Comparative Literature Commons^™

On The Margins, Rowan Cahill

Rowan Cahill

“Goethe, Faust, And Motherless Creations.” Goethe Yearbook 23 (2016): 59-75., Wendy Nielsen

Wendy Nielsen

“Goethe, Faust, and Motherless Creations” reads the life and work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe alongside the material culture of motherless creations, the automata, androids, and golems that his contemporaries imagined and created. Automata and androids are motherless in the sense that men create them, and they represent an attempt to usurp women’s primary role in reproduction. The manufacture of automata and androids and the pursuit of natural philosophy put male inventors and scientists in reproductive roles, for they sought to overturn the boundary between life and death. Examining Goethe’s relationship to the artificial life forms of his period …

Pre-Service Teachers’ Perspectives On How The Use Of Toon Comic Books During Guided Reading Influenced Learning By Struggling Readers, Ewa Mcgrail, Alicja Rieger, Gina M. Doepker, Samantha Mcgeorge

Gina Doepker

The study presented in this article examines the use of comic books, specifically the TOON comic books during guided reading instruction. The instruction was provided to struggling readers by the Literacy Center at a comprehensive university in southeastern United States. What most pre-service teachers in this study agreed upon was that comic books served as an effective tool for getting their students interested in reading. Reading comic books with tutors as partners in conversation with the struggling readers in this study was also a powerful medium for facilitating students’ literacy skills development, particularly in the areas of reading fluency and …

The Philosophy Of Myth, Erwin F. Cook

Erwin F. Cook

No abstract provided.

Rebel Roots.Docx, Rowan Cahill

Rowan Cahill

Vintage Red.Docx, Rowan Cahill

Rowan Cahill

Town-Talk And The Cause Célèbre Of Robert Browning’S The Ring And The Book, Amy R. Wong

Amy Wong

This essay examines Browning’s relentless preoccupation with generating such forms of “idle talk” in The Ring and the Book.³ For the most part, critics from the time of the poem’s initial publication to the present day have focused their energies on speakers directly involved in the case— Pompilia (on her deathbed), Guido, Caponsacchi—or the Pope, as he crafts his learned pronouncement^.4 Those who have devoted attention to the first three town talkers, including scholars such as Mary Rose Sullivan and William E. Buckler, give accounts that tend to individualize these personae in ways that obscure the significance of …

Review : Female Identity In Contemporary Zimbabwean Fiction By Katrin Berndt., Ann Elizabeth Willey

Ann Elizabeth Willey

No abstract provided.

Review : The Yambo Ouologuem Reader : The Duty Of Violence, A Black Ghostwriter's Letter To France, And The Thousand And One Bibles Of Sex By Christopher Wise., Ann Elizabeth Willey

Ann Elizabeth Willey

No abstract provided.

Review Of The Gift Of Active Empathy: Scheler, Bakhtin, And Dostoevsky, By Alina Wyman, Slav N. Gratchev

Dr. Slav N. Gratchev

There are certain writers that literary scholars of all times will study again and again, and there are certain literary works that are too important to be examined only once. Reading Dostoevsky is always an “excruciatingly visceral experience” not only for us, the readers, but also for scholars like Max Scheler and Mikhail Bakhtin (p. 230). Alina Wyman’s book makes a major contribution to this experience. Wyman’s argument is both original and elegantly simple: for Bakhtin and Scheler the concept of loving empathy is fundamental in both their respective models of being and in the particular structure of their careers. …

Review: Sylvia Martin, 'Ink In Her Veins: The Troubled Life Of Aileen Palmer', (Crawley: Uwa Publishing, 2016)., Rowan Cahill

Rowan Cahill

Review: Sylvia Martin, 'Ink In Her Veins: The Troubled Life Of Aileen Palmer', (Crawley: Uwa Publishing, 2016)., Rowan Cahill

Rowan Cahill

The Invaded Invading The Invaders, Daniel Reynaud

Daniel Reynaud

This article explores the impact of working on an anthology of Romanian poetry on an Australian academic. Having some exposure to world literature, the scholar discovers a new realm of poetic experience in a formerly obscure literary tradition previously almost inaccessible to Anglo scholarship. The article seeks to frame Romanian poetry in its broader historical context, as situate it in world literature.

