Comparative Literature Commons^™

The Problematics Of A Social Constructivist Approach To Science, Bryce Christensen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "The Problematics of a Social Constructivist Approach to Science," Bryce Christensen takes John Gray's hope that science can serve as a remedy for anthropocentrism as an entry point for discussing the debate between scientific realists and social constructivists. Christensen examines the way science appears to buttress the realist position when it confronts humans with truths that contradict their expectations and desires. In his discussion, Christensen also surveys the ways that science fits within social constructivist theory when it serves identifiable social needs or advances identifiable group interests. Further, Christensen identifies eschatological cosmology as an extreme test case …

Hybridity And Whiteness In Claudine C. O'Hearn's Half And Half: Writings On Growing Up Biracial And Bicultural, Heather Latimer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Hybridity and Whiteness in Claudine C. O'Hearn's Half and Half: Writings on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural," Heather Latimer examines the autobiographical collection Half and Half: Writings on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural assembled and edited by Claudine C. O'Hearn. Latimer's analysis reveals how current models of hybridity theory are performed, articulated, and exemplified in the texts of O'Hearn's volume. In her analysis, Latimer explores the anxiety and tension about whiteness within hybridity theory, often reflected in the performance of hybrid aesthetics. Latimer argues that while some authors in Half and Half avoid talking about whiteness as …

The Quest For Body And Voice In Assia Djebar's So Vast The Prison, Susannah Rodríguez Drissi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Using Northrop Frye's definition of the quest novel and Joseph Campbell's writings, Susannah Rodríguez Drissi explores in her paper, "The Quest for Body and Voice in Assia Djebar's So Vast the Prison," the motif of the journey as Djebar adapts it to her female characters. Rodríguez Drissi proposes that in previous studies concerning the hero -- such as in James Frazer's The Golden Bough or in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces -- women are relegated to a secondary role. Recently, however, it has become evident that the study of the woman as "heroine" is necessary to a …

Globalization, Ideology, And Narratives Of The East Asian Financial Crisis, Ezra Yoo-Hyeok Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Globalization, Ideology, and Narratives of the East Asian Financial Crisis," Ezra Yoo-Hyeok Lee analyzes the narratives of the East Asian financial "crisis" in 1997-98, arguing that it took place in the course of restructuring the world economy so that the first world would keep its hegemonic power. The East Asian financial crisis spread rapidly to the rest of the globe and in this urgent situation, the IMF: International Monetary Fund played its now typical role as a "savior of the world." Before the financial crisis, the East Asian economy was considered to be an exemplary model from …

Intercultural Communication And Speech Style, Fee-Alexandra Haase

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Intercultural Communication and Speech Style," Fee-Alexandra Haase discusses intercultural communication as a concept for the production and analysis of speeches and written texts. Starting with a theoretical and historical perspective, Haase exemplifies selected intercultural patterns found in different cultures. Further, based on definitions of style in rhetoric from different cultural backgrounds from the ancient Greek culture up to modern approaches of rhetoricians, Haase proposes a concept for the analysis of texts employing aspects of rhetoric as an intercultural concept. Haase locates in her concept methods of composition used for the analysis of texts and spoken words within …

Watsuji And Deleuze And Guattari In The Climate Of Culture, Seth Jacobowitz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Seth Jacobowitz, in his paper "Watsuji and Deleuze and Guattari in the Climate of Culture," analyzes theories of cultural properties in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus alongside Watsuji Tetsuro's prewar Climate and Culture. At stake in these investigations is the status of the West as a universalizing particular ratified by these authors in the instance of its own critique. We are confronted on the one hand with Deleuze and Guattari's exoticized, Orientalist promise of an alternative economy of meaning derived from the Balinese term for "plateau" and the morphology of the rhizome and, on the other hand, …

The Open And The Suspension Of Being: A Review Article Of New Work By Agamben, Heller-Roazen, And Smock, Paolo Bartoloni

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The "Essential Renewing Fantasy": The Vietnam Experience In American Literature, Jeffrey Gross

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this study, I employ the idea of postmodern naturalism to illustrate how Tim O'Brien addresses the postmodern era following the Vietnam War, which he achieves through form and characterization, and how he blends in a naturalistic framework where events and powers beyond his characters' control affect their lives. Such a study of six of O'Brien's novels-Northern Lights, Going After Cacciato, The Nuclear Age, The Things They Carried, In the Lake of the Woods, and July, July-is important because it unveils common motifs and structural strategies employed by O'Brien in developing an evolved and postmodern version of naturalism. Rather than …

