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Small Nations, Big Debates: Empowering The Slovenes As A Subject Of World History In The Critical 1930s, Marko Juvan Jun 2026

Small Nations, Big Debates: Empowering The Slovenes As A Subject Of World History In The Critical 1930s, Marko Juvan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The article looks at how Slovene intellectuals and writers in the 1930s attempted to redefine the role of a small nation within the world-system in the face of global economic crisis, authoritarianism, imperialism, and the threat of fascist expansion. Three central interventions are examined in detail: firstly, Josip Vidmar’s culturalist defense of Slovenia as a nation defined by its intellectual and artistic achievements, which is contrasted with Edvard Kardelj’s Marxist reinterpretation of the Slovene national question as part of a broader anti-imperialist struggle; secondly, Anton Ocvirk’s peripheral model of comparative literary history, which emphasizes the creative contribution of small literatures …


Reconsidering Karl Marx’S Concept Of World Literature, Kenneth Cheng Jun 2026

Reconsidering Karl Marx’S Concept Of World Literature, Kenneth Cheng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

It is widely assumed that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels regarded world literature as an epiphenomenal product of the capitalist world market, and therefore as a symptom of rather than potential cure to the crisis of modern society. However, this conflicts with the fact that they designated the Communist Manifesto itself as a world-literary production—the joint work of communists of various nationalities—and opposed it to the national limitations of German socialist literature. This article challenges existing interpretations by outlining how Marx and Engels incorporated the humanistic idealism of the Goethean Weltliteratur tradition into the theoretical framework of historical materialism. It …


Derrida In Mesopotamia: On The Import Of The Cuneiform Inscriptions In Of Grammatology, Will Greenshields Jul 2025

Derrida In Mesopotamia: On The Import Of The Cuneiform Inscriptions In Of Grammatology, Will Greenshields

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Cuneiform writing has a small but privileged position in Derrida’s Of Grammatology – providing the text with its first two epigraphs. By elucidating the source and import of these inscriptions and evaluating Derrida’s understanding of the cuneiform writing system in reference to more recent grammatological studies, this paper explains the significance of these references to the ancient Near East for Derrida’s arguments regarding the origins of Western metaphysics and logocentrism. In the first part, I analyze Derrida’s brief paragraph on cuneiform writing in Of Grammatology as evincing a “fundamental synaesthesia” of phonetic and non-phonetic elements that problematizes the phonocentric definition …


"El Corregidor" At The Crossroads: Desire, Law, And Coloniality In Martel's Zama, Leisa Kauffmann Jul 2025

"El Corregidor" At The Crossroads: Desire, Law, And Coloniality In Martel's Zama, Leisa Kauffmann

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "'El Corregidor at the Crossroads: Desire, Law and Coloniality in Martel's Zama" Leisa Kauffmann discusses Lucrecia Martel's filmic adaptation of Antonio DiBenedetto's 1952 novel, Zama. Highlighting the director's emphasis on the psychoanalytic (as opposed to the existentialist) dimensions of the novel, the essay follows the titular characater's unravelling and shows how Martel's film allegorizes colonial(ist) subjectivity. In Kauffmann's essay, various psychoanalytic theories (such as the work of Bhabha, Fanon, and Žižek), and critiques centering the notion of race in the Lacanian tradition are applied. In addition, differences between the novel and film, particularly regarding Zama's mutilation and …


Compilation As Narrative Art In Medieval Islam: The Redemption Of Kuthayyir In The Book Of Songs, Kirsten Beck Jul 2025

Compilation As Narrative Art In Medieval Islam: The Redemption Of Kuthayyir In The Book Of Songs, Kirsten Beck

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article examines the narrative art of Abū ‘l-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī’s Kitāb al-Aghānī through a close reading of the chapter on the poet Kuthayyir ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (d. 723). Though Kuthayyir is mocked throughout for his short stature, unorthodox beliefs, and supposed insincerity, the chapter ends with a surprising scene: his death is mourned by the people of Medina in a large public funeral, suggesting a reevaluation of his character. I argue that this tonal shift is not incidental but the result of Iṣbahānī’s deliberate narrative arrangement. By analyzing the structure of the chapter—including the juxtaposition of genealogical accounts, the gradual …


The Malvinas/Falklands War In Transatlantic Narratives: Exploring Collective Memory And Negotiating Self/Other Identity, Andrea R. Bellot Aug 2024

The Malvinas/Falklands War In Transatlantic Narratives: Exploring Collective Memory And Negotiating Self/Other Identity, Andrea R. Bellot