Unbalancing Acts: Plagiarism As Catalyst For Instructor Emotion In The Composition Classroom, Ann E. Biswas

Ann E. Biswas

In this essay, the author reflects on her experiences while researching composition instructors’ emotional responses to plagiarism. The research found that instructors faced a variety of complex and competing feelings when students plagiarized, and those responses threatened to upset relationships, power structures, and professional identities in the classroom. The author considers how and why her own emotional labor was altered in light of these findings and what this might suggest about the need for increased professional conversation in our discipline regarding the impact of emotions in the writing classroom.

Duvakin's Oral History And Bakhtin In His Own Voice, Slav N. Gratchev, Tatevik Gyulamiryan

Dr. Slav N. Gratchev

In their article "Duvakin's Oral History and Bakhtin in His Own Voice" Slav N. Gratchev and Tatevik Gyulamiryan examine Mikhail Bakhtin's notions of literary theory based on interviews recorded by Victor Duvakin in 1973. The collection is now held in the library of Moscow State University. As it so often happened in the Soviet Union, these unique interviews only became known many years later and Gratchev's and Gyulamiryan's analysis of the interviews sheds light on Bakhtin's thought not available when reading his published work.

Freedom Is A Good Book And A Sugar High, Meredith Doench

Meredith Doench

This is a creative nonfiction piece about reading literature with an inmate.

Focusing The Village: Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali And Prafulla Mohanti's My Village, My Life, Geoffrey Kain

Geoffrey Kain

Gandhi insisted that the spirit of India lives in its villages, but the drift away from the village and toward urbanization in post- independence India continues. Questions arise regarding the ideological motivations driving artists’ treatments of the village in various notable works in the modern South Asian canon. A comparison is drawn between Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali [1955] and Orissan artist and author Prafulla Mohanti’s My Village, My Life [1973]. While at first glance the two may seem to have little to do with another, a close consideration reveals some striking similarities between them, providing some compelling insights into Ray’s …

Familiar Strangers: International Students In The U.S. Composition Course, Elena Lawrick, Fatima Esseili

Fatima Esseili

This chapter presents selected findings from our study of a well-established ESL writing program at a U.S. university with a large population of international undergraduate students. The study was conducted in all 13 writing sections. The instruments included demographic data from university registrars; one instructor survey, administered at the end of the semester; and two student surveys, one administered at the beginning of the semester and one at the end. The instructor survey response rate was 100% (13 teachers); the student survey response rates were 82.5% (161 students) and 88% (171 students), respectively.

The reported findings inform five areas: an …

Seeking The Rhetoric Of Jesus, Susan L. Trollinger

Susan L. Trollinger

I come to the questions posed by this volume from a somewhat different background than one might expect. Whereas one might anticipate that I was an Anabaptist first and a scholar second, just the opposite was the case. I Before beginning my graduate studies I had never heard of Anabaptism. Indeed, I was poring over Aristotle's Rhetoric before I was even a Christian. I thus went through much of my graduate studies (not to mention all of college, high school, and elementary school) without giving a thought to how my studies were impacting my faith-never mind how my faith might …

Selling The Amish: The Tourism Of Nostalgia, Susan L. Trollinger

Susan L. Trollinger

In this book, I address these and related question. Although I talk about the Amish, my primary goal is not to describe them. Many others have offered excellent accounts of the Amish, and references to their books and articles can be found in this book's bibliography. Instead, my purpose is to understand Amish Country tourism and, specifically, how it attracts and sustains the interest of millions of visitors each year. The purveyors of Amish Country tourism use a variety of strategies to draw tourists in and give them pleasure during their stay, and I explore those techniques. I focus especially …

