Comparative Literature Commons^™

The Invention Of Tradition: From Ancient “Articles” To May Fourth “Literature” — A Concurrent Explanation Of The Connotation Of “Chinese Literary Theory”, Xu Xu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

This article focuses on the relationship between literary views and article studies of May Fourth scholars from the perspective of hermeneutics, in order to re-explain the connotation of “Chinese literary theory” and consider the construction of a Chinese literary theory discourse system. Rooted in interpretations of the interplay between literature and dao, May Fourth scholars reshaped the traditional framework, shifting the focus to the relationship between literature and humanity, through the integration of ideals and dao. Their commitment to broad, applied literary views led to a progression from a simple division between cultural traits and literary function to a more …

Race And Nation In Three Canonic Texts Of Puerto Rican Literature: Luis Palés Matos’S Tom-Tom Of Kinky Hair And Black Things, José Luis González’S La Llegada, And Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’S Cortijo’S Wake, Luis R. Galanes

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this essay we propose a critical reading of three politically-charged canonic texts of Puerto Rican literature that uphold and vindicate an African heritage for Puerto Rican culture, highlighting their role in moving discussions about blackness at the center stage of debates about national identity and culture, and assessing their contribution to the emergence and development of an Afro-Puerto Rican identity and literature. These texts are: Luis Palés Matos’s Tom-Tom of Kinky Hair and Black Things, José Luis González’s La llegada; and Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’s Cortijo’s Wake. Moreover, a debate about the racial background of the authors …

Creating Accessible Literature For Deaf Young Adults, Kailee Bates

Undergraduate University Honors Capstones

Access to literature in a person’s most accessible language is a human right. One that has been deprived from many members of the Deaf community, despite the growth of translated literature in other languages. Translators have yet to tackle the business of creating accessible American Sign Language (ASL) translations for older audiences, specifically for young adults. After the critical period of language development, less resources are tendered for older Deaf students. This project aimed to spread awareness of this need to several different people groups and emphasize the complexity of translating an English text into ASL. It did this by …

Wide Screen With Critical Essay "Translating A Poetry Of Cinema"., James L. Richie Iv

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation combines the creative task of translating Víctor Cabrera’s poetry collection WIDE SCREEN (2009) from Spanish into English with a critical study that analyzes the volume to highlight the uniqueness of his writing, the importance of translating such a work for an Anglophone audience, and the challenges that occur in translating this complex collection. Moreover, Cabrera’s writing engages with a variety of cultural works in ways that challenge preconceived notions of language, culture, and medium. The poetry in WIDE SCREEN draws inspiration from the films of American filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, while frequently putting these films into dialogue with works …

Earth As Archive: An Interdisciplinary Approach To Possibility And Understanding, Alissa Petrizzo

Honors College Theses

This thesis takes the reader on a journey through the process of literary analysis to uncover new considerations of our past, present, and future. Living in the climate crisis, we are in dire need of the humanistic presence within solution-making conversations. I introduce scholarly voices from anthropologists, environmental scientists, and novelists before diving into Pitchaya Sudbanthad's novel Bangkok Wakes to Rain. While you hear my voice throughout the journey, I exist more so as a tour guide, helping you along the way to new possibilities of understanding. We dig up and analyze evidence of the Earth as an archive …

The Truth And Other Fictions: The Nuance Of Truth In Medieval Literature, Mark-Allan Donaldson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation, “The Truth and Other Fictions,” is an exploration of the functional relationship between fiction and truth. It discusses truth as a type of nuanced information which may exist in a variety of forms (i.e., objective truth, narrative truth, emotional truth, cultural truth, etc.) and explores how these truths may be created or communicated through the medium of literature. The dissertation also explores how fiction, either narrative or structural, assists in said creation and communication of truth and in some cases is the necessary component to these processes. The Middle Ages and its literature provide the ideal staging ground …

Eng 155: Introduction To Literary Studies, Joseph Donica

Open Educational Resources

An OER syllabus covering the ways humans have read and continue to read literature from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. An emphasis is placed on the application of critical thought to writing expository essays and responding to readings.

