Comparative Literature Commons^™

A Case Study Of (Inter)Medial Participation, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "A Case Study of (Inter)medial Participation" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek presents survey data followed by quantitative and qualitative analysis about the daily intake of media in cultural participation. The survey data of the study are the result of questionnaires conducted 2001-2002 with advanced undergraduate students enrolled in media and communication studies at Northeastern University and with advanced undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. As the survey was conducted in 2001-2002, the data and the analysis have "historical" relevance with regard to (inter)medial cultural participation in the digital age. The data are from a mid-size …

Video Games As Equipment For Living, Ronald Soetaert, Jeroen Bourgonjon, Kris Rutten

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Video Games as Equipment for Living" Ronald Soetaert, Jeroen Bourgonjon, and Kris Rutten postulate that with the emergence of new media there is need of a re-evaluation of all modes of communication and the ways in which literacy is conceptualized. Drawing on the concept of multi-literacy they suggest a rhetorical/ anthropological meta-perspective to describe human beings as symbol using animals and focus on particular symbol systems: narrative, drama, and video games. Specifically, they focus on the perspective of drama as a tool to analyze cultural artifacts in general and video games — as a new art form …

Intermediality And Aesthetic Theory In Shklovsky's And Adorno's Thought, Oleg Gelikman

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In his article "Intermediality and Aesthetic Theory in Shklovsky's and Adorno's Thought" Oleg Gelikman places the concept of intermediality in the context of the unresolved conflict between philosophical aesthetics and aesthetic theory. The conflict originated in the response of an influential generation of thinkers to the crisis of the neo-Kantian schools and the emergence of modernism in the 1910s. Despite superficial similarities, aesthetic theory is neither a revamped aesthetics of the subject nor a theoretical vindication of modernism. By severing the connection between subject-object epistemology and theory of artworks, the practitioners of aesthetic theory such as Victor Shklovsky and Theodor …

Intermediality, Translation, Comparative Literature, And World Literature, Erin Schlumpf

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In her article "Intermediality, Translation, Comparative Literature, and World Literature" Erin Schlumpf postulates that the study of literature today is best performed in a framework of comparative literature and world literature including intermediality particularly in the case of translated texts. Schlumpf contends that working in comparative and world literature today demands a reexamination of translation and the teaching of works in translation. Following her theoretical postulates, Schlumpf analyzes two films, Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise (1966) and Xiaolu Guo's She, a Chinese (Zhongguo guniang) (2009).

Old And New Medialities In Foer's Tree Of Codes, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Old and New Materialities in Foer's Tree of Codes" Kiene Brillenburg Wurth analyzes how intermediality works — not what it "is" — in the analysis of literary texts. How intermedial can texts "do," precisely when they consist only of words? Do such texts compel us to reconsider literature as a verbal art? Her analysis focuses on a recent book by Jonathan Safran Foer: Tree of Codes (2010), a literary work cut out of the remains of Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles (1934). Brillenburg Wurth points out how intermediality works as a productive interaction not only between …

Intermedial Representations In Asian Macbeth-S, I-Chun Wang

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In her article "Intermedial representations in Asian Macbeth-s" I-Chun Wang discusses three Asian versions of Macbeths that exemplify the cultural meanings through the interaction of landscape, body, and spectacles of power. Shakespeare remains one of the most popular playwrights in the Eastern world, and playwrights in the Asian world find Shakespearean plays attractive to the Asian audience. Among Shakespearean plays, Macbeth fascinates its Asian audience with its theme on kingship, territory of social relationships as well as moral and emotional development. These adaptations oftentimes become cross-cultural reproductions because each adapted text manifests not only cross-cultural interpretations but also highlights …

The Spirit Of Matter In Büchner, Barbara Natalie Nagel

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In her article "The Spirit of Matter in Büchner" Barbara Natalie Nagel investigates different vectors of Georg Büchner's materialism: historical, philosophical, ethical, physiological. The analysis of what Büchner presents to be a necessary link between physiology and revolution aims to show how Büchner has a tendency first to entangle two relatively static, binary oppositions — literal/figurative and material/spiritual — in order then to play them against one another. Büchner thus uses the dynamics of literalization to evoke necessity: for example, if the revolution is conceived of in physiological terms, then the will either has to become physiological or biology has …

