Comparative Literature Commons^™

Postcolonial Studies In The Twenty-First Century: A Book Review Article About New Work By Ashcroft, Mendis, Mcgonegal, Mukerjee And Carrera Suárez, Durán Almarza, Menéndez Tarrazo, Alejandra Moreno

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Time, Photography, And Optical Technology In Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Tetyana Lyaskovets

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Time, Photography, and Optical Technology in Nabokov's Speak, Memory" Tetyana Lyaskovets discusses how Vladimir Nabokov narrates time in his autobiography by invoking photography and optical instruments. Photography and optical technology function in Speak, Memory as metaphors and probe the limits of chronological time. Nabokov portrays time as personal and reversible time that collapses the past and the present and allows one to glimpse the future. Because this temporal collapse is not possible physically but, as Nabokov believes, can be achieved through one's will, he engages optical technologies which provide a spatial form for his project to …

Review Article About U.S. Comparative Literature Journals Published In 2013, Miaomiao Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Queering Masturbation In Lorde's Life And Writing, Eric Sipyinyu Njeng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Queering Masturbation in Lorde's Life and Writing" Eric Sipyinyu Njeng discusses masturbation in Audre Lorde's life and works to signal an important aspect of her oeuvre often neglected in scholarship. Lorde stands out among prominent queer queens by demonstrating theory corporeally thereby going beyond mere theory and positing her body as a space of complex sexual passions. When Judith Butler speaks of gender as performative rather than embodied, Lorde theorizes and foregrounds this in her works and self and celebrates a sexual matrix that ranges from heterosexuality to homosexuality to auto-sexuality. Lorde places masturbation between the binary …

Postmodernist Poetics And Narratology: A Review Article About Mchale's Scholarship, Biwu Shang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Literary Adaptations Of James In Roth's, Ozick's, And Franzen's Work, John Carlos Rowe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Literary Adaptations of James in Roth's, Ozick's, and Franzen's Work" John Carlos Rowe posits that Henry James continues to exert a powerful influence on contemporary writers. Given the dramatic social, economic, and political changes from modern to postmodern eras, his continuing influence requires explanation. Rowe considers three US-American novelists—Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Jonathan Franzen—who are influenced by James and presents an interpretation of James's continuing impact. Despite James's reputation as a cosmopolitan modern who influenced global literature in significant ways, US-American writers attempt to "Americanize" him. Their effort expresses the problem of contemporary US-American literary practice …

Roth's Graveyards, Narrative Desire, And "Professional Competition With Death", Debra Shostak

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Roth's Graveyards, Narrative Desire, and 'Professional Competition with Death'" Debra Shostak analyzes Philip Roth's 1954 short story "The Day It Snowed" and surveys a range of his books. Shostak offers a reading of Sabbath's Theater and Everyman to explore Roth's fictional forms and his conception of storytelling, elucidates how the traumatic knowledge of death at graveside initiates the psychoanalytic process of repression, repetition, remembering, and telling, and uncovers several motifs or formal strategies that appear when Roth deploys cemetery scenes: the linear plotting toward death is often embraced within circular narrative structures; the voice of the mother, …

Jewish History, Us-American Fictions, And "Soul-Battering" In Roth's "Conversion Of The Jews", Sandor Goodhart

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Jewish History, US-American Fictions, and 'Soul-Battering' in Roth's 'Conversion of the Jews'" Sandor Goodhart discusses Philip Roth's story in which an innocent question raised in a Hebrew school discussion in the early 1950s gets wildly out of control. It leads the student into a screaming fight with his Rabbi, which propels the child into a confrontation with his mother, which in turn leads to a second violent confrontation with the Rabbi (who ends up slapping the child), and the episode culminates in a rooftop exchange over the synagogue where the boy’s thought of escape is suddenly converted …

European Literary Tradition In Roth's Kepesh Trilogy, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

in his article "European Literary Tradition in Roth's Kepesh Trilogy" Gustavo Sánchez-Canales discusses the significance of European literature in Philip Roth's novels. Sánchez-Canales analyses the influence of Nikolai Gogol's "The Nose" and Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" on Roth's The Breast and in Roth's The Professor of Desire of Anton Chekhov's tales and Franz Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" and The Castle. Further, Sánchez-Canales elaborates on the impact of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and W.B. Yeats's poem "Sailing to Byzantium" on Roth's The Dying Animal.