Homemade Language, Conservative Fro-Yo, And Sci-Fi Sloths: How Speculative Migration Fiction Confronts The Ends Of Worlds By Challenging The Nation-State, Zoe R. Scheuerman

English Honors Projects

This English literature thesis project explores an emerging, genre-defying body of fiction which I call “speculative migration fiction.” Speculative migration fiction imagines how ongoing global developments like climate change, technological development, and war may shape future migrations. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s conception of national culture, Wendy Brown’s theory of the border, and Caroline Levine’s understanding of literary form, as well as close readings from Scattered All Over the Earth by Yōko Tawada, Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, and 2 A.M. in Little America by Ken Kalfus, I argue that transnational migrations move toward becoming postnational migrations as migrants evade border …

Mapping Literature In The Age Of Ai, Virginia Ramos

Comparative Woman

"Mapping literature in the age of AI" discusses the concept of "mapping", from its historical meaning to its technological meaning in the field of literature and AI tools developed in recent years and designed to "map literature". The article addresses ethics, biases, and the issue of human capacities vis a vis machine capacities, in support of the critical and crucial value of the humanities and their unavoidable relationship with GenAI.

From Bushwick To Portland: Bori Girls Of The Diaspora Revolutionizing The Puerto Rican Coming-Of-Age Narrative, Lily V. Alvarado

Dissertations and Theses

Trailblazing Puerto Rican women in the diaspora have challenged dominant imagery and fought against patriarchy, U.S. imperialism, and white supremacy through their writing. Writers like Esmeralda Santiago and Nicholasa Mohr have transformed the literary canon via the bildungsroman, highlighting the unique struggles of Boricua girlhood and proving that our stories matter. Two prominent female Boricua writers today, Elisabet Velasquez and Gabby Rivera, have raised the baton that has been passed down to them and revolutionized the Diasporican literary canon. In their respective texts, When We Make It: A Nuyorican Novel and Juliet Takes a Breath, Velasquez and Rivera highlight the …

“I Know What Nothing Means”: Nostalgia, Hope, And The Postmodern Search For The Sublime, Kathryn L. Donati

Theses and Dissertations

Amid simultaneous crises of self, nation, digital citizenship, global health, climate change, and socio-political polarization, to name but a few of the catastrophes that seem to define life in the global West in the twenty-first century, where do we find hope? Do we find it at all? Is there any hope to be found? These are the questions that serve as the genesis for this undertaking in which I locate the origin of these crises far before the events of the 2016 and 2020 elections, far before even the panic of Y2K. I begin my examination of hope in contemporary …

Truth And Knowledge In A Literary Text And Beyond: Lydia Chukovskaya’S Sofia Petrovna At The Intersections Between Selves, Culture, And Paratext, Angelina Rubina

Theses and Dissertations

Although Lydia Chukovskaya’s novella Sofia Petrovna (1965) is not considered to be an autobiographical work, the life story of its protagonist, Sofia Petrovna, and the life of Lydia Chukovskaya herself have certain parallels. Chukovskaya’s very own fate, which she described in the foreword to the novella and in her other biographical works, is often viewed inseparably from the novella. However, among the many connections between the fictional fate of Sofia Petrovna and the real fate of Lydia Chukovskaya, one aspect that has not been properly explored by the critics is the “dialogue” between the author and the protagonist with respect …

Witchy Politics: Witches And Witchcraft As Political Tropes From Malleus Malleficarum (1487) To Les Sorcières De La République (2016) And The Mercies (2020), Mallaury Joëlle Marie Gauthier

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The focus of this thesis are two recent novels featuring witches: Chloé Delaume’s Les Sorcières de la République(The Witches of the Republic, 2016) and Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Mercies (2020). The first is a futuristic dystopia set in 2062, during the witch trial of the Sibyl of Cumae. The second is a work of historical fiction based on witch trial records and set in seventeenth-century Finnmark (Norway). Both are feminist novels, and both emphasize the political valence of the witch as a gendered figure. This figure emerged from the misogyny of early modern demonology but acquired its contemporary contours …

Narratives Of Trauma In South Asian Literature, Ryan Wander

Critical Humanities

Narratives of Trauma in South Asian Literature uses seven geographically-focused clusters of essays to elucidate the ways in which the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies allows for a delineation of the cultural and historical specificity of South Asian narratives of trauma. These essays simultaneously serve as a means for connecting South Asian literary accounts of individual and collective trauma to broader national and transnational dynamics.

