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Pantheism And Escapism In Abu Madi's 'Enigmas' And 'The Evening' From English Romanticism Perspectives, Yasser K. R. Aman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Pantheism and Escapism in Abu Madi's 'Enigmas' and 'The Evening' From English Romanticism Perspectives" Yasser K. R. Aman investigates and analyses the possibilities of pantheism's encirclement of escapism in Elia Abu Madi's two poems from English Romanticism perspective. The article compares Abu Madi's fluctuating attitude towards escapism and pantheism to William Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour July 13, 1798," Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," highlighting the affinities and differences. The …

« L’Insulte (L’Affaire No. 23) » De Ziad Doueiri, Joseph Korkmaz

Regards

Comment un incident trivial – une dispute entre un Libanais chrétien et un ouvrier palestinien – peut-il devenir une affaire nationale à cause d’une simple insulte ? Le vrai sujet du film est le ressentiment que ressentent les chrétiens de Beyrouth-Est envers les Palestiniens, leurs anciens ennemis durant la guerre civile. La confrontation met en lumière l’évolution de la haine et l’impossibilité d’un pardon trente ans après la fin de la guerre. Le réalisateur fait ainsi preuve d’audace, traitant de front la question de l’amnésie/amnistie qui permit, de manière peut-être artificielle, la fin des combats.

« Tramontane (Rabih) » De Vatché Boulghourjian, Joseph Korkmaz

Regards

The story of a blind Lebanese musician confronting an unforgiving bureaucracy and the traumas of a violent past – the Lebanese Civil War – Vatché Boulghourjian’s Tramontane (Rabih) explores questions of memory and the lingering ghosts of war through the struggles of a war orphan seeking to obtain a passport. The article examines the trials he endures in his quest to uncover his identity, along with decades-old family and political secrets, adopting a historical perspective that draws parallels between the protagonist’s journey and society’s broader struggle to confront a troubled chapter in the nation’s history.

Résumé

L’histoire d’un …

Entretien Avec Vatché Boulghourjian, Joseph Korkmaz

Regards

Interview with Vatché Boulghourian, director of the movie Tramontane (Rabih), 2016, around the difficulties of representing the memory of civil war through the trials of a blind orphan.

Résumé

Entretien avec Vatché Boulghourian autour de son film Tramontane (Rabih), 2016, et des défis de traiter la mémoire de la guerre à travers les tracas bureaucratiques d'un orphelin aveugle.

الفنون المعاصرة من خلال أعمال ربيع مروة, Hana Kaaki

Regards

The article deals with the works of Rabih Mroué and its place in contemporary artistic practices in the Middle East region. The question of the study centers on the specificity of contemporary practices and the creative process of the artists in question, and the redefinition of Aesthetics – at least the traditional meaning of the concept – in light of the transformations of artistic thought and achievements.

Résumé

L’article traite des travaux de Rabih Mroué et de la place qu’il occupe dans les pratiques artistiques contemporaines au Moyen-Orient. Cette étude se concentre sur les spécificités du processus créatif de l’artiste, …

Entretien Avec Ziad Doueiri, Joseph Korkmaz

Regards

Entretien avec Ziad Doueiri, réalisateur du film L’Insulte (2017), sur les défis de la mise en scène et de la production d’un drame libanais à forte teneur politique.

La « Mimèsis » Dans Le Théâtre Et La Peinture, Joanna Raad

Regards

Le terme mimésis vient du verbe mimisthai qui signifie imiter, ou plus précisément suivre un exemple ou faire une « représentation ». Ainsi, l’imitation, ou mimésis, est un principe académique qui impose un culte de la représentation fondé sur la reconnaissance. Cet article voudrait discuter la manière dont la mimésis et l’illusion au théâtre interagissent avec l’art, et plus particulièrement la peinture.

