Comparative Literature Commons^™

A Miracle Through An Ymage: Gautier De Coinci’S Retouched Legend Of Theophile, Isabella Williams

Quidditas

This article examines the use of the Old French word “ymage” in Gautier de Coinci’s early thirteenth-century Legend of Theophile. Gautier is the first author to write a version of the legend that includes an ymage, designating a material representation of the Virgin. Far from a subtle insertion, he mentions the term ten times, during every pivotal moment of the story, when terrestrial and celestial spheres collide. Critics acknowledge the centrality of Gautier in representing this revolutionary French period, during which time attitudes concerning ritualistic images were in a state of flux; yet, Gautier’s repetitive and groundbreaking use of …

Cover

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Langland, Father Of American Literatures, John M. Bowers

Quidditas

Geoffrey Chaucer’s position as “father of English literature” has been steadily challenged in recent years. This paper both proposes and interrogates the other fourteenth-century English poet William Langland’s possible claims as the origin for the Puritan tradition of New England and, hence, the later traditions of American literatures—in the plural. We know that the first copy of his satirical, theological dream-vision Piers Plowman arrived in New England in 1630 with the father of Anne Bradstreet, and as a result any patriarchal genealogy is already problematic because the first author in the American family-tree was a woman. Rather than the linearity …

Hamlet In Cinema: Oedipus Lives On, Keolanani Kinghorn

Quidditas

I have often questioned why Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a play more than 400 years old, remains tied to a century-old Freudian concept. Since Freud’s Oedipus Complex has been disproven, what purpose does it still serve and why are directors still intrigued by this interpretation of Hamlet? In 1949, Dr. Ernest Jones published his book, Hamlet and Oedipus (1949),1 but at the time he was also collaborating with Laurence Olivier to create the first movie adaptation of Hamlet to embrace the Oedipus Complex. I believe that because of Jones and Olivier Shakespeare’s Hamlet will always be connected to psychoanalysis. While …

Re-Dress As Redress: Shakespeare’S Comedy Of Errors, Jane Foster Woodruff

Quidditas

DELNO C. WEST AWARD WINNER

Writing near the end of a century-long ‘explosion’ of Tudor theatre, Shakespeare benefitted from a variety of influences, both sacral and secular. Among his literary influences were the works of classical dramatists (Sophocles, Seneca, Plautus, and the like), who had used their plays to editorialize on contemporary societal issues. To this same end, in his early historical play Richard III Shakespeare chose to address a multiplicity of problematic themes, the most obvious being that, although Richard’s ambition and his lethality had been sufficient to win him a crown, they were insufficient to preserve it: power …

Extreme Translation: Six Medieval Lessons For Everyone, Michelle Warren

Dartmouth Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Interpretation And Ovidian Myth In Alexander’S Bridge And O Pioneers!, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This essay describes interpretive strategies widely applied to Ovidian mythic materials during the period of Cather’s early career, especially those operative in Alexander’s Bridge and O Pioneers! The article assumes that widely held conventional interpretations of myths, in this case Ovidian myths, in a specific time and area are part of their semantic content, or iconology, and are tools Cather used in communicating with her audience. The essay then looks at a passage in the 1912 Alexander’s Bridge and two disputed passages in the 1913 O Pioneers! along with extended Bacchic themes in the latter novel that employ conventional Ovidian …

Reflections On The Victorian(Ist) Impulse To Totalize Africa, Adrian S. Wisnicki

Department of English: Faculty Publications

IN this essay, I offer some reflections on how Victorianists might understand nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discursive practices for mapping Africa. In doing this, I respond to what Sukanya Banerjee, our panel organizer, asked us to do in determining the focus for our essays—namely, that we direct “attention to topics in Victorian studies that [we] feel might otherwise be overlooked or viewed differently.” In what follows I introduce and problematize a series of Victorian-era maps or, more specifically, problematize what such maps represent conceptually, then offer some alternate means by which Victorianists might critically engage with cultural and social reality …

The Politics Of Tools, Stephen Ramsay

Department of English: Faculty Publications

A consideration of the political meaning of software that tries to add greater philosophical precision to statements about the politics of tools and tool building in the humanities. Using Michael Oakeshott's formulations of the “politics of faith” and the “politics of skepticism,” [Oakeshott 1996] it suggests that while declaring our tools be morally or political neutral may be obvious fallacious, it is equally problematic to suppose that we can predict in advance the political formations that will arise from our tool building. For indeed (as Oakeshott suggests), the tools themselves give rise to what is politically possible.

