Comparative Literature Commons^™

Steven Pinker. Enlightenment Now: The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism, And Progress. New York: Penguin Books, 2018., Ashok Kumar Malhotra

Comparative Civilizations Review

Steven Pinker’s monumental work, Enlightenment Now, The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress is an impressive volume. He presents his position so vividly that the book reached the New York Times Bestseller List, and received enthusiastic reviews from diverse scholars and readers. Even Bill Gates regards it as: “My new favorite book of all time.”

The Blocks Of History: A Step-By-Step Model For The Evolution Of Civilizations, Shuai Wang

Comparative Civilizations Review

The Pattern Recognition algorithm in Artificial Intelligence has been applied to many fields and proven to be very effective when seeking out patterns that arise from huge amount of raw data. As world history has evolved, it has revealed the shift of hegemony from one civilization to another, for example, from the Spanish Empire to the Kingdom of France, from the Kingdom of France to the British Empire, and from the British Empire to the United States. As historians have shown, the relevant eras are the Spanish Golden Age, the Age of Enlightenment, Pax Britannica, and Pax Americana. Since the …

Thank You To Minna And Gordon Hewes: Friends Of The International Society For The Comparative Study Of Civilizations From The Ecumene, John Grayzel

Comparative Civilizations Review

The ISCSC is always extremely appreciative when it receives a special gift from those who support its intellectual and organizational endeavors. This certainly was the case when it recently received a generous bequest from the estate of Mrs. Minna Hewes, the most substantial financial donation in the history of this organization.

Christopher I. Beckwith. Empires Of The Silk Road: A History Of Central Eurasia From The Bronze Age To The Present Day. Princeton And Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011., Constance Wilkinson

Comparative Civilizations Review

Empires of the Silk Road is an ambitious work that fulfills its stated ambitions, fully. Written with boldness and authority, it packs many punches and pulls few. Author Christopher I. Beckwith manages to cover ~5,000-years-worth of Central Eurasian history in this single volume; he sees those events differently than your common or garden-variety Central Eurasian historian/philologist and demonstrates patiently and precisely why he does so in a way that is rich and insightful. Beckwith’s work is both complex and concise. It is provocative and persuasive. It is frequently captivating, often surprising, occasionally perplexing, and sometimes slightly weird 1 (not that …

Ottomanism: A Transition From Byzantinism To Balkanism, Blagoj Conev Phd

Comparative Civilizations Review

Ottomanism as an ideology and way of life is nothing but a pale copy of Byzantinism. Ottomanism is the direct successor of the Eastern Roman Empire (the Byzantine Empire), which is the legal and sole successor to the only Roman Empire. But Ottomanism itself has not been sufficiently studied because much more attention has been paid to the way the Ottoman Empire was governed than to the identities that it sought to define as its own, which were in fact nothing more than a faint copy of Byzantinism before 1204.

Ottomanism can be defined as the imperial identity of the …

An Attempt To Arrive At The Meaning Of Civilization As The Third Millennium Dawns, Mojtaba Sadeghi Independent Scholar

Comparative Civilizations Review

Civilizations may be understood as phenomena subject to differing perspectives. This article views civilization from the perspective of Geography. A civilization is a “Geographical Space” that arises from complex interactions over time. The core of civilization from a geographical perspective is this: every civilization is a geographical space, but not every geographical space is necessarily a civilization. A civilization has a “cultured soul” and an “advanced body.” We may use this approach to understand, measure, critique, and emancipate civilization in the third millennium.

Table Of Contents

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Is Music The Barometer Of Society? Exploring How Music Mirrored Society From The Ancient World, China To Central Europe In The 21st Century, Bibi Pelić

Comparative Civilizations Review

“If one should desire to know whether a kingdom is well governed, if its morals are good or bad, the quality of its music will furnish the answer.” ― Confucius

“What music do you listen to?” Would this be a valid question to ask a presidential candidate or person looking for a high political office today? If mankind had followed the advice of Confucius, many disastrous episodes in history might have been prevented.