Musical, Rhetorical, And Visual Material In The Work Of Feldman, Kurt Ozment

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Musical, Rhetorical, and Visual Material in the Work of Feldman" Kurt Ozment compares early and late scores by Morton Feldman and argues that Feldman's interest in the visuality of the score was not limited to his experiments with graphic notation. More specifically, Projection 3 (1951) and String Quartet (II) (1983) suggest that Feldman experimented with notation from beginning to end. Up until the early 1980s, one of Feldman's main strategies for commenting on his music was to refer to painting. In his essay "Crippled Symmetry" and in an interview with the percussionist Jan Williams, Feldman also turns …

Intermediality As Cultural Literacy And Teaching The Graphic Novel, Geert Vandermeersche, Ronald Soetaert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Intermediality as Cultural Literacy and Teaching the Graphic Novel" Geert Vandermeersche and Ronald Soetaert argue for the inclusion of the graphic novel for the teaching of cultural literacy and literature. As the printed book is no longer the sole carrier of cultural literacy, Vandermeersche and Soetaert postulate that literary culture must be repositioned in intermedial culture and practices. In order to do so, Vandermeersche and Soetaert apply Werner Wolf's typology of intermediality, aspects of narratology, and scholarship about comics. Following a theoretical discussion they analyze the graphic novel series The Unwritten, a text that thematizes the …

Voices In Australia's Aboriginal And Canada's First Nations Literatures, Kim Scott, Eden Robinson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Kim Scott suggests in his text "I Come from Here" by means of "yarning" that the authority of Indigenous people and language is primary to an authentic "sense of place." Scott uses an accumulative, episodic, and personal narrative style to argue that the return "to," and consolidation of cultural material "in," a "community of descendants of the informants" must be founded upon principles of community development. Collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people by sharing of ancestral material with ever widening, concentric circles is how this process results in respect and partnership that empowers community life.

Eden Robinson explores in her …

Aboriginal Australian And Canadian First Nations Children's Literature, Angeline O'Neill

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In her article "Aboriginal Australian and Canadian First Nations Children's Literature" Angeline O'Neill discusses Canadian First Nations and Australian Aboriginal children's picture books and their appeal to a dual readership. Inuit traditional storyteller and writer Michael Kusugak, Nyoongar traditional storyteller and writer Lorna Little, and Wunambal elder Daisy Utemorrah are cases in point. Each appeals to Indigenous and non-Indigenous, child and adult readerships, thus challenging two assumptions in Western scholarship on literature that 1) the picture book genre is necessarily the domain of children and 2) that traditional Indigenous stories are, similarly, best suited to children. O'Neill considers the ways …

Collaborative Authorship And Indigenous Literatures, Albert Braz

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In his article "Collaborative Authorship and Indigenous Literatures" Albert Braz discusses the duality of the writer. As suggested by Roland Barthes in his "The Death of the Author," the distinction between writer and author — the first being the historical person behind the text and the second a figure in the text — the duality of the author remains a paradigm of contemporary critical analysis. Braz argues that this new emphasis is not germane when it comes to Indigenous literatures, a field in which one often cannot determine who are the material producers of texts and/or their writers. Braz postulates …

Towards Transnational Native American Literary Studies, Hsinya Huang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Towards Transnational Native American Literary Studies" Hsinya Huang discusses how Native American literature can be adapted, translated, articulated, and interpreted in a transnational/trans-Pacific context, using the recently emerging Native American scholarship in Taiwan as a point of departure. Through collaboration across institutional lines, exploration of the community production of local knowledge, and our obligation and desire to participate meaningfully as intellectuals in the international initiatives in Native Studies, can we conceive of an expansive indigenous region across the Pacific? How can indigeneity be both rooted in and routed through particular places and articulated? Through envisioning an expanding …

Indigenous Literature And Comparability, Katherine Durnin

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In her article "Indigenous Literature and Comparability" Katherine Durnin discusses some of the barriers to the comparative study of Indigenous literature alongside non-Indigenous literature. These barriers include the Eurocentrism of traditional comparative literature, certain aspects of postcolonial theory and, above, all the assumption that Indigenous and Western epistemologies belong to separate and incommensurable worlds. Durnin examines some recent theoretical and critical approaches that offer ways to bridge the two worlds and make comparative literature an ethical space of mutual respect and understanding.

