Comparative Literature Commons^™

A Poet Bears Witness: An Interview With M. L. Williams On The Function Of Literary Studies In Troubled Times, Leah Toth, M. L. Williams

Critical Humanities

Dr. M. L. (Marty) Williams is a poet and professor of literature at Valdosta State University, a comprehensive university in south-central Georgia. He is the author of Game (What Books Press 2021), Other Medicines (Redbone Chapbooks 2008) and co-editor of How Much Earth: The Fresno Poets (Roundhouse Press 2001). The focus of the interview that follows is the future of literary studies in the modern neo-liberal university, a daunting topic in 2026, in the face of what many administrators refer to as the "right-sizing" of literature programs nationwide in both the U.S. and the U.K. Anybody paying attention to the …

The Nabokovian Looking-Glass Of Igor Prikhozhay, Victor Fet

Biological Sciences Faculty Research

A Russian translation of the Looking-Glass was completed in 2020 by Ukrainian poet and translator Igor Prikhozhay (Ігор Прихожай). Born in 1987, Igor was killed in action on November 12, 2025, defending his country.

Planetary/Peripheral Appalachia, Matthew Halm

Critical Humanities

One of the characters in William Gibson’s science fiction novel The Peripheral describes the timeline-manipulating technology around which the story turns as a way of “third-worlding” the past. By sending information back and forth across time, the users of the technology, in our future, outsource work to inhabitants of their past (our near-present). An entire world becomes the “third world” for another world, home to cheap labor and expendable resources. The characters this happens to in the novel live in Appalachia, a choice that works in part to ground the otherwise cosmic scale of timeline manipulation and global catastrophe while …

The Extraction Unconscious: Solar-Powered Utopias In Catching The Sun (2015) And In The Name Of Lithium (2021), Isidora Cortés-Monroy

Critical Humanities

By comparing the depictions of future energy regimes in the two ecodocumentaries, Catching the Sun (2015) and In the Name of Lithium (2021), this article explores representations of post-carbon futures from the US and Argentina. Read closely alongside Frederic Jameson’s notions of utopias, the article delineates the extent to which a solar powered future challenges and reiterates current neocolonial extractivist structures. Basing myself on Patricia Yaeger’s concept of an “energy unconscious,” I argue that these solar utopias maintain an “extraction unconscious” that continues to produce sacrifice zones where primary commodities needed for the energy transition can be found. By analysing …

The New Old Logic Of Ai: A Review Of Mark Coeckelbergh’S The Political Philosophy Of Ai And Calvin Lawrence’S Hidden In White Sight, Steven Wandler

Critical Humanities

The New Old Logic of AI: A Review of Mark Coeckelbergh’s The Political Philosophy of AI and Calvin Lawrence’s Hidden in White Sight by Steven Wandler, St. Catherine University

Humanities In The Time Of Chatgpt And Other Forms Of Ai, Puspa Damai, Barbara Postema

Critical Humanities

Humanities in the time of ChatGPT and other forms of AI

Narratives Of Trauma In South Asian Literature, Ryan Wander

Critical Humanities

Narratives of Trauma in South Asian Literature uses seven geographically-focused clusters of essays to elucidate the ways in which the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies allows for a delineation of the cultural and historical specificity of South Asian narratives of trauma. These essays simultaneously serve as a means for connecting South Asian literary accounts of individual and collective trauma to broader national and transnational dynamics.

Dispositif, Biopolitical Governance, And Significance Of Genealogical Approach In Navigating Refugees’ Experiences Of Camp And Community, Rabindra Chaulagain

Critical Humanities

Foucault’s distinction between biopolitics and biopower is significant to society, a normative body in terms of seeing biopower as the practical production of the visible and invisible poles of the dispositif through interdependent discursive and institutional practices of administration. This paper fundamentally discusses two theoretical ideas ingrained with the notion of Foucauldian biopolitics---dispositif and genealogy that Foucault brought into account for merging them into modern biopolitical administrative forces. First, it discusses the idea of dispositif as a mechanism of governance and critically examines its connection to biopower and biopolitics. Second, it analyzes the notion of genealogy as a tool to …

Versions Of An Arab American Identity: Toward A Revision Narrative For Rajia Hassib’S In The Language Of Miracles, John K. Young

