Comparative Literature Commons^™

Possibilité Du Filmage Documentaire Des Marges Berbères Au Maroc : Cas Comparés Des Tournages Clandestins De « La Longue Journée » (Mohamed Abbazi, 1969) Et D’« Amussu » (Nadir Bouhmouch, 2019), Marie Pierre-Bouthier

Regards

This paper explores two filmic attempts at compensating for the invisibility in which Amazigh people and struggles are kept in Morocco. Both films and filmmakers experimented with shooting and production plans, devices, and film forms that should best convey these realities. With a 50-year interval between the two, both attempts share the ambition to go against the limitations imposed by the “Centre Cinématographique Marocain”, resorting to clandestine shooting and supported by an international network. In particular, both attempts were made possible by a detour through California (USA). The Breadwinner (1969) is an unfinished documentary by Mohamed Abbazi, dedicated to the …

La Guerre Civile Libanaise Au Cinéma Et Les Circulations Transculturelles, Thomas Richard

Regards

The trajectories of Lebanese film directors and their work, characterized by a strong international dimension and by their insertion within the art film networks, bear the mark of interactions between local and global visual and memorial norms linked to these trajectories, in a globalized cultural environment. These films, though enriched by this international dimension, may appear to develop their narrative following the demands of international festival audiences, risking that these demands become constraints, and at the risk of possible loss of contact with local audiences.

Résumé

Les circulations des cinéastes libanais et de leurs œuvres, fortement marquées par une dimension …

Production Locale Et Coproductions Européennes Des Films D'Auteur Dans Le Cinéma Turc Contemporain, Hilal Ahiskali

Regards

Since its birth, Turkish cinema has gone through different eras that have allowed it to progressively evolve towards an author cinema. Even though it took longer than for European cinema, certain contemporary Turkish directors today manage to nourish themselves not only from the aesthetics and theory of European cinema but also from their own cinematic culture called Yeşilçam. This is the result of their cinematographic approaches, their independent productions, and European financial support. These production sources have allowed Turkish directors to choose the subjects of their films to work on their art, rather than serve the commercial expectations of …

Petites Et Grandes Guerres : Une Filmographie Des Longs Métrages Tournés Au Liban Pendant La Guerre Civile (1975-1990), Hady Zaccak

Regards

This study was carried out as part of the “Ciné-rencontres de l’ALBA” (Académie libanaise des beaux-arts, University of Balamand), a film event organized at the School of Cinema and Audiovisual Directing by Ghassan Koteit, May El Koussa, Danielle Davie, Myriam Hage, and Gregory Buchakjian, from April 9 to 12, 2019.
This filmography includes 70 feature films (fiction and documentaries) shot in Lebanon between 1975 and 1990...

Résumé

Cette étude a été effectuée dans le cadre des « Ciné-rencontres de l’ALBA » (Académie libanaise des beaux-arts, University of Balamand), événement de rencontres cinématographiques organisé à l’École de cinéma et de réalisation …

Les Co-Productions Algériennes Avec L'Europe : Standardisation Ou Résistance ?, Salima Tenfiche

Regards

After more than twenty years of silence, Algerian cinema has resurfaced on the international scene for ten years, through co-productions with foreign countries and especially Europe. The use of foreign funding and the recognition of these films by the legitimating institutions of the North — reading committees and prestigious international festivals — raise the question of the subjugation of these filmmakers to European cultural hegemony.
However, if some Algerian filmmakers and producers appeal to foreign funds, it is above all to free themselves from the supervision of the State and from censorship in their own country. These filmmakers are far …

10 Theses On Feminist Economics (Or The Antagonism Between The Strike And Finance), Luci Cavallero, Verónica Gago

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article, “10 Theses on Feminist Economics (or the antagonism between the strike and finance),” Luci Cavallero and Verónica Gago are interested in a feminist economics that is able to redefine, based on the bodies and territories in conflict, labor and exploitation, communal and feminized modes of doing and resisting, and popular innovation in moments of crisis. They write from the position of having formed part of the organizing for the feminist strike that, since 2016, has driven what they characterize as a massive, radical, and transnational movement. They root the theses that they synthesize here in that dynamic …

