Comparative Literature Commons^™

Literature And Science In Nineteenth-Century Realist Novels: A Book Review Article About Ambrière's And Bender's Work, Anne-Marie Reboul

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

New Work About Reading Poetry: A Book Review Article On Stafford's And Bohn's Work, Martyna Markowska

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Love And Marriage In The Work Of Abdul-Baki, Abu-Jaber, And Al-Razzaz, Qusai A.R. Al-Debyan, Shadi S. Neimneh

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Love and Marriage in the Work of Abdul-Baki, Abu-Jaber, and al-Razzaz" Qusai A.R. Al-Debyan and Shadi S. Neimneh posit that love, marriage, and sexuality represent important aspects in Mu'nis al-Razzaz's 1997 novel Alive in the Dead Sea, Kathryn K. Abdul-Baki's 2000 novel Ghost Songs: A Palestinian Love Story, and Diana Abu-Jaber's 2003 short story "Madagascar." Issues of love, marriage, and sexuality in these texts suggest a rebellious attitude on the part of women protagonists against taboos of religion, politics, and sexuality and Abdul-Baki, Abu-Jaber, and al-Razzaz employ descriptions of sexual intimacy to reflect the social …

Trust-Based Learning And Its Importance In Intercultural Education, Clemens Seyfried

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Trust-Based Learning and Its Importance in Intercultural Education" Clemens Seyfried introduces the concept of "trust-based learning," an approach he developed for learning in an intercultural world and applied in primary and secondary education. The objective of the concept is the raising of opportunities students with (im)migrant background in education. Seyfried presents an overview of the educational situation of (im)migrants and ethnic minorities in the European Union with special focus on Austria, followed by a description of the said concept of trust-based learning including the results of a statistical survey conducted in Austria. The focus of the concept …

Arab Women Writers As Revolutionary Orators And Catalytic Agents Of Emancipation, Safaa S. Nasser

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Contemporary Egyptian and Palestinian Women's Writing as 'Committed Literature'" Safaa S. Nasser discusses the role of Arab women writers whose works were harbingers of the Arab Spring of 2011. Nasser's analysis demonstrate that the majority of Arab women writers acted as agents of feminist action and social change through their critique of patriarchal, phallocentric domi-nation and through their call for a secular sensibility. Their works demonstrate the symbiotic relation-ship between political, national, and feminist struggle for equality between genders. To exemplify this revolutionary perspective, Nasser analyzes texts by Nawal El Saadawi, Ahdaf Soueif, Salwa Bakr, Saki-na Fuad, …

Postcolonial Studies In The Twenty-First Century: A Book Review Article About New Work By Ashcroft, Mendis, Mcgonegal, Mukerjee And Carrera Suárez, Durán Almarza, Menéndez Tarrazo, Alejandra Moreno

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Temporal Spaces In García Márquez's, Salih's, And Rushdie's Novels, Adrienne D. Vivian

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Temporal Spaces in García Márquez's, Salih's, and Rushdie's Novels" Adrienne D. Vivian discusses the significance of time in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. While culturally distinct to one another, in each novel temporal space is narrated as a means to express and explore postcolonial identity. Vivian examines the connections between time and memory, history, and nation in each of the novels and the ways postcolonial authors use time as a device to mark the crossroads of precolonial past …

Time, Photography, And Optical Technology In Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Tetyana Lyaskovets

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Time, Photography, and Optical Technology in Nabokov's Speak, Memory" Tetyana Lyaskovets discusses how Vladimir Nabokov narrates time in his autobiography by invoking photography and optical instruments. Photography and optical technology function in Speak, Memory as metaphors and probe the limits of chronological time. Nabokov portrays time as personal and reversible time that collapses the past and the present and allows one to glimpse the future. Because this temporal collapse is not possible physically but, as Nabokov believes, can be achieved through one's will, he engages optical technologies which provide a spatial form for his project to …