Critical Humanities

This essay compares the draft and published versions of three central chapters in Rajia Hassib’s 2015 novel In the Language of Miracles, as a smaller instance of what John Bryant terms a revision narrative. The key differences in characterization across the evolution of the narrative, along with the elements of a related character that remain largely unchanged, indicate the ways in which Hassib negotiates public and private versions of a gendered Arab American identity. By revising one chapter to remove a scene depicting a public assault in a pharmacy, the essay concludes, Hassib resists familiar narratives constraining Arab American …

Plagues, Oblivion, And The Anonymous Dead Echoes From Seneca’S Oedipus And Lucan’S Civil War To Covid-19, Christina Franzen

Critical Humanities

The dead who are piled up in the literary worlds of Seneca’s Oedipus and Lucan’s Civil War are not very different than those of modernity. In their anonymity and silence, they speak so much about the atrocities and traumatic events of the societies in which they live. In Oedipus, nameless citizens claustrophobically are joined to one another in death, and, in Civil War, heaps of dead rot as Caesar looks on. One cannot help being reminded of the mass graves on Hart Island, the refrigerated morgue trucks, and the mass funeral pyres in India. This essay explores how the …

Maneuvering Past Meaning: Queering Language Through Trans-Poetics, Brooke Ingram

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Queer studies today has seen a rise in analysis of the trans subject. While previous research has focused on the queer body and on the term queer, my interest in trans studies is in the form and function of language. That focus on the structures of language is what underlies this thesis. My claim is that queering language is visible in the authors I cover in the form of what I call trans-poetics. I focus on keri edwards’ succubus in my pocket and Moss Angel’s Sea-Witch Volume 1. In edwards, I locate a displaced “I” and thus a displaced subjectivity …

Some-Ness In No-When: Queer Temporalities In The Horror Genre, Melody Hope Cooper

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In my research, I question why heteronormative society is afraid of the elements of horror films that are inherently queer. My focus is on temporal understandings of horror through the concepts of queer time, as theorized by Jack Halberstam and the theory of the abject, as presented by Julia Kristeva. I examine the relationship between queer time and heteronormative time. The abject serves as the return of time without identity or defined by binaries. Queer time is the time that will destroy heteronormative time’s conception of itself. This then relates to the horror that is created by the queering of …

Thematic Patterning In English And Arabic And Its Implications On Translation, Saud Abdulrahman Alshehri

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis examines patterns of thematization between English and Arabic, demonstrating variations in textual meaning and implications of such an examination on the activity and education of translation. Translators frequently encounter the challenge of positioning clausal constituents at the beginning of a sentence when translating from English to Arabic. The study, drawing on Halliday’s SFL theory, applies the system of Theme as a tool to the analysis of an English text and six Arabic translations to investigate such variations. The analysis also aims to demonstrate to what extent thematic patterning is preserved or changed between the original and target text. …

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

Modern Languages Faculty Research

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. …

A Newer Humanism, Andrew Kirkland Johnston

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

New Humanism, a critical movement that can be traced back to the early 1900s and Mathew Arnold, is an aesthetic committed to reclaiming the defining moral agents of Western Europe and liberal humanism. This commitment to the past is still the focal point of academic discussions as scholars contemplate whether or not to move away from the humanist tradition. A Newer Humanism is my own attempt at inserting myself into the academic conversation as I hope to shed light on the current situation plaguing academics. While I argue for the overthrow of the liberal humanist subject, a commitment to the …

Gi Jive: Us Soldiers' Writings And Post-World War Ii America, Amanda Lee Stevens

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This work is a comprehensive study of American soldiers‘ writings during World War II as they related to personal and national postwar aims. The paper uses military and domestic publications along with a selection of memoirs and diaries published during and immediately after the war to create an overview of soldiers' ideological and material desires of postwar America.