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Malvinas/Falklands War in Transatlantic Narratives: Exploring Collective Memory and Negotiating Self/Other Identity", Andrea R. Bellot examines the remembrance of the Malvinas/Falklands War (1982) through cultural texts for children, presenting a comparative analysis of post-war narratives from both the United Kingdom and Argentina. Through a detailed exploration of "The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman" by British author and illustrator Raymond Briggs (1984), and the Argentine TV cartoon show "La Asombrosa Excursión de Zamba en las Islas Malvinas" (2012), broadcasted on Paka Paka, Bellot discusses how collective memory and national identity are crafted and contested …


Chinese Ideas And American Politics: Confucius As A Guideline For Leadership, Alfred Hornung Aug 2024

Chinese Ideas And American Politics: Confucius As A Guideline For Leadership, Alfred Hornung

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Chinese Ideas and American Politics: Confucius as a Guideline for Leadership", Alfred Hornung traces the influence of Chinese ideas on American politics with a focus on the works of Confucius. The more than 2.500-year-old impact of the Chinese philosopher on public conduct and his pursuit of virtuous perfection has served as a guideline for leadership emanating from China to Europe and America. For this trajectory of ideas, the historic and the new Silk Road play a decisive role. The exchange of goods along the land-based and maritime routes, which inform Xi Jinping's Belt and Road Initiative, also …


All Men Are Brothers: Pearl S. Buck’S Translation Of Shui Hu Zhuan And Its Effects On Her Writing Career, Zhihui Sophia Geng Aug 2024

All Men Are Brothers: Pearl S. Buck’S Translation Of Shui Hu Zhuan And Its Effects On Her Writing Career, Zhihui Sophia Geng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “All Men Are Brothers: Pearl S. Buck’s Translation of Shui Hu Zhuan and its Effects on Her Writing Career,” Zhihui Sophia Geng focuses on Pulitzer Prize winner and Noble Laureate Pearl Sydenstricker Buck’s All Men Are Brothers, her translation of the classical Chinese novel Shui Hu Zhuan. She examines the reception of her translation and analyzes the significance of All Men Are Brothers to Buck’s literary career. By providing the first complete translation of Shui Hu Zhuan to an English-speaking audience, Buck made a significant cultural contribution to the United States and English-speaking cultural spheres. The …


Topological Tropology Of V.S. Naipaul’S Islamic Travelogues And Daniel Pipes’ Islamic History: Ahistorical Historicism, Md. Habibullah Oct 2023

Topological Tropology Of V.S. Naipaul’S Islamic Travelogues And Daniel Pipes’ Islamic History: Ahistorical Historicism, Md. Habibullah

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s (1932-2018) first Islamic travelogue Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) contains his experience of a visit from August 1979 to February 1980 to the four non-Arab Muslim-majority countries – Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Similarly, his last Islamic travelogue Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998) has a description of another visit to the same countries for five-month in 1995. Concurrently, Daniel Pipes (1949-), an American historian, published his doctoral dissertation, Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System (1981), which represents Islamic culture as the first instigator of …


Playing With Time: Writing History In Neo-Zionist Hebrew Literature, Huiruo Li Oct 2023

Playing With Time: Writing History In Neo-Zionist Hebrew Literature, Huiruo Li

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The term neo-Zionism can be used to group ideologically much of contemporary Hebrew literature. However, since neo-Zionism shares similar critical tools with post-Zionism, while also sharing a common political vision with Zionism, it has been difficult to find the definitive signifiers of neo-Zionist writing. This paper offers a way to determine the nuanced ideological inclination of Hebrew literature: the presentation of time. First, this paper recognizes the metamorphosis of time in Israeli literary history that reflects the writers’ historical view of the Zionist agenda. Zionist Hebrew literature was engaged in re-establishing Jewish historical time by emphasizing the relationship between time …


On A Small Glossary Of Academic Anti-Intellectualism, William Díaz Villarreal Mar 2022

On A Small Glossary Of Academic Anti-Intellectualism, William Díaz Villarreal

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article presents the Small Glossary of Anti-intellectualism, where the most common rhetorical strategies and themes of contemporary academic anti-intellectualism are commented on. Anti-intellectualism is as old as intellectual life itself. However, its contemporary version is historically and sociologically rooted in the very structure of modern culture industry. It is a manifestation of a now universal pseudo-culture (Halbbildung) which, according to Adorno, has become the “dominant form of contemporary consciousness.” Arthur Schlesinger said that anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman; today, anti-intellectualism is certainly the antisemitism of several social and political groups, including academia …


Tituba, “Dark Eve” In The Origins Of The American Myth: The Subject Of History And Writing About Salem, Junghyun Hwang Feb 2022

