Comparative Literature Commons^™

About Society: A Book Review Article Of Work On Roth And Kundera By Shostak And Ivanova, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Commodity And Waste As National Allegory In Recent South African And Post-Soviet Fiction, Alla Ivanchikova

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Commodity and Waste as National Allegory in Recent South African and Post-Soviet Fiction" Alla Ivanchikova analyzes the issue of commodity in its relation to identity. The article contains a reading of two novels: The Quiet Violence of Dreams by K. Sello Duiker and Dukhless. Povest o nenastoiaschem cheloveke (Douh-Less: The Tale of an Unreal Person) by Sergey Minaev. Rapid political changes, both in South Africa and the former Soviet Bloc were accompanied both by rapid changes in the practices of consumption and also by often inconsistent cultural efforts to establish the meaning of these practices. Ivanchikova …

Inanimate Speech From Lovecraft To Žižek, Apple Z. Igrek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Inanimate Speech from Lovecraft to Žižek" Apple Z. Igrek explores an influential line of reasoning associated with our contemporary loss of the Real. The argument describes how the contingencies and nuances of social life have been reduced to an operational, friction-free, and homogeneous realm of signs. Slavoj Žižek contends that our inherently traumatic relationship with the Other is being foreclosed and replaced by an omnipresent technological screen of virtual communication. The danger of this shift, identified as the "digital break," is that it facilitates an extraordinary form of divine violence which strikes back at the social system …

Comparative Literature In Chinese, Xiaolu Wang, Yan Liu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Comparative Literature in Chinese" Xiaolu Wang and Yan Liu describe the development of comparative poetics in Chinese by sketching major publications and the general institutional situation of the discipline. Wang and Liu suggest that comparative work remains impulsive while at the same time dynamic. Like other fields in the humanities, the study of poetics — comparative or other — in Chinese is no longer traditional in terms of discursive form but copied from the West. Although the scholarly achievements in the field within the past thirty years are considerable, problems remain including the issue of translation of …

Academic Discourse And Literacy Narratives As "Equipment For Living", Kris Rutten

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Academic Discourse and Narratives of Literacy as 'Equipment for Living'" Kris Rutten discusses practices of academic discourse and argues that students entering higher education have to become part of a specific community of institutional discourse. Rutten claims that narratives of and about literacy — narratives that revolve around issues dealing with language and the acquisition of literacy — "dramatize" the tension of moving from one discourse community to another. By charting situations of "type," fictional literacy narratives can be used by students as "equipment for living" in order to reflect on confrontations and difficulties they experience in …

Latino Identity In Allende's Historical Novels, Olga Ries

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Latino Identity in Allende's Historical Novels" Olga Ries analyzes the concept of individual and group identity found in five historical novels by Isabel Allende. Ries argues that while Allende's protagonists come from different backgrounds and different epochs, they share a process of psychological transformation and that affects their identity formation. The result is the formation of a transnational "Hispanic" identity, group as well as individual. In Ries's reading of Allende's texts, transnational Hispanic identity is based simultaneously on the Mexican/Hispanic concept of mestizaje and on the US-American concepts of the "melting pot" and the "American Dream."

About The Human Condition In The Works Of Dickens And Marx, Ami E. Stearns, Thomas J. Burns

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "About the Human Condition in the Works of Dickens and Marx" Ami E. Stearns and Thomas J. Burns contribute to the study of Charles Dickens's Industrial Revolution-era fiction by examining his novels in relation to Karl Marx's social philosophy. Stearns and Burns postulate that Dickens relies on Marxist concepts of class consciousness, sacrifice, revolution, social antitheses, and social injustice to weave his narratives and compare and discuss six of Dickens' novels: A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Great Expectations with three works of Marx: Grundrisse, The Communist Manifesto, …

Dante's Linguistic Detail In Shelley's Triumph Of Life, Anita O'Connell

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Dante's Linguistic Detail in Shelley's Triumph of Life" Anita O'Connell analyzes Shelley's attention to detail in Dante's poetic style and presents a close textual analysis of the ways Shelley draws on the beauty of Dante's texts. When Dante's Divine Comedy re-emerged into the public sphere in Britain through Henry Cary's 1814 translation, his reputation was as a stern, dark, Medieval poet and readers and writers alike shared a love of the perceived gothicism particularly of The Inferno. Shelley, however, differed from this general view of Dante: despite the grotesque descriptions in his Triumph of Life …