N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, And The American Imagination: Medieval Myth In 19th- And 20th- Century Children’S Literature, Alyssa Kowalick

West Chester University Master’s Theses

This thesis attempts to elucidate how the illustrated images and text of the medieval myths of King Arthur and Robin Hood were translated from an English national epic to an American classic and used, I argue, to construct a new American identity. My analysis looks at both the written word and illustrated images in Howard Pyle’s The Story of King Arthur and His Knights and The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, as well as The Boy’s King Arthur written by Sidney Lanier and illustrated by N.C. Wyeth, and Robin Hood written by Paul Creswick and illustrated by N.C. Wyeth. …

The Assemblage Of The Rings: Reading Lord Of The Rings Through The Philosophy Of Gilles Deleuze And Félix Guattari, Kieran Leeds

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is a monument to literary achievement; a world built so completely that other literature, both canonical and not, attempts in vain to match its grandeur. Likewise, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's body of philosophy is conspicuous not only for its thematic variation across books but also the profundity of its concepts. Given this, it is shocking then that the critical apparatuses of Deleuze and Guattari have not been used to explore Tolkien's novels, given the innate symmetry between the two bodies of work. While ample research has been carried out regarding each separately, there …

Constructing (Un)Situated Women: Situated Knowledges In Arundhati Roy's The God Of Small Things (1997) And Balli K. Jaswal's Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows (2017), Necole T. Deloach

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis applies Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledges” to postcolonial feminist novels such as Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Balli K. Jaswal’s Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows in order to illustrate why there needs to be a new framework for analyzing literary postcolonial women. Despite the applicability of Donna Haraway’s “situated knowledges” to postcolonial feminist literary studies, there has been little research published that analyzes not just the intersection of “situated knowledges” and postcolonial feminist literature, but also the problems that occur when Western scholars approach postcolonial texts without completely acknowledging their own worldview. I argue …

Communicating With The Past Via Javier Cercas’ Las Leyes De La Frontera, Bobby D. Nixon

The Coastal Review

Cercas’ protagonist, Gafitas, narrates his memories of being a member of "el Zarco's" youth gang in the barrio chino of Girona during the summer of 1978, from the vantage point of the early 2000s. The novel is simultaneously viewed through the intertextual lens of José Antonio de la Loma’s cycle of quinqui films based on the life of the famous Catalan delinquent, El Vaquilla, Juan José Moreno Cuenca. There is renewed interest in these films from the Transition period of the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the success of this novel and director Daniel Monzón's film based on Cercas’ …

De Médée À La Sorcière : Reconstruction D’Un Mythe Par Michelet, Caroline Strobbe

The Coastal Review

In La Sorcière, Jules Michelet uses the strength and the myth of the Medea character, which had already fascinated Corneille. In the second part of his work, Michelet creates nominative witches after authentic texts. In the first part, he creates an allegoric witch on the Medea model: the Woman, a victim of arbitrariness, injustice and repression, rises up against her oppressors, figuring the march of Humanity towards Enlightenment and Liberty. The analogies between the Witch and Medea are therefore numerous and necessary, since they help to render the defense of the oppressed against the oppressor. Would the somber Medea, …

Front Matter

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

History And Directing Shakespeare, James H. Forse

Quidditas

In years past I have been asked, “where did you get that idea?”—from those who perused something I wrote concerning the history of Shakespearean theatre, and from those who saw Shakespearean plays I directed for my local community theatre. Sometimes the question was a compliment. Yet the question, I think, points to a sort of symbiosis that academic research and the practical dictates of directing a play can offer to anyone. For it’s truly hard for me to tell whether my research into theatre history has come to affect how I directed Shakespeare, or whether directing Shakespeare’s plays in a …

Poems On Gender, Sexuality, And Kinship, Elisa Subin

Comparative Woman

The attached poems are a series thematically linked through gender, sexuality, and kinship.

5 Poems, Rebecca Ruth Gould

Comparative Woman

These poems examine the challenges facing the woman creator, and focus in particular on the problem of the muse, and how this relates to the feminist reconceptualization of traditional notions of gender and sexuality. As part of this broader poetic inquiry, I also challenge traditional notions of monogamy and heterosexual desire.

Kinship Poems, K. Avvirin Gray

Comparative Woman

In the appended collection of three poems, canopied under the title, ”Kinship Poems” I explore the possibilities for and practice of kinship between Native and African American women. In my first poem, ”Auntie,” a prose poem, I center non-sanguineous kinship affiliation in the decolonial project. In my final poem, I give equal consideration to biological kinship, by staging a speaker’s direct address to her unborn child.