Scandalous Deception In The Castle: An Examination Of The Gender Performance Through The Bedtrick Trope In Arthurian Literature, Abby Louise Daniel

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The bedtrick – mistaken identity in a sexual encounter – is a comic motif employed by medieval, renaissance and modern storytellers. While modern readers tend to recognize this motif as (at best) a disturbing sexual escapade and (at worst) rape, the scholarship on mistaken identity in medieval literature still generally glosses over the bedtrick as a moment of comedy. My thesis examines the literary trope of the bedtrick through the critical lens of Judith Butler’s performativity theory, and the motives behind this form of deception and the modern implications. Furthermore, the bedtrick trope is explored in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur …

Terror, Hospitality And The Gift Of Death In Morrison’S Beloved, Puspa Damai

English Faculty Research

The “us versus them” narrative still pre-dominates the analysis of terrorism in the West, which invariably associates “them” with terrorism. Toni Morrison’s hauntingly memorable novel – Beloved – provides a radically different and historically grounded view of terror and terrorism in the West. The novel not only releases us from the “us versus them” paradigm by demonstrating America’s intimacy with terror, it also enables us to examine terror and terrorism from the perspective of a gendered and ethnic subject who subverts the easy categorization of “us” and “them” or civilized and terrorist. Following Jacques Derrida’s contemplations on death and terror, …

A Contrastive Systemic Functional Analysis Of Causality In Japanese And English Academic Articles, Masaki Shibata

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Typological differences between languages have been a much debated topic in linguistic studies. Despite their usefulness in understanding syntactic features of various languages, such contrastive analyses have yet to thoroughly explore semantic variation among languages; furthermore, the results obtained have not been practically utilized in other areas of applied linguistics. This situation may come from the fact that a large number of contrastive studies have eclectically examined isolated areas of language variation either from syntactic, morphological, or from pragmatic perspectives. Viewing this issue from another angle, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) focuses on language from a multi-dimensional perspective, where language is …

The Interplay Of Authorial Control And Readerly Judgments In Ian Mcewan's Atonement, Marissa Danaé Nelson

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Mainly focusing on postmodern literary theory, I will analyze Ian McEwan’s Atonement and suggest how it becomes a simulacrum due to the protagonist, Briony Tallis taking control of authorship from McEwan and expressing how she is the author of the text. Because Briony negates an important aspect of the novel, hyperreality occurs. This thesis will look at the role McEwan plays as author of Atonement, how main characters Robbie and Cecelia take part within this fictional world and how they become aware of an authorial presence within their lives, how Briony takes ultimate control of the pen and appoints herself …

Logogenesis And Appraisal: A Systemic Functional Analysis Of English And Japanese Language Arts Textbooks, Shinji Kawamitsu

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate the distinct and purposeful differences of the language of evaluation between English textbooks and Japanese textbooks. This thesis applies Appraisal system in Systemic Functional Linguistics to the language arts textbooks used in 2nd to 4th grade classrooms in Japan and in the U.S. The analysis shows that the number of Attitudinal lexical items, especially invoked Attitude, is notably higher than that in the English texts. The analysis also shows that the Japanese texts employ Judgment lexis, which is a resource to form a sense of group harmony, more than the other Attitudinal …

A Poet's Request : Text And Subtext In Horace's Odes 1.1, Virginia C. Cook

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

As the first poem within Horace's original publication of Odes, Odes 1.1 embodies aspects of theme and style representative of the poet's approach to the genre of lyric poetry. The Odes of Horace allow various interpretations by the reader based on construction, vocabulary and imagery. This thesis explores Odes 1.1 in its entirety through such approaches and focuses on the text and subtext incorporated by the poet. The first chapter sets the foundation needed in order to begin a study of Horace's lyric poetry, detailing the genre as a whole, the life of the poet, as well as the contradiction …

The Postcolonial "Knight‘S Tale": A Social Commentary On Post-Norman Invasion England, Ruth M.E. Oldman

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Every author injects a purpose into his or her works; in Chaucer‘s case, he scribed The Canterbury Tales, which tackles and successfully demonstrates various aspects to fourteenth century English society and culture. "The Knight‘s Tale" is no different; the tale is almost identical, plot-wise, to Giovanni Boccaccio‘s Teseida, and yet Chaucer weaves a tale that is distinctive. The tale reflects Chaucer‘s views on his society, in particular post-Norman attitudes. By examining the text with a post-colonial theoretical approach, Chaucer‘s "The Knight‘s Tale" is a subaltern commentary on the colonization of England after the Norman Conquest.