The Tartu School And Catalan Scholarship: A Book Review Article Of New Work In Reception And Communication Studie, Christopher Larkosh

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Psychology, Science, Feminisms, And Cultural Studies: A Book Review Article Of New Books By Bell And Hardin, Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Intermediality, Translation, Comparative Literature, And World Literature, Erin Schlumpf

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Intermediality, Translation, Comparative Literature, and World Literature" Erin Schlumpf postulates that the study of literature today is best performed in a framework of comparative literature and world literature including intermediality particularly in the case of translated texts. Schlumpf contends that working in comparative and world literature today demands a reexamination of translation and the teaching of works in translation. Following her theoretical postulates, Schlumpf analyzes two films, Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise (1966) and Xiaolu Guo's She, a Chinese (Zhongguo guniang) (2009).

Introduction To New Perspectives On Material Culture And Intermedial Practice, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek, Asunción López-Varela, Haun Saussy, Jan Mieszkowski

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

(Inter)Mediality And The Study Of Literature, Werner Wolf

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "(Inter)mediality and the Study of Literature" Werner Wolf elaborates on the "intermedial turn" and asks whether this turn ought to be welcomed. Wolf begins with a discussion about the definitions of "medium" and "intermediality" and the impact these concepts and practices exert on scholarly, as well as student competence. He argues that despite of the fact that literary studies ought not simply turn into media or cultural studies, mediality and intermediality have become relevant issues for both teaching and the study of literature especially in the fields of comparative literature and (comparative) cultural studies. Following his postulate …

Discourses And Models Of Intermediality, Jens Schröter

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Discourses and Models of Intermediality" Jens Schröter discusses the question as to what relations do different discourses pose between different "media." Schröter identifies four models of discourse: 1) synthetic intermediality: a "fusion" of different media to super-media, a model with roots in the Wagnerian concept of Gesamtkunstwerk with political connotations, 2) formal (or transmedial) intermediality: a concept based on formal structures not "specific" to one medium but found in different media, 3) transformational intermediality: a model centered around the representation of one medium through another medium. Model 3) leads to the postulate that transformational intermediality is not …

Intermediality And Aesthetic Theory In Shklovsky's And Adorno's Thought, Oleg Gelikman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Intermediality and Aesthetic Theory in Shklovsky's and Adorno's Thought" Oleg Gelikman places the concept of intermediality in the context of the unresolved conflict between philosophical aesthetics and aesthetic theory. The conflict originated in the response of an influential generation of thinkers to the crisis of the neo-Kantian schools and the emergence of modernism in the 1910s. Despite superficial similarities, aesthetic theory is neither a revamped aesthetics of the subject nor a theoretical vindication of modernism. By severing the connection between subject-object epistemology and theory of artworks, the practitioners of aesthetic theory such as Victor Shklovsky and Theodor …

Making Sense Of The Digital As Embodied Experience, Serge Bouchardon, Asunción López-Varela

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Making Sense of the Digital as Embodied Experience" Serge Bouchardon and Asunción López-Varela discuss a digital creation — Loss of Grasp <http://lossofgrasp.com/> — created by Serge Bouchardon and Vincent Volckaert. The work is about the notions of grasp and control. Through an analysis of Loss of Grasp, Bouchardon and López-Varela Azcárate show how the Cartesian understanding of private isolated experience, independent of reality external to it, has given way to a communal understanding of experience in which the subject constitutes itself by mirroring himself/herself on its objects, producing a mutual engagement or co-creativity among interdependent intersubjects: …

Video Games As Equipment For Living, Ronald Soetaert, Jeroen Bourgonjon, Kris Rutten

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Video Games as Equipment for Living" Ronald Soetaert, Jeroen Bourgonjon, and Kris Rutten postulate that with the emergence of new media there is need of a re-evaluation of all modes of communication and the ways in which literacy is conceptualized. Drawing on the concept of multi-literacy they suggest a rhetorical/ anthropological meta-perspective to describe human beings as symbol using animals and focus on particular symbol systems: narrative, drama, and video games. Specifically, they focus on the perspective of drama as a tool to analyze cultural artifacts in general and video games — as a new art form …