Review Article About U.S. Comparative Literature Journals Published In 2013, Miaomiao Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Queering Masturbation In Lorde's Life And Writing, Eric Sipyinyu Njeng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Queering Masturbation in Lorde's Life and Writing" Eric Sipyinyu Njeng discusses masturbation in Audre Lorde's life and works to signal an important aspect of her oeuvre often neglected in scholarship. Lorde stands out among prominent queer queens by demonstrating theory corporeally thereby going beyond mere theory and positing her body as a space of complex sexual passions. When Judith Butler speaks of gender as performative rather than embodied, Lorde theorizes and foregrounds this in her works and self and celebrates a sexual matrix that ranges from heterosexuality to homosexuality to auto-sexuality. Lorde places masturbation between the binary …

Greenberg's Prose And Poetry About World War I, Chanita Goodblatt

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Greenberg's Prose and Poetry about World War I" Chanita Goodblatt analyzes the literary response of Uri Zvi Greenberg to the war. His volume of poetry Krieg oyf der Erd— largely untranslated to English — can be read as part of a multicultural literary response to World War I, particularly in juxtaposition with the poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Goodblatt posits that a study of shared esthetic strategies and literary traditions underlines the way in which Greenberg created an "alienated wanderer" who witnesses and stands helpless in the face of the violence and destruction of …

Marriage In The Short Stories Of Chekhov, Mark Richard Purves

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Marriage in the Short Stories of Chekhov" Mark Richard Purves explores Anton Chekhov's often occurring depiction of marriage. Purves posits that Chekhov's depiction of the experience of marriage raises important ontological questions about the core features of family life such as what it means to be a husband, what it means to be a wife, and the degree of relatedness between them. Chekhov elaborates on what he sees as matrimony's central antinomy, namely that the wedding of one individual to another produces loneliness, an absence of intimacy, and a kind of alienation so acute it causes love …

Postmodernist Poetics And Narratology: A Review Article About Mchale's Scholarship, Biwu Shang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Utopian Literature From The Sixteenth Century To Present Day, Lisa Sikkink

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, and George Orwell’s 1984 are all works of utopian literature. Although they were written during different time periods, the issues they explore are remarkably similar. My research project explores such ideas as literature, sex and reproduction, society, and family life in these utopian works in order to demonstrate these affinities.

Lessons In Liminal Space: Borders As Pedagogical Tools In No Country For Old Men, Steven Norton

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

As scholars continue to explore the territories created by burgeoning interdisciplinarity and ever-growing global networks, the concept of borders become a topic of increased theoretical and pedagogical discussion. Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men, set at the Texas-Mexico border, provides an opportunity to explore the liminal nature of borders and their role in identity formation. The novel allows us to embrace the fluidity of borders and see, as Gayatri Spivak argues, that “we are made by the forces moving about the world” (3), rather than divided by them. Throughout No Country for Old Men, McCarthy posits that borders …

Ekphrasis And Skepticism In Three Works Of Shakespeare, Robert P. Irons

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the claim that “The truest poetry is the most feigning” by examining ekphrasis and its relation to skepticism in Shakespeare. Two fundamental claims comprise my argument: first, Shakespeare uses ekphrasis to acknowledge doubt in order that his poetry might become most true; second, ekphrasis is the unique means by which the spectators–at times both within and outside of the play– may question their own skepticism and additionally consider their role and place as audience.

In the introduction, after discussing key characteristics of ekphrasis conveyed in the Shield of Achilles, I argue that the spatial focus of Horace’s …

Poetic Appropriations In Vergil’S Aeneid: A Study In Three Themes Comprising Aeneas’ Character Development, Edgar Gordyn

Theses and Dissertations

In Vergil’s Aeneid, Aeneas’ character development into the leader of the new Roman race is depicted in light of three significant themes: the bees, whether they appear in the epic’s similes or in the prophetic vision in book 7, the theme of passion, particularly ira, and the theme of reason, whether in Aeneas’ spoken commands or in his increasingly purposeful actions in founding his intended city. These themes, I argue, are interdependent and together highlight Aeneas’ character development into a model Roman leader, as well as highlight significant depictions of Vergil’s vision of the model Roman state.

