Comparative Literature Commons^™

Across Time And Genre: A Comparative Analysis Of Eastern And Western Romanticism, Nayoung Seo

English MA Theses

This research centers on big ideas about flowers, fruit, and growing up as themes that create a bridge between American, British, and South Korean Romanticism. Through comparatively analyzing Romantic elements in literary works across genres, the globe, and time periods—from poems, a short story, to popular contemporary music—this research will trace out the dimensions and contours of that bridge, which more and more people are crossing today than ever before as readers, music fans, and as travelers and immigrants. Each chapter will focus on Romantic elements interwoven with humanity, nature, and art and their demonstration of what it means to …

Kelly Comfort And Marylaura Papalas, Editors. New Directions In Flânerie: Global Perspectives For The Twenty-First Century. Routledge, 2022., Emily Hall

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Kelly Comfort and Marylaura Papalas, editors. New Directions in Flânerie: Global Perspectives for the Twenty-First Century. Routledge, 2022. 273 pp.

Orphan Hermeneutics: Refashioning Archetypes In 19th-Century Epic Prose Fiction, John David Sieker

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Celebrated authors of the 19th century, Herman Melville and Charles Dickens are frequently critiqued within specifically national parameters, regarded as authors whose literary concerns reflect their respective countries and cultures. From that premise, there seems little if any connective thread to link Bleak House, the quintessential "stay-at-home" novel, and Moby-Dick, the epic, sea-faring adventure spanning nearly the entire globe. However, certain parallels between these novels in both form and content prove quite striking and reveal a transatlantic connection worthy of sustained critical attention. Both Melville and Dickens gesture to biblical and Classical antiquity in order to weave their respective narratives. …

Sin Without Absolution: A Critical And Comparative Analysis Of Select Works By Albert Camus, Will Hodges

Honors College Theses

The Fall by Albert Camus, published in 1956, is cryptic and easily misunderstood. On first reading, it can appear to be a condemnation of modern man, a declaration that all have sinned and there is no divine absolution. However, this bleak misreading is deceptive because The Fall is not a condemnation; it is a warning. It does not condemn modern man as he is, but rather as what he could become if he succumbs to living in bad faith, a cautionary tale that resonates today. Camus presents the same message through his philosophy of revolt in The Plague and The …

Why Biography?, Robert L. Mack

Journal X

Reading for Pleasure (Essay Review)

Back To The Future Or Forward To The Past: Ocean Voyaging And Slow Travel, Christina Gerhardt

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Going back to previous modes of travel, such as walking or sailing, to ensure a future, is currently being engaged by everyone from ambling environmentalists to scientists and technologists. In Germany and in Sweden, scientists are working to develop large cargo sailing ships. These ships of the future hearken back to the past of ocean voyaging. They dovetail with contemporary literary reflections on ocean voyaging and slow travels, such as Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will (2009). Weaving together an analysis of Schalansky’s atlas with environmental humanities discourses on …

Exemplars Of Error In The Works Of Spenser And Sidney, Rene Ferrer

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis was to examine how the Elizabethan poets Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney explored the idea of emulation within the pages of The Faerie Queene and The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Specifically, how both poets employed the unorthodox characters of Malbecco and Amphialus within texts meant to pro vide moral instruction to the reader.

This research will be accomplished by examining the philosophical underpinnings relating to ideas about emulation, conducting a thorough close reading of primary texts, and studying scholarly articles relating to Spenser, Sidney, the English Renaissance, and emulation.

This thesis will endeavor to …

Fir-Flower Petals On A Wet Black Bough: Constructing New Poetry Through Asian Aesthetics In Early Modernist Poets, Matthew Gilbert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Critics often credit Ezra Pound and his Imagist movement for the development of American poetics. Pound’s interest in international arts and minimalist aesthetics of cross-cultural poetry gained the attention of prominent writers throughout Modernist and Post-Modern periods. From writers like Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein to later poets like Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, image and precise language has shaped American literature. Few critics have praised Eastern cultures or the Imagist poets who adopted an East-Western form of poetics: Amy Lowell and William Carlos Williams. Studying traditional Eastern painting and short-form poetry and interactions with personal connections to the East, …

Conceptions Of Modern Egyptian Childhood During The Period Of The “Liberal Experiment” In Egypt, 1922–1952: A Comparative Study Of Taha Hussein’S, “An Egyptian Childhood,” And Sayyid Qutb’S, “A Child From The Village”, Nora Elgabalawy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Counter to French social historian Philippe Aries’ argument, the concept of an Egyptian childhood has its own traceable history, separate from the modern Western European concept of childhood. As shown, with the presence of language on childhood, in a number of pre-modern Arabic/Islamic literature, notions of childhood had a rich history outside of modern Western Europe. But, depictions of an Egyptian childhood in modern Egyptian literature, specifically two childhood autobiographies/memoirs, Taha Hussein’s An Egyptian Childhood and Sayyid Qutb’s A Child from the Village, do not emerge seamlessly from these early pre-modern depictions of childhood. Both Hussein and Qutb wrote …

