Comparative Literature Commons^™

"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 …

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 …

Marianismo And The Catholic Autobiographer: A Comparative Analysis, Nina Lee

Theses and Dissertations

As a version of femininity that derives from the figure of the Mother Mary, marianismo emphasizes the traditional roles of self-sacrifice, motherhood, spirituality, and nurturance. While marianismo is most often associated with Latin America, it can be traced back to Catholicism’s origins in Europe. Early and medieval Catholic theologians, such as Saint Augustine of Hippo and Peter Abelard, demonstrate marianista beliefs within their autobiographical writings. As autobiography is purported to be the most intimate window into both the personal and larger social situations of a given time and place, the autobiographies of such Catholic male theologians provide insight into the …

“Young Adult Books Don’T Realize They Have That Power”: Reader Response To Ideology In Young Adult Dystopian Fiction, Zane Emīlija Sarma

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to find out how readers interact with novels in the Young Adult dystopian genre. I will examine the ways in which readers resist the dominant patriarchal ideological discourses in the YA dystopian novel and how readers submit to this ideology. Through an interaction with the text, the reader produces oppositional, negotiated, or preferred meanings. I will argue that readers’ response to ideology in the YA dystopian novel is affected by their active participation in reader communities such as the Bookish community online.

YA dystopian fiction was highly popular in the early 2010s, but the …

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 …

Lady Delacour’S Resentment Of The “Ideal Woman” Standard In Edgeworth’S Belinda, Kayla J. Baur

Publications and Research

Maria Edgeworth’s nineteenth-century novel Belinda (1801) follows the tale of seventeen-year-old Belinda Portman who is sent away by her notorious match-making aunt to lodge with the reputable Lady Delacour in the hopes of having her find a suitable husband. Women must take great care to present themselves as worthy, respectable damsels during the process of finding suitors, which means they must associate with respectable crowds and show society they are capable of becoming the “ideal woman”. An ideal woman during this time is expected to simultaneously fulfill her obligations as an obedient wife, an attentive and nurturing mother, and a …

Politics Of Evasion And Tales Of Abjection: Postmodern Demythologization In Angela Carter And Ghazaleh Alizadeh, Narges Montakhabi Bakhtvar, Hoda Niknezhad-Ferdos

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Angela Carter and Ghazaleh Alizadeh as the prophetesses of postmodern fairy tales in British and Persian literature re-narrativize these tales as a loophole from socio-political stagnation and cultural paralysis. Evading direct contact with the political jargons of their eras, they seek gender generativity via the fairy tale machine. Alizadeh finds refuge in modernizing Persian fairy tales. Carter chants her frustration at Thatcherism through gender subversion. Carter’s and Alizadeh’s revulsion at the politics of gender in their eras can be read via the duet between the abject and the chora in Kristeva’s thought. It is through the encounter with the external …

Strategies Of (In)Visibility And Resilience: Women Writers In A Digital Era, Miriam Borham-Puyal, Daniel Escandell-Montiel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Women’s presence in literary history has been particularly conditioned by their place in society and by the limited spheres in which their production was expected to appear (e.g. the sentimental novel, romances or children’s literature). In today’s digital, open and connected society, women continue to face visibility problems in the publishing industry and in the online spaces that grant presence and agency. Their role in cultural creations is still hindered by vertical powers that operate as main censors. This circumstance takes place even in a rhizomatic and decentralized virtual space, where dissident discourses have highlighted it, although without enough discursive …

“No Roses, White Nor Red, Glow Here”: The Motif Of The Garden In Two Proserpine Poems By A. Swinburne And D. Greenwell, Cristina Salcedo González

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this article, I discuss Algernon Swinburne’s and Dora Greenwell’s engagement with the myth of Proserpine through an analysis of the motif of the garden, which takes central stage in both accounts. The examination will illustrate how the authors’ outlined images of the garden challenge the dominant representation of the motif within Western literary tradition, offering a re-interpretation of the myth as social commentary.

The Inappropriate/D Fantastic: A Proposal Beyond Feminism, Teresa López-Pellisa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Teresa López-Pellisa’s article “The Inappropriate/d Fantastic: A Proposal Beyond Feminism” discusses a type of narration that goes beyond the feminist fantastic. These are fantastic texts permeated not only by a feminist discourse, but by intersectionality, transfeminism, ecofeminism, cyberfeminism, post-humanism, xenofeminism and/or necropolitics as well. Borrowing the term inappropriate/d others from Donna Haraway (The Promises of Monsters), who in turn takes it from the feminist theorist Trinh Minh-ha, we can analyze those fantastic stories that call into question the categories of gender, class, race and sexuality established by Western enlightened humanism. These types of non-mimetic narrations have …

Female Fantastic In Anthologies: Gendering The Genre And Its Discourse, Anna Boccuti