Tituba, “Dark Eve” In The Origins Of The American Myth: The Subject Of History And Writing About Salem, Junghyun Hwang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Recasting the Salem witchcraft trials in light of Walter Benjamin’s theses on historiography, this paper revisits the question of history by examining ways in which Tituba is dis/con-figured as the subject of American history in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. Both stories of persecution revolve around the figure of Tituba, a slave from the Caribbean to whom the beginning of the witch trials is attributed, as the nodal point of different modes of representing the Salem history. The telos in Miller’s drama coincides with the subject-formation of Proctor as the legitimate …


Socrates The Degenerate: Irony As Trope Of Decadence, Daniel R. Adler Feb 2022

Socrates The Degenerate: Irony As Trope Of Decadence, Daniel R. Adler

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Decadence is typically associated with a fall from, or an opposition to, ideals of civilization. Western Civilization traditionally traces its roots to the culture of Ancient Greece. While theorists of periodicity from Vico to Nietzsche and Deleuze, to Hayden White and other contemporary scholars, associate decadence with excess, artificiality and over-indulgence, they also recognize that decadence often incorporates pre-civilized, base or “Other” tendencies. Paradoxically, decadence as a degeneration of an original culture’s values can also rejuvenate that culture’s core values through mutation so that a new version of the original culture arises. In literature, degeneration has also been associated with …


Trans-Atlantic Interrogation: Fabienne Pasquet’S La Deuxième Mort De Toussaint Louverture, Mariana F. Past Mar 2021

Trans-Atlantic Interrogation: Fabienne Pasquet’S La Deuxième Mort De Toussaint Louverture, Mariana F. Past

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Trans-Atlantic Interrogation: Fabienne Pasquet’s La deuxième mort de Toussaint Louverture,” Mariana Past situates the Haitian-Swiss novelist’s understudied narrative within the context of Caribbean letters and the Haitian literary tradition, then discusses the broader, intertextual implications of Toussaint Louverture’s “second” death for Haiti and the trans-Atlantic world. To what end does Pasquet deploy the aged ghost of a Haitian revolutionary icon being invoked by German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist in the Fort de Joux castle-cum-prison within France’s remote, mountainous Jura region? What is at stake when the diasporic writer reincarnates a legendary German poet as protagonist, placing him …


Natan Zach’S Poetics Of Erasure, Michael Gluzman Apr 2020

Natan Zach’S Poetics Of Erasure, Michael Gluzman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Natan Zach has often been described as the most influential Hebrew poet in the second half of the 20th century. Indeed, the scholar Dan Miron described him as a poet who had “reached the deepest part within us,” and as a “cultural leader” and “cultural hero.” Yet when Miron went on to detail Zach’s immense influence on other poets, he described his poetic legacy in exceedingly limiting formal terms such as “the use of enjambment” or “the magic of the unexpected rhyme, seemingly out of place.” Miron’s reading is symptomatic in the way it uses, indeed echoes, Zach’s own critical …


Domestic Trauma And Imperial Pessimism: The Crisis At Home In Charles Dickens’S Dombey And Son, Katherine E. Ostdiek Sep 2019

Domestic Trauma And Imperial Pessimism: The Crisis At Home In Charles Dickens’S Dombey And Son, Katherine E. Ostdiek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Domestic Trauma and Imperial Pessimism: The Crisis At Home in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son,” Katherine Ostdiek discusses Dickens’s representation of violence, grief, and recovery within the Victorian home as a pre-Freudian example of trauma. This comparison not only demonstrates the importance of trauma studies in the nineteenth-century, but more importantly, it thematically focuses empathy for the traumatized on the home. In this novel, Dickens dismisses topics related to the financial and social crises of mid-century Britain in favor of domestic themes that emphasize an idealized structure of the Victorian family. Through her use of trauma theory and …


Suffering And Climate Change Narratives, Simon C. Estok Sep 2019

Suffering And Climate Change Narratives, Simon C. Estok

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Suffering and Climate Change Narratives" Simon C. Estok begins with a brief survey of definitional issues involved with the term “suffering” and argues that there has been a relative lack of theoretical attention to suffering in climate change narratives, whether literary or within mainstream media. Estok shows that suffering, far from being singular, is a multivalent concept that is gendered, classed, raced, and, perhaps above all, pliable. It has social functions. One of the primary reasons for the failure of climate change narratives to effect real changes, Estok argues, is that they often carry the functions of …


The Different Representation Of Suffering In The Two Versions Of The Vegetarian, Young-Hyun Lee Sep 2019

The Different Representation Of Suffering In The Two Versions Of The Vegetarian, Young-Hyun Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “The Different Representation of Suffering in the two versions of The Vegetarian” the author examines how different the representation of suffering in the original and translated versions of The Vegetarian and explores the reasons for this difference. The author in particular refers to representative episodes which the translator’s strategy distorts even the central concepts of suffering in the original work. Her translated version results in critical misrepresentation of suffering and violence in the original version.


