Comparative Literature Commons^™

Svealand, Götaland And The Rise Of The East-Slavic Kingdom — Response To Piotr Murzionak (Comparative Civilizations Review, No. 73 Fall 2015), Bertil Haggman

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Full Issue, Comparative Civilizations Review

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Delillo's Falling Man And The Trouble With Sympathy In Narratives Of Terrorism, Jessica Mcdonald

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "DeLillo's Falling Man and the Trouble with Sympathy in Narratives of Terrorism" Jessica McDonald discusses the ways Don DeLillo's characterization of a 9/11 terrorist elicits reader sympathy in his 2007 novel Falling Man. McDonald argues that introducing sympathy into narratives of terrorism undermines attempts to understand the contextual issues out of which terrorism arises even if the rhetoric of sympathy may seem to foster a sense of "fellow-feeling" that makes acts of political protest and resistance more accessible to broader publics.

The Evolution Of The Vampire From Stoker's Dracula To Meyer's Twilight Saga, Dijana Vučković, Ljiljana Pajović Dujović

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "The Evolution of the Vampire from Stoker's Dracula to Meyer's Twilight Saga" Dijana Vučković and Ljiljana Pajović Dujović analyze the metamorphosis of the vampire character from the Victorian fin de siècle to the Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer. Vučković and Pajović Dujović consider the evolution of the vampire in the context of several important changes: emergence of the vampire from the dark/death in the light/life and separation from the home soil; improving the vampire species through crossbreeding, i.e., hybridization with people; bringing the characteristics of vampires closer to very desirable human characteristics and losing those properties …

Circus As Idée Fixe And Hunger, Anna-Sophie Jürgens

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Circus as idée fixe and Hunger" Anna-Sophie Jürgens discusses circus fiction in which characters often display extreme, intense psychological traits. They are for example irascible, pyromaniac, sadistic, or megalomaniac. Particularly striking are protagonists with alternative psychological attitudes in fictional circus texts of the twentieth century such as Franz Kafka's hunger artist, Michael Raleigh's ringmaster Lewis Tully or Richard Schmitt's aerialist Garry, who can be seen as incubators of circus-related idées fixes. These literary circus characters develop fixations on circus that manifest themselves as a physical sensation of desiring circus like food, in other words: in circus …

Genre Categorization In Contemporary British And Us-American Novels, Carlos Ceia

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Genre Categorization in Contemporary British and US-American Novels" Carlos Ceia discusses a certain type of resistance to genre categorization in many novels in contemporary literature. Many British and US-American contemporary novels show patterns in narrative creativity where novel-writing techniques are sometimes more important than the traditional subject matter driven work of fiction. Ceia reviews experimental/metafictional novels which do not show intent to fulfil an aesthetic role pre-determined in a certain moment in history. Not having this kind of burden before them, many contemporary British and US-American novelists devote their artistic imagination more to the "potential" of the …

The Translation Of Madurese Cultural Expressions Into English, Masduki Masduki

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

This article reports on research project analyzing the specific terms of cultural expressions that exist in Madura Island, the strategies in translating Madurese cultural expressions into English, andhow the strategies of transferring messages take place. The sources of data utilized in this study were the translators in the local government, private sectors, educational institutions, and both official and unofficial documents throughout the region containing Madurese cultural expressions. The data were collected using document analysis, questionnaire distribution, and in-depth interviews. The analysis was carried out in view of interactive model. The findings show that categories of specific terms found in the …

Laughter After Tears: Sitting For American Humors In Indonesian Sofas (Subtitling Humors Of A Tv Serial Friends), Gusti Nyoman Ayu Sukerti, Yazid Basthomi

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

The study reported in this paper aims to analyze the possible strategies used in the subtitling of the first five episodes (season 1) of Friends to render the episodes’ humorous dialogues. It examines the subtitler’s strategies in preserving both the semantic and humorous genes of laughter intended by the original humor. The analysis takes into account the internal and external structures of humors both in the target and source language. Choosing a subtitling strategy involves a decisionmaking process where the internal and external factors come into play and, therefore, rendering humors in a contextually bound medium, such as subtitling, does …

Educating The Imagination: Northrop Frye Past, Present, And Future Edited By Alan Bewell, Neil Ten Kortenaar, And Germaine Warkentin, David Carruthers

The Goose

Review of Alan Bewell, Neil ten Kortenaar, and Germaine Warkentin's Educating the Imagination: Northrop Frye Past, Present, and Future.