Mcwilliams, Ellen. Women And Exile In Contemporary Irish Fiction, Maureen T. Reddy

Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought

No abstract provided.

The Art Of Lebanese Verbal Dueling: The Battle Of Beit Mery And Beyond, Paula Marie Haydar

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the living and vibrant oral tradition of verbal dueling in Lebanon, also known as Lebanese zajal. The introductory chapter explores the historical, sociolinguistic, and musical-metrical roots of today's Lebanese zajal contests and festivals, which feature teams of up to four poets who compete against each other in improvised, sung verse in colloquial Lebanese, carrying a sort of dialogue within which they argue opposing sides of universal themes and topics of current social interest. Though time, tradition, and culture in the Lebanese mountainside have nurtured the development of sung oral poetry into its current form and status …

Wit In The Early Modern Literary Marketplace, Danny Childers

Dissertations

The concept of wit undergoes a transformation in the sixteenth century from having associations with the intellect, with its cultural productions, and with classical study towards more direct associations with the writing trade and with clever wordplay. This transition, as I will demonstrate, relates specifically to tensions between humanist culture and the early modern literary marketplace. This dissertation begins by examining the early sixteenth century humanists' concept of wit and goes on to examine the presentation of the concept by four late sixteenth century writers—John Lyly (1553-1606), Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), Robert Greene (1560-1592), and William Shakespeare (1564-1616). I argue that …

Transnational Historical Fiction In A Postsecular Age: A Study Of The Spiritual Theses In The Works Of Luis Alberto Urrea And Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, Mary Anna Sobhani

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study, employing a postsecular theoretical prism, analyzes the spiritual theses given expression through the historical fiction of Mexican-American, or Chicano, author Luis Alberto Urrea and exiled Persian Bahá'í author Bahiyyih Nakhjavani. This study examines three novels: Nakhjavani's The Woman Who Read Too Much, Urrea's The Hummingbird's Daughter, and its sequel Queen of America. These novels express world-views in which the spiritual has particular importance, not as a supersession of quotidian reality but in an integral partnership with it, the baseline upon which postsecular thought is built. This study concludes that such an expression of world-views signals towards …

Welsh Manipulations Of The Matter Of Britain, Timothy J. Nelson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

"Welsh Manipulations of the Matter of Britain" examines the textual relationships between Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae and the Welsh Brut y Brenhinedd in the Cotton Cleopatra manuscript. This thesis initially provides an overview of the existing scholarship surrounding the Welsh translations of Geoffrey's Historia with a specific focus on the Cotton Cleopatra Brut. The textual examination of the two histories begins with an extended commentary on the general textual variations between the two texts before concentrating on the specific changes that were made in the Cotton Cleopatra to reflect the adapter's pro-Welsh nationalistic and political biases. The general …

Echoes Of Peace: Anti-War Sentiment In The Iliad And Heike Monogatari And Its Manifestation In Dramatic Tradition, Tyler A. Creer

Theses and Dissertations

The Iliad and Heike monogatari are each seen as seminal pieces of literature in Greek and Japanese culture respectively. Both works depict famous wars from which subsequent generations of warriors, poets, and other artists in each society drew their inspiration for their own modes of conduct and creation. While neither work is emphatically pro-war, both were used extensively by the warrior classes of both cultures to reinforce warrior culture and to inculcate proper battlefield behavior. In spite of this, however, both tales contain a strong undercurrent of anti-war sentiment which contrasts sharply with their traditionally seen roles of being tales …

"No Goin' Back": Modernity And The Film Western, Julie Anne Kohler

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is inspired by an ending—that of a cowboy hero riding away, back turned, into the setting sun. That image, possibly the most evocative and most repeated in the Western, signifies both continuing adventure and ever westward motion as well as a restless lack of final resolution. This thesis examines the ambiguous endings and the conditions leading up to them in two film Westerns of the 1950s, George Steven's Shane (1953) and John Ford's The Searchers (1956). Fascinatingly, the tension and uncertainty conveyed throughout these films is also characteristic of life in modernity, a connection which has previously gone …