On Reading Grace's Potiki, Eva Rask Knudsen

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In her article "On Reading Grace's Potiki" Eva Rask Knudsen takes as her point of departure the critical impasse of postcolonial analyses of Indigenous literatures and the claim made by some (Indigenous) commentators that non-Indigenous scholars and critics often re-colonize the texts they deem to be "postcolonial" because — in their theoretical concern with issues of marginalization and resistance — they overlook (and so overwrite) the specific indigenous knowledges and ontologies that the literatures draw on. Through an analysis of the 1986 novel Potiki by Māori writer Patricia Grace, Rsak Knudsen looks in other directions than those catalogued by …

Introduction To About Indigenous Literatures, Angeline O'Neill, Albert Braz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Politics Of Indigeneity In Fogarty's Poetry, Sean Gorman

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In his article "Politics of Indigeneity in Fogarty's Poetry" Sean Gorman discusses Indigenous themes and issues with regards to the poetry of Murri writer Lionel Fogarty. As Fogarty is seen as a poet who writes complex prose, his material challenges non-Indigenous readerships by subverting Standard English and conventional reading practices. Gorman suggests strategies by which to engage with Fogarty's material and, employing the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, namely heteroglossia and dialogism, to arrive at a better understanding of the rich and complex nature of Fogarty's work. Gorman executes his analysis in relation to the political debates that have arisen since …

Australian Indigenous Philosophy, Stephen Muecke

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In his article "Australian Indigenous Philosophy" Stephen Muecke discusses the fact that neither Australian philosophy nor Indigenous Australian philosophy exists as a field of study. Settler Australians have imported their philosophical traditions and have left it up to other disciplines to undertake the translation work of knowledge in the long-lived Indigenous traditions. Here, anthropology, history, and cultural studies have taken up the challenge. Muecke revisits his 2004 book Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy in order to refine some of his arguments about philosophical practice and the damaging periodization into "ancient" and "modern" cultures in colonial societies like …

Textual Fantasies And Culturality In Native American Fiction: A Review Article Of New Books By Treuer And Justice, Angeline O'Neill

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Bibliography Of Scholarship On Indigenous Literatures And Cultures, Angeline O'Neill, Albert Braz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Gender Performance In The Literature Of The Female Beats, Gillian Thomson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Gender Performance in the Literature of the Female Beats" Gillian Thomson examines the re-negotiation of gender boundaries within Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters and Hettie Jones's Drive poems; secondary to this is how the male Beats demonstrate a more concrete, dichotomous version of such gender categories. Thomson intend to demonstrate how the women often write themselves into Beat history and how their revised performance of gender modifies the normative tropes regarding females within the Beat enclave. The theoretical backdrop focuses on how language not only records or expresses reality, but also shapes it. This is a decidedly poststructuralist …

Osundare's Poetry And The Yoruba Worldview, Christopher Anyokwu

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In his article "Osundare's Poetry and the Yoruba Worldview" Christopher Anyokwu analyses the use of Indegienous Yoruba concepts found in Niyi Osundare's texts. Anyokwu postulates that Osundare appears to combine in his work concepts and traditions of Yoruba culture and Marxist ideology which, as Anyokwu argues, locates Osundare with other revolutionary-minded radical poets such as Pablo Neruda, Octovio Paz, Nicolas Guillén, Agostinho Neto, or Okot P'Biteke. Further, Anyokwu argues that a major aspect of the sources of Osundare's work, this perspective has either been under-theorized or examined only superficially in the critical corpus of Osundare's texts. Anyokwu both analyzes and …

Motherhood In African Literature And Culture, Remi Akujobi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Motherhood in African Literature and Culture" Remi Akujobi analyzes the place and the role of women in African Religion and tradition and also interrogates the place of Motherhood in the production, circulation and consumption of items in African tradition. Akujobi examines Motherhood as a sacred as well as a powerful spiritual component of the woman's life. Emphasis is put on literary discourse where motherhood is a recurrent theme, where motherhood is also a lifelong commitment. The article particularly explores motherhood as a discourse in African women creative efforts. A key intention of the article is to explore …