Music is one of the most wonderful achievements of mankind. As far back in history as we know, music has been part of man’s life. Whether it …

Mamikon Airapetian. World Civilizations And Economic Cycles: A Comparative Historical Analysis. Part 1. Concepts And Determinants Of World History. Moscow: Editorial Urss Publishers, 2020, Vlad Alalykin-Izvekov

Comparative Civilizations Review

The author of scholarly materials under review is a prominent Russian scholar, Doctor of Economics Prof. Mamikon S. Airapetian, the Leading Researcher of the Department of Macroeconomic Forecasting and Planning of the Financial University (FinU), Moscow, Russia.

In his book entitled World Civilizations and Economic Cycles: A Comparative Historical Analysis (Airapetian, 2020) Dr. Airapetian introduces an original, fundamental paradigm of global history. In order to substantiate and present his ideas, the author turns to a vast array of classical and contemporary scholarly sources as well as introduces a significant number of new concepts, such as, for example, the notions of …

Harry Redner. Beyond Civilization: Society, Culture And The Individual In The Age Of Globalization. Routledge, 2014., Mariana Tepfenhart

Comparative Civilizations Review

Harry Redner was a reader at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and a visiting professor at Yale University, University of California-Berkeley and Harvard University. His book has three parts: An Overview of History, The Present Predicament of History, and The Future Prospects of Civilization.

The book addresses two major issues affecting our society today. One of them is globalization and its effect on civilization. The topic is analyzed not only from a cultural perspective but also from a political and cognitive standpoint. The second issue is technology and its place in a global society. Redner argues Western civilization’s development of …

Traversing Paradigms: An Environmental Journey To Body And Mind, Martin Ceja Mejia

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Traumatic life experiences altered the way I perceive the world. As a result, I embark on a journey to reshape my relationship to self, the built and natural world; to environment. In this thesis I ask: How do I want to relate to the environment? Considering I am a doubly colonized agent, I also aim to decolonize my relationship to environment along the process. Therefore, this work aims to formulate a new, personal, relationship to environment through academic literature, history, psychology, Indigenous knowledge and science, and literary studies, among other fields of knowledge. This work is interdisciplinary in nature; life …

Representation Of Terror And Terrorism In Two Arab Films: Paradise Now (2005) By Hany Abu-Assad And Horses Of God (2012) By Nabil Ayouch, Mustapha Hamil

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Middle Eastern violence and terrorism are not novel subjects in world cinema, especially American cinema. The Arab or Muslim other in these films is always presented as someone who epitomises a culture of violence, directed mostly against innocent civilians. Against the backdrop of Hollywood’s stereotypical representation of Middle-Easterners as advocate of indiscriminate terror and terrorism, Arab filmmakers have turned in recent years to the representation of terror and religious extremism. Paradise Now (Abu Assad 2005) and Horses of God (Ayouch 2012) address the controversial issue of suicide bombing with the same motivation: to examine the choice of suicide bombing within …

Resisting Pacification: Locating Tension In G'Ebinyo Ogbowei's Poetry, Niyi Akingbe, Paul Ayodele Onanuga

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Where Are The Women?: An Ecofeminist Reading Of William Golding’S Lord Of The Flies, Hawk Chang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The absence of female characters and their voices in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) has been previously examined. On the surface, this fiction focuses on the struggle and survival of a group of boys who are left alone on a Pacific island against the background of nuclear warfare. The only presence of women in the story seems to be the aunt via a boy’s narration. However, when approaching the fiction through the lens of ecofeminism, we can find a range of feminized entities which are metaphorically embodied in the natural surroundings of the secluded island. The boys’ interactions …

‘Convicted Of Patricide?’: Robert Frost’S Nationalism In The Eyes Of Contemporary Arab-American Women Writers, Eman K. Mukattash

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Given the culturally expansive nature of the American literary tradition of today, the question of the relevance of Robert Frost’s poetry to the poetry of contemporary Arab-American women writers is an issue worth digging into. Writing almost one hundred years ago does not make Frost’s poetry out of date. Frost’s poetry is as relevant to today’s America as it has been to the America of his days. And this can be ascribed to the multiplicity of perspectives he presents in his poetry as he examines crucial questions lying at the core of America’s “grand narrative of national development.” (Westover 2004: …

La Créativité Métaphorique En Amazigh, Mohamed Sguenfle

Dirassat

Metophocric creativity in Amazigh

The concept of neology can be defined as an enrichment which affects a given language at different levels, phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic, Semantic neology is a special case of polysemy; a new meaning for an already existing unit. This is a change which affects the meaning without a concurrent change in the signifying form of the lexeme.

