Comparative Literature Commons^™

Junebug In January: A Novel Excerpt, Hannah Carson

Best Integrated Writing

This section of Junebug in January is the beginning of a much longer story that follows eighteen-year-old June and her small family as she attempts to survive the harsh reality of living in the era of the Great Depression and her attempts to survive her Papa’s tasks for her. This story challenges the boundaries of family loyalty, investigates the concept of “saving yourself,” and explores the limits of redemption.

Best Integrated Writing Fall 2024 - Complete Edition, Wright State University School Of Humanities And Cultural Studies, Kristie Mckiernan, Tracy Smith

Best Integrated Writing

Best Integrated Writing includes excellent student writing from Integrated Writing courses taught at Wright State University.

Table Of Contents

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Editor's Note, Joseph Drew Editor-In-Chief

Comparative Civilizations Review

Although the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations was formally launched in 1961 via a scholarly conference convened in Salzburg, Austria, which brought together many of the world’s leading experts on the subject under the sponsorship of the Austrian government and UNESCO, regular annual meetings for those interested in comparative civilizations have been held subsequently by the society variously in North America, South America, Asia or Europe almost every year since that time.

Former Iscsc President Wayne Bledsoe: An Appreciation, Michael Palencia-Roth

Comparative Civilizations Review

About three weeks before Wayne Bledsoe died on the 2nd of June 2024, at 83, my wife Elaine and I commented to each other that we simply had to get in touch with him and Deb again, for too much time had passed since we had seen each other. We did not know that he was ill, and so the news of his death surprised and distressed us.

Cognosis And The Evolution Of Civilization, Ken Baskin

Comparative Civilizations Review

From the time when the complex states such as Egypt or Sumer emerged roughly 5,000 years ago, the civilizations they represent have generally become more populous, more socially varied, wealthier, and more technologically advanced. As a result, the innovations they produced would begin to change the conditions in which they existed, and their cultures have had to evolve to adapt to this ongoing change. For instance, the cultures of Bronze Age Egypt and the Iron Age Han Dynasty had to be quite different, even though both were agricultural societies. And, of course, the Electronic Age cultures of the United States …

Is Donald Trump A Modern-Day Catiline?, Jamie González-Ocaña

Comparative Civilizations Review

Could the story of a failed Roman politician who organized a plot to seize the Roman republic in 63 BCE be a metaphor for Donald Trump’s political persona — his initial presidential run against the establishment, his rhetorical effort to overthrow the status quo and the natural order of things in national politics, the love affair Trump has always had with the struggling working-class voters (with the “forgotten” Americans), his constant testing the Constitutional limits of our republican system of government? Could both figures be symptoms of times when a republic is in crisis and reminders of the perils that …

Niccolò Longobardo And The Early Modern Encounter Of Europe With China, Yu Liu

Comparative Civilizations Review

Writing in 1962 about the founding fathers of the early modern Jesuit China mission, Jesuit historian George H. Dunne famously called them the generation of giants “who, breaking with the dominant spirit of their times and recalling a distant past, restored the concept of cultural adaptation to a central position in the world mission of Christianity.”

Seventeen Crises In Western Civilization That Have Arisen Since The Dark Ages: A Cognition Science-Oriented Approach, Andrew Targowski

Comparative Civilizations Review

The purpose of this article is to synthesize those crises in the unfolding of Western civilization that are controlled by human knowledge and wisdom. The methodology is transdisciplinary, utilizing a cognitive science-oriented, big-picture view of civilization and main conflicts. The crises are investigated across three time periods; the Dark Ages (from the fifth to the fourteenth century), Modern Times (from the fifteenth to the twentieth century), and the present century. The findings reveal that today Western civilization faces seventeen significant crises. Knowledge is not sufficient to solve these crises; we need to employ knowledge-based wisdom. This approach presents a new …

What Lessons Can Be Learned From The United Nations Preventive Deployment Mission In North Macedonia, On The Border Of Two Civilizations: Nothing Fails Like Success?, Mary Frances Lebamoff

Comparative Civilizations Review

Preventive deployment as a conflict prevention tool has not recurred in the past several decades, despite the broadly acclaimed success of the United Nations Preventive Deployment in Macedonia, UNPREDEP 1995-1999, and of its predecessor missions, UNPROFOR/Macedonia, and UNPROFOR/M 1992-1995.