Gotra I Choose, Aparajita Dutta

Comparative Woman

This poem is about kinship terms explored by a Bengali girl who came from West Bengal , India to Louisiana and found a family there after facing discrimination as an independent non-Brahmin woman.

Reverberations Of Boarding School Trauma In Upstate New York, Grace A. Miller

Comparative Woman

The legacy of boarding schools in Upstate New York is one that non-Natives seem to have forgotten. This historical amnesia compounds other acts of genocide, including cultural genocide, of the Haudenosaunee people throughout US history. Established in 1855 at the Cattaraugus Reservation (Seneca), the Thomas Indian School would serve as an institution of forced assimilation and displacement, much like the other Native American boarding schools. While the larger US population has grown to forget these schools' existence, the shadowed legacy of institutions, like the Thomas Indian School, Haskell, and Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the rippling effects of these schools’ practices …

Wolfpen Hollow, Amy Wright Vollmar

Comparative Woman

No abstract provided.

Twitter As Limited Digital Rhetorical Forum – The Reproductive Rights Discourse Online, Jacob L. Longini

Comparative Woman

Rhetorical discourse has long been characterized by patriarchal systems, and this reality has persisted in online spaces. How might today’s scholar dissect and better understand the nature of online communities, specifically those that engage in women’s rights discourses? I argue that using Thomas Farrell’s notion of “rhetorical forum”, James P. Zappen’s outline for digital rhetorical theory, and Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin’s feminist understanding of rhetorical practice, one can account for the current state of such discourses on Twitter. The patriarchal flaws that Foss and Griffin identify in traditional rhetoric can shed light on the negative aspects of …

Magpies, Bridge And Goddess: Unearthing The Hidden Symbols And Rediscovering The Lost Goddess In Chinese Qiqiao Festival, Juan Wu

Comparative Woman

The Qiqiao Festival, also known as the Qixi Festival, or Chinese valentine’s day, is a festival celebrating the annual meeting of the Cowherd and Weaver Maid in mythology. The most influential version focuses on the romance or love theme; however, it ignores its underlying historical context, gender tension and mythical belief. This paper takes the texts, rituals and materials related to the Qiqiao festival to investigate its origin and evolution. First, it takes the anthological case of the Qiqiao festival in Xihe county to explore its core image of the holy bridge and Goddess Qiao. Second, it traces the bridge …

Queer Historicism As Literary Theory: An Exploration Of Three Texts, Theodore D. Kenning

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

From “A Room Of Your Own” To “A Room Of Her Own”: Women Rewriting Women And The Path To Feminist Practice, Vasiliki Misiou

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) was first translated in Greek by Mina Dalamanga (Odysseus Editions) in 1980. Almost forty years later, in 2019, Vasia Tzanakari was assigned the translation of Woolf’s seminal text by Metaichmio Publications. And in 2021, a new translation by Sparti Gerodimou saw the light of day, published by Erato Publications (2021). Three different women translators have thus rendered Woolf’s text in Greek with all three publications coming out at times marked by significant changes in Greek society. Exploring the context in which the agents were situated and drawing on feminist translation practices and …

“Thinking Across Bodies”: Percepción Woolfiana Y Giro Material En La Cuentística De Rodoreda, Roig, Alós Y Riera, Ana Álvarez Guillén

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

Conventional understandings of perception have long undergirded traditional readings of Modernist texts in adopting a predominantly subject-centered perspective that separates subject from object in a vertical and hierarchical relationship. I argue that a consideration of Virginia Woolf’s short stories in dialogue with four generations of twentieth-century Catalan women writers who followed her work closely suggests an entirely different epistemological framework of perception in which subject and object are fluidly and horizontally organized. Mercè Rodoreda, Concha Alós, Montserrat Roig and Carme Riera establish a horizontal fictional dialogue that constitutes a return to matter that decenters the subject, resulting in an alternative …

Covid Implications For Southeastern States: A Thematic Analysis Of Influences From Leaders And Health Agencies Social Media Platforms, Jennifer Suber

Dissertations

The problem investigated in this study was the conflicting social media messages between the Office of the President and the two preeminent national health organizations (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the U.S. National Institutes of Health) regarding the COVID-19 crisis. The purpose of this study was to explore alignment and disconnect in the social media messaging between the Office of the President and the top two health organizations and subsequent state government decisions around the COVID 19 pandemic in the southeast region of the United States. …

การประกอบสร้างอัตลักษณ์นักเดินทางของกลุ่มนักเขียนเจเนอเรชั่นวายในบันทึกการเดินทางท่องเที่ยวร่วมสมัยของไทย, อรสุธี ชัยทองศรี

