Comparative Literature Commons^™

"El Corregidor" At The Crossroads: Desire, Law, And Coloniality In Martel's Zama, Leisa Kauffmann

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "'El Corregidor at the Crossroads: Desire, Law and Coloniality in Martel's Zama" Leisa Kauffmann discusses Lucrecia Martel's filmic adaptation of Antonio DiBenedetto's 1952 novel, Zama. Highlighting the director's emphasis on the psychoanalytic (as opposed to the existentialist) dimensions of the novel, the essay follows the titular characater's unravelling and shows how Martel's film allegorizes colonial(ist) subjectivity. In Kauffmann's essay, various psychoanalytic theories (such as the work of Bhabha, Fanon, and Žižek), and critiques centering the notion of race in the Lacanian tradition are applied. In addition, differences between the novel and film, particularly regarding Zama's mutilation and …

Haunting Pasts, Cancelled Futures: Polish And Argentinian Experiences Of Postdependency, Ewa Kobyłecka-Piwońska

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The aim of this article is to compare Polish and Argentinian experience of democratic transitions of the 1980s and 1990s. Establishing new political and economic orders in both countries did not entail a change in their citizens’ post-dependent mentality. In the first part of the paper, a connection is drawn between Polish and Argentinian collective memories in line with the methodology of transcultural memory studies (Erll, Rothberg). The post-dependent condition is articulated twofold: through the remembrance of the disappearance (of the Jews, the victims of the Argentina’s state terrorism, the indigenous peoples), and through the confusion in grasping the sense …

The Extraction Unconscious: Solar-Powered Utopias In Catching The Sun (2015) And In The Name Of Lithium (2021), Isidora Cortés-Monroy

Critical Humanities

By comparing the depictions of future energy regimes in the two ecodocumentaries, Catching the Sun (2015) and In the Name of Lithium (2021), this article explores representations of post-carbon futures from the US and Argentina. Read closely alongside Frederic Jameson’s notions of utopias, the article delineates the extent to which a solar powered future challenges and reiterates current neocolonial extractivist structures. Basing myself on Patricia Yaeger’s concept of an “energy unconscious,” I argue that these solar utopias maintain an “extraction unconscious” that continues to produce sacrifice zones where primary commodities needed for the energy transition can be found. By analysing …

La Pratique Intermédiale, Vers Une Nouvelle Approcheinterdisciplinaire : Perspectives Théoriques Et Pratiques Scripturales, Cas De La Télévision Et Dutéléphone Dans L’Œuvre De Fatou Diome, Le Ventre De L’Atlantique (2003), Youssef El Habachi

Dirassat

In the digital age, new literary forms are emerging within the post-modernist novel, particularly in french. The latter, whose aesthetic and formal construction, increasingly draws on media or artistic motifs that orient literary writing towards new aesthetic and discursive practices that break with structuralist formalism, most often based on the classic narrative schema of Julien Greimas or the actantial schema of Vladimir Propp. Thus, we are talking today about the interdisciplinary or polydisciplinary, hydrid or transcultural text, wich integrates paraliterary motifs such as the media with the aim of creating a new “vision of the world” based on exchange and …

Love And Power: Narrative Resistance In The Contemporary Literature And Film Of The Americas, Tania Nicolaou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project analyzes the ways in which narratives of love, care, and intimacy support sociocultural change through cinema, literary fiction, and memoir in Indigenous, immigrant, and diasporic communities in the United States, Haiti, and Cuba. The project’s intervention revolves around how we compare and examine narratives of the marginalized, underrepresented, and misremembered in a way that does not focus primarily on pain and trauma, but on experiences that embody radical change, healing, and a shift in the colonial matrix of power. The chapters consider love as constructed through family, identity, memory, and nationhood, all in relationship to what love looks …

Theatricality Of The Ephemeral: Media Of Surplus And Spectatorship In Liang Dynasty (南朝梁, 502-557) Palace-Style Poetry And Hou Hsiao-Hsien’S A City Of Sadness (1989), Yingyi Wang