Anabaptists And Postmodernity, Susan L. Trollinger, Gerald Biesecker-Mast

Susan L. Trollinger

The title of this book was intended simply to bring together two concerns: Anabaptist identity on the one hand and our postmodern cultural moment on the other. Thus the purpose of the book was to inquire about the relationship between the two. The aim was to seek answers to such questions as what it means to be an Anabaptist today, the extent to which postmodernity presents problems and possibilities for Anabaptists, and how Anabaptists ought to live out their faith in the contemporary context.

Heritage Versus History: Amish Tourism In Two Ohio Towns, Susan L. Trollinger

Susan L. Trollinger

Judging from the relative number of tourists who visit these two sorts of towns, tourists appear to prefer views of the Amish that are provided by more rather than less touristy venues. In this essay, I compare the views of Amish offered by two towns in Ohio's Amish Country. One town, Walnut Creek, is very popular among tourists; the other town, Mount Hope, is significantly less popular. Ultimately, I argue that Mount Hope is less popular than Walnut Creek largely because its representation of the Amish constitutes the tourist in ways that are less reassuring for middle Americans. But before …

Review Article: Could Isidore’S Chronicle Have Delighted Cicero? Using The Concept Of Genre To Compare Ancient And Medieval Chronicles, Jesse W. Torgerson

Jesse W Torgerson

The Digital Dionysus: Nietzsche & The Network-Centric Condition

Dan Mellamphy

No abstract provided.

Writers And Rebels: The Literature Of Insurgency In The Caucasus (Yale University Press, Table Of Contents), Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Gould

Turning Seventy, Rowan Cahill

Rowan Cahill

The author's ruminations on the occasion of him reaching the age of 70 years old.

Differend, Sexual Difference, And The Sublime, Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

The aim of this chapter is to articulate how two key feminist writers, Marguerite Duras and Luce lrigaray, engage and rewrite Lyotard's interest in the sublime as a feminist aesthetic category. Jean-François Lyotard was at the vanguard of a retrieval of the category of the sublime in contemporary aesthetic theory. A trenchantly polymorphous philosopher, he wrote of the sublime in a range of styles that rivals the old masters of aesthetics, who not only mastered the thought, but were themselves sublime in their works. Whereas the tradition of aesthetics almost unequivocally aligns the sublime with the masculine and the feminine …

Invisible Monsters And Palahniuk's Perverse Sublime, Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

Invisible Monsters is a novel about the search for identities — sexual, family, gender, social — that is never at ease with the search. The characters in the novel wish to put an end to the need to search for an identity and to draw to a close the need and urge to represent themselves to others. These are characters who wish to be what and who they are without apology or argument but are ill-equipped to do so. They cannot find the means by and through which to put the seeking to an end. It may be tempting to …

Mixing Mourning And Desire: Alfonso Cuarón's 'Y Tu Mamá También', Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También was one of a series of hit movies from Mexico in the early years of the millennium. From the beginning, the movie generated shock and scandal for its representations of graphic sex, but more than that for its representation of queer desire between the emerging young stars Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal. As the two established their careers, they continued to answer questions about Julio and Tenoch, the two adolescent, urban cowboys they played in Y Tu Mamá También. The road movie as coming-of-age story on its own would not produce any disconcerting …

Hiroshima, 'Mon Amour,' Trauma, And The Sublime, Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

Trauma ruptures the world of our daily experiences. It is an intrusion that threatens the body and psyche and affects us in symptomatic ways. That something happened is certain; what that is, however, resists comprehension and understanding. The impetus of much contemporary trauma research in the humanities derives from the coincidence of survivors' insistence on the truth of their experiences and life in a global culture that multiplies traumatic circumstances. These circumstances pose a radical threat to the fecundity of human life, to be sure, and also to the very possibility of brute survival. My aim in this essay is …