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In the last decades, the fantastic literature written by women has been the subject of various studies, which, from different standpoints, have tried to investigate the characteristics of the female fantastic. In this essay, after a critical review of the most prominent theories about the so-called feminine fantastic and female writing, I will focus on the narrative strategies of the female fantastic. Through the close reading of the anthologies Tra due specchi. 18 racconti di scrittrici latinoamericane, and Insólitas. Narradoras de lo fantástico en Latinoamérica y España, I’ll try to draw a cartography of the Hispanic …

Transgression, Essentialism And Literary System: An Approach To The Viability Of The Female Fantastic, Alfons Gregori

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The main aims of this article are firstly to find out whether the concept of “fantastic female” is a contradictory and ambiguous construct, and secondly to challenge the feasibility of applying it to literary studies. The matter of the existence of the “female fantastic” refers to the theoretical approaches made to undertake a double-edged task in the 1970s and 1980s: the conceptualization of a dual scheme establishing a female aesthetic opposed to the dominant patriarchy on the one hand, and on the other, the promotion of non-mimetic narrative modes as formulas for transgressing the patriarchal system. However, the crystallization of …

Visualizing Women: Teaching Modern Images And Medieval Texts About Pre-Modern Women, Esther Liberman Cuenca

Quidditas

This paper examines two visual texts for teaching a course called “Saints, Wives and Witches” at the University of Houston-Victoria: Jennifer A. Rea’s graphic novel Perpetua’s Journey (Oxford, 2018), which illustrates the eponymous North African martyr’s third-century prison diary, and the film Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen (2009), directed by Margarethe von Trotta, who drew on feminist readings of Hildegard of Bingen’s writings for the purposes of dramatization. The course itself followed a chronology that took students from antiquity to the early modern period and was divided into thematic units that highlighted women’s intersecting identities with regards …

Teaching Premodern Women And Gender, Lucy C. Barnhouse

Quidditas

In her influential History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism, Judith Bennett asked “Who’s afraid of the distant past?” Fifteen years after this book’s publication, the question remains relevant. Teaching the history of women and gender in the premodern world presents linked pedagogical challenges. Most students enter college with little to no background in premodern history. Many find premodern primary sources, when taught with the same pedagogical scaffolding as modern sources, inaccessible due to real or perceived strangeness. These challenges can be compounded by the challenges of teaching women’s and/or gender history. This roundtable addresses strategies for productive …

What She Said: Recovering Early Modern Women’S Experiences Through Court Records, Jennifer Mcnabb

Quidditas

Much of the fame of early modern England’s church courts today is based on their reputation as “women’s courts.” Because ecclesiastical law allowed women to initiate suit and to be sued in their own names, the courts’ records are full of women’s words. But the task of discovering women’s experiences through these records is a methodologically complex one. Words attributed to women, for example, come to us courtesy of the male church court clerk, whose education and legal experience shaped the written record of legal oral proceedings. And while women filing suit gives the appearance of female agency, it was …

Queering Identity Politics In Shimon Adaf’S Aviva-No, Yael Segalovitz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article offers a queer reading of Shimon Adaf’s volume of poetry, Aviva-No (2009), analyzing it in conjunction with his recent collection of essays on identity formation, Ani aherim (I am others) (2018). Adaf’s oeuvre has been primarily studied through the lens of ethnicity and race. This article demonstrates that gender plays a key role in his body of work. Aviva-No, which is a lamentation for the poet’s sister, destabilizes the boundaries between the mourning brother and the absent sister. This ontological deconstruction stimulates in Aviva-No a broader undoing of gender as an embodied identity. The volume is replete …

Symposium Of Laughter: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity And Sociability In George Knapton's Portraits Of The Society Of Dilettanti, Meredith Hanna

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Ideal masculine conduct for aristocratic and bourgeois circles of the British 18^th century entailed polite restraint, and much of the scholarly discussion on 18^th century British masculinity treats politeness and how it was taught and modeled. The Society of Dilettanti, a British antiquarian society whose early members met on the Grand Tour, seemed to flout polite ideals in their portraits by George Knapton, executed from 1740-1749. With consideration to expanding dialogue on the nature of ideal masculine conduct in the 18^th century, this paper asserts that the portraits create, through depictions of alcoholic ritual and interaction with …

Rethinking The Monstrous: Gender, Otherness, And Space In The Cinematic Storytelling Of Arrival And The Shape Of Water, Edward Chamberlain

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Through comparing the Hollywood films Arrival and The Shape of Water, this article explicates the films’ similar portrayals of gender, social collaboration, and monstrosity. Although the mainstream media in the United States has linked the idea of the monstrous to larger global forces, the two films suggest that “the monster” exists much closer to home. Hence, this article makes the case that monstrosity occurs in a variety of formulations such as the actions of national authorities like governmental officials that oppress and endanger a myriad of American citizens as well as newcomers. Further, this article makes the case that …