Dialogue Between Meaning Systems In Intermedial Texts, Cristina Peñamarín

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Dialogue between Meaning Systems in Intermedial Texts" Cristina Peñamarín analyzes visual-verbal texts showing different ways of conceiving and representing the world, that in each case involves certain ways of reinforcing or challenging preconceptions about the object and ways of positioning author and addressee. Peñamarín's aim is to explore a method by which to address presupposed world visions in the texts and to ask how images and plurisemiotic texts are used to confirm, discuss, or expand the boundaries of systems of meaning. She raises the question of the possibilities of dialogue, hybridization, cultural translation, and the change …

Intermediality And Human Vs. Machine Translation, Harry J. Huang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Intermediality and Human vs. Machine Translation" Harry J. Huang analyzes translation as a process of transferring meaning and/or information. The process and the translated text represent a new medium. When machine translation originating from human translation is integrated into the world wide web, it becomes part of global media. Accordingly, machine translation may best be studied within the context of intermediality, especially its quality vs. that of human translation. Based upon data generated from an international survey of 300 translators, writers, editors, and translation scholars, Huang analyses the participants' expectations and their acceptance of imperfection in the …

Intermediality, Rhetoric, And Pedagogy, Kris Rutten, Ronald Soetaert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Intermediality, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy," Kris Rutten and Ronald Soetaert discuss how the notion of intermediality challenges the institutions that traditionally "mediate" culture and they discuss implications for pedagogy. First, they focus on how the museum as an institution is questioned and problematized by describing it as a "medium" that is increasingly influenced by cultural and technological developments. Second, they focus on the implications of new material culture and intermedial practice and how this requires new perspectives on pedagogy. Rutten and Soetaert elaborate on previous work on the curriculum as a "contact zone" (Pratt) by focusing on the …

An Intermedial Reading Of Paley's Sita Sings The Blues, Ipshita Chanda

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "An Intermedial Reading of Paley's Sita Sings the Blues" Ipshita Chanda discusses the film text of Nina Paley's 2008 animation film, a culturally reconceptualized version of Válmíki's Sanskrit epic Rámáyana. Chanda discusses the film as an intermedial retextualization of the Rámáyana in the film where media boundaries and genres are crossed in "textual," audio, and visual media. The basic premise from which Chanda proceeds is that the condition of intermediality in film is produced by a "conceptual fusion" of different media which, in turn, are analyzed using theories of reception and contact between different media …

Old And New Medialities In Foer's Tree Of Codes, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Old and New Materialities in Foer's Tree of Codes" Kiene Brillenburg Wurth analyzes how intermediality works — not what it "is" — in the analysis of literary texts. How intermedial can texts "do," precisely when they consist only of words? Do such texts compel us to reconsider literature as a verbal art? Her analysis focuses on a recent book by Jonathan Safran Foer: Tree of Codes (2010), a literary work cut out of the remains of Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles (1934). Brillenburg Wurth points out how intermediality works as a productive interaction not only between …

Intermedial Representations In Asian Macbeth-S, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Intermedial representations in Asian Macbeth-s" I-Chun Wang discusses three Asian versions of Macbeths that exemplify the cultural meanings through the interaction of landscape, body, and spectacles of power. Shakespeare remains one of the most popular playwrights in the Eastern world, and playwrights in the Asian world find Shakespearean plays attractive to the Asian audience. Among Shakespearean plays, Macbeth fascinates its Asian audience with its theme on kingship, territory of social relationships as well as moral and emotional development. These adaptations oftentimes become cross-cultural reproductions because each adapted text manifests not only cross-cultural interpretations but also highlights …