Overlapping Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature As A Global Assemblage, Wai-Chew Sim Jul 2019

Overlapping Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature As A Global Assemblage, Wai-Chew Sim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Overlappinig Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature as a Global Assemblage,” Wai-Chew Sim offers a globalist vision or understanding of Chinese literary studies/Sinophone studies. Deploying the notion of scriptworld (Damrosch), he examines how the Chinese, English, and Malay-language scriptworlds interact in the Southeast Asian context. He traces the rhizomatic connections between Joo Ming Chia’s Exile or Pursuit, a Singapore Sinophone text that explores multiple belongings, and two novels: M. L. Mohamed’s Confrontation (originally published as Batas Langit), and T.H. Kwee’s The Rose of Cikembang (originally published as Bunga Roos dari Cikembang). Tracing the sinophonicity of the latter …


Retro-Future In Post-Soviet Dystopia, Sergey Toymentsev Jul 2019

Retro-Future In Post-Soviet Dystopia, Sergey Toymentsev

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Retro-Future in Post-Soviet Dystopia” Sergey Toymentsev explores the vision of retrospective future in such Russian novels as Tatiana Tolstaya’s The Slynx, Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, Olga Slavnikova’s 2017, and Dmitry Bykov’s Zhd. Unlike Zamyatin’s and Platonov’s anti-Soviet satires, post-Soviet dystopias do not respond to any utopian narrative, but project the historical and ideological reality of Russia’s violent (predominantly Soviet) past into the future. Such a traumatic reenactment of the Soviet past in the dystopian future testifies to the rise of authoritarianism in contemporary Russia as well as its incomplete collective memory …


Chase Riboud’S Hottentot Venus (2003) And The Neo-Victorian: The Problematization Of South-Africa And The Vulnerability And Resistance Of The Black Other, Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz Mar 2019

Chase Riboud’S Hottentot Venus (2003) And The Neo-Victorian: The Problematization Of South-Africa And The Vulnerability And Resistance Of The Black Other, Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article touches upon issues of captivity, suppression, misrepresentations and exclusion of black people from a historical and cultural point of view through the analysis of Chase-Riboud’s neo-Victorian novel Hottentot Venus (2003). It also focuses on the implications and consequences for contemporary South Africa of situations of slavery and exploitation of African descended peoples. Notions of identity and moral and legal inclusion of black women into past and contemporary societies and communities will be also discussed from the point of view of postcolonial and gender and sexuality studies. The complexities of blackness and the violation of human rights as a …


Landscapes Of Illness, Politics Of Segregation And Discourse Of Empathy In The 19th Century Leprosy Narratives Of Hawaii, I-Chun Wang Dec 2018

Landscapes Of Illness, Politics Of Segregation And Discourse Of Empathy In The 19th Century Leprosy Narratives Of Hawaii, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Leprosy is one of the oldest known human diseases, recognized throughout the world. Leprosy causes serious damage to the nervous system, often resulting in deformity in the absence of an effective treatment; sufferers were often left at the mercy of its natural process or were segregated from others due to the fear of contagion. The places ravaged by leprosy became lands of fear. Modern science has shown that leprosy bacilli have a high rate of infectivity but a rather low rate of pathogenicity, and above ninety percent of people are equipped with immunity to leprosy. Leper colonies as described in …


More Migrants With Nowhere To Go?, Mary E. Theis Dec 2018

More Migrants With Nowhere To Go?, Mary E. Theis

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "More Migrants with Nowhere to Go?” Mary Theis reframes the stories of the Tai Dam and discusses this group of people, who migrated from Vietnam and Laos to Thailand and then to Iowa in 1975 after the wars in Southeast Asia when they virtually had nowhere to go. It is based on interviews with some of the 1,200 Tai Dam who were invited by Governor Robert Ray to resettle in Des Moines, Iowa, and nearby cities. The stories are contextualized by research on U.S. policies on immigration and the current precarious fates of other migrants in the United States …


The Colonized Masculinity And Cultural Politics Of Seediq Bale, Chin-Ju Lin Dec 2018