Understanding How Women Navigated The Fight For Equality During The Second Republic And Transition-Era Spain Through Feminist Literature, Amanda Jeanette Pagoaga

Honors Theses

This paper explores how women navigated the fight for equality during the Second Republic and Transition-era Spain through the lens of feminist literature. Specifically, comparing and analyzing two books, Doble esplendor by Constancia de la Mora (1939) and Crónica del desamor by Rosa Montero (1979). Both books feature women in their thirties who work and explore themes of marriage and romantic love, friendship as a space of freedom, motherhood, working women, and politics against the backdrop of the ever-changing sociopolitical situation in Spain. Through close analysis of these works, the author examines how these women navigate gender roles and societal …

Humanization Of The Refugee As The Modern Subject In Mohsin Hamid’S Exit West, Ani Gazazyan

English (MA) Theses

This thesis discusses the central concern of the global refugee crisis through the fictional novel Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. The novel tells the story of two protagonists who are portrayed as the modern subject that Hamid comes to humanize, which reflects on current society’s representation of the refugee as dehumanized or “the Other.” Hamid takes his readers on a journey that represents his characters as normal everyday humans that are forced into the process of refugeehood and displacement. Throughout this thesis, I discuss what makes the novel so unique in representing the modern-day refugee. In the first section titled …

Conjuring Creative Citizenship Beyond Rights, Elizabeth Swanson

Criticism

A Review of Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights by Lyndsey Stonebridge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 176. $25 hardcover.

Deus Ex Machina: Contemporary Argentina's Literature Of Infrastructure, D. Bret Leraul

Faculty Journal Articles

This article traces the growth of representations of literary infrastructure in Argentinean literature parallel to the rise of global finance capital and the successive price and debt crises it has visited upon the Argentinean economy since the restoration of liberal democracy in 1983. I argue that as Argentina’s robust mid-century literary institution has declined, the concrete organizations that constitute its infrastructure—for example publishing houses, educational institutions, cultural bureaucracies—become fodder for literary fiction. In short, literature represents its own infrastructure when that infrastructure comes to present a problem. My claim rests at once on the logics of the literary institution and …

Language, Science And Literature, Hitoshi Oshima

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The creativity of language Chomsky puts so much importance on must be questioned because the same creativity has produced lethal weapons such as atomic bombs. Modern science developed by the power of language has certainly produced many beneficial things, but we should not overlook its destructive side. Besides, language capable of inventing a new reality leads us to believe in it blindly. Let us remember philosophers such as Wittgenstein or Nagarjuna who warned us not to believe in the construct called “reality” made up by language power.Now, is it better and safer then to use a metaphorical language that composes …

Documents And The Malady Of Truth, Ronald E. Day

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This article discusses documents, knowledge, and truth through a conceptual examination and through an examination of Flaubert's 19th century novel Madame Bovary. It argues that the main characters of Madame Bovary deceive themselves by believing that the contents of the fictional and medical texts they read convey truth. In contrast, the article argues that modern knowledge is constituted by documentary evidence operating in knowledge networks and processes where the result of such operations is what can be claimed to be true about the world through such processes. The representational malady that Madame and Doctor Bovary suffer in the novel was …

Steven Patrick Fernandez’S Transcreation Of Poetry And The Integrated Performing Arts Guild’S Sugatula/Crossing Poetry: An Autotheoretical Analysis, Onnah Pierre P. Talle

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

This is an analysis of Steven Patrick Fernandez’s transcreation of poetry through the Integrated Performing Arts Guild’s SugaTula. I use autotheory as I retell, examine, and reflect on my experiences on SugaTula and on Fernandez’s transcreation of poetry. From my autotheoretical analysis, I then situate Fernandez’s and IPAG’s SugaTula in the field of translation studies. The study reveals that Fernandez’s transcreation of poetry through SugaTula is a concept which is not only significant for theater practitioners but also for reading and literature teachers. Transcreation can also be used as a method to explore not only poetry but other various literary …

Book Review: The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel: Quests For Meaningfulness, Sabah Carrim

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

First Person Narration In Postwar British Women’S Fiction, Julia Mccoy

English Student Scholarship

Julia McCoy ’22
Majors: English and Political Science
Faculty Mentor: Dr. William Hogan, English

A study of postwar English novelists Margaret Drabble and Jeannette Winterson, looking particularly at the way these writers use first person narration in their works. Both writers explore how women’s identity can be ‘written into being’ against external pressures and authorities that seek to define women’s ‘proper’ role.