Performability And Translation : A Case Study Of The Production And Reception Of Ying Ruocheng’S Translations, Yichen Yang

Lingnan Theses

The active scholarly contribution made by practitioners of theatre translation in the past decades has turned the research area into what is now considered a burgeoning field. Despite recent developments, it seems that performability, a long-discussed yet controversial concept in the study of theatre translation, would remain part of the practitioners’ discourse. Based on a historical survey of the production and reception of the translations of Anglo-American plays by Chinese actor-director Ying Ruocheng (1929-2003) in and around the 1980s, this study explores how the performability, or theatrical potential, of a translated playtext is constructed through the negotiation between/among the norms …

Poetics Of The Sufi Carnival: The ‘Rogue Lyrics’ (Qalandariyât) Of Sanâ’I, ‘Attâr, And ‘Erâqi, Matthew Thomas Miller

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

"The Poetics of the Sufi Carnival: The ‘Rogue Lyrics’ (Qalandariyât) of Sanâ’i, ‘Attâr, and ‘Erâqi" is the first detailed study of the poetics and cultural politics of the “rogue lyrics” (qalandariyât) of medieval Persian Sufi literature. Countering approaches that either reduce this carnivalesque poetry to an abstract symbolist poetics or sublimated aesthetic expression of Sufi antinomianism, the present study analyzes (1) the historical development of this countergenre, (2) the myriad ways in which its heterotopic poetics creates—indeed, performs—meaning, and (3) the cultural politics of its (typically) same-sex beloved.Chapter one and two position the qalandariyât within the broader historical development of …

About The Concept Of "Gnosticism" In Fiction Studies, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

I In his article "About the Concept of 'Gnosticism' in Fiction Studies" Fryderyk Kwiatkowski notices that in the twentieth-century humanities the concept of Gnosticism has become a popular term for labelling tendencies in modernity and postmodernity. Kwiatkowski argues that the majority of scholars in fiction studies base their research on outdated methodologies. In consequence, Kwiatkowski presents an overview of contemporary approaches in Gnostic studies and discusses how they can be adapted in studies of literature, film, video games, comic books, etc. By outlining advantages and disadvantages of methodological approaches, Kwiatkowski posits that in studies of fiction with Gnostic components it …

Ciudad Letrada Y Poder En La Novela Del Caribe Hispánico Contemporáneo: La Noche Oscura Del Nino Avilés, Bachata Del Ángel Caído Y La Cazadora De Astros, Amilkar Ernesto Caballero

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes Edgardo Rodríguez Julia’s La noche oscura del Niño Avilés, Pedro Antonio Valdez’s Bachata del ángel caído, and Zoé Valdes’s La cazadora de Astros from the perspective of the intersection between intellectuality and power. Its main thesis is that these three writers are “political” writers who postulate “possible worlds” to reconfigure the divisions of the Social world carried out by power vectors in their respective nations. These reconfigurations are based on “detour” strategies that attempt to deconstruct the canonical aesthetic forms and the discourses of truth established by those vectors. The first chapter analyzes the way the three …

Culturally Relevant Education For Rural Schools: Creating Relevancy In Rural America, Joshua J. Anderson

Dissertations

In this dissertation, I investigate the ways in which culturally relevant pedagogy is conceptualized and implemented by two secondary English Language Arts educators in one school district with a strong sense of rural identity. Culturally relevant pedagogy is considered by many professionals in the field of education to be an effective philosophy to inform instructional practices for narrowing the achievement gap of historically marginalized groups (Cummins, 1990; Gay, 2000; Ladson-Billings, 1994, 2000). A careful review of the literature on culturally relevant pedagogy reveals the discourse surrounding culturally relevant pedagogy has largely been dominated by urban voices (Cochran-Smith, 2003; Esposito & …

La Violencia Terrorista En La Narrativa Vasca Del Siglo Xxi, Montserrat Fuente-Camacho

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Teniendo en cuenta la evolución tanto de la opinión pública sobre ETA, como la del tratamiento del tema del terrorismo desde la literatura, este trabajo se centra en la narrativa vasca del siglo XXI, analizando tres obras literarias de diferente género: una recopilación de cuentos, una novela y un cómic o novela gráfica. En cada capítulo se estudia un aspecto relacionado con el terrorismo de ETA: el silencio, las víctimas y el perdón. En el primer capítulo se argumenta que además de la violencia de ETA, el silencio es un elemento que une los cinco relatos de Letargo (2004), de …

