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Articles 1321 - 1350 of 7714

Full-Text Articles in Comparative Literature

Confinement, Care, And Commodification In Mati Diop’S In My Room, Brittany Murray Aug 2022

Confinement, Care, And Commodification In Mati Diop’S In My Room, Brittany Murray

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Confinement, Care, and the Commodification in Mati Diop’s In My Room,” Brittany Murray discusses a short film released in 2020 by the French and Senegalese director, Mati Diop. Shot in the artist’s studio in a Parisian banlieue during mandatory Covid-19 confinement, the film tackles the issues of grief, isolation, and care. The article shows how the film represents these issues, particularly urgent during the pandemic and yet belonging to longstanding concerns about care work and reproductive labor. To mediate between present crisis and a larger historical framework, the article demonstrates how the film’s formal attributes make a …


Reading The Global City: Crisis, Cognitive Mapping And The “Urban Sensorium” In Tom Mccarthy’S Satin Island And Ben Lerner’S 10:04, Marty Gilroy Aug 2022

Reading The Global City: Crisis, Cognitive Mapping And The “Urban Sensorium” In Tom Mccarthy’S Satin Island And Ben Lerner’S 10:04, Marty Gilroy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

“What is the role played by the aesthetics and politics of space,” asks Kanishka Goonewardena, “in producing and reproducing the durable disjunction between the consciousness of our urban everyday life […] and the now global structure of social relations that is itself ultimately responsible for producing the spaces of our lived-experience?” (55). Goonewardena’s account of the “urban sensorium” describes the mediatory, ideological role played by space in this “gap,” informing his adaptation of Jameson’s “cognitive mapping” as a hermeneutics of urban experience vis-à-vis totality. This article considers the mediation of these insights as critical aesthetic strategies in two global city …


Literature And Economy In Portuguese-Speaking Southern Africa, Thomas Waller Aug 2022

Literature And Economy In Portuguese-Speaking Southern Africa, Thomas Waller

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Literature and Economy in Portuguese-speaking Southern Africa”, Thomas Waller offers a comparative reading of literary responses to neoliberalization in Portuguese-speaking southern Africa. Reading the proliferation of spectral effects in the Mozambican literature of the late 1980s alongside dystopian depictions of societal collapse in contemporary Angolan fiction, he suggests that writers in the two states have used distinctive aesthetic idioms to register the reintegration of southern Africa into the neoliberal world-system. In the fiction of Mozambican writers Aldino Muianga and Aníbal Aleluia, he shows how the legacy of colonial underdevelopment and its role in the transition to neoliberalism in Mozambique …


Conjunctures, Commodities, And Social State Marxism, Stephen Shapiro Aug 2022

Conjunctures, Commodities, And Social State Marxism, Stephen Shapiro

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article, “Conjunctures, Commodities, and Social State Marxism,” Stephen Shapiro discusses our current moment as the conjuncture of three temporalities: a secular trend of centrist liberalism, a Kress cycle of managerial capitalism, and three Kondratieff waves. These can be understood by the addition of implied terms in Marx’s advanced discussion of the commodity-form through an approach that Shapiro calls Social State Marxism.


Periodizing The Present: The 2020s, The Longue Durée, & Contemporary Culture, Treasa De Loughry, Brittany Murray Aug 2022

Periodizing The Present: The 2020s, The Longue Durée, & Contemporary Culture, Treasa De Loughry, Brittany Murray

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


The Fallacy And Verification Of Criticism On Contemporary Chinese Confessional Poetry, Lei Wei Aug 2022

The Fallacy And Verification Of Criticism On Contemporary Chinese Confessional Poetry, Lei Wei

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Contemporary Chinese confessional poetry has engaged much academic attention despite its short existence between the 1980s and the 1990s. The confessional poetry has been related with female poetry by scholars since the beginning, and they have been criticized for lacking Chinese cultural characteristics, skills or aesthetic values etc.. However, contemporary Chinese confessional poetry is not exclusively the product of female poets, as there are quite a few male poets who created some fine confessional poems. Chinese confessional poetry of new period turned out to be embodied with a literary form of strong nationalistic features and contain rich elements of traditional …


Intentional Entanglement : Walter Benjamin, Transcendental Yet Speculative, Darstellung, Andrew Brooks Aug 2022

Intentional Entanglement : Walter Benjamin, Transcendental Yet Speculative, Darstellung, Andrew Brooks