Eloge De I'Absent, Hassan Wahbi

Dirassat

Raise of the Absent

Behind the meaning stifled by the oblivion of things and events, by the fragmentation of duration, there is the figure and the fatal enigma of self-identity. Each life is first of all a silence, a postponement of the intimate word, the re verse of a voice, a "limbee" presence. Whoever decides to write about oneself knows well that his exercise is the temptation to take in the trap of words this silence, this setback, this limbo, this murmuring obscurity.

Transgressing Boundaries Of Identity, Geography And Time In Transmutadxos And La Mucama De Omicunlé, Lucinda Smith

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

The literary works of Rita Indiana (1977) and Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro (1970) are recognised for exposing and challenging hegemonic ideas of identity, sexuality and power. The transgression of boundaries appears time and again in the fiction of both writers, whether these be boundaries of sexual or gender identity, desire, geography, time or even life and death. Using Rita Indiana’s novel La mucama de Omicunlé (2015) and Arroyo’s collection of short stories Transmutadxs (2016), the authors’ representations of such transgressions are the focus of this essay.

Further to addressing similar themes in their texts, both Rita Indiana and Arroyo Pizarro were …

My Antonia: A Retrospective On An Immigrant Narrative, Sydney Werner

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

Beginning with the early days of American literature, this work explores where the immigrant narrative has existed, and what said narrative may look like. When reading immigrant literature, there are typically three or four themes that present themselves among the immigrant characters and their community. Those themes are: a feeling of nostalgia towards, or affinity to the culture and of the immigrant’s home country, the theme of inclusion or exclusion by the larger society in the new country, and the theme of resilience, that is, how immigrants overcome adversities and bounce back challenge after challenge. A novel in particular where …

When Saeed Betrays Fuad: Laughing At The Mechanized Occupation, Ezgi Demirors

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis comparatively explores the emergence of the comic in the novel The Secret Life of Saeed The Pessoptimist by Emile Habibi and the film The Time That Remains directed by Elia Suleiman, by building on Bergson’s theory of mechanization. By tracing Bergson’s idea that comic effect is created through the creeping up of the mechanical on the living, the establishment of the “mechanical occupation” as a source of the comic will be elucidated. The comic will be explored in terms of the ways in which both texts offer a new historicizing operation, being works that focus on the narration …

The Image Of The Human Psyche In Rauf Parfi Poetru, Nigora Bozorova

Scientific reports of Bukhara State University

Introduction. The first President of The Republic of Uzbekistan theoretical views on Karimov's works on spiritual values, National ideas and ideology formed the methodological basis of this work. A number of literary scholars drew attention to the scientific-theoretical views of literature, literature of the period of independence, poetry of the period of independence on the creativity and life of Rauf Parfi, the peculiarities of Rauf Parfi's creativity, the world of images, genres and poetic forms, the proposals and comments expressed in them. Rauf Parfi's poetic collections, published in different years, served as an important source of internet materials for the …

Trois Expériences Littéraires Du Langage Réaliste : H De Balsac, G Verga Et Th Mann, Abdellaziz Belkaz

Dirassat

Three literary experiences of realistic language:

H. de Balzac, G. Verga and TH. Mann

The literary bias of the French realist H. de Balzac, the Italian verist G. Verga and the German decadentist Th. Mann is expressed by a textual conditioning which provides undeniable proof of his resolutions.representational, It is important to us, in this approachcomparatist, to examine the path by which the trivial becomes ennobled, irrevocably operates its mutation into a "Masterpiece" at the very moment when narrative mobility and mobilization are employed in the sense of wishes and confessions of some purpose.

Contagion And Crisis: Narrating Egypt’S 1947 Epidemic In Literature And Film, Nada Maurice Ibrahim

Theses and Dissertations

In 1947, cholera struck Egypt causing around 10,277 deaths from a total of 20,804 cases within a few months. What does the cholera outbreak reveal about Egyptian society at the time? How did different writers and filmmakers respond to it? Although several studies have tackled epidemics and the emergence of medical and public health practice in Egypt from an historical perspective, virtually none to date have seriously examined Egypt’s 1947 cholera epidemic from a literary standpoint. This thesis, by analysing the epidemic through works produced about or during the time of the epidemic, offers a deeper insight into the event …