Reverse Anti-Semitism In The Fiction Of Bellow And Roth, Jay L. Halio

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Reverse Anti-Semitism in the Fiction of Bellow and Roth" Jay L. Halio discusses anti-Semitism in Philip Roth's fiction that what might be called reverse anti-Semitism: the active reaction by Jews who are subjected to anti-Semitism. This aspect of Roth's work is not often discussed: it is not the same as philo-Semitism, which takes a different form entirely. Since Roth was an admirer of Saul Bellow, Halio begins by considering reverse anti-Semitism in Bellow's early novel The Victim. In the novel the protagonist, Asa Leventhal, is accused by a character named Allbee of costing him his job …

Roth’S Humorous Art Of Ghost Writing, Paule Levy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Roth's Humorous Art of Ghost Writing" Paule Lévy analyses Philip Roth's Exit Ghost, the last novel featuring Nathan Zuckerman, in which Roth reassesses his favorite alter ego's itinerary while exploring the troubled relation between writing and aging. Lévy considers Exit Ghost as an ironic sequel to The Ghost Writer and posits that in the light of Derrida's theories of writing and "hauntology" the central motifs of ghosts and "spectrality" in the novel are a means for Roth to reflect anew on the ambiguous relation between autobiography and fiction. Lévy asks whether Exit Ghost should be …

Bibliography For The Study Of Phillip Roth's Works, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales, Victoria Aarons

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Roth's Contribution To The Narrativization Of Illness, Miriam Jaffe-Foger

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Roth's Contribution to the Narrativization of Illness" Miriam Jaffe-Foger argues that Philipp Roth's fiction represents him as an empath, a writer who prescribes for modern medicine a dose of humanity in listening to the pain of others. Using Roth's The Anatomy Lesson, The Dying Animal, and Exit Ghost as primary source material in combination with theories from medical anthropology, Jaffe-Foger suggests that Roth is an inspiration for the field of narrative medicine. Jaffe-Foger examines the art in organizing narratives to tell these stories. Jaffe-Foger also argues against misogynist views of Roth as he represents woman's …

Philip Roth, Henry Roth And The History Of The Jews, Timothy Parrish

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Philip Roth, Henry Roth and the History of the Jews" Timothy Parrish argues that while Roth's status as a Jewish American writer has been a pressing issue since his career began and that while in recent scholarship Roth's achievement as a US-American writer is stressed, the durability of Roth's work depends more on its implied submission to a Jewish tradition. From "The Conversion of the Jews" (1959) to Nemesis (2010), his characters challenge endlessly the ethical and moral constructs of their Jewish community to acknowledge the fact that they exist inside of it. One might choose any …

Roth's Fiction From Nemesis To Nemesis, Emily Budick

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Roth's Fiction from Nemesis to Nemesis" Emily Budick discusses Philip Roth's novel Nemesis as the culminating work of a career in which one nemesis or another has afflicted almost all of the author's protagonists. During the bulk of Roth's career, the hero's nemesis was generally, as in the ordinary, literary usage of the term, the protagonist's enemy, whether Judge Wapter in The Ghost Writer or the alter-Roth in The Counterlife. In Nemesis Roth restores the word nemesis to its classical meaning: Nemesis, as the goddess of revenge and cosmic balance. The nemesis in Roth's novel, therefore, …