Nebraska's Wedding Crasher, Jennine Capó Crucet

Department of English: Faculty Publications

My building thinks of itself as Lincoln's premier wedding venue. I was not told this when I signed the lease. A glitch of duct work sends the sounds of every single party straight through the exhaust fan of my apartment's bathroom, so loud and clear that I can hear the names of everyone in the wedding party as they are announced -- not just in the bathroom, but from the living room. I can hear when people are clapping, can hear the claps as individual sonic events: I can almost always make out the crisp echo of the last person …

From Professor-Student To Collaborators, Jesse E. Siegel

Blogging the Library

I had not met Michael Ritterson before he visited the Conservation Lab at Special Collections, where he was having a book mended, but I had certainly heard of him. A former faculty member of the German department, Mr. Ritterson is now a German translator, taking on projects from translating the work of a 17th German woman’s study of butterflies to the poetry of a Berlin leftist written during the 1968 Movement. And, by previous contact in the mail, he had heard of me. So after Mary Wooton showed him the fully repaired book, we were formally introduced and had the …

Palpable Hits: Popular Music Forms And Teaching Early Modern Poetry, Stephen M. Buhler

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Recent pedagogical scholarship has engaged strenuously with the use of YouTube and other online platforms in the literature classroom. Stephen O’Neill, for one, champions video-sharing and similar media “in the interests of fostering various experiential, collaborative and peer-learning scenarios,” especially in tandem with the “array of Shakespeare content, which can potentially illuminate and deepen [learners’] understanding of the text and its diverse contexts” (190). In this essay, I discuss the advantages of sharing for this purpose online materials that have been developed by artists, instructors, students, and others—specifically, materials with a musical orientation. Along the way, I shall explain my …

The Ethics And Politics Of Love In Postwar France: The Case Of Beauvoir, Camus, And Sartre, Christian Wood

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The Ethics and Politics of Love focuses primarily upon Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre during the period 1935 to 1960, specifically the periods before and after the Second World War (1939 -- 1945), and the Franco-Algerian War (1954 -- 1962). I argue that inquiring into each thinker's theory of love yields crucial and hitherto unexplored insights into their ethical and political theories: "love" thus represents my particular Ariadne's thread to guide us into, and then back outside of their daunting oeuvres and singular lives. I use their documented thoughts on love as an analytical tool with which …

The Cradle Of Democracy And The Longue Durée Of A Crisis: Some Thoughts From The Perspective Of Historical Sociology, Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

The relationship between Modern Greece and the West has always been a complex and tortuous one. Greece as “the cradle of democracy” – a construct at the intersection of western modernity’s political imaginary and Greek national identity – a terribly familiar and powerful cliché which to a great extent, still today, informs our imagination and politics has been at the heart of this relationship. It is rather a truism to suggest that democracy lies at the political core of the civilization that the West insists offering to the rest of the world, yet we tend to forget that this is …

The Nature Of Conditional Sentences In Nyakyusa, Amani Lusekelo

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

The mechanisms utilized to introduce conditional construction in Nyakyusa are partly similar to the patterns available in some Bantu languages because its protasis is introduced by the word lıınga. The counterfactual marker angali introduces the apodosis of the counterfactual sentences, similar to Zulu and Swahili. The main difference is that Nyakyusa differentiates reality and unreality situations primarily through TAM formatives. For instance, realistic situations manifest in future and present tenses while unrealistic events are primarily indicated by remoteness in past tense.

Advocating For Mother Earth In The Undergraduate Classroom: Uniting Twenty-First Century Technologies, Local Resources, Art, And Activism To Explore Our Place In Nature, Christina Triezenberg, Ilse Schweitzer Vandonkelaar

The Hilltop Review

Despite the growing evidence of humanity’s impact on the natural world and the urgent need to shape citizens who understand the impact that their choices and actions have on their local and global environments, colleges and universities throughout the United States have been slow to add environmental education as a core component of their undergraduate curricula. Harnessing our shared interest in environment issues and the humanities, we designed and taught an experimental course in environmental literature for the honors program at Western Michigan University that we hope will become a template of what is possible in postsecondary environmental education. Using …

“Über Die Liebe”: Love And Sex According To Eduard Von Keyserling, Caroline Urvater

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation is built around an annotated translation of Eduard von Keyserling’s 1907 essay, “Über die Liebe.” The author’s citations are often made from memory and consequently, are not always entirely accurate. This fact is discussed and inaccuracies are corrected.

