial portrayal of a religion besieged by external imperialist forces. For example, at one point, the character Palipana refers to the assassination of his brother, Narada, a Buddhist monk. Narada was possibly the victim of a "political …

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The Motif Of The Collector And History In Ondaatje's Work, Jon Saklofske Sep 2004

The Motif Of The Collector And History In Ondaatje's Work, Jon Saklofske

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Jon Saklofske, in his paper "The Motif of the Collector and History in Ondaatje's Work" recognizes that Ondaatje rescues Buddy Bolden from historical obscurity by elevating and complicating the musician's largely forgotten history with a self-conscious and largely fictional synthesis of memory and imagination. The liberties Ondaatje takes in Coming Through Slaughter with his subject to achieve this re-presentation and the ownership of the portrait that results exposes this type of authorial activity as a problematic appropriation. Saklofske suggests that to understand the implications of Ondaatje's activity it is useful to compare his efforts with Walter Benjamin's "collector" figure, who …

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Introduction To Comparative Cultural Studies And Michael Ondaatje's Writing, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek Sep 2004

Introduction To Comparative Cultural Studies And Michael Ondaatje's Writing, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

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Exploring Transnational Identities In Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Victoria Cook Sep 2004

Exploring Transnational Identities In Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Victoria Cook

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Victoria Cook, in "Exploring Transnational Identities in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost," addresses issues of identity raised in the narrative of Michael Ondaatje's novel Anil's Ghost. Cook's paper is a close analysis of Ondaatje's novel, paying particular attention to the way in which Ondaatje examines identity as both a "construct" and a "process." The approach used is one that draws on postcolonial theory and takes a "transnational" perspective. Cook argues that Ondaatje's text moves beyond the concept of a postcolonial literature of "resistance" into an area that requires a theory of process rather than product. Transnationalism is shown here to be just …

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Ondaatje's The English Patient And Altered States Of Narrative, Beverley Curran Sep 2004

Ondaatje's The English Patient And Altered States Of Narrative, Beverley Curran

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Beverley Curran argues in her paper "Ondaatje's The English Patient and Altered States of Narrative" that Ondaatje reconfigures in his novel the "romantic" figure of the father/artist as a clandestine lover, a drug addict, or an eccentric translator, all figures with dependencies. In The English Patient, the father or artist's sense of source, continuity, or authority are translated into a narrative which rejects the perverse captivity demanded of the lover and the translator by fidelity or by the tenets of realistic representation. Using sex, drugs, and translation, Ondaatje deranges both time and space to reconfigure the role of the artist …

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Benjamin, Agamben, And The Paradox Of Translation, Paolo Bartoloni Jun 2004

Benjamin, Agamben, And The Paradox Of Translation, Paolo Bartoloni

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In his paper, "Benjamin, Agamben, and the Paradox of Translation," Paolo Bartoloni offers a theoretical discourse on translation that goes beyond the traditional precincts of linguistics and literary theory as well as the disciplines of cultural studies and postcolonial theory. Bartoloni argues that more recently, the discourse on translation has begun to incorporate epistemological concerns, dealing not only with language but also with subjectivity and ethics. At the root of this theoretical articulation of translation are the essays "The Task of the Translator" ("Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers") by Walter Benjamin and other reflections on translation by Martin Heidegger, especially in …

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Haruki Murakami And The Ethics Of Translation, Will Slocombe Jun 2004

Haruki Murakami And The Ethics Of Translation, Will Slocombe

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In his paper, "Haruki Murakami and the Ethics of Translation," Will Slocombe argues that despite the fact that Murakami has gained world-wide popularity recently, there has been little critical attention to his works outside of the comparatively narrow area of Japanese studies. Slocombe proposes that Murakami is too important an author to be limited in this way because of his definition of "translation." For Murakami, translation delineates an operative ethics between Self and Other, a dialogue that is not only between different languages and cultures, but also between the private and political spheres, and between different individuals. Slocombe discusses Murakami's …

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Medieval Cosmopolitanism And The Saracen-Christian Ethos, Marla Segol Jun 2004

Medieval Cosmopolitanism And The Saracen-Christian Ethos, Marla Segol

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Medieval Cosmopolitanism and the Saracen-Christian Ethos," Marla Segol argues that in Floire et Blancheflor and Aucassin et Nicolette, two medieval Occitanian romances, the writers work actively to incorporate Islamic culture and its accomplishments into a hybrid communal identity. The hybrid elements of this identity are demonstrated in two ways: first, through the portrayal of mixed couples and second, through depiction of a biculturally constituted landscape and culture. Intercultural relations between the characters are dramatized through the structures of religious conversion. Each romance features a mixed couple, with one member Christian and the other, formerly Muslim but converted …

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The Representation Of 'Race' In Ondaatje's In The Skin Of A Lion, Glen Lowry Jun 2004

The Representation Of 'Race' In Ondaatje's In The Skin Of A Lion, Glen Lowry

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Glen Lowry, in his paper "The Representation of 'Race' in Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion" bases his discussion on the observation that critics tend to view Ondaatje's writing in terms of a progression towards complex issues of "race" and post-coloniality. In contrast, Lowry argues that the matter of "race" forms an integral aspect of Ondaatje's oeuvre and Lowry proposes that In the Skin of a Lion is a key site in the development of Ondaatje's engagement with issues of "race" and the cultural politics of post-coloniality. Focusing on Ondaatje's depiction of Toronto in terms of its complex history …

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From Commonwealth To Postcolonial Literature, Edward O. Ako Jun 2004

From Commonwealth To Postcolonial Literature, Edward O. Ako

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In his paper,"From Commonwealth to Postcolonial Literature," Edward O.Ako begins by establishing the link between Empire and English-language literature. Drawing on Elleke Boehmer, Gauri Viswanath, and Terry Eagleton, Ako discusses the ideological uses of literature and argues that the textual forms that emerged as "resistance" to imperial domination were referred to by a multiplicity of terms: Commonwealth Literature, New English Literature, Literature in English, Third World Literature, World Fiction, Minority Literature, Multicultural Literature, or Postcolonial Literature. Ako examines the merits and handicaps of each designation and explains why, in his view, the term "postcolonial" is the more appropriate notion and …

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Monénembo's L'Aîné Des Orphelins And The Rwandan Genocide, Lisa Mcnee Jun 2004

Monénembo's L'Aîné Des Orphelins And The Rwandan Genocide, Lisa Mcnee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Monénembo's L'Aîné des orphelins and the Rwandan Genocide," Lisa McNee discusses Tierno Monénembo's L'Aîné des orphelins, a novel that offers a double discourse and a dual memory of the genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994. McNee argues that L'Aîné des orphelins presents us with an extraordinary kind of fictional testimonial to genocide. Although Monénembo is not from Rwanda and did not participate in the tragedy, only someone who has paid the price of the clarity needed to distinguish between good and bad faith could have written a novel like L'Aîné des orphelins. Monénembo's characterization of …

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Asian-American Literature And A Lacanian Reading Of Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey, Fu-Jen Chen Jun 2004

Asian-American Literature And A Lacanian Reading Of Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey, Fu-Jen Chen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Asian-American Literature and a Lacanian Reading of Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey," Fu-jen Chen explores the protagonist's subjective progression into the post-Symbolic Real in Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey -- from subject as Demand, through subject as Desire, to subject as jouissance. Tripmaster Monkey records Ah Sing's transformation from a racial paranoiac at the beginning of the novel through a subject as demand to a subject as desire who is learning to target new desires via his engaging in real myth and staging real theater, and finally to a subject as jouissance -- one who is oriented to his …

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