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation consists of retranslations of three essays by Walter Benjamin: “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy,” “The Task of the Translator” and “La traduction—le pour et le contre.” Each section and interlinear retranslation-commentary builds on the previous, moving from 1) Benjamin’s “transcendental yet speculative” philosophical foundation for experience, to 2) the importance of a performative Darstellung [performative presentation] which places criticism/philosophy/translation between science and poetry, 3) the conception of translation for Benjamin in 1923 within the frame of said philosophy and Darstellung, juxtaposed with his conception of translation in 1936, after his materialist aesthetic turn. The necessity of …


Unraveling Dna And Identity: A Humanistic Perspective On Epistemologies And Ethics Of Genetic Ancestry Testing., Eve Carlisle Polley Aug 2022

Unraveling Dna And Identity: A Humanistic Perspective On Epistemologies And Ethics Of Genetic Ancestry Testing., Eve Carlisle Polley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The advent of DNA ancestry testing motivated a burst of human activities that constitute a scientific-technological-industrial-personal-social movement of immense scale, infused with epistemological and ethical questions of great and important variety. This movement has motivated many discourses in the social sciences, with study subjects ranging from the language usage of geneticists, to moral conundrums faced by test-takers, to potential ramifications in global structures of political power. At the same time, and especially in recent decades, the discourses of the comparative humanities have included with increasing frequency and urgency research and theorization about concepts and consequences of human social identities, alongside …


Trade Study Analysis Of The Janus Moon Lander Vehicle, Omar Vazquez Aug 2022

Trade Study Analysis Of The Janus Moon Lander Vehicle, Omar Vazquez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Liquid Oxygen (LOX) and Liquid Methane (LCH4) has become a propellant combination of interest in the recent years, especially for leading aerospace companies with the sight set on mars such as SpaceX and Blue Origin in their heavy thrust engines (the Raptor and BE-4 respectively) since methane can be more stable than hydrogen, can be stored at more manageable temperatures and can be produced locally, at mars, using in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) [1].The Center for Space Exploration and Technology Research (cSETR) has developed a 500 lbf throttleable (4:1) thrust chamber (CROME) using the aforementioned propellant combination with the intention of …


Conceptions Of Space, Gender, And Movement Within Literature And Film: An Analysis Of "The Whimper Of Whipped Dogs" & Westward The Women, Stephanie Fishleigh Aug 2022

Conceptions Of Space, Gender, And Movement Within Literature And Film: An Analysis Of "The Whimper Of Whipped Dogs" & Westward The Women, Stephanie Fishleigh

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Often portrayed as static, and neutral, “space,” as it is used in this paper, refers to a literary conception, one which encompasses a sphere of locations as well as settings of events, characters, and objects within a literary narrative. Much to our detriment, humans are often compelled to codify and compartmentalize the world around us, using perceived differences as our epistemological touchstone. This phenomenon extends even to our relationship to space. In examining the interplay between space, geographies, genre, and gender, using two objects of analysis, this paper seeks to further the current scholarship on how gender ideology informs our …


When Books Sing: The Musicalization Of Fiction And Intermediality In Craig Russell’S Fragment, Kathleen Collins Aug 2022

When Books Sing: The Musicalization Of Fiction And Intermediality In Craig Russell’S Fragment, Kathleen Collins

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Craig Russell’s novel Fragment merges a science fiction story of first contact between humans and whales and a chilling ecological disaster warning into one high action-adventure novel of the sea. Undergirding the novel and its many musical references is a rondo musical structure, manifested in the use of several geographical locations and a diverse group of character singers, both human and other. To uncover this, I will define and apply the contemporary theory of intermediality to the novel, and, along the way, expand the definition and consequences of the theory of intermediality. The result will be an ever-increasing interconnectedness to …


Book Review: The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel: Quests For Meaningfulness, Sabah Carrim Jul 2022

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

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.