Women With Short Hair, Amanda Layne Stephens

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Women with Short Hair is a short-fiction collection that centers on the lives of four women who live in West Virginia. Each story depicts a female character during a different developmental stage: childhood in ―In Casino Daycare,‖ young adulthood in ―Felis domestica,‖ adulthood in ―Date Night at the Beach,‖ and middle-age in ―Women with Short Hair.‖ Short-fiction collections that influenced Women with Short Hair include Flannery O‘Connor‘s A Good Man Is Hard to Find, James Joyce‘s Dubliners, and Ernest Hemingway‘s In Our Time. Symbolism, repetition, the objective correlative, and free indirect discourse constitute reoccurring literary devices while reappearing themes include …

Heavier Than It Looks And Other Stories, Matthew Tobias Ray

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Heavier Than It Looks and Other Stories is a collection of fiction containing one novella-length story, in six parts, centering on the life of a young man coming to terms with a close friend’s suicide. The remaining stories depict different characters amidst situations unique to each character’s stage in life: childhood in 1930s Appalachia in "The Other Kid In a Candy Store," mourning and violent crime in "Picking A Lock," transcendence in "Pathétique," mid-life changes in "Lester’s Last Melancholy," managing addiction in "Staying Clean," youthful folly in "Just For Fun," and storytelling in "The Taste of a Story." Works that …

Identity Anxiety And The Power And Problem Of Naming In African American And Jewish American Literature, Rachael Peckham

English Faculty Research

This article examines the fraught power of names and (re)naming in African-American and Jewish-authored literature in 20^th-century America. The article applies various concepts within critical race theory, such as critic Stuart Hall's theories on cultural identity, to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Ralph Ellison's personal essay "Hidden Name and Complex Fate," and Bernard Malamud's short story "The Lady of the Lake." In each of these texts, African-American and Jewish characters' names serve as loaded markers for the shifting planes of identity in tension with a culture and history of oppression.

Silence As Insubordination: Friday And Michael K’S Wordless Weapon, A Post-Colonial Approach Toj.M. Coetzee’S Foe And Life And Times Of Michael K, Cody C. Mullins

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

While most critics of J.M. Coetzee’s fiction focus on silence as a weapon of imperial oppressive forces to subjugate representations of the "other," this thesis argues that, on the contrary, characters representing the traditional colonially oppressed use their silence as a weapon to in turn oppress the representations of imperial power. Through close reading explication and the use of the post-colonial theories of both Homi Bhabha and Edward Said, I focus on the inverted oppression, the shifting of identity, and the role of authorial authority within the novels, Foe and Life & Times of Michael K. By engaging in this …

Interrupting The Puppet Master: (Un)Reliability And Metatextuality In Dave Eggers’S You Shall Know Our Velocity, Suzanne R. Samples

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In 2002 Dave Eggers (who had just come off of the success of a Pulitzer Prize nominated memoir about the death of his parents and the influx of cash that ensued) published a novel titled You Shall Know Our Velocity. Within three years the novel underwent significant alterations that changed the plot’s original meaning. Most notably, some of the printings of the novel contain an additional section of text called “An Interruption” written by the best friend (Hand) of the original narrator (Will); this additional text destroys Will’s original plot and makes the reader question the reliability of the text. …

Chasing Demons: Female Villains And Narrative Strategy In Victorian Sensation Fiction, Heather Sowards

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis explores Victorian sensation fiction and key authors who rely on essentialism, employing the classifications of either angel or demon to their literary female figures. Using Nina Auerbach's theories on these above categorizations and Helene Cixous's linguistic binaries, I examine the ways in which the narrators of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas, and Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science force this taxonomy onto the female villains who dominate the novels' themes. By looking closely at the narrative strategies, I conclude that these female characters themselves are proposing a very different sense of self or …

O Caramuru Y Caramurú: Sus Relaciones En La Formación De Un Protoimaginario Nacional Uruguayo, Maria Cristina Burgueno

Modern Languages Faculty Research

This article examines the inter-textual relations between the novel Caramurú (1848?) by the Uruguayan writer Alejandro Magariños Cervantes, and the epic poem O Caramuru (1781) by the Portuguese Friar Jose de Santa Rita Durão. The thesis of the article is that these literary works reflect the deep cultural and political connections between Uruguay and Brazil, and how these links were present at the time when –surrounded by uncertainties about the viability of the new state—the elaboration of a Uruguayan national identity started. The pro-Brazilian option –shown by the selection of Caramuru, who was a foundational character of the Brazilian History …