Two Traumas One Aesthetic In Walsh's Operación Masacre And Kaufman's The Laramie Project, Henry James Morello

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In his article "Two Traumas One Aesthetic in Walsh's Operación Masacre and Kaufman's The Laramie Project" Henry James Morello analyzes the stylistic similarities of Walsh's and Kaufman's texts. Walsh's 1957 testimonio Operación masacre was written as a response to the politically motivated violence perpetrated by the military government after the overthrow of Juan Perón, specifically the kidnapping and murder of a group of men thought to be Peronist sympathizers. In 1998 Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project created The Laramie Project, a play about the reactions of the people of Laramie to the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard, …

Children's Literature In South-East Europe, Milena Mileva Blažić

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Children's Literature in South East Europe" Milena Mileva Blažić begins with an introduction to Maria Nikolajeva's 2000 book From Mythic to Linear: Time in Children's Literature in which a theoretical framework of thematics is defined, systematized, and categorized. Nikolajeva's framework for children's literature suggests attention to characteristics through which the maturation process of becoming adult is accomplished. Following the introduction and application of Nikolajeva's concepts, Blažić first applies the frame to selected texts published in South-East Europe, followed by lists of children's book published in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia.

Globalization, Pedagogical Imagination, And Transnational Literacy, Ezra Yoo-Hyeok Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Globalization, Pedagogical Imagination, and Transnational Literacy," Ezra Yoo-Hyeok Lee explores the juncture of comparative literature, globalization and postcolonial studies as to how creative writers, literary critics, and cultural theorists respond to globalization and its challenges. Arjun Appadurai expounds that globalization has demanded new research conceptualization and invention in academia. Subsequently, Lee investigates methods through which educators and scholars in comparative literature take up such a demand. In turn, Lee proposes a transnational literacy which offers a responsible form of cultural explanation, through which to explore the interrelations between the national and the postcolonial or global paradigms, both …

Tropologies Of Tradition And (Post)Modernity In Nwagwu's Forever Chimes, James Tar Tsaaior

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In his article "Tropologies of Tradition and (Post)modernity in Nwagwu's Forever Chimes" James Tar Tsaaior explores Mark Nwagu's novel and postulates that the author succeeds in constructing a novelistic universe both concrete and fluid in its re-invention or re-fabrication of cultural traditions and identity formation processes. This universe is simultaneously traditional/indigenous and (post)modern. However, rather than to delineate these cultural formations through difference as oppositional categories, Nwagu suggests grounds for multicultural interactions and transactions. In this cultural schema, none of the cultures claims exclusive preserve or pre-eminence over the other as what exists is a democratic space for the …

Early Twentieth-Century Fashion Designer Life Writing, Ilya Parkins

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Early Twentieth-century Fashion Designer Life Writing," Ilya Parkins examines memoirs of major modernist fashion designers in the, finding that the genre is characterized by a strong geographic cleavage between France and America, overlain by perceptions of epistemic difference. She compares Elsa Schiaparelli's and Paul Poiret's work, finding that despite their differences, the opposition between France as a locale of abstract knowledge and America as a site of empiricism allows them to claim, as French designers, a certain privilege in a profession characterized by an unresolvable tension between art and commerce. The encroachment of American industrial models in …

Comparativism And Cyberculture: A Review Article Of New Books By Płaszczewska And Zawojski, Michał Ostrowicki

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Science Fiction And A Rhetorical Analysis Of The 'Literature Myth', Kris Rutten, Ronald Soetaert, Geert Vandermeersche

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Science Fiction and a Rhetorical Analysis of the 'Literature Myth'" Kris Rutten, Ronald Soetaert, and Geert Vandermeersche discuss what we can learn from science fiction about cultural literacy in general and literary culture in particular. From a theoretical and methodological perspective the authors start from the work of rhetorician Kenneth Burke. First, the authors conceptualize literature as "equipment for living" followed by a discussion of science fiction as "equipment for living" based on a description of the genre as "satire by entelechy." Second, they analyze a selection of science fiction narratives using the "dramatistic pentad" as …