La Prédominance Des Techniques Audiovisuelles Et Numériques Au Théâtre, Marcel Ghosn

Regards

The evolution of technologies in the audiovisual and theatre fields has succeeded in breaking the separation between actors and digital bodies. What is an actor today? Is he still essential on stage or in film? And what about digital bodies and their ability to produce and convey emotions and performances in the same way as a human actor?

Résumé

L'évolution des technologies dans les domaines du théâtre et de l’audiovisuel a permis d’effacer la frontière entre le corps de l’acteur et les corps numériques. Cela nous amène à poser la question : qu’est-ce qu’un acteur aujourd’hui ? Est-il toujours central …

Entretien Avec Le Producteur Georges Schoucair, Joseph Korkmaz

Regards

Interview with Georges Schoucair, producer of the movie Tramontane (Rabih, 2016).

فسيفولد إيميلوفيتش مايرخولد العبقري المشاغب, Michel Jabre

Regards

Meyerhold, dubbed “the people’s artist” by the Soviet regime, led a tumultuous artistic life and carried out provocative experiments in unconventional theatre settings. After cofounding the Moscow Art Theatre with renowned colleagues such as Stanislavski and Danchenko, he left the company to regain his independence as an actor and stage director. He then developed his theoretical concept of “conditional theatre,” reinterpreting classical plays in innovative ways and reimagining them within a renewed contemporary theatrical context.

Résumé

Meyerhold, surnommé « l’artiste du peuple » par le régime soviétique, a eu une vie artistique tumultueuse et a mené des expérimentations provocantes dans …

Éditorial, Joseph Korkmaz

Regards

Le cinéma libanais s’illustre par son dynamisme manifeste dans le nombre de films tournés. Des comédies légères épinglent quelques caractéristiques et travers de la société et des mœurs libanaises. Des feuilletons télévisés engourdissent une frange importante de la population, avide de romantisme et d’aventures rocambolesques.
De ce lot de productions émergent des œuvres qui méritent considération et encouragement, surtout quand il s’agit de premiers films [...]

مسـرح شـوشـو للأطفال, Rana Azzaz

Regards

Theatre for children is grounded in imaginative creativity and forms an educational, intellectual, and aesthetic tradition that refines a child’s spirit while developing taste, a sense of beauty, and openness. In Lebanon, plays designed for children began appearing in professional theatre venues in the late 1960s. The “Chouchou Children’s Theatre” was among the earliest and most significant initiatives, drawing a strong response from young audiences. In this article, I examine this phenomenon – which emerged spontaneously and without a clear methodology – with particular attention to audience reception.

Résumé

Le théâtre pour enfants est une tradition éducative, intellectuelle et esthétique …

Some-Ness In No-When: Queer Temporalities In The Horror Genre, Melody Hope Cooper

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In my research, I question why heteronormative society is afraid of the elements of horror films that are inherently queer. My focus is on temporal understandings of horror through the concepts of queer time, as theorized by Jack Halberstam and the theory of the abject, as presented by Julia Kristeva. I examine the relationship between queer time and heteronormative time. The abject serves as the return of time without identity or defined by binaries. Queer time is the time that will destroy heteronormative time’s conception of itself. This then relates to the horror that is created by the queering of …

China On The Move : Travel, Exile, And Migration In Chinese Literature And Film Of The 20th Century, Stephen Roddy, Frederik H. Green, Wei Menkus

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

During no previous century in China’s long history has society experienced more profound and far-reaching changes than during that nation’s long twentieth century. The contact with Western modernity and institutional change during the late Qing dynasty, the end of dynastic rule and the birth of the Republic, the Pacific War and the Civil War, the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan’s gradual democratization and finally the era of opening and reform in China under Deng Xiaoping 鄧小平 (1904−97) and the ensuing economic rise are only some of the key historical events that have profoundly transformed Chinese society …

Gender Representations In Adaptations Of Foreign Literature In The Republican Period, Liyan Qin