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay focuses on the mediation of spectatorship experience by “ephemeral media” in Liang Dynasty (南朝梁, 502-557) palace-style poetry and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film A City of Sadness (1989). Drawing from Alexander Galloway’s “the interface effects” in new media studies, I investigate how the diegetic “ephemeral media” in these two texts, such as dust, candlelight, silence, and writing, function as opaque interfaces that complicate spectatorship. I examine spectatorship experience from the angle of ephemeral media by looking at how they direct spectators’ attention from the world of representations to processes of mediation. Transplanting Xiaofei Tian’s notion of the “surplus” in her …

Transmedial Econarratology: Environment And The Subject Of Science Fiction, Joseph R. Boisvere

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that narrators are constructed by their interactions with diegetic space and time in an ecological relationship. This argument draws upon Erin James’s work on econarratology, particularly her book The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives, putting her theories of narrating time and place in dialogue with contemporary “unnatural” narratology as theorized by scholars such as Jan Alber and Brian Richardson. Science fiction (SF) offers a rich complement to these theoretical stances. I also focus much of my dissertation on how narratology works across and is influenced by specific media, featuring literary, audiovisual, and digital media, including novels, …

How To Walk On Water: Living Through The Absurd, Esther Du

Masters Theses

Set in a speculative world submerged by water, this thesis constructs a fragmented, nonlinear narrative that reflects on survival, memory, and displacement in the aftermath of catastrophe. Through three interwoven chapters—The Outcast, The Researcher, and The World—the project explores the emotional and psychological landscapes of individuals navigating a post-apocalyptic existence where the past is irretrievable and the future uncertain. Using an interdisciplinary form of visual storytelling, writing, and sound, the work draws from personal experience and collective trauma to examine how people reconstruct identity and meaning after loss. Rather than offering a definitive answer to existential …

Wide Screen With Critical Essay "Translating A Poetry Of Cinema"., James L. Richie Iv

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation combines the creative task of translating Víctor Cabrera’s poetry collection WIDE SCREEN (2009) from Spanish into English with a critical study that analyzes the volume to highlight the uniqueness of his writing, the importance of translating such a work for an Anglophone audience, and the challenges that occur in translating this complex collection. Moreover, Cabrera’s writing engages with a variety of cultural works in ways that challenge preconceived notions of language, culture, and medium. The poetry in WIDE SCREEN draws inspiration from the films of American filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, while frequently putting these films into dialogue with works …

The Tragic Outlaw Hero In Modern Egyptian Fiction: A Case Study On Naguib Mahfouz’S "The Thief And The Dogs", Manar Ellethy

Regards

This article examines the outlaw figure in modern Egyptian fiction

through the lens of the conceptual framework of social banditry and classical

tragedy. It offers a unique angle of analysis of one of Mahfouz’s most prolific

works that emerges in times of growing political anxiety following the Egyptian

Revolution of 1952. Reading the 1962 film adaptation of Naguib Mahfouz’s The

Thief and the Dogs directed by Kamal El-Sheikh as a projection of the socio-

political uncertainty of the post-revolution Nasser era, this paper considers the

outlaw figure within the condition of social alienation. Using the conceptual

borders set by Eric …

A Polyphonic Adaptation: Noir Sensibilities In Naguib Mahfouz And Salah Abu Seif’S Take On Émile Zola’S "Thérèse Raquin", Fadi Awad Elsaid

Regards

In 1951, Salah Abu-Seif directed Lak Yūm yā ẓālim (Your Day Is Coming) – scripted by Naguib Mahfouz – adapting Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1867). In their third collaboration, Abu-Seif and Mahfouz went beyond merely adapting Zola’s novel – they also incorporated traits and techniques from film noir, creating what this article terms a “polyphonic adaptation” that draws from multiple sources. While their partnership is often credited with pioneering realism in Egyptian cinema, this article argues that the film’s crime-thriller elements invite a reassessment of that narrative. Although adapting French novels was common in pre-1952 Egyptian cinema, their …