Geography Of A “Foreign” China: British Intellectuals’ Encounter With Chinese Spaces, 1920-1945, Yuzhu Sun Jul 2022

Geography Of A “Foreign” China: British Intellectuals’ Encounter With Chinese Spaces, 1920-1945, Yuzhu Sun

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how eleven British intellectuals, who lived in or traveled to China from the early to mid twentieth century, represent Chinese spaces and how Chinese spaces shape their identities. This group of writers includes WilliamSomerset Maugham, Robert William Swallow, Ann Bridge, Stella Benson, Maurice Denton Welch, Harold Acton, Osbert Sitwell, Peter Quennell, Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, and J.G. Ballard. Multiple genres, including travel writing, diaries, poetry, and fiction, based on the authors’ real experiences in China constitute the research corpus. Current scholarship has researched these works fromhistorical andsocio-political viewpoints, but the spatial perspective has been ignored. Edward Soja’s …


Nelly Arcan, Langage De La Honte, Jordon B. Mcconnell Jul 2022

Nelly Arcan, Langage De La Honte, Jordon B. Mcconnell

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the role that shame plays as a subversive tool in the works of Québécoise author Nelly Arcan. Dealing with themes such as sexuality, gender, suicide, and resentment, Arcan’s works deal with that which can be deemed “shameful,” and she deliberately speaks the unspeakable. First in constructing an understanding in how a shame-based vocabulary is employed throughout her works, we then study how this shame subverts expectations and adds weight to political questions relevant to the widespread use of electronic media. How does intentionally occupying a role that is shamed within society function …


Nami-Ko: A Realistic Novel, Kenjiro Tokutomi Jul 2022

Nami-Ko: A Realistic Novel, Kenjiro Tokutomi

Zea E-Books Collection

Nami-Ko, also called The Cuckoo (不如帰, Hototogisu), is a tragic story of love and devotion, through sickness, war, oppression, and vengeance. Eighteen-year-old Nami Kataoka hoped her marriage to Baron Takeo Kawashima would bring freedom from her overbearing stepmother. But the couple’s happiness is spoiled by her illness, her mother-in-law’s jealousy, and the schemes of Chijiwa, her husband’s cousin and her own disappointed suitor. Takeo’s naval career takes him away for long periods, and when war breaks out between Japan and China (in 1894), his mother takes advantage of his absence to break up the marriage, sending Nami back …


Truth And Identity In Dostoevsky’S Raskolnikov And Prince Myshkin, Gwendolyn Walker Jul 2022

Truth And Identity In Dostoevsky’S Raskolnikov And Prince Myshkin, Gwendolyn Walker

Theses and Dissertations

Situated in the context of Bakhtin’s understanding of Dostoevsky’s narrative structure, the goal of this thesis aims to analyze the ways in which Dostoevsky’s characters negotiate their identities through a dialogic process of truth-telling as it appears in two forms: an explicit expression of truth that is consciously made by a novel’s characters in earnest dialogue, and an unspoken, even unconscious expression of truth that is not openly expressed, but can be inferred from the seemingly illogical reactions and behaviors of characters in the novel. The latter form is established in terms of Freud’s discussion of the unconscious and unconscious …


Afro-Diasporic Literatures Of The United States And Brazil: Imaginaries, Counter-Narratives, And Black Feminism In The Americas, David E. S. Beek Jul 2022

Afro-Diasporic Literatures Of The United States And Brazil: Imaginaries, Counter-Narratives, And Black Feminism In The Americas, David E. S. Beek

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores contemporary Afro-diasporic literatures by black cultural producers in the United States and Brazil that resist, subvert, and dismantle the persistent myth of Brazilian racial democracy. From the US, I investigate John Keene’s 2015 collection of stories and novellas Counternarratives, in addition to Gayl Jones’ 2021 novel Palmares. Conversely, from Brazil, I examine Conceição Evaristo’s 2003 novel Ponciá Vicêncio, as well as the black trans musician and slam poet Bixarte’s social media performance art. Although these Afro-diasporic literatures deconstruct the myth of racial democracy in Brazil, at the same time, each is entangled with what …


Ghost (Hi)Stories: Fiction As Alternative History In Brodber, Valdés, Cisneros, And Condé, Kristina Suzette Gibby Jun 2022

Ghost (Hi)Stories: Fiction As Alternative History In Brodber, Valdés, Cisneros, And Condé, Kristina Suzette Gibby

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the role that female ghosts play in recuperating memory and filling the gaps of official history in the following four contemporary novels: Erna Brodber’s Louisiana (1994), Zoé Valdés’s Te di la vida entera (1996), Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo: or, Puro Cuento (2002), and Maryse Condé’s Victoire, les saveurs et les mots: récit (2006). The ghosts in these novels disrupt a linear temporality and present a matriarchal mode of remembering, leading readers to reconsider the past outside of the dominant historical discourse. In this way, the novels become alternative histories that oppose the monologic historical paradigm and recuperate marginalized …