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

Chinese film The Heroine in the Besieged City 孤城烈女 (Gucheng lienü, 1936) is based on 19th-century French writer Guy de Maupassant’s (1850−93) story “Boule de Soif.” The Chinese version of Boule de Soif, like her French counterpart, is caught in a moral dilemma: should she surrender her body to a bad guy to save her fellow citizens? Both women choose to sacrifice themselves for others. However, the outcome and worthiness of the sacrifice in the Chinese film are just the opposite to those in the French literary source. Maupassant makes the girl’s sacrifice pointless and worthless by portraying the beneficiaries …

The Diaspora And The Nation : A Cultural Poetics Of Re-Membering In Lai Shengchuan’S Taiwan Trilogy, Jon Eugene Von Kowallis

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.

Frankenstein’S Migratory Subject : Under The Dome And Formosa Vs. Formosa, Chia-Ju Chang

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.

The Dmz Responds, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Seo-Young Chu’s “The DMZ Responds” appeared in Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea edited by Haerin Shin.

Too Intimate To Speak : Regional Cinemas And Literatures, Victor Fan

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

In this essay, I look back at a moment in Chinese literature and cinema, the 1930s and 1940s, when writers, filmmakers, and critics were driven by a series of political crises to conceptualize the relationship between “mother language” and “national language” from a very different perspective than Song’s. I do so by scrutinizing film and literary criticisms from this period. A national language, literature, and cinema are not static, unified, and internally coherent entities that naturally subsume their regional counterparts under them. While Putonghua 普通話 (literally, common language) required—and still requires—an ongoing process of putong hua 普通化 (communalization), regional topolects, …

Transnational Film Production And The Tourist Gaze : On Hou Hsiao-Hsien’S Café Lumière And Flight Of The Red Balloon, Shr-Tzung, Elliott Shie

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

This article attempts to reexamine the multiple forms of displacement in and of the film to which the new historical era gave rise, and thereby critically engage with the questions of transnational capital flow, global tourism and spectatorship, and textual migration in the case of intertextuality.

Lost At Home : Jia Zhangke’S Journey Toward Modernity, Wei Menkus

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

In this essay, I take a close look at three of Jia’s films that have prominently engaged the topic of home in relation to place, identity, and nation: Still Life 三峽好人 (2006), 24 City 24城記 (2008), and A Touch of Sin 天註定 (2013). Set at the turn of the twenty-first century, these films employ various modes of representation concerning the reality of space. Still Life, a quiet and contemplative cinematic essay on change and obsolescence, tracks two strangers’ separate journeys to the Three Gorges city of Fengjie as they look for their missing spouses in the disappearing land. 24 City …

The Futures Of Comparative Literature Envisioned By Chinese Comparatists, Sheng Meng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "The Futures of Comparative Literature Envisioned by Chinese Compara­tists" Sheng Meng and Yue Chen discuss the future of Comparative Literature from the perspective of Chinese comparatists. They argue that in response to the latest rhetoric around the crisis and death of Comparative Literature as a discipline, Chinese comparatists have fallen into four major repre­sentative groups. While the first one advocates restoring of international literary relations study of the French School, the second and the third camp see the future of the discipline lying in both the turn to translation and world literature respectively. However, the most ambitious …

Selected Bibliography For The Study Of The "Death" Of The Discipline Of Comparative Literature, Peina Zhuang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The Significance Of The Variation Theory In Cross-Cultural Communication, Yi Wan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Significance of the Variation Theory in Cross-Cultural Communication" Yi Wan analyzes some problems that East-West Comparative Literature, as a discipline, has encountered and discusses the significance of the development of the Variation Theory, proposed by Shunqing Cao. The author aims to explore two important points of this new platform, namely, heterogeneity and variation, and compares this new perspective to the French School, which is based on "influences" and the American School which is based on "analogies." By investigating the variations of literary texts or theories during the course of cross-civilization communication from the perspectives of imagology …