The 1953 Codes: Rayyā And Sakīna On Screen (1953-2005), Elena Chiti

Regards

This paper examines on-screen representations of female criminals. It focuses on Rayyā and Sakīna, two sisters who were arrested in Egypt in 1920 and executed in 1921. Since 1953, the sisters have inspired movies and TV series that have entrenched their myth in popular culture. Rayyā and Sakīna are at the core of narratives that bear moral imperatives on societal issues, such as the place of women in society and the relation of the nation to its margins. I will argue that, until a recent off-screen resignification, Rayyā and Sakīna have not been deeply resignified in Egyptian movies. Instead, they …

Inherited Wounds: Generational Trauma In Postcolonial Film And Narrative Fiction Of The Global South, Sabrina Testi Melgarejo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The theorization of trauma in literary studies emerged in the 1990s, evolving from its physiological origins to a multidisciplinary framework encompassing literature, psychology, and history. However, classical trauma theory, rooted in Western scholarship and focused on singular traumatic events, has been criticized for its limitations in addressing collective and ongoing trauma in non-Western contexts. This thesis responds to a call for a more inclusive approach to trauma studies, examining how multi-generational and cultural trauma is represented in non-Western postcolonial films and literature from the Global South, including works from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Vietnam, and Lebanon.

The …

Prison Sentences: Spaces Of Liberation In Arab Prison Writing, Joseph Farag

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Spatial and temporal motifs predominate throughout the extensive corpus of Arabic prison writing. However, far from establishing the prison as an exceptional space, and periods of imprisonment as “time outside time,” this paper argues that modern Arabic prison literature tends instead to blur the distinction between “inside” and “outside” prison space and time. In place of a rigid spatial demarcation, dramatically exemplified by images of towering, razor wire-tipped walls, Arabic prison writing consistently seeks to create continuity between the punishment meted out to those within the prison’s walls and the repression endured by those beyond it. Consequently, these texts figuratively …

Punish Yet Cannot Discipline: Two Iraqi Prison Novels, Hanan Jasim Khammas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Al-Munāḍil (The Militant) (1972) by ʿAzīz al-Sayyid Jāsim, and Iʿjām (Iʿjaam) (2004) by Sinan Antoon are two prison novels about the historical turning points which mark the rise and fall of the Baʿth regime in Iraq. While the first employs imprisonment as a lens through to expose the corruption and injustice exercised by the monarchy against the emergent revolutionary power, the second shows the Baʿthist government applying similar methods of surveillance, and of physical and psychological torture. Reading these texts by al-Sayyid Jāsim, who died in the Baʿth prisons, and by Antoon who wrote Iʿjaam …

Hold Fast The Rope Of God: Space, Authority, And Speech In Muslim Prison Narratives, Basit Kareem Iqbal, Walaa Quisay

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Scholarship about Muslims in prison has been overwhelmingly dominated by security studies’ radicalization thesis and by a superficial reading of incarcerated Muslims’ “religious resilience.” Such approaches caricature the force of Islam in prison and indeed in Muslim prison narratives. This essay draws on interviews with survivors of prisons in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Syria in order to develop other terms for analysis. Across our textual and ethnographic engagements, we read for varied permutations of carceral space, formations of religious authority, and an intimate (witnessing) relation between speech and violence. Muslim prison narratives see a broad emphasis on the …

The Networks Of Prison Narrative: Imagining Sociality And Making Narrative In Assad’S Syria, Anne-Marie Mcmanus

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article argues for a new reading of collectivity – in both narrative voice and scenes of shared experience – in works of Syrian prison literature. Although these texts were published and are interpreted as the products of single author figures, the wider narrative field from which they emerge is shaped by numerous collective practices, from the oral and written to the digital. Breaking disciplinary boundaries around prison literature, this article introduces the term “prison narrative” and foregrounds diverse efforts by Syrian writers and former prisoners to imagine alternative formations of national experience and community under the Assad regime (1970-2024). …