The Place Of Race: Ethnicity, Location And Progress In The Fiction Of Chinua Achebe And Ralph Ellison, Harry Olufunwa

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This paper examines the ways in which ethnicity and location intersect in selected works of fiction of Chinua Achebe and Ralph Ellison. It argues that the traceable correlation between ethnic origin and geographical location in the novels of these writers affects perceptions of and possibilities for personal and communal growth. Drawing upon Achebe’s No Longer At Ease and Ellison’s Juneteenth, the paper explores the ways in which characters and situations demonstrate the significance of ethnicity as major determinant of progress or catastrophe in multiethnic societies. It argues that the central characters of the two texts are culturally dislocated and …

Nation, Heritage, And Hospitality In Britain After Thatcher, Ryan S. Trimm

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Nation, Heritage, and Hospitality in Britain after Thatcher," Ryan S. Trimm examines the trope of cultural inheritance in postimperial Britain. "Heritage," an ubiquitous term in 1980s Britain, circulates largely as a conservative concept, an imagined bequest that works to exclude groups such as minorities who are disinherited putatively by not being part of the past and conceived as handing down some legacy. Such seems to be precisely the way heritage functioned under Margaret Thatcher's heritage politics, a collection of policies that associated icons such as the country house with the nation itself. However, although appeals to heritage …

Tracing Chinese Gay Cinema 1993-2002, Lan Dong

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Lan Dong explores in her paper, "Tracing Chinese Gay Cinema 1993-2002" the recent landscape of Chinese gay cinema through discussing the following three feature films: Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine (1993), Zhang Yuan's East Palace, West Palace (1996), and Stanley Kwan's Lan Yu (2001). The grouping derives from the concern that they all set their stories in Beijing. Using the capital city as a cultural background, the films display how queer is perceived in China from the 1920s to the end of the 1990s. All three storylines portray the characters' struggle to recognize their particular identity as gay men. In …

Reality Tv, Faking It, And The Transformation Of Personal Identity, Joanne Morreale

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Reality TV, Faking It, and the Transformation of Personal Identity," Joanne Morreale examines the hybrid makeover, game, and reality TV show Faking It as a cultural form that portrays the transformation of personal identity through performance. Morreale argues that the contents and performance of the show intensify the link between consumer culture and the fabrication of identity by teaching that fulfillment comes from becoming, rather than having, a commodity. In the show, participants learn to perform new selves that are perceived as "better." Faking It thus puts on display the processes of fabrication whereby the self is …

But... Can The Subaltern Sing?, Rebecca Romanow

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "But... Can the Subaltern Sing?," Rebecca Romanow discusses the dominance of the English language in rock music and the cultural values and global power that are exerted through the exportation of rock by American and British bands. Further, she explores the question of the ways in which this music represents an area of popular culture where the voices of the non-English speaking and the non-Western are silenced. Salman Rushdie, in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, complains that rock music "is precisely one of those viruses with which the almighty West has infected the East, one of the …

Dust And The Avant-Garde, Jake Kennedy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Dust and the Avant-Garde," Jake Kennedy presents an interdisciplinary exploration of experimental modernism in the work of visual artist Marcel Duchamp and writer Gertrude Stein. Kennedy focuses on the strange presence of dust in the work of these two artists and argues that as an abject object -- it is literally the unwanted of domestic space -- the idea of dust engages radically modernism on a material level. Dust is also the unwanted of modernity itself, as it represents a potentially subversive sister-part to urban, masculine modernity's valorisation of machinery, glass, and steel. Transmuted into the metaphysical …

Introduction To New Papers In American Cultural Studies, Joanne Morreale, P. David Marshall

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Selected Bibliography Of Scholarship In (Comparative) Cultural Studies And Popular Culture, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek, Yilin Liao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Political Deliberation And E-Participation In Policy-Making, Rebecca J. Romsdahl

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Political Deliberation and E-Participation in Policy-Making," Rebecca J. Romsdahl proposes that the internet has now become a valuable medium for information dissemination and long distance communication; it is also gaining attention as a potential tool for political deliberation. Public participation has been a long-standing tradition in American democracy but most scholars today believe it needs a revival. Some of these scholars believe that e-participation in policy-making could help revitalize political discussion between citizens and government and promote greater participation by disenfranchised groups. Whether this would lead to greater opportunities for true deliberation on political issues and not …