Les Italiques Et Le Style Indirect Libre: Sur Le Chemin De La Parodie Intertextuelle, Sad Slamti

Dirassat

Lethalics and the free indirect style: on the road to intertextual parody

Literary works would have a memory. Here is a postulate which would make us consider intertextuality as "a library where each trans / elm text. others which modify it. The author, to borrow an expression from Umberto Eco, should certainly "die so as not to interfere with the progress of his work" His death without his knowledge, since it can be buried even during his lifetime, is in any case a theoretical commitment which allows the dialogue between the texts to be enriched and to always make this …

Lost In Time And Lost In Space: Chronotopes In Thomas Pynchon’S Against The Day, Stephen Margavio

Poster Presentations

Honors thesis poster presentation.

In his 1937 essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin coins the term “chronotope” to discuss the inherently interconnected nature of time and space in narrative constructions. According to Bakhtin, there are a number of specific chronotopes (or space/time configurations) that help to define literary genres. Applying Bakhtin’s concepts to Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day (2006), this thesis examines how the idea of narrative space/time can clarify Pynchon’s use of genre to make socio-political commentary. The first chapter of this thesis focuses on Bakhtin’s “road chronotope,” …

Lost In Time And Lost In Space: Chronotopes In Thomas Pynchon’S Against The Day, Stephen Margavio

Honors Theses

In his 1937 essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin coins the term “chronotope” to discuss the inherently interconnected nature of time and space in narrative constructions. According to Bakhtin, there are a number of specific chronotopes (or space/time configurations) that help to define literary genres. Applying Bakhtin’s concepts to Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day (2006), this thesis examines how the idea of narrative space/time can clarify Pynchon’s use of genre to make socio-political commentary. The first chapter of this thesis focuses on Bakhtin’s “road chronotope,” which is characterized by …

Desde El Fuego Que En Mí Arde: Performance, Literatura Y Cine Afro-Latinoamericano Producidos Por Mujeres Afrodescendientes En Perú, Cuba Y Brasil (1960–2000), Elena Ekatherina Chavez Goycochea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines different films, literary, and performance art pieces created by contemporary afro-descendant women from Peru, Cuba, and Brazil after the sixties with emphasis on the most relevant works of Conceição Evaristo, Sara Gómez, Victoria Santa Cruz, and Lucía Charún-Illescas. I focus my research on the crucial role these artists played in the cultural identity formation of Latin America when inserting ‘race’ as a category of socio-political analysis and cultural production. How did their films, performances, and texts challenge national narratives and imaginaries after 1960? Although in the sixties, women improved their civil rights in different countries, the ‘mujer …

Issues In Translating Tarifit Tales, Hanan Bennoudi

Dirassat

Oral literature is a sold as man; it has existed in the Amazigh language for many centuries. Among the innumerable genres of oral literature, folktales( Tinfasin Tarifit) remain the most important because they have played an important role in touching the heart of our collective being and permitted to people, young and old, to shift beyond the boundaries of reality. However, Tarifit tales have remained terrain cognita to this day because they were shutdown and stuffed in the family and village context.

Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism And The Genres Of Decolonization, Jini Kim Watson

Literature

How did the Cold War shape culture and political power in decolonizing countries and give rise to authoritarian regimes in the so-called free world? Cold War Reckonings tells a new story about the Cold War and the global shift from colonialism to independent nation-states. Assembling a body of transpacific cultural works that speak to this historical conjuncture, Jini Kim Watson reveals autocracy to be not a deficient form of liberal democracy, but rather the result of Cold War entanglements with decolonization.

Focusing on East and Southeast Asia, the book scrutinizes cultural texts ranging from dissident poetry, fiction, and writers’ conference …

Dialogue Et Discours Attributif Dans Un Barrage Contre Le Pacifique De Marguerite Duras, Rabia Maaroufi

Dirassat

This article is a study of attributive discourse through the work of Marguerite Duras. The author proposes an analysis based on the variety of expressive verbs and the dominance of the neutral verb in the novel. The article also explores the notion of non-communication and conversation. Drawing up a complete picture of a colonial life perceived as a positive vision of French colonialism, dialogue and discourse symbolize the vanity of the characters' efforts to get out of their condition.