Teaching Attentive Reading And Motivated Writing Through Digital Editing, Amanda A. Gailey

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Though English departments, including my own at the University of Nebraska, have been teaching digital humanities (DH) courses for over a decade, hyperbolic claims about the perils and promises of using computers in the study of literature continue to appear in the press. A piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books likens the algorithms used by some digital humanities methods to fascism (Marche). Another, in The Huffington Post, compares the rise of digital humanities to “our uncritical acceptance of drone attacks” (Mohamed). On the other hand, digital humanists such as Franco Moretti, who famously promote “distant reading” as opposed …

In Search Of An Author: From Participatory Culture To Participatory Authorship, Rachel Elizabeth Meyers

Theses and Dissertations

The question of fidelity, which has long been at the center of adaptation studies, pertains to the problem of authorship. Who can be an author and adapt a text and who cannot? In order to understand the problem of fidelity, this thesis asks larger questions about the problems of authorship, examining how authorship is changing in new media. Audiences are taking an ever-increasing role in the creation and interpretation of the texts they receive: a phenomenon this thesis refers to as participatory authorship, or the active participation of audience members in the creation, expansion, and adaptation of another's creative work. …

The Subjection Of Authority And Death Through Humor: Carnivalesque, Incongruity, And Absurdism In Cormac Mccarthy's Blood Meridian And No Country For Old Men, Ruth Ellen Covington

Theses and Dissertations

Cormac McCarthy's representation of the comic theories of the carnivalesque, incongruity, and absurdism by the antagonists of Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men demonstrates the unique and ostensible power of humor over (or at least, its awareness of and reconciliation to the absurdity of) death; it also emphasizes the supreme power and influence of humor as a means for destroying other institutions and philosophies which claim knowledge or authority but fail to sustain individuals in times of crisis. This makes humor a formidable factor in determining and justifying the outcome of human interactions and in defining the strengths …

Agreeable Despair: Modernism And Melancholy, Derrick James Gentry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study considers a group of distinctly modernist philosophers for whom aesthetic and reflective practices represented a way out of the paralysis of a culture dominated by narrowly conceived philosophical values. These modernist philosophers, I argue, helped to give birth to mode of experimental writing that Robert Musil called "essayism." I begin in Chapter One with an account of Walter Benjamin's experimental concept of melancholy and its intersection with the avant-garde practices of French Surrealism. Chapter One begins to contrast Benjamin's concept of melancholy with Friedrich Nietzsche's therapeutic efforts to transform and overcome melancholy on both a personal and a …

Reading Cruft: A Cognitive Approach To The Mega-Novel, David J. Letzler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Reading Cruft offers a new critical model in which to examine a genre vital to modern literature, the mega-novel. Building on theoretical work in both cognitive narratology and cognitive poetics, it argues that the mega-novel is primarily characterized by its inclusion of a substantial amount of pointless text ("cruft"), which it uses to challenge its readers' abilities to modulate their attention and rapidly shift their modes of text processing. Structured into five chapters respectively devoted to subgenres in which mega-novels have been grouped--the dictionary novel, the encyclopedic novel, the Menippean satire, the picaresque and frame-tale, and the epic and allegory--it …

Literary Adaptations Of James In Roth's, Ozick's, And Franzen's Work, John Carlos Rowe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Literary Adaptations of James in Roth's, Ozick's, and Franzen's Work" John Carlos Rowe posits that Henry James continues to exert a powerful influence on contemporary writers. Given the dramatic social, economic, and political changes from modern to postmodern eras, his continuing influence requires explanation. Rowe considers three US-American novelists—Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Jonathan Franzen—who are influenced by James and presents an interpretation of James's continuing impact. Despite James's reputation as a cosmopolitan modern who influenced global literature in significant ways, US-American writers attempt to "Americanize" him. Their effort expresses the problem of contemporary US-American literary practice …