Womanist Poetics: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, And Audre Lorde, Aya Telmissany Jun 2022

Womanist Poetics: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, And Audre Lorde, Aya Telmissany

Theses and Dissertations

Today, the sentimentality associated with poetry is often condescendingly dubbed in a patriarchal society as “feminine poetry.” The first women poets who dared to attempt the pen were often met with attacks on their femaleness and harsh critiques of their writing which was likened to sorcery and witchcraft. Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Audre Lorde are three American women poets who countered these attacks and turned them inside out in favor of their own womanist poetics. They wrote about experiencing the world as women and most importantly about experiencing poetry as women. What happens to poetry when a woman appropriates …


Marianismo And The Catholic Autobiographer: A Comparative Analysis, Nina Lee Jun 2022

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 …


The Flow Of (Re)Memory In African American And Nubian Egyptian Literature: Morrison, Oddoul, And Mukhtar, Bushra Hashem Jun 2022

The Flow Of (Re)Memory In African American And Nubian Egyptian Literature: Morrison, Oddoul, And Mukhtar, Bushra Hashem

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to define the term rememory, which Toni Morrison coins in her novel Beloved, and explore its interplay with water imagery in the novel and in two Nubian short stories, namely Haggag Oddoul’s “The River People” and Yahya Mukhtar’s “The Nile Bride.” The three narratives have core common features: they centralize water bodies as key sites of events, they depend heavily on the retelling of history and mythology, and they are told predominantly from the perspective of women. How do the writers weave rememory, history, and mythology to produce these narratives? Are they attempting to …


Voicing Female Servitude In Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, Jean Rhys, And Taha Hussein, Muhammed Salem Jun 2022

Voicing Female Servitude In Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, Jean Rhys, And Taha Hussein, Muhammed Salem

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the literary portrayal of the female servant in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1816-1865), Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1890-1979), and The Call of the Curlew by Taha Hussein (1889-1973), within the theoretical framework of subaltern and gender studies. The study shows how three female subordinates in Victorian England, Postcolonial Caribbean Islands, in addition to Bedouin Egypt bargain while trying to dismantle their intersectional subordination within the patriarchal order. The problematic yet romanticized portrayal of governessing in Jane Eyre becomes a commoditized servitude, which requires active resistance in the postcolonial setting of Wide. As for The …


“A Sick Eagle” And “I Am”: Hymns To Sculpture By Keats And Rilke, Ya-Feng Wu Jun 2022

“A Sick Eagle” And “I Am”: Hymns To Sculpture By Keats And Rilke, Ya-Feng Wu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

At the turn of eighteenth and nineteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, sculpture came to serve as an emblem of humanity’s response to the challenges of the times. John Keats and Rainer Maria Rilke, felt compelled at their encounters with ancient Greek sculpture in the museum to reflect upon their vocation in an age disrupted by political upheaval and rampant commercialization respectively. Keats’s sonnet, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817), registers an intimation of his latent grandeur in the form of a “sick eagle,” confronting “a shadow of a magnitude.” To overcome this experience, Keats made attempts at epic on the …


Female Bonding And Marginality In Shang Wanyun’S Novella “Xialihe” (1978), Antonio Paoliello Jun 2022

Female Bonding And Marginality In Shang Wanyun’S Novella “Xialihe” (1978), Antonio Paoliello

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article explores the representation of homosociality between two marginalized female characters in “Xialihe” (夏麗赫) (1978), a novella by Sinophone Malaysian writer Shang Wanyun (商晚) (1952-1995). Although some scholars have suggested that the writer’s preoccupation with the intimate world of women started only in the 1980s, I argue that “Xialihe” already highlights issues such as female intimacy and women’s social marginalization. The text represents, therefore, a link between her earlier nativist production and her later more feminist approach. Additionally, I contend that, writing from a marginal position at the periphery of Malaysia’s national literary system and from a doubly-conservative environment …


Trauma, History, And Terror In The Poetry Of Yusef Komunyakaa And Sinan Antoon, Reema Binghadeer Jun 2022