The Colonized Masculinity And Cultural Politics Of Seediq Bale, Chin-Ju Lin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “The Colonized Masculinity and Cultural Politics of Seediq Bale,” Chin-ju Lin discusses a Taiwanese blockbuster movie, a postcolonial historiography and a form of life-writing, which delineates the last Indigenous insurrection against Japanese colonialism. This article explores the cultural representations in Seediq Bale. Fighting back as a colonized man for pride and dignity is portrayed as means to restore their masculine identity. The headhunting tradition is remembered, romanticized, praised highly as heroic and even strengthened in an inaccurate way to promote individualistic masculinity and to forge a new national identity in postcolonial Taiwan. Nevertheless, the stereotypical …


Albert Camus' Social, Cultural And Political Migrations, Benaouda Lebdai Pr Dec 2018

Albert Camus' Social, Cultural And Political Migrations, Benaouda Lebdai Pr

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Albert Camus’ social, cultural and political migrations,” Benaouda LEBDAI analyses Albert Camus’ posthumous autofiction The First man, a fascinating self-representation and self -telling. Found after his deadly car accident, the manuscript adds a tragic dimension to the disguised autobiography. This paper demonstrates Camus’ capacity to migrate from one world to another, looks into the reasons behind such attitudes and stresses the significance of an outstanding life account within the on-going debate between France and Algeria about his political stands during colonial Algeria. His vision of the indigenous people, the Algerians, and of the future of colonial Algeria, …


Shakespeare's Henry Vi And Depression, Cindy Chopoidalo Dec 2018

Shakespeare's Henry Vi And Depression, Cindy Chopoidalo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Shakespeare’s Henry VI and Depression”, Cindy Chopoidalo discusses Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays not only as his first significant explorations of the tragic consequences of war and the price of ambition, but also as his first major treatment of a character who, in both fiction and reality, suffered from what has sometimes been described as severe clinical depression and what would have been known in Shakespeare’s time as melancholy. In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, as well as in his historical inspiration, we see an early counterpart of his later characters who have been linked to melancholy or depression, such …


Changez/Cengiz's Changing Beliefs In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Valerie Kennedy Dec 2018

Changez/Cengiz's Changing Beliefs In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Valerie Kennedy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Changez/Cengiz's Changing Beliefs in The Reluctant Fundamentalist” Valerie Kennedy analyzes the interrelation of individual subjectivity and global capitalism and the conflict between two belief systems in Mohsin Hamid’s novel. These are, first, a neoliberal system that sees individuals as rationally self-interested, mobile, economic units, and, second, a system based on a humanist definition of individuals as defined by nation, family, and tradition. Changez, the novel’s protagonist, initially endorses the first, but later rejects it for the second, due to his growing awareness of the impact on Pakistan of American geopolitics after 9/11. The essay also examines …


The Subversion Of East And West In Orhan Pamuk’S Novel, The White Castle, Adile Aslan Almond Jun 2018

The Subversion Of East And West In Orhan Pamuk’S Novel, The White Castle, Adile Aslan Almond

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The subversion of East and West in Orhan Pamuk's novel, The White Castle" Adile Aslan seeks to show how Orhan Pamuk plays with the theme of East versus West in his third novel The White Castle (1985), with the aim of de-essentializing both concepts. In 1928, Perso-Arabic script, in use for centuries as the main writing system in the Ottoman Empire, was replaced with Latin alphabet (accompanied by an intensive Turkification of the Ottoman language in the coming years) as a part of a larger modernization-Westernization project in the new nation state, a move which effectively …


Introduction To The One Asia Foundation And Its Cooperation And Peace-Making Project, Asunción Lópezvarela Azcárate Jun 2018

Introduction To The One Asia Foundation And Its Cooperation And Peace-Making Project, Asunción Lópezvarela Azcárate

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Let The Other Be Me - The Theo-Political Predicament And The Arab In Shin Shalom’S Early Writings, Haim Otto Rechnitzer Mar 2018

Let The Other Be Me - The Theo-Political Predicament And The Arab In Shin Shalom’S Early Writings, Haim Otto Rechnitzer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Let the Other be Me - The Theo-Political Predicament and the Arab in Shin Shalom's Early Writings" Haim O. Rechnitzer explores the theo-political predicament as reflected in the writings of poet, playwright and novelist Shin Shalom (Parczew Poland 1904–Haifa, Israel 1980). Particular attention is given to writings composed during the intensification of violence between Arabs and Jews in Mandatory Palestine from the early 1920s through the Arab revolt of 1936-39. This period is also a volatile period in Shalom's life; Aliya (Zionist immigration to the Land of Israel) with a Hasidic Zionist group, leaving the Hasidic settlement …