The United Nations in particular has continued with mainly first- and second-generation peacekeeping, peacemaking and peacebuilding actions even on civilizational borders. What may best explain why there has been no other engagement in preventive deployment missions? There has been much emphasis placed formally and informally on early warning, detection, mitigation, and prevention of conflict. There have also been increasing numbers of …

Book Review: Liberalism, Realism, Or … Integralism? Perusing John J. Mearsheimer’S Book The Great Delusion, Vlad Alalykin-Izvekov

Comparative Civilizations Review

The paper presents an analysis of the scholarly views of prominent American political scholar John J. Mearsheimer as set forth in his book The Great Delusion (Yale University Press, 2019). It also offers analysis of other existing approaches, as well as elaborates on a new Integralistic Paradigm which has a potential to integrate the field of International Relations (IR) Theory.

End Matter

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Books Of Interest, Stephen T. Satkiewicz

Comparative Civilizations Review

The journal is adding this section since there are books that may be of interest to scholars of the comparative study of civilizations and that may add significantly to the body of scholarship in the civilizational field. The books listed below are also available to be reviewed in the Book Review section of future editions of Comparative Civilizations Review.

Book Review: The Americans: The Democratic Experience And The Creators, Robert Bedeski

Comparative Civilizations Review

Two classics by American historian Daniel Boorstin should be central in the analysis of civilization.

Civilizations From Toynbee To Coker: The Quest Of Christopher Coker (1953 – 2023) To Reinstate Comparative Civilizational Thinking In Western Scholarship, Greg Lewicki Vice President

Comparative Civilizations Review

In the gentlemen’s heaven, Christopher Coker must surely have his separate suite, one with golden busts of travelers, old-fashioned English furniture, and cold-toned walls resembling those of Athenaeum, a Pall Mall club in London, one of a few clubs where he liked to dine.

The Sociology Of Crisis: Pitirim Sorokin’S Scholarly Legacy And Current Problems, Resilience, And Community, Emiliana Mangone

Comparative Civilizations Review

In his writings on crises, Sorokin highlighted their complexity and their multiple consequences on a personal, cultural, and social level. In this paper, crises in the 21st century are analyzed from Sorokin’s incisive perspective. The significant points include:

1. the study of crises cannot be enclosed within the confines of individual disciplines but rather must incorporate interdisciplinary approaches.
2. the category “crisis” does not encompass only those conditions that are the consequences of specific disastrous events such as natural disasters, wars, and terrorism but also all those phenomena that produce the conjunction of harm to human beings and social disturbances.
3. successive crises …

Front Matter

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Divergence Between The Teachings And Practice Of Islam: A Civilizational Analysis Of Muslims In Indonesia, Hisanori Kato

Comparative Civilizations Review

Indonesia is a country of cultural as well as religious diversity. Even before the advent of Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism were widespread in the region. Some think that Islam in Indonesia spread to the archipelago through interaction with local civilizations. Although Islam has become a majority religion in Indonesia today, long-standing local cultural traditions, ones that have existed throughout its recorded history, are often still maintained and practiced widely in Indonesia. These pre-Islamic traditions have a profound association with nature, and the people tend to appreciate animistic entities.

The Geographic Clash Of Civilizations?, Mojtaba Sadeghi

Comparative Civilizations Review

The Geographic Clash of Civilizations represents a significant geographic-civilizational reality and process, a phenomenon that has occurred and is expected to unfold increasingly in the third millennium. Understanding, analyzing, and forecasting this phenomenon relies solely on the geographic conceptualization of civilization. Through that perspective, the world is undergoing another instance of the geographic clash of civilizations, a clash more profound than the Clash of Civilizations, impacting the survival or collapse of human civilizations. The geographic clash of civilizations epitomizes an inescapable conflict between the soul (das-man) and the body (no-da-sein) of a civilization, stemming from …

Book Review: Arabia Felix: From The Time Of The Queen Of Sheba (Eighth Century B.C. To The First Century A. D.), Tseggai Isaac

Comparative Civilizations Review

Arabia Felix is a book about Sheba, “modern Yemen” with added highlights on the broader region of Arabia. The author gives an in-depth analysis on how Arabia captured the attention of ancient empires. Arabia also conducted rich trade with her contemporary civilizations such as the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Persians who “encountered caravans of aromatic products coming from South Arabia.”