Owu's First Asian Horror Film Festival, Kaitie Welch

Student Symposium

Under an apprenticeship with Dr. Sokolsky, I planned and hosted Ohio Wesleyan University's first "Asian Horror Film Festival." The project began after the realization that among OWU's various film festivals, which celebrate diversity and differing cultures, there were no East Asian or Asian film festivals to speak of. Together, Dr. Sokolsky and I prepared a course of action and settled on the horror genre. I spent my winter break watching many Asian horror films via Kanopy and narrowed down films from four different Asian countries and territories through a rubric of criteria that I created. The films I selected were …

“Beyond The Gilded Cage”: Staged Performances And The Reconstruction Of Gender Identity In Mrs. Dalloway And The Great Gatsby, Anthony F. Pinzone

ETD Archive

Although scholars have examined Mrs. Dalloway extensively in terms of gender performance, few critics of The Great Gatsby have explored Gatsby’s masculinity through gender studies. Using Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, I argue that Mrs. Dalloway and Gatsby represent both actors and directors rehearsing a new gendered identity of the twentieth century. Through their roles as staged performers, I emphasize how seemingly minute tasks connect to larger social and political stakes of memory, celebrity status, and reappraisals of gender identity. I further assert that while both Mrs. Dalloway and Nick Carraway experience revelations and heightened imagination through death, neither …

The Theoretical Basis And Framework Of Variation Theory, Shunqing Cao, Zhoukun Han

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "The Theoretical Basis and Framework of Variation Theory" Shunqing Cao and Zhoukun Han re-examine the conclusions on variation theory drawn from Cao's The Variation Theory of Comparative Literature. Drawing on the past three decades of Chinese comparatist practice, the proposal of variation theory in that book is a scientific endeavor from China. China's comparative literature has sustained a focus on comparison of literatures Eastern and Western. And Chinese scholars have long been aware of the heterogeneity of civilizations and the variability in literature exchanges. By demonstrating uses and potentials of variation theory, this thesis attempts to …

Another Argument On The "Crisis Said" Of Comparative Literature, Ping Du

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Another Argument on the 'Crisis Said' of Comparative Literature" Ping Du discusses "Crisis Said", the long-lasting topic since the birth of Comparative Literature. She argues that after every crisis comes an opportunity of a new development of Comparative Literature. Du claims that comparative literature is experiencing a rebirth in the Age of Multiculturalism. She, firstly, reviews the first wave of "Crisis Said", its solution and the progress of Comparative Literature, then she analyses the prevailing second wave of "Crisis Said" or even "Death Said", and finally points out that the way-out is not merely world literature but …

Letras De Uma Resistência: Fantasmas Transgeneracionais E Ditadura. Brasil, Argentina E Cuba 1964-2002, Fabrício Silva

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

During the period of military government in Argentina, Brazil (1964 –1982) and the present day communist Cuban regime, a machinery of cultural repression was established in these countries, these states had a systematic plan of cultural repression of any kind of opposition, dictatorships had an organized and sophisticated operating control over the press and all publications. The dissident writers examined in this dissertation developed strategies of resistance that depended largely on allegory to carry their messages against their respective oppressive regimes. By means of a detailed rhetorical analysis, our study examines the lookings of allegory and cultural resistance under the …

Bowles's Up Above The World As Beatnik Murder Mystery, Greg Bevan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Bowles's Up Above the World as Beatnik Murder Mystery" Greg Bevan discusses Paul Bowles's fourth and final novel, which at the time of its publication was met with mixed reactions from reviewers and its creator alike, and has seen relatively scanty critical attention in the years since. Gena Dagel Caponi perceives in the novel a reflection of Bowles's struggle for control, during the time of its writing, in the face of his wife Jane's terminal illness. Building on this insight, the current essay notes the same tension in the writings of the Beats—a movement with which Bowles …

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 …

The House In South Asian Muslim Women’S Early Anglophone Life-Writing And Novels, Diviani Chaudhuri

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation undertakes the first sustained examination of representations of Islamicate material culture, domestic interiors, residential forms, and historic sites in the early Anglophone writing of South Asian Muslim women. Reading the memoirs of Pakistani diplomat Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah, From Purdah to Parliament (1963), in conjunction with three early Anglophone novels, namely, Zeenuth Futehally’s Zohra (1951), Mumtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided (1957), and Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), I develop the analytic category of autoethnographic spatial discourse in contradistinction to the harem fantasy inflected colonial spatial discourse prevalent at the time in order to describe the …

Writers And Rebels: The Literature Of Insurgency In The Caucasus (Yale University Press, Table Of Contents), Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Gould

Quelques Réflexions Sur Les Épilogues De Beloved Et De Célanire Cou-Coupé : Ariane Et La Mygale, Anne Debrosse

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This paper focuses on the links between Ariadne or Arachne on the one hand and Sethe and Célanire on the other hand, the protagonists of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Maryse Condé’s Célanire cou-coupé. Weaving and sewing are often used as metaphors of the texts ; however, Condé and Morrison play with that metaphor and redefine this hackneyed common place.