Eating And Suffering In Han Kang’S The Vegetarian, Won-Chung Kim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Eating and Suffering in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian” Won-Chung Kim examines how Han investigates suffering through the topic of food and eating. Kim shows that The Vegetarian is a work that thoroughly investigates both what constitutes suffering and what role carno-phallogocentric thinking can play in such suffering: suffering becomes in the novel a psychological, physical, and spiritual effect of dietary resistance to male-dominated Korean society. After offering a working definition of sufferings, Kim argues how the suffering caused by Yeong-hye’s refusal to follow the reigning norms of the meat eating, patriarchal society disintegrates the intactness of …

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 …

The Commodified Body And Post/In Human Subjectivities In Frears’S Dirty Pretty Things And Romanek’S Never Let Me Go, Rocio Carrasco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Following new materialist analysis, this article takes the body as the central locus of analysis, and relates it to broader questions such as ethics, ideology, power and/or technologies. Specifically, it revolves around the idea of embodied subjectivity as articulated by scholars Rosi Braidotti, Sherryl Vint or Cary Wolfe, whereby body and subjectivity are indissolubly and interestingly connected. Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (2010) exploit the idea of the commodified body, understood here as a vulnerable body, a disposable commodity at the service of powerful and/or wealthy people. Victims of the cruelties inflicted …

Trauma, Ethics, And The Body At War In Brittain, Borden And Bagnold, Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “Trauma, Ethics, and the Body at War in Brittain, Borden and Bagnold,” Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo discusses how the autobiographical accounts of the conflict by Vera Brittain, Enid Bagnold and Mary Borden, inspired by their experiences as voluntary nurses in the front, deconstruct the meanings of femininity, masculinity and patriotism, contesting the official rhetoric of passivity that defined the role of women in World War I. Their extreme engagement with the precariousness and vulnerability of others elicits an empathic response that can be interpreted through Judith Butler (2004; 2009), Emmanuel Lévinas (1969) and Alan Badiou’s (1993) ethics of …

Introduction, Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz, Manuela Coppola

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This special issue addresses contemporary representations of “vulnerable” bodies in transit in Anglophone literature and culture and explores their strategies of resistance. The use of the expression “bodies in transit” in this issue has to be understood both as a reference to the materiality of diasporic, exiled, migrating, trafficked bodies, and as an allusion to the metaphorical transition of these marginalized subjects from alienation to regeneration in multiple contexts. The interdisciplinary contributions in this special issue tackle vulnerability as a marginal(ized) and potentially enabling condition entailing the crossing of bodily, sexual, mental, ethical, cultural, and national borders. Ranging from literature …

“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 …

Disability, Victorian Biopolitics And Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, Hiu Wai Wong

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “Disability, Victorian Biopolitics and Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray,” Hiu Wai Wong discusses The Picture of Dorian Gray as Oscar Wilde’s life writing of the androgynous beauty. Extending his praise of Lord Alfred Douglas in De Profundis, Wilde’s descriptions of Dorian as the androgyne can be read as the demonstration of Michel Foucault’s techniques of the self. She argues that the androgynous beauty can be a strategy of bodily practice that overthrows the Victorian biopolitics which enforces a rigid gender role. Moreover, she explores the notion of camp and Judith Butler’s theory of performance to explain the …

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 …

The Rise Of The Neoliberal Chinese Female Subject In Go Lala Go, Su-Lin Yu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Built upon feminist critique of neoliberalism, this paper will examine a prominent medium through which neoliberal feminist ideology is disseminated: Go Lala Go. By analyzing the film, I will show how it co-opts the discourse of neoliberalism, and reworks it to construct neoliberal female subjects. First, I will explore what kind of role neoliberalism has enacted in the formation of an emergent type of female subject in China. Then, I will demonstrate how the contentious process of neoliberal feminism affects young career women’s identities. More than career guides promoting different techniques for making women more successful at their workplaces, …

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

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Women Near Tv's White House: Power, Gender, And Race On Us Narrative Television, Teresa Caprioglio

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

CBS’s drama Madam Secretary, USA’s miniseries Political Animals, and ABC’s drama Scandal all debuted between 2012-14, each with a female protagonist working closely with the executive branch in Washington-based political circles. Each displays, however, a different engagement with political activity and its relationship to personal life and relationships and to personal identity and presentation. By examining the configurations of gender and power in Madam Secretary and Political Animals, both of which portray female Secretaries of State, this thesis addresses the visual and behavioral expectations for TV women’s access to power and visibility as women and political actors, …

The Sin Of Pride In Dressing Bodies In Spanish And Anglo-American Ballads, Ana Belén Martínez García

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Sin of Pride in Dressing Bodies in Spanish and Anglo-American Ballads" Ana Belén Martínez García argues that trying to decipher the reasons for characters to dress in a certain way may help discover the underlying sociocultural mechanisms that prevail. The author aims to reveal the gender divide associated to clothing through a comparative approach towards popular literature in Spanish and English. She uses Judith Butler's theory of performative acts in order to conduct the text analysis. Clothes-related acts feature prominently in the case of popular balladry. Spanish "romances" and Anglo-American ballads are poems that were and …