Chapter One begins with an overview of the historical background of the Keyserling family. It includes biographical material that describes the author’s life and experiences, and introduces his illustrious forbears. It also points to the writers and philosophers who influenced the author’s thinking.

Chapter Two, a review of the literature, discusses some of the dissertations, articles and books that were …

Crossing Boundaries: The Transnational Third Space Of Contemporary Chinese-Francophone Writers, Paula S. Delbonis-Platt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the past two decades, a group of Chinese writers who pen their works in French, their adopted language, have garnered prizes in France and received international acclaim. The transnational voices of these writers have drawn attention to Chinese history, literature, and human-rights issues, as well as to their own diverse intersections with French culture. The four Francophone-Chinese writers studied—François Cheng (b. 1929), Gao Xingjian (b. 1940), Dai Sijie (b. 1954), and Shan Sa (b. 1972)—constitute themselves as subjects at least partially through their Chinese birth and French citizenship or residency and through the production of literary works that range …

Transatlantic Surrealisms, Imagined Homelands, And The Poetry Of Paul Laraque, Maxine C. Anderson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Many theoretical treatments of Caribbean and Latin American surrealism(s), most notably Fredric Jameson and Alejo Carpentier’s foundational essays on magical realism, argue that the surrealism of the European metropole is a sophisticated avant-garde movement, in contrast to the blunt tool of Caribbean and Latin American surrealism which reaches back toward a precolonial past in order to bolster a nationalist project. Existing critical writing about Paul Laraque, a Haitian poet and surrealist identifies Laraque as Haitian first and foremost: as a political poet using surrealism solely in support of a nationalist project. This reading of Laraque’s work fails to reckon with …

Fragmentation And Multiplicity In Cuban-American Identity: In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd By Ana Menéndez And Memory Mambo By Achy Obejas, Daimys E. Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Maria Lugones offers a new way of perceiving the world, which makes visible that fragmentation is not a valuable and transgressive understanding of identity, as Western philosophy and some political theory suggests. What Lugones believes in, as a strategy of resistance to the dominant gaze, is multiplicity – mestizaje. Using Lugones’s framework, this thesis will look at the different aspects of Cuban-American characters in In Cuba I was a German Shepherd by Ana Menéndez and Memory Mambo by Achy Obejas. Each novel offers insight into how characters develop and understand themselves (and others) when they use language that shows that …

Classical-Christian Friendship Operating In Western Literature: Oral Traditions To The Apex Of Print Culture, Marc G. Levasseur

Ph.D. Dissertations (Open Access)

The classical-Christian model of friendship has operated for many centuries from oral traditions and through the age of print. However, technological developments in communication and media rearrange mindscapes. Consequently, values, or, those things that give meaning, can change, such as perceptions of friendship. If one accepts that communication is vital to human relationships, the paradigm for the classical-Christian friendship should operate according to the new vocabulary of expanding communication and media possibilities. This work examines literature and philosophical thought within their historical contexts in order to gauge the operation of the classical-Christian friendship model from the beginning of Western literature …

La Littérature Africaine Francophone Et La Théorie Bourdieusienne De Champ Symbolique, Louis Bertin Amougou

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic fields as a social arena for rivalries between agents for the capture, accumulation or conservation of capitals of its own is now implemented with the same rigor to African literature as to French literature which served as the material for the French sociologist. Yet, the specific characteristics of African literary production make it a weak institution. The present article is an attempt to put in perspective the relevance of Bourdieu’s studies to an insufficiently autonomous literary institution and holds the point that any literary field is a secondary field.

Introduction To New Work In The Empirical Study Of Literature And Culture, Aldo Nemesio

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Toward An Aesthetics Of Adaptation In Empirical Research, Marion Behrens, Christian Kell, Pascal Nicklas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Toward an Aesthetics of Adaptation in Empirical Research" Marion Behrens, Christian Kell, and Pascal Nicklas discuss the requirements and potential of empirical research into the reception of adaptations: adaptation is one key strategy in the creation of literature and art in general. The creative process and product of adaptation has its counter-part on the side of reception. Empirical research into the aesthetics of adaptation aims at the experimental elucidation of the physiological background and the establishment of a model describing the perceptual underpinnings of the act of seeing an adaptation as adaptation. This implies evolutionary biological reasoning …