Researching The Avant-Garde: A Book Review Article Of New Work By Bohn And Sell, Blaž Zabel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Subjectivity In 'Attār's Shaykh Of San'Ān Story In The Conference Of The Birds, Claudia Yaghoobi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Subjectivity in 'Attār’s Shaykh of San'ān Story in The Conference of the Birds" Claudia Yaghoobi discusses intersections of transgression, law, inclusion and exclusion, self and Other in Farīd al-Dīn 'Attār's (1142?-ca.1220) treatment of religion with regard to Shaykh San'ān and the Christian girl's love story in The Conference of the Birds. San'ān is an ascetic master who has never transgressed any of the Islamic laws until he embarks on a journey from Mecca to Rome after a dream only to fall in love with a Christian girl, convert to Christianity, and begin drinking wine and …

Art And Politics In Latin America: A Book Review Article Of New Work By Van Delden And Grenier, Sánchez, And Cohn, Nicole L. Sparling

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Intertextuality In Beckett's And Ağaoğlu's Work, Elmas Şahín

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In her article "Intertextuality in Beckett's and Ağaoğlu's Work" Elmas Şahín discusses Adalet Ağaoğlu's 1973 novel Ölmeye Yatmak (Lying Down to Die) and Samuel Beckett's 1950 Malone Dies in terms of intertextuality. Şahín employs tenets of comparative literature in order to analyze the two texts with regard to form and content and focuses on the on protagonists' worlds. In Şahín's interpretation, Ağaoğlu's protagonist Aysel is narrated in postmodern intertextuality as an individual of our days alienated from society, searching for her self/selves as she cannot succeed in dying. Both Beckett's and Ağaoğlu's protagonists attempt to "escape" from their selves and …

Embodied Cognition And The Grotesque In Calvino's La Giornata D'Uno Scrutatore And Sanguineti's Capriccio Italiano, Marco Caracciolo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Embodied Cognition and the Grotesque in Calvino's La giornata d'uno scrutatore and Sanguineti's Capriccio italiano" Marco Caracciolo analyzes the multiple dimensions of embodied experience and how they can be brought to bear on literary texts. Drawing on scholarship in cognitive science, he argues that the embodiment of people's engagement with the world emerges from the interaction between the physical structure of the body and socio-cultural practices. Caracciolo shows how such nexus of biological make-up and culture can give rise to particularly complex meanings in the representation of grotesque bodies. In order to illustrate his postulates, Caracciolo …

Sisyphus In Kertész's Fatelessness, Eric Beck Rubin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Sisyphus in Kertész's Fatelessness" Eric Beck Rubin discusses Imre Kertész's novel in relation to the philosophy of eternal recurrence, namely the notion that an individual inhabits a universe made of finite possibilities experienced and re-experienced without variation or end. Early explorations of eternal recurrence by Friedrich Nietzsche were taken up by Albert Camus, and Beck Rubin argues that certain works by both authors are fundamental to any reading of Fatelessness. Further, Beck Rubin argues that Kertész's contribution to the debate can be viewed from two perspectives: one sees Kertész as an author in conversation with …

History And Identity In Post-Totalitarian Memoir Writing In Romanian, Nicoleta D. Ifrim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "History and Identity in Post-Totalitarian Memoir Writing in Romanian" Nicoleta D. Ifrim analyzes Virgil Tănase's confessional and ego-graphic writing in his 2011 Leapșa pe murite (Playing Fetch with Death). Tănase's text is about the individual caught in history and re-writes it post-traumatically from a double perspective: that of the collective memory of totalitarianism and the personal thus functioning as a filtering mechanism for the creation of meta-historical identity. For Tănase, the experience of exile and post-exile, as well as the confrontation with the West legitimizes identity dilemmas and the construction of the individual. The book is representative …

Electronic Journals, Prestige, And The Economics Of Academic Journal Publishing, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek, Joshua Jia

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Electronic Journals, Prestige, and the Economics of Academic Journal Publishing" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Joshua Jia discuss the current state of the academic journal publishing industry. The current state of the industry is an oligopoly based on a double appropriation model where academics produce work for at no cost only to have publishers earn significant profit margins by selling the work back to academics. Publishers are able to do this given the price inelasticity and weak bargaining power of its main consumer, university libraries. Publishers' ability to increase prices is also supported by what the authors …