Readymade Or Made [To Be] Ready, Replicant Or Surplus: Social Reproduction And The Biopolitics Of Abstraction Prefigured In Contemporary Art, Jaleh Mansoor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The artist may be one of the last subject-positions within capitalism to determine their own labour under the sign of “creativity,” and to be held at an oblique angle to value productive labour; they are dialectically “free” to be creative (Adorno, Vishmidt, Stakemeir, Beech). But since 1973 if not 1915, artists mark this creative capacity as a process whereby reification has migrated from that of the object to that of the subject, to the artist-subject, now heightened in a post-industrial era of “feminized” and immaterial labour where service eclipses production. Artists in the “post medium condition” elaborate practices that track …

Detroit’S Water Wars: Race, Failing Social Reproduction, And Infrastructure, Brian Whitener

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this essay, I theorize an emergent urban power dynamic of infrastructural resource grabs or the use of state power to transfer infrastructural resources away from marginalized, racialized, and/or precariously documented populations. As a transfer, rather than a set of cuts or privatizations, I argue this dynamic is distinct from those of neoliberal or “shrinking” states and is a direct attack on the social reproduction capacity of communities and individuals. Focusing on the case of Detroit, where predominantly white suburban elites succeeded under the cover of Detroit’s 2013-14 bankruptcy proceedings to pry the possession of the water and sewage infrastructure …

De La Novela Picaresca A El Chavo Del 8, Carlos Aguasaco

Publications and Research

Los albores de la modernidad[i] coincidieron con la emergencia de la novela picaresca en la que temas como la niñez, la educación, la pobreza agravada por el hambre extrema, y la idea de la movilidad social, aparecieron representados en obras muy populares como El Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), El Buscón (1626), El Periquillo Sarniento (1819) y La vida inútil de Pito Pérez (1938). La popularidad de la novela picaresca emanaba de su novedosos realismo social y urbano, sumados a la disponibilidad de copias hecha posible gracias a la imprenta de Gutenberg. El Chavo del 8 (1971-1980) ha tenido una …

The World’S Greatest Hero: An Examination Of Superhero Tropes In My Hero Academia, Jerry Waller

Master's Projects and Capstones

In this paper the author explores the cross-cultural transmission of genre archetypes in illustrated media. Specifically, the representation of the archetype of American superheroes as represented in the Japanese manga and anime series, My Hero Academia. Through examination of the extant corpus of manga chapters and anime episodes for the franchise, the author draws comparison between characters and situations in the manga series with examples from American comic books by Marvel Comics and DC Comics. By skillfully incorporating foundational themes of American superhero comics into the shonen manga genre, My Hero Academia joins a growing collection of media that draws …

Little Magazines, Postwar Internationalism, And The Construction Of World Cinema, Louise Kane

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This essay explores how two interwar film magazines, Close Up (1927-33) and Experimental Cinema (1930-4), pioneered early forms of world cinema as part of wider postwar attempts to forge transnationalism, improved international relations, and humanistic dialogue among people and nations. I argue that both magazines presented the cinema as a form of global community through their establishment of film societies and clubs, inclusive contributor policies, turn toward Russian cinema, and staunch rejection of Hollywood cinema’s commercialism. These strategies enabled the construction of a shared, albeit idealistic, vision of world cinema centered on comparative approaches, anti-imperialism, and the preservation and documentation …

Reactions To Gulf War I And Gulf War Ii In American And Iraqi Cinema And Theatre: The Quest For A Global Utopia, Tajaddin Salahaddin Noori

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many American and Iraqi cultural reactions to Gulf War I and Gulf War II, including the texts selected for this story, expressed the dystopian consequences of these wars. However, this study focuses on exploring the utopian dimensions of the selected texts and investigates how these texts attempt to reconcile both sides of the conflict and produce visions toward a global utopia. Significantly, this study represents the visions toward a global utopia as a series of visions toward oneness. That is, oneness of human beings over otherness, oneness of different nation states under one global community, and oneness of cultural productions’ …

Curating Digital Pedagogy In The Humanities, Katherine Harris, Matthew Gold, Rebecca Frost Davis

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

This is the published introduction to the born-digital, open-access, peer-reviewed *Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities*. More a rationale and scholarly study of both Digital Pedagogy and DPiH in general, this introduces articulates the uses, theory, rationale about digital pedagogy as it has been shaped in U.S. institutions since the explosion of Digital Humanities in 2009. As a separate field now, Digital Pedagogy is built on the generosity of its practitioners, but saving the *stuff* of teaching and pedagogy is difficult. The introduction historicizes this now-published project, its open peer review process, and its development in the early years (starting in …

Why I Write In Yiddish, Karen Alkalay-Gut

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

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

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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

Fascist Aesthetics From 1940 To Contemporary Times, Anna M. Gellerman

Publications and Research

Movies and literature all over the world share some common aesthetics: militarization, romanticization of death, beauty of perfection, and even purity. What most don't think about is how these tropes rose to popularity due to Nazi Germany's propaganda films. This work describes these fascist aesthetics, and uses famous publications from the 1940s until now to paint just how common these themes are.