Trauma, History, And Terror In The Poetry Of Yusef Komunyakaa And Sinan Antoon, Reema Binghadeer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her comparative study “Trauma, History, and Terror in the Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa and Sinan Antoon,” Reema Binghadeer considers the work of the African American poet Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1941) and the (Arab) Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon (b. 1967) through the lens of trauma theory of some notable theorists including; Freud, Cathy Caruth, Jean Laplanche, Roger Luckhurst, and Shoshana Felman—have negotiated in this field. The article explores the literary manifestations of trauma in two distinct historical periods and geographical settings to show the specificities of each prototype and how the historical-cultural significance and textual meanings of trauma have intertwined …


The Extinction Race: Techniques Of The Human In Proust, Via Houellebecq, James Dutton Jun 2022

The Extinction Race: Techniques Of The Human In Proust, Via Houellebecq, James Dutton

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, “The Extinction Race: Techniques of the Human in Proust, via Houellebecq” James Dutton “reads” identity and race from the point of view of technics. Namely, he does so through the work of two nominally “Eurocentric” authors, Marcel Proust and Michel Houellebecq, observing how familial and racial resemblance is a living inscription of “lost time.” This inscription comes about through the technical means available to and constitutive of the categories which bind them. Thus, instead of furthering unfinishable racial distinctions which only serve to support discourses of racism, this article follows assertions made in the novels of …


The Silmarillion By J.R.R. Tolkien And Shahnameh By Firdausi: A Sadraic Interpretation Of Free Will And Determinism, Mohsen Hanif, Masoud Tadayoni Jun 2022

The Silmarillion By J.R.R. Tolkien And Shahnameh By Firdausi: A Sadraic Interpretation Of Free Will And Determinism, Mohsen Hanif, Masoud Tadayoni

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Fate, doom, and free will have always proved to be controversial terms among philosophers. The chief problem is whether a deterministic power prescribes the destiny of creatures or they possess pure free will in shaping their destinies. Mulla Sadra, a 17th century Iranian philosopher, believes in a blending of determinism and free will which he develops in the terms of Qaza and Qadar respectively. He introduces a model of fate through which determinism and free will equally participate. Using the human soul as a model, Mulla Sadra points out that people meet their fate through several factors, one of which …


The Turn Toward The Nonhuman In Susan Straight’S A Million Nightingales, Katarzyna E. Nowak-Mcneice Jun 2022

The Turn Toward The Nonhuman In Susan Straight’S A Million Nightingales, Katarzyna E. Nowak-Mcneice

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article proposes a reading of Susan Straight’s 2006 novel A Million Nightingales in the light of critical posthumanities, focusing specifically on references to nonhuman animals. It does so in order to place Straight’s writing within the context of the recent posthumanist debate concerning the distinction between human and nonhuman animals (cf. Donna Haraway, Cary Wolfe). I claim that while addressing the “fused” discrimination (after Carol J. Adams) of sexism, racism, and speciesism, Straight’s prose can be seen as a proposition of a reconfigured subjectivity, one based on “entanglement” and “intra-action” (Karen Barad). A Million Nightingales, which – together …


Cooling Down Transmedia Storytelling, Jan Baetens, Domingo Sánchez-Mesa Jun 2022

Cooling Down Transmedia Storytelling, Jan Baetens, Domingo Sánchez-Mesa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this article we propose a reading of “Dead End Street”, one of the most successful songs of one of the most popular British pop groups of the 60s, The Kinks. However, we will not discuss the song as such, but its remediation as a music video (a practice that did not have to wait for MTV to make its appearance in mass media culture). The analysis will briefly contextualize the group, the song and the clip, but its major objective is to use the Kinks example to open a new question in the larger debate on intermediality and transmediality …


Extending The Frontiers Of The Detective Novel In Adaora Ulasi’S The Man From Sagamu, Onyeka Odoh Jun 2022

Extending The Frontiers Of The Detective Novel In Adaora Ulasi’S The Man From Sagamu, Onyeka Odoh

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Part of the beauty of detective literature is the mental engagement and psychological contest it stages between the author and the readers, as well as its fascinating probe into the nature and dynamism of crime. However, of greater import are the formulaic structural elements that define the genre—a crime, the detection of the crime, an omniscient detective who intelligently investigates the crime, and a justified resolution of all. Though the structure of Adaora Ulasi’s The Man from Sagamu does not exactly fit into the above model, it is still a detective novel. Therefore, this essay aims to propose a new …