The Paradox Of The European Discourse About The Moors: A Reading Of Gorge Peel’S The Battle Of Alcazar, Limame Barbouchi

Dirassat

The European literature is fraught with the stories of the Moorish villains and the dark side of their presence in the west as the Other and a threat. The post-colonial writers, critics and even some commentators have tried to reevaluate these works and shed lights on the canonical orientation for the sake of correcting and refraining these misconceptions and representations. In this article, the aim is to analyze texts and stories to dismantle the European discourse on race and to understand the extent to which the European canonized texts canbe taken for granted as a haven of European cultural discourse …

Time Decay: Assets, Authoritarianism, And Anxiety About The Future, Jack Davies

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article identifies a basic formula in the Freudo-Marxist take on twentieth-century authoritarianism. This is the incommensurability of inherited past development with the pace and demands of industrial social life, damming up a tremendous excess that seeks reactionary outlet. Authoritarianism, here, breeds in the contradiction between the symptoms of the Oedipal drama and the commodity form. The implicit “repressive hypothesis” for sexuality and developmentalist teleology make this theorization of authoritarian formations untenable today. This article, however, identifies moments of promise in this literature, and turns to materials available to these thinkers—specifically interwar psychoanalytic theory on anxiety and economic theory on …

Defending “Western” Values: Reactionary Neoliberalism In The Americas, Gabriela Segura-Ballar

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Right-wing populism and authoritarianism are on the rise globally after the financial crisis of 2008. This reactionary trend has widely channeled anxieties created by neoliberal insecurities into cultural and nationalistic backlash against the ostensible enemies of “Western” values (e.g., immigrants, racial and sexual minorities, feminists, and leftists). President Jair Bolsonaro’s “Brazil above everything, God above everyone” and President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” are the most conspicuous examples of the resurgence of a populist reactionary right in the Americas. This continental trend promotes ultra-nationalism and more coercive neoliberalization processes combined with a reactionary authoritarianism that celebrates essentialized “Western” values, …

Incipient Fascism: Black Radical Perspectives, Alberto Toscano

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The sordid twilight of the Trump presidency raised the stakes of the debate on fascism. While much of the discussion has been magnetised by the legitimacy of analogies with the 1930s, this article argues that a rich and complex tradition of Black radical critique of right-wing authoritarianism provides a vital resource for thinking through the problem of US fascism beyond analogy – beginning with the DuBoisian insight that a racial fascism forged by chattel slavery and settler-colonialism anticipated the ascendancy of European fascisms. The article homes in on Black radical theories of fascism developed in the wake of the movements …

Neo-Authoritarianism And The Contestation Of White Identification In The Us, Justin Gilmore

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Justin Gilmore’s article "Neo-Authoritarianism and the Contestation of White Identification in the US" examines how the political forces around Donald Trump are often interpreted as an external attack on American democracy, and how the dynamism of these attacks is thought to emanate from various sites of white chauvinism. This article argues that such an interpretation is partial. The upsurge associated with “Trumpism” represents a distinctive contestation of an alternative type of white identity, one that has been elemental for a progressive form of neoliberalism. Although the neoliberal construction of white identification is distinctive, and indeed kinder, its material basis rests …

Neo-Authoritarianism Without Authority, Massimiliano Tomba

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article examines two aspects of neo-authoritarianism. The first is mainly diagnostic and concerns the nature of authoritarianism as a phenomenon of transition. The article investigates tensions and conflicts between temporalities. It pays attention to the asynchronous nature of change which, alongside the social structural level of changes, also the psycho-social level, intervene politically in different forms. There are social strata that are strangers in their own country and do not share the same present with others. For them, looking to the past is the only way to imagine a different future. If they are looking for values and authority, …

A Trumpian Mechanism, Emmett Peixoto

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In 2016, a liar made a hypocrite appear worse and thereby won the US presidency. How did a liar, which is traditionally deemed something worse than a hypocrite, manage to do this? This article offers an answer. It does so by uncovering a peculiar mechanism, a Trumpian mechanism, at the heart of Trump’s relations with his critics. The mechanism explains how Trump benefited from wrong-footing his critics and is thus essential for understanding Trump’s success. The article offers a few key examples of this mechanism working against Trump’s political opponents, e.g., Trump’s (first) impeachment. It then shows how the mechanism …