Bibliography For The Study Of Chinese Literature In The Anglophone World, He Lin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

“Form Without A Home: On Translating The Indo-Persian Radīf”, Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Gould

No abstract provided.

Unacknowledged Victims: Love Between Women In The Narrative Of The Holocaust. An Analysis Of Memoirs, Novels, Film And Public Memorials, Isabel Meusen

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation combines cultural theory and gender theory with literary criticism to evaluate the treatment of lesbians during the Holocaust and in narratives about the Holocaust. Responding to the kissing-scene controversy of the Berlin memorial for the homosexual victims of the Holocaust I claim that lesbian women’s experience of suffering is downplayed and disappears under the umbrella term ‘homosexuals.’ Employing a critical historical conceptualization of “lesbian love,” I consider examples from Claudia Schoppmann’s Days of Masquerade and Verbotene Verhältnisse as well as the personal estate of political activist Hilde Radusch to trace the personal view lesbians have of themselves. Shifting …

Making The Irrational Rational: Nietzsche And The Problem Of Knowledge In Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master And Margarita, Brendan Mooney

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this thesis is twofold: first, to explore the influence of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche on the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, and second, to use Nietzsche’s unpublished essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (written 1873) to examine the problem of knowledge in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (written 1928-1940).

In existing scholarship on Bulgakov’s masterpiece The Master and Margarita, the novel’s epistemological underpinnings are a topic that remains relatively unacknowledged. The “supernatural” element presents an opportunity to examine the manner in which man interacts with unprecedented phenomena, that is, phenomena that do not …

Qazbegi’S Mountaineer Prosaics: The Anticolonial Vernacular On Georgian-Chechen Borderlands, Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Gould

No abstract provided.

“Conservative In Form, Revolutionary In Content: Rethinking World Literary Canons In An Age Of Globalization”, Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Gould

No abstract provided.

_The Poetics From Athens To Al-Andalus: Ibn Rushd’S Grounds For Comparison, Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Gould

No abstract provided.

Literary Innovation In Yiddish Sea Travel Narratives, Ken Frieden

Ken Frieden

Sea travel was an influential literary genre in Europe in the eighteenth century, and this genre subsequently influenced enlightened and Hasidic Jewish circles. As a result, the genre of sea narratives assumed a significant role in the rise of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. This article considers the place of Yiddish sea narratives--adapted from Campe's Reisebeschreibungen and in Hasidic writings--in the early nineteenth century. Both enlightened and Hasidic authors shaped modern Yiddish and Hebrew prose.

Animals Speaking In The Fiction Of Jin And Malamud, Matt Prater

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Animals Speaking in the Fiction of Jin and Malamud" Matt Prater discusses "The Jewbird" by Bernard Malamud and "A Composer and His Parakeets" by Ha Jin as transcultural texts which involve non-human animals as major characters. Jin and Malamud examine differing representations of animal language and how these representations connect to the politics of both interspecies and transnational relationships. By applying critical animal studies and transnational discourse and by charting the interlinking of other-ings by theorists such as Carol Adams and Susan Kappeler, Prater attempts to show that animals figure into transcultural and transnational discourses in ways …

Recounting The Themes Of Desire In Márquez’ Memories Of My Melancholy Whores, Melodie J. Rodgers

mrodgers5@student.gsu.edu

Gabriel García Márquez’ Memories of My Melancholy Whores is a novella surrounding the events of a 90-year-old man’s request to a madam of prostitutes. The narrator’s opening sentence states, "The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” (García Márquez, 1) Despite the fact that the title of this García Márquez masterpiece reeks of a text whose sole purpose is to satisfy prurient interests, the real forbidden fruit lives inside the underlying themes of desire within this seemingly simple story. Once one gets past the taboo, García …

Recounting The Themes Of Desire In Márquez’ Memories Of My Melancholy Whores, Melodie J. Rodgers

mrodgers5@student.gsu.edu

Gabriel García Márquez’ Memories of My Melancholy Whores is a novella surrounding the events of a 90-year-old man’s request to a madam of prostitutes. The narrator’s opening sentence states, "The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” (García Márquez, 1) Despite the fact that the title of this García Márquez masterpiece reeks of a text whose sole purpose is to satisfy prurient interests, the real forbidden fruit lives inside the underlying themes of desire within this seemingly simple story. Once one gets past the taboo, García …