Gérer La Distance : Réflexivité Et Éthique Des Corps Meurtris Dans Les Documentaires Syriens D’Après 2011, Nicolas Appelt

Regards

Taking into account the post-2011 Syrian documentary, we realize that the question of the representation of “bruised bodies” occupies a major place which goes beyond crimes’ documentation committed during the conflict. In fact, in a large number of them there is a respect, an ethics towards “bruised bodies”. The question of their representation raised deep debates concerning both the fact of showing bodies and how to do it. By focusing more on how to represent bodies, we will be interested in the reflexive and ethical dimension that these representations involve. In this perspective, it will therefore be a question of …

Du Corps Écran À La Ville Corps, Noha Maroun

Regards

The human body always attracts and fascinates Arab filmmakers, that is why it is considered as an agglomerate of signs, which usually reveals the social and political instability of a nation. In the Lebanese cinema, the body representations are controversial and related to war themes. The men’s body becomes the screen and the receptacle of the violence when it exhibits its wounds and scars, while the moving women’s body holds within itself the early signs of safeguards. The moving women’s body is also correlated to the space that determines its trajectory. Beirut city emerges then as a huge body in …

Subversion, Subjectivité Et Critique : Le Corps Dans La Performance Artistique Aux Émirats Arabes Unis, Océane Sailly

Regards

Between 1982 and 1984, London-trained, Dubai-based artist Hassan Sharif produced and documented a body of performance work that is often seen to inaugurate the practice of contemporary performance art in the United Arab Emirates. In his wake, artists Mohammed Kazem and Ebstisam Abdulaziz have further developed this artistic genre and profoundly altered the relationship between art and corporeality. Subversive, critical and political, these three artists have made their bodies a tool for challenging established standards while claiming their artistic subjectivity. Based on a selection of performances and taking into account the socio-cultural context of their realization, this article proposes to …

Introduction – Les Régimes Esthétiques Du Corps Dans Le Monde Arabe, Gilles Suzanne

Regards

Que l’art, dans le monde arabe (qui nous servira de périmètre), voire, dans l’aire d’influence culturelle de l’Islam qui ne saurait s’y réduire, entretienne un rapport au corps, n’a rien d’une découverte...

Le Pouvoir Du Sang Féminin Dans L’Art Contemporain Arabe, Jana Mrad

Regards

After the 1970’s performances, and at the time the feminist collectives, whose artistic approaches often recall menstruation, emerged, feminine blood also found its place in the contemporary Arab art scene. Driven by a desire of emancipation and freedom, some Middle Eastern artists seized the feminine blood and made it into a paradigm in order to shed light on the female body and the way the latter is lived, perceived and controlled. By taking on this taboo, they found a way to elude censorship, waive the rules, cross the limits... in order to free women’s wounded bodies.

Résumé

Après les performances …

Le Corps Anamorphosé Dans Le Théâtre Marocain : Cas De Capharnaüm De Latefa Ahrrare, Imad Belghit

Regards

Given the territorial and cultural differences, some Moroccan plays produce a particular corporeality around which the scene is articulated. We then witness a questioning of ethos, a morality that incorporates postures and dispositions of the body. The show entitled Capernaum Auto-Sirate by Latefa Ahrrare is part of this scenic dynamic peculiar to the construction of corporalities in the context of contemporary Moroccan theater. The performance of this actress raises existential questions through her presence on stage and via a body subjected to the process of unveiling.