The Dravidian And Āryan Migrations In Europe And India, Alexander Jacob

Comparative Civilizations Review

Much has been written about the relationship between the Indo-Āryans and the Dravidians. Debates have proliferated on the question of whether the Āryans invaded Dravidian India or whether they were indigenous to Dravida. If we consider the literary evidence of the ancient Indians we can inform a different view of the origins of Indian Brāhmanical religion and the historical relationship between the two major population groupings of India.

Book Review: Why War?, Stephen T. Satkiewicz

Comparative Civilizations Review

Pay any attention to current events and it seems that war and conflict are everywhere: from the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, to the eruption of conflict in the Middle East in October 2023, to on-going geopolitical tensions in the Pacific over the status of Taiwan. It was only a decade or so ago that many were confidently predicting not only the decline but the outright end of war, as Steven Pinker boldly argued in his The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

Full Issue

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Displaced Ukrainian Writers After 2014, A Postcolonial Perspective, Sophie Ivanka Shields

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This paper analyzes post-2014 Ukrainian displacement literature from a postcolonial perspective. I argue that Ukrainian writers, displaced with the 2014 invasion of Eastern Ukraine and/or 2022 full-scale invasion by Russia, transform literature into a tool of cultural resistance against Russia, forging a postcolonial Ukrainian identity in their works that unites those displaced since 2014. I particularly focus on two long-form works by displaced writers: the novel Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love (2019) by Volodymyr Rafeyenko, who was displaced in 2014 from Donetsk to Kyiv and again in 2022 to Pittsburgh, USA on the City of Asylum Exiled Writer and …

News Framing Of The Ukrainian-Russian War: A Comparative Analysis Of Russian And American News Media, Alina Rudakova

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study was conducted with the goal of exploring ways in which American (The New York Times) and Russian (TASS) print news media frame the Ukrainian-Russian War. Along with examining the differences and similarities in primary framing techniques used by American and Russian news, the focal point of this study was to identify who is portrayed as an aggressor and who is illustrated as a victim in this conflict. Informed by the news media framing literature and construction of the social problems perspective, this study was led by two research questions: (1) How do the American and Russian news media …

Homemade Language, Conservative Fro-Yo, And Sci-Fi Sloths: How Speculative Migration Fiction Confronts The Ends Of Worlds By Challenging The Nation-State, Zoe R. Scheuerman

English Honors Projects

This English literature thesis project explores an emerging, genre-defying body of fiction which I call “speculative migration fiction.” Speculative migration fiction imagines how ongoing global developments like climate change, technological development, and war may shape future migrations. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s conception of national culture, Wendy Brown’s theory of the border, and Caroline Levine’s understanding of literary form, as well as close readings from Scattered All Over the Earth by Yōko Tawada, Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, and 2 A.M. in Little America by Ken Kalfus, I argue that transnational migrations move toward becoming postnational migrations as migrants evade border …

Plath Fostered It, Women Are Nurturing It: Cycles Of Existential And Confessional Women's Writing In The Mid-20th Century And Beyond, Sophie Elisabeth Conrad

Senior Theses

During the mid-20th century, a wide-ranging yet topically focused genre of women’s writing began to emerge in earnest, currently categorized as existential and confessional. Works like Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) offer explanations of why an ineffable feeling of malaise permeated the lives of 20th-century women and led them to adopt these methods of writing and thinking. However, existential feelings akin to that of the 20th-century female malaise have returned to stake their claim on the minds of 21st-century women, evidenced in popular contemporary works such as Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year …

The Impact Of The Gut-Brain Axis On Alzheimer’S Disease, Elissa Wakim

Best Integrated Writing

Elissa’s review for the Graduate Biomedical Review focuses on the links between the gastrointestinal tract and the brain; the gut-brain axis and the development of Alzheimer’s disease. As a student in the Microbiology and Immunology Masters Program Elissa was particularly interested in the gut microbiota and their connection to neurodegenerative disease. She tidily reviewed the literature and wrote a fascinating and compelling piece of work.

Best Integrated Writing Spring 2024 - Complete Edition, Wright State University School Of Humanities And Cultural Studies, Kristie Mckiernan, Tracy Smith

Best Integrated Writing

Best Integrated Writing includes excellent student writing from Integrated Writing courses taught at Wright State University. This is the first issue after a 5 year hiatus.

Front Matter

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.