Comparative Literature Commons^™

Foreword

Transference

No abstract provided.

Transference Vol. 3, Fall 2015

Transference

No abstract provided.

Said And The Mythmaking Of Auerbach's Mimesis, Hyeryung Hwang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Said and the Mythmaking of Auerbach's Mimesis" Hyeryung Hwang revisits critical debates on Edward W. Said's unwitting participation in the mythmaking of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis and analyzes the degree to which critical discourse overlook what Said actually wanted to revive, namely the spirit of philological methodology. Hwang argues that before Said worked on Mimesis, the book already acquired a sort of myth. Hwang attempts to go beyond the commonly held understanding of philology and suggest it as a methodology for historical synthesis whose dialectical tension between texts and history amounts to the synthesis of "fact" …

Faithful To The Fans: Audience Influence On The Lizzie Bennet Diaries And Transmedia Adaptation Fidelity, Shaina Gwynn Robbins

Theses and Dissertations

New forms of digital storytelling directly challenge conventional notions about adaptation by allowing for increased audience participation. Fans today exercise unprecedented levels of influence over how beloved stories are adapted. According to Thomas Leitch, fans have historically influenced certain adaptations by calling for increased fidelity. He refers to these adaptations, which resist the inevitability of infidelity to an unusual degree, as “exceptionally faithful.” Though rare, these efforts at fidelity are typically the result of fan demands. Ultimately, these seemingly faithful adaptations are more faithful to fan expectations than to their original texts. Scholarship is needed on the extensive influence of …

(Im)Migrant And Ethnic Minority Literature In Education Curricula In Slovenia, Marijanca Ajša Vižintin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "(Im)migrant and Ethnic Minority Literature in Education Curricula in Slovenia" Marijanca Ajša Vižintin argues that there is a need to develop in the educational system of Slovenia a comprehensive theoretical and applied approach for the inclusion of (im)migrant and ethnic minority students: in addition to writers who represent the Slovenian majority population, school curricula should include members of Slovenian (im)migrant and ethnic minority members of the country irrespective of the language in which they write. In accordance with this objective and recommendation, the reading and study of the cultural production of (im)migrant and ethnic minority texts ought …

Golding's The Spire As An Architectonic Novel, Stephan Schaffrath

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Golding's The Spire as an Architectonic Novel" Stephan Schaffrath analyzes William Golding's work as an excellent example of one of Mikhail Bakhtin's early critical concepts. In contrast to most literary entertainment which thrives on the readers' suspension of disbelief, The Spire challenges readers to actively and consciously interpret its text, thus raising readers' awareness as participants in the reading act. The Spire achieves this by presenting readers with a novelistic world seen more or less through the eyes of a pseudo narrator, a third-person narration style that consistently and regularly — yet subtly — delves into the …

Digital Humanities And Publishing A Learned Journal, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Digital Humanities and Publishing a Learned Journal" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek discusses digital humanities and the publishing scholarship online in the context of the politics of publishing scholarship specifically as it pertains to humanities. Funding for the publishing of humanities scholarship remains constricted worldwide whether in print or digital and the standard remains to publish journals by subscription fees. Based on his argumentation against the "colonialism of knowledge," Tötösy de Zepetnek argues for the publishing of humanities scholarship against subscription-based or author-pay models. Further, he presents suggestions as to the how-s of the founding of a digital …

Visualizing Electronic Literature Collections, Urszula Anna Pawlicka

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Visualizing Electronic Literature Collections" Urszula Pawlicka discusses the development of electronic literature by visualizing material available in the Electronic Literature Collection <http://collection.eliterature.org/>. Her visualization of electronic literature presents a timeline with tag clouds of keywords related to works classified chronologically by dates of publication. Pawlicka's visualization includes also all keywords of the Collection (two date there exist three Collections) separately without division in the publication dates of works. Pawlicka argues that keywords turn out to be important data to demonstrate changes occurring in the history of electronic literature. Further, in her visualization of electronic literature …