Intermediality, Rewriting Histories, And Identities In French Rap, Isabelle Marc Martínez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Intermediality, Rewriting Histories and Identities in French Rap" Isabelle Marc Martínez analyzes aspects of French hip hop culture. As an example of resistant cultural manifestations, hip hop scenes all over the world develop strategies to subvert mainstream values and to replace them by new de-localized, contesting identities via intermedial and intertextual processes. In France during the 1990 rap was intended to reassess French national history and national self-perception. Foundational hip hop bands such as Assassin, Ministère AMER, IAM, and NTM aimed at discrediting official narratives concerning the French culture's colonial and social past. hip hop artists, who …

Digital Media, 419, And The Politics Of The Global Network, Paul Benzon

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Digital Media, 419, and the Politics of the Global Network" Paul Benzon analyzes advance fee fraud, a scam in which con artists communicate with potential victims via email, promising them a monetary reward in return for financial assistance in extracting an allegedly astronomical (yet ultimately nonexistent) fortune from within a geographical zone often characterized as highly violent and unstable. Advance fee fraud is often referred to simply as 419, in accordance with the section of Nigerian penal code that addresses fraud. Benzon reads advance fee fraud as a practice of epistolary narrative that self-consciously allegorizes central processes …

Computer Mapping Of Geography And Border Crossing In Scandinavia, Øyvind Eide

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Computer Mapping of Geography and Border Crossing in Scandinavia" Øyvind Eide discusses computer based methods for enquiry into a set of border protocols created in the mid-eighteenth century based on interviews with inhabitants of northern Scandinavia. Most of the interviews are with common people: semi-nomadic reindeer herders, fishers, and farmers of Sámi, Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish origin. Eide discusses the value of the interview material as source material which can be used to understand the way people spoke, especially about geographical matters. The data and their analysis suggest the relevance of mediality and materiality with not only …

Intermediality, Architecture, And The Politics Of Urbanity, Virgilio Tortosa Garrigós

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Intermediality, Architecture, and the Politics of Urbanity" Virgilio Tortosa Garrigós discusses aspects of the exponential development of large cities, the neoliberal economy, and the "spectacle" of architecture in the context of intermediality. With the connivance between land speculators and politicians — which has led not only to the loss of spatial identity but to irreversible pollution and geographic degradation — urbanity is epitomized on the Mediterranean coast line. In reaction to this development, a series of anti-globalization organizations and social movements, rooted in urban neighbourhoods, resist the homogenization of taste with anti-billboards and anti-advertising against consumerism and …

Intersubjectivity And Intermediality In The Work Of Serra, Rocío Von Jungenfeld

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Intersubjectivity and Intermediality in the work of Serra" Rocío von Jungenfeld examines the intersubjective space in which artworks are conceived and the cross boundaries of media in order to construct a general understanding of intersubjective perception in visual and plastic arts and an understanding of the processes that determine works of art, reflective perception, and intersubjective experience. Although the argument is that perception is subjective and untransferable, (i.e., a unique personal experience) influenced by innumerable factors and bound to a specific context, there are some elements of perception which can be understood intersubjectively as they apply to …

Plotting The Pixel In Remediated Word And Image, Sarah Wyman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Plotting the Pixel in Remediated Word and Image" Sarah Wyman argues that art's historic negotiation of culture continues into the new digital media age as it both asserts the materiality of the medium and acknowledges the impact of embodied perception. She demonstrates that however revolutionary, the new digital media still relate to many traditional paradigms of aesthetic expression. Problems of representation and simulation continue to catch on questions of time, space and human perception. The contingent relationships between categories and entities once kept separate — word/image, observer/observed — determine and define the process of globalization. The new …

Towards A Multimodal Analysis Of Da Rimini's Dollspace, Maya Paniagua Zalbidea

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Towards a Multimodal Analysis of da Rimini's Dollspace" Maya Zalbidea Paniagua analyzes Francesca da Rimini's Dollspace <http://dollyoko.thing.net/> (1997-2001). By analyzing Dollspace Zalbidea Paniagua reinforces the proposition that studies on material aesthetics and intermediality encompass a process of rethinking the notion of boundaries across material structures. This is clearly shown in da Rimini's Dollspace, where ambivalence cuts across discursive genres and distinct material formats of image, text, and audio. Hypertext engages the user/participant in a dialogue with the machine and, in the case of Dollspace, across people's sexual attitudes. Dollspace seeks to do more than …