Harry Potter And The Susceptible Child Audience, Kara Lynn Andersen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Kara Lynn Andersen, in her paper "Harry Potter and the Susceptible Child Audience," argues for a rethinking of assumptions of child audiences as passive readers and viewers through an analysis of the Harry Potter phenomenon. Andersen argues that instead of categorizing children as passive and homogenous subjects of analysis, they should instead be incorporated as participants in the discourse about children's books and films. Although frequently figured as especially susceptible to the affects of advertising and other media, young Harry Potter fans are particularly visible as not only consumers of the texts, but creators of new texts. Using work done …

Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz In Seventeenth-Century New Spain And Finding A Room Of One's Own, Deborah Weagel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Seventeenth-Century New Spain and Finding a Room of One's Own," Deborah Weagel examines the life of the seventeenth-century nun and compares her life with the ideals Virginia Woolf portrays in A Room of One's Own. Woolf asserts that in order for a woman to develop innate gifts, she needs a certain degree of financial freedom and private space in which to create. The concept of having one's own room, or space, that can be segregated from the activities of home and public life can be considered both literally and metaphorically. …

An Introduction To The Work Of Elfriede Jelinek, Nobel Laureate In Literature 2004, Andrea Bandhauer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "An Introduction to the Work of Elfriede Jelinek, Nobel Laureate in Literature 2004," Andrea Bandhauer explores reactions of the press to the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek after she received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature. Bandhauer discusses how the extreme irritation following this announcement was frequently directed at the author's public persona rather than at her work. Against this background, Bandhauer explores the ambivalent relationship of the public towards a politically and socially engaged and outspoken public figure who in her literary work produces highly hermetical texts. As a writer, Jelinek is preoccupied with language and form …

The Arachne Myth In Oral And Written Literature, José Manuel Pedrosa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "The Arachne Myth in Oral and Written Literature," José Manuel Pedrosa explores the folktale about a person who prides himself being the most intelligent individual and whom the gods punish with a metamorphosis into spider. Pedrosa discusses similar myths in existence in modern oral traditions and in literary works such as the Bible, Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Quran, and García Márquez's masterpiece Cien años de soledad. The universality of the myth is underlined by the existence of a folktale registered among the Bubi people of Equatorial Guinea. Not known about it until the twentieth century, the oral transmission …

Generic Identity And Intertextuality, Marko Juvan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Generic Identity and Intertextuality," Marko Juvan proposes that an anti-essentialist drive -- a characteristic of recent genology -- has led postmodern scholars to the conviction that genre is but a system of differences and that its matrix cannot be deduced from a particular set of apparently similar texts. Juvan argues that the concept of intertextuality may prove advantageous to explain genre identity in a different way: genres exist and function as far as they are embedded in social practices that frame intertextual and meta-textual links/references to prototypical texts or textual series. In Juvan's view, genres are cognitive …

Modernism And The Issue Of Periodization, Leonard Orr

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Modernism and the Issue of Periodization," Leonard Orr describes how literary theorists, historians, and anthology editors have put forward many conflicting models for literary periodization, while simultaneously expressing their doubts about the categories they have created. They are caught between intellectual despair and pragmatic necessity, scholarly journals and presses and academic departments imagine they are working at the cutting edge of thinking about their subjects but period concepts remain in place, even while every article focused on the subject expresses strong objections to the terms. Orr traces in his paper these problems and issues through the twentieth …

Domesticating Translation Can Make A Difference : A Case Study Of Foreign Film-Title Translation In Hong Kong And Taiwan, Ka Ian, Justina Cheang

Lingnan Theses

This thesis seeks to examine the translation of selected foreign film-titles in Hong Kong and Taiwan from 1990 to 2002. Lawrence Venuti’s theory on “domesticating translation” and “foreignizing translation” will be taken as the conceptual framework for the study. Building on Friedrich Schleiermacher’s perspective on translation and on his observations about the Anglo-American publishing industry, Venuti asserts that “foreignizing translation”, being a strategy to bring the target-text audience toward the original text, should be preferred over “domesticating translation” as the former would guarantee difference by introducing foreign elements to the text recipients. By doing so, people will have more chances …