Anthropological Inquiry And The Limits Of Dialogue, Kathleen M. Gallagher

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Anthropological Inquiry and the Limits of Dialogue" Kathleen Gallagher analyzes the epistemological and ethical implications created by representations of Self and portrayals of Other in two apparently different ethnographic texts, R.F. Fortune's Sorcerers of Dobu and Kevin Dwyer's Moroccan Dialogues. Specific attention is paid to the authors' portrayal of themselves and the observed and the ramifications of such portrayals in the construction of anthropological knowledge. Dwyer's work was a reaction to what he perceived as anthropology's traditional muting of other voices, an alternative to such denigration being the incorporation of dialogue into one's methodology. Gallagher describes …

The Realist Author And Sympathetic Imagination (Book Review), Juliana Starr

Foreign Languages Faculty Publications

A review of the book, The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination by Sotirios Paraschas is presented.

Art From The Macchiaioli To The Futurists: Idealized Masculinity In The Art Of Signorini And Balla, Melissa Ann Bush

Theses and Dissertations

Beginning around 1850, Italians found themselves in the midst of an identity crisis. Europeans in France and England had surpassed Italians in terms of political, economic, and social progress. Italians seemed trapped in the past, clinging to their magnificent artistic heritage. However, new cultural and social movements were on the rise in Italy that attempted to throw off the domination of other European entities and forge a promising future for Italy. The Macchiaioli, a group of Italian modern artists who painted from 1853 to 1908, were the first group to address contemporary social issues such as class struggle and national …

World War I And The Idea Of Progress In Powers's Three Farmers On Their Way To A Dance, Karsten H. Piep

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "World War I and the Idea of Progress in Powers's Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance" Karsten H. Piep reads Powers's 1985 novel as a critical reexamination of the dynamics and iconography of the early twentieth century that challenges the technological positivism espoused by many U.S. neoconservatives during the 1980s, while insisting on the individual's interpretive powers to discern and release the ever present transformative potentials of history. Situating Three Farmers in the postmodernism debates of the 1980s, Piep argues that the novel succeeds in challenging the idea of history conceived as linear progression, …

Dostoyevsky, Bernanos, And Knowing Joy As The Unknown, Ruth Karin Lévai

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Dostoyevsky, Bernanos, and Knowing Joy as the Unknown" Ruth Karin Lévai analyzes the concept of joy in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Georges Bernanos's The Diary of a Country Priest. Lévai follows five main aspects of the experience of joy common to the characters of both novels: 1) joy as prerequisite to true freedom, 2) joy as risk, 3) joy as the ability to love, 4) joy as the ability to give and receive prosaic gifts, and 5) joy as community. Lévai argues that in both works joy is portrayed as a starting point rather than …

Postcolonial Studies In The Twenty-First Century: A Book Review Article Of Literature For Our Times & Reading Transcultural Cities, Alejandra Moreno Álvarez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Refiguring The Wild West: Minerva Teichert And Her Feminine Communities, Deirdre Mason Scharffs

Theses and Dissertations

Minerva Teichert (1888-1976) was a twentieth-century American artist, who spent most of her life residing in remote towns in the West, earnestly balancing the demands of family and ranching, and painting scenes of her beloved Western frontier. Her steady and significant production of art is remarkable for any artist, and particularly compelling when one considers her time constraints, inaccessibility of art supplies, distance from other artists and art centers, and lack of public attention. The success of women artists during the first half of the twentieth-century was dependent not only upon their artistic aptitude, but also upon external forces, such …

The Prince And The Priestess: Artistically Elevating Charles De Valois' Authority In Fifteenth-Century France, Sarah James Dyer

Theses and Dissertations

Charles de Valois (1446-1472) was a prince in fifteenth-century France. During his short lifetime, Charles endeavored to gain more authority while in conflict with his brother Louis XI, who was king. Although a minor political character in French history, Charles did demonstrate his power in several artistic ways. One commission by the young royal was a manuscript now known as the Hours of Charles of France. Two pages of this text, the Annunciation to the Virgin, are decorated with rich imagery and iconography used to exhibit Charles' desire for greater authority. The manuscript has only been discussed stylistically, and therefore …

Empowering The Arabic – Javanese Translation As An Indigenous Language Protection In Asia Toward The Books Of Islamic Moral Ethic, Muhammad Yunus Anis, Arifuddin Arifuddin, Eva Farhah, Abdul Malik

Bahasa dan Seni: Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, dan Pengajarannya

This article was undertaken to investigate the moral ethics learned in the Arabic-Javanese translation text, and how this model of translation can be the main aspect of protecting the indigenous/natural/mother language in Indonesia as a main potential of Asian Cultural Heritage. The data of this research is a Arabic – Javanese translation texts and also some units of language inside the texts. The result of this article shows that there is a connection line between empowering of Arabic Javanese translation and protecting the indigenous language.