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

วิทยานิพนธ์ฉบับนี้ศึกษาการประกอบสร้างอัตลักษณ์นักเดินทางของกลุ่มนักเขียนเจเนอเรชั่นวายในบันทึกการเดินทางท่องเที่ยวร่วมสมัยของไทย ผลการวิจัยสรุปได้ว่ากลุ่มนักเขียนเจเนอเรชั่นวายซึ่งเกิดระหว่างพ.ศ.2523 – 2543 ได้ใช้บันทึกการเดินทางท่องเที่ยวร่วมสมัยในการประกอบสร้างอัตลักษณ์นักเดินทางผ่านองค์ประกอบของหนังสือบันทึกการเดินทาง ได้แก่ ยานพาหนะ ที่พัก และสถานที่ ทั้งนี้ อัตลักษณ์ที่ประกอบสร้างขึ้นเป็นผลมาจากวาทกรรมจำนวนมากที่ไหลเวียนอยู่ในสังคม ทั้งวาทกรรมที่ผูกติดกับงานเขียนประเภทนี้มาแต่เดิม และวาทกรรมที่สัมพันธ์กับบริบทสังคมปัจจุบันที่คนเจเนอเรชั่นวายเติบโตขึ้น การประกอบสร้างอัตลักษณ์ดังกล่าวเป็นไปเพื่อให้เห็นถึงรูปแบบวิถีชีวิตและรสนิยมที่เหนือกว่า อันเป็นผลมาจากความสามารถในการระดมทุนประเภทต่าง ๆ ที่คนเจเนอเรชั่นวายได้รับถ่ายทอดและปลูกฝังมาตั้งแต่เยาว์วัย ทำให้พวกเขามีศักยภาพที่เหนือกว่าในสนามการเดินทาง นอกจากนี้ การเดินทางและการประกอบสร้างอัตลักษณ์นักเดินทางยังเป็นส่วนหนึ่งของกระบวนการของการสั่งสมและนำมาซึ่งการแลกเปลี่ยนทุนที่ช่วยธำรงตำแหน่งแห่งที่ของพวกเขาในโครงสร้างทางสังคมเอาไว้นอกจากนี้ นักเขียนเจเนอเรชั่นวายยังได้ใช้สื่อสังคมออนไลน์เพื่อนำเสนอประสบการณ์การเดินทางด้วย โดยสื่อสังคมออนไลน์นี้ได้แสดงให้เห็นถึงรูปแบบและวิธีการนำเสนอประสบการณ์การเดินทางที่แตกต่างจากสื่อดั้งเดิม ได้แก่ ประสบการณ์การเดินทางจากวัฒนธรรมการมีส่วนร่วมระหว่างนักเขียนและผู้ติดตาม และการนำเสนอประสบการณ์ผ่านภาพซึ่งใช้การดูอันเป็นวิถีของการเสพสื่อใหม่ที่เข้ามาแทนที่การอ่าน อนึ่ง วัฒนธรรมการมีส่วนร่วมดังกล่าวยังทำให้นักเขียนต้องตอบสนองความต้องการของผู้ติดตามด้วยการปรับเปลี่ยนอัตลักษณ์ไปตามบริบทแวดล้อมรวมถึงเมื่อได้รับการวิพากษ์วิจารณ์เพื่อรักษาการมีส่วนร่วมบนสื่อสังคมออนไลน์เอาไว้ เนื่องจากปัจจุบันจำนวนผู้ติดตามและปฏิสัมพันธ์ที่เกิดขึ้นบนสื่อประเภทนี้นับเป็นทุนอีกลักษณะหนึ่งที่แปลงไปเป็นทุนประเภทอื่นได้ ปัจจัยดังกล่าวทำให้นักเขียนบันทึกการเดินทางบนสื่อสังคมออนไลน์กลายเป็นอินฟลูเอนเซอร์ที่ต้องรักษาสถานภาพของตนด้วยการปรับปรุงอัตลักษณ์ตามความคาดหวังของผู้ชมในฐานะผู้บริโภค อย่างไรก็ดี อัตลักษณ์นักเดินทางที่ปรากฏบนสื่อเหล่านี้อาจไม่ได้เป็นอัตลักษณ์ของปัจเจกบุคคล เนื่องจากการเป็นอินฟลูเอนเซอร์เป็นผลจากกระบวนการทำงานร่วมกันของหลายฝ่ายที่ผลิตและประกอบสร้างอัตลักษณ์นักเดินทางขึ้นเพื่อเป็นสินค้าประเภทหนึ่งในระบบทุนนิยมปัจจุบัน