Voiceless Victims In Sin Tetas No Hay Paraíso, Henry James Morello

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Voiceless Victims in Sin tetas no hay paraíso" Henry James Morello discusses Gustavo Bolívar's Sin tetas no hay paraiso. The novel is, in Bolívar's words, his way of bringing attention to the problem of young women in Colombia using prostitution in order to pay for plastic surgery a very specific problem facing the youth of Colombia. However, at what price is the success of the novel? Or, rather, who is compromised as a result of this cultural phenomenon? The author may have intended to write a novel that called attention to the problems facing Colombian …

The Suppression Of Satirizing Belgian Community Difficulties In Flemish Cinema And The Film Adaptation Of Will-O'-The Wisp, Gertjan Willems

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Suppression of Satirizing Belgian Community Difficulties in Flemish Cinema and the Film Adaptation of Will-O'-the Wisp" Gertjan Willems analyzes two film projects of Frans Buyens. In 1970, Buyens received a positive funding recommendation for Top-Hit Girl, a satire about community difficulties in Belgium. However, Minister of Culture Frans van Mechelen refused to support the project because it conflicted with his pro-Flemish views. The minister successfully swept this controversial decision under the rug by offering Buyens the option to trade his socially critical project for a film adaptation of Willem Elsschot's novel Will-O'-the Wisp. …

Transnational Uses Of Mafia Imagery In Zadie Smith’S White Teeth, Andrea Ciribuco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Transnational Uses of Mafia Imagery in Zadie Smith's White Teeth" Andrea Ciribuco discusses the literary representation of multiculturalism in Zadie Smith's first novel, White Teeth (2000). The novel focuses on multicultural encounters in Great Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. This article focuses on one site for these encounters: the character of Millat Iqbal, who joins a gang of teenagers and subsequently a radical Islamic group in his problematic search for identity and belonging. This search is characterized by Millat's tendency to define himself by reference to well-known pop-cultural Mafia figures, whom he …

Perspectives On Video Games As Art, Jeroen Bourgonjon, Geert Vandermeersche, Kris Rutten, Niels Quinten

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Perspectives on Video Games as Art" Jeroen Bourgonjon, Geert Vndermeer­sche, Kris Rutten and Niels Quinten engage in discussing whether or not video games can be considered a form of art. Although this question has already been discussed elaborately, the debate is guided by many differ­ent and often conflicting positions. The aim of this article is to revisit this debate by mapping out a range of perspectives on video games as art. The authors explore the relation between games and differ­ent definitions and functions of art, different motives of artists, and the potential impact of the arts. The …

Black Australia ‘Writes Back’ To The Literary Traditions Of Empire, Danica Čerče

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

I In her article "Black Australia 'Writes Back' to the Literary Traditions of Empire" Danica Čerče discusses the verse of Australian Indigenous authors Romaine Moreton and Alf Taylor, notable for the overt objection to the institutional and historical processes. These have enabled and maintained the dominant position of those identified as white on the one hand, and the concomitant political, economic, and cultural subordination of Indigenous Australians on the other. Focused on strategies and poetic devices used by the two poets to engage non-Indigenous readers in the experience of their writing, the article examines how the rhetoric of their critique …

Literary And Cinematic Representations Of Neoliberal Forms Of Contemporary Violence In Latin America With Special Interest In Mexico And Colombia, Ivan De Jesus Iglesias

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the last decades, with an increased rhythm and greater intensity, the so-called neoliberal violence has come to play a relevant role within the history of world societies. The Latin American institutional, political, social, and economic changes of the 1970’s and 1980’s, especially those produced under dictatorships, contributed to create the conditions for the implementation of the processes of economic liberalization and global market as part of the concept of institutional modernization and cultural globalization that gave rise to the neoliberal mentality. In this context, neoliberalism becomes hegemonic as a mode of discourse and is incorporated into the way individuals …