Exilic Perspectives On "Alien Nations", Sophia A. Mcclennen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Sophia A. McClennen's paper, "Exilic Perspectives on 'Alien Nations'," is an excerpt from her book, The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language and Space in Hispanic Literatures (Purdue UP , 2004). In the paper, McClennen summarizes her theory that exile writing is inherently dialectical. Focusing on writers working in the latter part of the twentieth century who were exiled during a historical moment of increasing globalization, transnational economics, and the theoretical shifts of postmodernism, McClennen proposes that exile literature is best understood as a series of dialectic tensions about cultural identity. Through a comparative analysis of Juan Goytisolo (Spain), Ariel …

Translingual Literature: The Bone People And Borderlands, Jill Marie Murphy

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis proposes that by producing and existing within a translingual text, the ethnofeminist has found a way to subvert others' construction of her and redefine her identity. In particular, the ethnofeminist uses code switching to select and reinvent meaning from the language system of the dominant culture while maintaining the language system of the "marginal" group. In combining two (or more) language systems within a literature she has created her own language.

Mosaic: Exploring Patterns In Literature: Volume 2: Virtual Voyages, Institute For The Development Of Gifted Education, Ricks Center For Gifted Children, University Of Denver

Ricks Curriculum Units Series

Virtual Voyages is an integrated thematic unit developed to weave together the academic strands of geography and literature into a single curriculum that fosters appreciation, awareness, and understanding of cultures around the world. The individualized research format meets the needs of gifted students to work within a particular area of passion, to work at an individualized pace, and to work with depth and breadth on projects that especially engage their interests.

編選重寫與翻譯重寫 : 沈從文作品英譯選集研究, Kit Ching Leung

Lingnan Theses

中國現代作家沈從文 (1902-1988) 的著作，自一九四九年開始在中國大陸 和台灣被禁，長達三十年。這期間，沈從文的文學成就被主流文學史忽略，甚 至否定。可以說，沈從文在中國的文學評論界，以至中國文學史“缺席”逾三 十年。八十年代初，中國大陸的政治環境改變，西方學者的影響增加，中國學 術界開始重新肯定沈從文的文學成就，沈從文的名字乃得以在中國現代文學史 的論述中重現。反之，在西方學術界，沈從文研究從沒有中斷。

選集，無論是個別作家的專集，還是不同作家的合集，是作家風格、面貌 的縮影，而中國現代作家的英譯選集，更是英語讀者認識中國作家最便捷的途 徑。翻譯、編選是“重寫”(rewriting) 活動，而“重寫”往往隱含選取、評價 等判別標準，操縱着譯者、編者對作品、作家的認識與接受程度，對文學作品 能否成為經典作品和成為甚麼樣的經典，有一定的影響。本論文借用勒菲弗爾 (André Lefevere) 的“重寫”概念，先從宏觀角度探討沈從文作品英譯選集的編 者在編選過程中，如何“重寫”沈從文的形象；然後從微觀角度分析譯者在翻 譯的過程中，如何“重寫”沈從文的作品及其形象；而在兩種“重寫”的操縱 下，各英譯選集又如何折射沈從文的形象。

Separatist Nationalism In Gilbert Imlay's The Emigrants, Karsten H. Piep

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Karsten H. Piep, in his paper "Separatist Nationalism in Gilbert Imlay's The Emigrants," argues that only recently rediscovered among American scholars and still awaiting much critical work, Gilbert Imlay's The Emigrants offers an intriguing case study in the complex relationship between fictional representation and late eighteenth-century nation formation. Tracing briefly the novel's reception history, Piep locates The Emigrants within the socio-political context of eighteenth-century discourses on revolution, emancipation, and independence. Taking Benedict Anderson's study on the rise of nationalism as a point of reference, Piep argues that Imlay's novel offers an example of a perhaps uniquely American separatist nationalism that …

Czech Literature, The King With The Horse's Ears, And Its Translations By Karel Havlícek Borovský And Milan Uhde, Michelle Woods

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Michelle Woods, in her paper "Czech Literature, The King with the Horse's Ears, and Its Translations by Karel Havlícek Borovský and Milan Uhde," analyses the adaptation and "translation" of the Irish legend into the Czech language in Karel Havlícek Borovský's 1854 epic poem Král Lávra and in Milan Uhde's 1964 play Král Vávra. The translation of Irish language myths and legends into English functioned as way of constructing and disseminating the notion of a great literary and heroic past within the language of the colonizer but also in dissent to the constructions imposed by that language. Woods focuses on how …