Science-Fictional North Korea: A Defective History, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Kafkaesque, Orwellian, eerie, surreal, bizarre, grotesque, alien, wacky, fascinating, dystopian, illusive, theatrical, antic, haunting, apocalyptic: these are just a few of the vaguely science-fictional adjectives that are now associated with North Korea. At the same time, North Korea has become an oddly convenient trope for a certain aesthetic – an uncanny opacity; an ominous mystique – that many writers and artists have exploited to generate striking science-fictional effects in texts with little or no connection to North Korean reality. (The 2002 Bond film Die another Day, for example, draws from North Korea’s science-fictional aura to animate North Korean super-villains who …

On World Literatures, Comparative Literature, And (Comparative) Cultural Studies, Ning Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "On World Literatures, Comparative Literature, and (Comparative) Cultural Studies" Ning Wang argues that cultural studies is characterized by being opposed to (elite) literary studies not only because it points to popular or non-elite literature, but also because it challenges the discipline of comparative literature. On the other hand, (comparative) cultural studies complements literary studies in that it contributes a great deal to the reconstruction of a sort of new comparative literature. Wang illustrates how some of the representative Anglo-American comparatists are now doing cultural criticism while still engaging in comparative literature and they paved the way for …

Interdisciplinary Studies And Comparative Literature In China And The West, Aaron Lee Moore

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Interdisciplinary Studies and Comparative Literature in China and the West" Aaron Lee Moore addresses the arguments on the part of Chinese and Western scholars against and for the full inclusion of interdisciplinary studies within the discipline of comparative literature. Interdisciplinary studies, in general, have been resisted in Chinese scholarship as it once was in the U.S. and other Western countries. Moore discusses the major Chinese arguments for and against interdisciplinary studies in general and interdisciplinary studies within comparative literature. Moore's main argument is that the study of literature by necessity must always cross disciplinary boundaries and the …

Western And Oriental Worlds Of Literature And Modern Greek Literature, Maro Kalantzopoulou

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Western and Oriental Worlds of Literature and Modern Greek Literature" Maro Kalantzopoulou explores the extent to which modern Greek literature can be seen as linked to Western and Oriental literary cultures. She discusses examples of literary phenomena featuring Western influences, as well as works which are linked in different ways to Southeastern Europe in general, the Ottoman world, and Oriental literary cultures. Kalantzopoulou's claim is that scholarship tends to associate modern Greek literature with Western literary cultures and dismisses non-Western contributions and influences. Kalantzopoulou suggests that by acknowledging the historical situatedness of such assumptions and by examining …

Introduction To New Work About World Literatures, Graciela Boruszko, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Interculturality And World Literary System(S), Jola Škulj

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Interculturality and World Literary System(s)" Jola Škulj proposes a new framework for studying planetary exchanges of literatures, one that subverts the systemic distinction between centers and peripheries. She advocates a model that can yield the analytical conceptualization and hermeneutic understanding of literary phenomena and their historical reality in the complexity of semiotic traces, in actual distinctiveness of formal and textual deposits, and in interconnections of poetological impacts. She argues that literary facts seen in such intricate networks of mutual intertextual phenomenology and reaccentuations attest to their character of permanent mobility, evident instability, and constant inventive reformulation of …

Positive Uncertainty And The Ethos Of Comparative Literature, Brigitte Le Juez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Positive Uncertainty and the Ethos of Comparative Literature" Brigitte Le Juez examines the continuous difficulty comparatists have with the lack of definition of the discipline and explores possible new avenues for tackling the problem. Le Juez argues that "uncertainty" recognized as a tenet of comparative literature should not be unheeded, but embraced in order to shift the focus from the idea that comparative objects and methods are the defining elements of the discipline and envisage them as the aims and results of an ethos. Le Juez posits that when "indiscipline" and "serendipity" are added to the notion …