Fire Was In The Reptile’S Mouth: Towards A Transcultural Ecological Poetics, Stuart Cooke

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This paper compares two creation narratives from indigenous peoples on either side of the Pacific Ocean, the relationships between which catalyse the theorisation of a transcultural approach to ecological poetics. The comparison of these narratives reveals important, rhizomatic similarities, and also unmistakable regional differences, concerning the origins of language and culture in Yanomami (Venezuela) and MakMak (Australia) communities. Concomitant with the centrality of indigenous thought in this theorisation of ecopoetics is the de­centrality of human-only conceptions of poetics. Accordingly, the paper considers non-semantic forms of poetics such as birdsong in order to de-centre classically Western, humanist conceptions of language …

Culture, Health, And Science: A Multidisciplinary Liberal Arts Alternative To The Public Health Major, Morgan M. Morgan, Sabina Knight, Aline C. Gubrium

World Literature: Faculty Publications

Since the 2003 call by the Institute of Medicine to educate undergraduates in public health, various models have emerged for incorporating public health into the liberal arts and sciences. One model is a professionalized public health major that uses core public health competencies to prepare a workforce of health professionals. A second model offers a broad-based public health major rooted in liberal arts principles, resisting the utilitarian trend toward human capital formation. A third model resists even the label of “public health,” preferring instead to introduce undergraduates to many ways of analyzing human health and healing. The multidisciplinary Culture, Health, …

"Why Is Bilbo Baggins Invisible?: The Hidden War In The Hobbit", Jane Beal Phd

Journal of Tolkien Research

Why is Bilbo Baggins invisible? This study suggests that Tolkien’s knowledge of philology, theology, philosophy, literature, history, and his own life experience all contribute to the development of the symbolic, moral, and psychological significance of invisibility in The Hobbit. On one level, Tolkien’s theology is informed by his philology, so that being invisible (or “not able to be seen”) becomes a way of symbolically representing the Augustinian concept of evil as the absence of good in the world. On another level, Tolkien’s use of invisibility in The Hobbit demonstrates his knowledge of the philosophic and literary tradition associated with the …

Selma Lagerlöf And Early Ecological Thought, Chelsea Francis, Christopher Oscarson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

While it is not difficult to isolate the first uses of the word “ecology,” it is far more elusive to trace the origins of the idea before the term became commonplace. In this project, Dr. Oscarson and I attempted to map the changing concept of nature in turn-of-the-century Sweden in literary and scientific sources to clarify and define this important paradigm shift, particularly through the works of Nobel prizing winning Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf (1858-1940). Lagerlöf is a popular figure in Swedish literary history, and this project proposes to study her in a new light. Although she has not historically …

Mémoire Et Identité Dans Les Réécritures Caribéennes : Wide Sargasso Sea Et La Migration Des Coeurs, Camille Charlery

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis will study creole identity in Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), prequel of Jane Eyre, as well as in Maryse Condé's La Migration des Coeurs (1995), a rewriting of Wuthering Heights. I argue that both novels create a new creole identity by conversing with their original texts as well as by going beyond the official definition of creoleness. Using the concepts of obsessive memory and forced forgetfulness, I explore the tension betwee innate and constructed identity. First, I focus on the meaning of creoleness, then, I examine how memory plays a crucial role in the novels through topics …