Résumé

Compte tenu des différences territoriales et culturelles, certaines pièces de théâtre marocaines produisent …

What Can A Body Do? Answers From Arab Cinema, Laura U. Marks

Regards

Baruch Spinoza’s statement “We do not know what a body can do” argues that bodies learn their powers not from divinely imposed laws but through experience in the world. Thought must pass through the body, in a way that menaces both existing thoughts and the body as it is at present. Great works of contemporary independent cinema in Arabic-speaking countries express the body’s forces of becoming in numerous ways, some of which this essay tracks: from not yet living to cultivating molecular forces, enfolding powers, expressing volatile passions, coming to life, and attaining adequate ideas. Some of these dynamics are …

Pays Rêvé (2011) De Jihane Chouaib, Joseph Korkmaz

Regards

The scenarist and director Jihane Chouaib returns, after a long absence, to her native country that she left during the war. She visits South Lebanon where she was born and wanders with her sister, who’s a dancer, in the places that marked her childhood. Her peregrinations are nostalgic and her memories are bitter-sweet. Her path crosses the path of the Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Moawad, of the director and journalist-photographer Katia Jarjoura, and of the French-Lebanese director Patric Chiha. To all these immigrants, Lebanon is the dreamed country that Jihane Chouhaib recalls through her view and her poetic comments.

Résumé

La …

Le Pouvoir En Images : Les Affiches Politiques Au Liban Entre 2005 Et 2010, Elie Yazbek

Regards

During the turbulent period following the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Lebanon, political posters were an important medium used by rival political parties to impose specific imagery on the public, contributing to set up a partisan discourse linked to the political position of each one. A war of images and slogans then took place, based on an audacious revaluation of the notion of image, reconsidered as both a symbol and an icon. The classical figurative representation system inherited from the Renaissance was confronted with ideological considerations that created a rupture and proposed original models of images.

Résumé

Durant …

Café Central, Joséphine Van Glabeke

Regards

Écriture blanche imprimée sur une tente en toile rouge vif, avec l’indication « Beirut » en exergue, pour rappeler où l’on se trouve…

The Moving Image And The Time Of Prophecy: Trauma And Precognition In L. Von Trier’S Melancholia (2011) And D. Villeneuve’S Arrival (2016), Luca Zanchi

Journal of Religion & Film

Both the deferred recurrence of post-traumatic symptoms and the foresight granted by prophetic vision bring about a disruption of temporality and generate a chronological discontinuity which is often formally rendered as narrative discontinuity. This similarity produces an interpretive ambiguity that is central to the films, Melancholia (2011) by Von Trier and Arrival (2016) by Denis Villeneuve. Both movies begin by hinting at the post-traumatic origin of visions and then gradually shift towards a prophetic explanation. In addressing these two case studies, this article approaches prophecy and its temporality from a narratological perspective, integrating the critical parameters of trauma-theory with the …

Terre Brûlée : Une Éco-Poétique Du Vide, Pierre Taminiaux

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Au XXIe siècle, les sociétés occidentales sont confrontées à de nouvelles formes de chaos. Celui-ci comporte plusieurs dimensions, à la fois sociales, culturelles et écologiques. L’art doit dès lors prendre en considération cette situation d’une manière ou d’une autre. C’est ce qui m’autorise à parler ici de mes images photographiques rassemblées sous le titre de Terre brûlée.

Celles-ci ont été prises à l’automne 2017, au Portugal, près de la ville de Leiria, dans une forêt de bord de mer (une pinède, plus exactement) qui fut longtemps considérée dans l’histoire de ce pays comme un domaine royal. Cette saison fut …

Rethinking The Monstrous: Gender, Otherness, And Space In The Cinematic Storytelling Of Arrival And The Shape Of Water, Edward Chamberlain

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Through comparing the Hollywood films Arrival and The Shape of Water, this article explicates the films’ similar portrayals of gender, social collaboration, and monstrosity. Although the mainstream media in the United States has linked the idea of the monstrous to larger global forces, the two films suggest that “the monster” exists much closer to home. Hence, this article makes the case that monstrosity occurs in a variety of formulations such as the actions of national authorities like governmental officials that oppress and endanger a myriad of American citizens as well as newcomers. Further, this article makes the case that …

Making The Global Visible: Charting The Uneven Development Of Global Monsters In Bong Joon-Ho’S Okja And Nacho Vigalondo’S Colossal, Ju Young Jin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her essay, “Making the Global Visible: Charting the Uneven Development of Global Monsters in Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja and Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal,” Ju Young Jin examines the entanglement of the global and the monstrous in two recent films that position Korea on the cusp between Cold War politics and global capitalism: Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja and Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal. The Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho and Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo offer viewers films that challenge conventional notions of monster by fusing it with a coming-of-age plot of the female protagonist that takes place on a global scale, which contests the …