Il Dilemma Del Prigioniero. Luciano Bianciardi E Il Disincanto Del Moderno, Ilaria Muzzi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The aim of my study on the works of Luciano Bianciardi is to expand upon his complex and conflicted relationship with the modernity of the new mass communication society emerging in Italy during the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on his career and several important areas of his work in particular. Bianciardi’s confrontation with modernity is ambiguous and challenged because it originates from the result of a dialectic between his intense, innate and conflicted roots in his hometown area of Maremma, his traditions and values and his fatal attraction to the new society and new mass culture. This can be compared …

Interfictional Identities: Transformation And Dissimulation In The Early Modern Period, Yael Nezer Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Interfictional Identities develops the concept of interfictional transformations. In these transformations, characters in early modern texts adopt new identities rooted in previous literature. Specifically, Interfictional Identities explores how four early modern moments of interfictional transformation—of Nick Bottom in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, of Pyrocles in Sidney’s New Arcadia, of Uriel da Costa in A Specimen of Human Life, and of Don Quixote in Cervantes’ novel—produce both literary and literal hybridity. One wonders why, in these works, writers and playwrights such as Shakespeare, Sidney, Da Costa, and Cervantes favor interfictional transformations over mere allusions to classical literature, …

The Queen's Feud: Women And Kinship In Malory's Morte Darthur, Elsa K. Anderson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The impact of blood feud on the knights of the Round Table in Malory's Morte Darthur is clear and has been well studied. Likewise documented is the shift to an institutionalized political system focused on individual chivalry after the founding of the Round Table. This study focuses on the feuds and political changes, which also swept up the women in and around the Round Table including Nynyve, Lyonesse, Guenivere, and Morgawse. Individual chivalry gives women significant independence in action and changes the values they are celebrated for, but their family connections are always considered as primary motivations. The women of …

A Passage From Brooklyn To Ithaca: The Sea, The City And The Body In The Poetics Of Walt Whitman And C. P. Cavafy, Michael P. Skafidas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This treatise is the first extensive comparative study of Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy. Despite the abundant scholarship dealing with the work and life of each, until now no critic has put the two poets together. Whitman’s poetry celebrates birth, youth, the self and the world as seen for the first time, while Cavafy’s diverts from the active present to resurrect a world whose key, in Eliot’s terms, is memory. Yet, I see the two poets conversing in the crossroads of the fin de siècle; the American Whitman and the Greek Cavafy embody the antithesis of hope and dislocation …

Wandering In Contemporary Literature: A Narrative Theory Of Cognition, Hillel E. Broder

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study offers a theory of wandering cognition as an animating feature of western literature, in general, and of contemporary literature, in particular. Unlike existing theories of peripatetic bodies and minds in fiction that focus primarily on political critiques, cultural practices, or pleasures of digression, this theory of wandering offers an aesthetic philosophy and ethical critique of representing cognition, memory, and narrative identity that finds affinities in the political, phenomenological, and ethical thought of Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas, and Giorgio Agamben.

Unlike existing cognitive theories of literature that apply cognitive theory to literary study (or vice versa), this study develops …

Locked In: Melancholia In The Modern American Prison Literature Of R. Dwayne Betts And Jarvis Jay Masters, Johnna Scrabis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the theme of melancholia in the writing of currently and formerly incarcerated African American men during the late 20^th and early 21^st century. Melancholia, with its rich history in literature from ancient times to the present, is discernable in the works of many people with prison experience. In their writing, melancholia is expressed primarily as a loss and as a disconnection with time, as well as an empowering creative force. The work of Jarvis Jay Masters and R. Dwayne Betts reflects the paradox of melancholia: just as it shows the depressive element of the condition, …

Creating With Anger: Contemplating Vendetta. An Analysis Of Anger In Italian And Spanish Women Writers Of The Early Modern Era, Luisanna Sardu Castangia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the vast gamut of human emotions, anger is one of the most complex, provocative, and enduring. From Greek philosophers working in antiquity to today’s most recent theories on emotions, most scholars agree that anger has a multifaceted nature. This near universal agreement across the barriers of time and geography stems from the following facts: in order to exist, anger involves the participation of other emotions; anger does not have an opposite; anger leads an individual to engage in an act of self-analysis and in an evaluation of other individuals; and, finally, anger inspires action to right a wrong that …

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 …