Comparative Literature Commons^™

Comment By David Rosner, David Rosner

Comparative Civilizations Review

Human beings need to “make sense” out of the world, but our world is sometimes unintelligible.

Comment By Tseegai Isaac, Tseegai Isaac

Comparative Civilizations Review

Ethiopia is celebrated for its ancient biblical civilization. Its political traditions for centuries blended Old and New Testament tenets, creating templates for daily social and religious life.

Comment By David Wilkinson, David Wilkinson

Comparative Civilizations Review

In his life, Sorokin was variously a starving peasant orphan, an itinerant icon gilder, a self-taught bookworm, a political activist, a six-time political prisoner, an empirical penologist, a quantitative sociologist, a Socialist Revolutionary, a starving intellectual worker, an involuntary passenger on the Ship of Expelled Russian Thinkers, a founding comparative civilizationist, a conservative Christian anarchist, a Tolstoyan believer that “the Kingdom of God is within you,” and an elected write-in candidate for President of the American Sociological Association.

Editor's Note, Joseph Drew

Comparative Civilizations Review

The ferocity of Covid-19 has struck worldwide this year. In the process, all of humanity has been affected. Civilizations and societies, and nations large and small, have responded to the challenge, some with more success than others.

Chogyal Namkhai Norbu. The Light Of Kailash, A History Of Zhang Zhung And Tibet, Constance Wilkinson

Comparative Civilizations Review

The Light of Kailash : A History of Zhang Zhung and Tibet is a three-volume series by the late Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, former professor of Tibetan and Mongolian Language and Literature at the University of Naples L'Orientale. Born in Derge, Tibet, he spent much of his career researching the origins of pre-Buddhist Tibetan culture, finding sources in an ancient civilization, Zhang Zhung1, and an indigenous ritual tradition, Bon2.

Civilizational Dynamics Of "Hybrid Warfare", Stephen T. Satkiewicz

Comparative Civilizations Review

Since the end of the Cold War, analysts have struggled to make sense of the proliferation of smaller scale conflicts. Several labels have been used to describe this phenomenon, the most recent being “Hybrid Warfare.” This paper attempts to analyze them through the perspective of civilizational theory.

Very rarely, however, have the civilizational dimensions to these "Hybrid Wars" been extensively addressed. Considering that civilizations represent collective identities on perhaps the most macro-scale, they play an important potential dimension in this ongoing debate. Avoiding any gross simplified variation of a "clash of civilizations" type thesis, a civilizational perspective into this debate …

Pestilence And Other Calamities In Civilizational Theory: Sorokin, Mcneill, Diamond, And Beyond, Vlad Alalykin-Izvekov

Comparative Civilizations Review

This paper analyses the phenomenon of pestilence through paradigmatic and methodological lenses of several outstanding social scholars, including Pitirim A. Sorokin, William H. McNeill, and Jared M. Diamond. All three thinkers have advanced original, fundamental, and revolutionary paradigms regarding the profound role which infectious diseases played, are playing, and will continue to play in world history and culture. The phenomenon of pestilence is studied in the context of other major calamities. The relevant historic, as well as contemporary macro-level and long-term sociocultural research, is reviewed. The author advances a number of original concepts, as well as makes relevant projections into …

St. Thomas Aquinas And The Third Hellenization Period, Demetri Kantarelis

Comparative Civilizations Review

In this paper, I assert that currently the world has been experiencing the Third Hellenization Period that started with the Italian Renaissance, instigated by the teachings of the theologian and philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 CE). Unlike philosophers in previous periods (First and Second Hellenization as well as Medieval), St. Thomas preached that Truth is a function of both Natural Revelation and Supernatural Revelation. This resulted in, simultaneously, Christianizing Aristotle (St. Thomas’ most referenced philosopher) and Aristotleizing Christianity, thus opening up the doors to human reason that had been muted during the Medieval centuries.

I also assert that the basic …

Locke’S Rebellious Progeny: Phenomenology And Ethics Of Leopardi’S A-Dialectical Materialism, Paolo Pellecchia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With this study I reconstruct a genealogy of the a-dialectic materialism that defines the production of 19^th-century Italian author Giacomo Leopardi and with which he criticizes canonical metaphysical stances. In this regard, I consider John Locke as the first instance of a philosophical outlook that stands as an alternative to the anthropocentrism demanded by traditional metaphysics. By focusing on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and its significant influence on Leopardi’s philosophical and aesthetic work, I emphasize how Locke’s system finds a synthetic formulation in the hypothesis, at the time highly contested yet groundbreaking, that matter might be endowed …

The Twilight Of The Absolute: Russian Symbolism And The Romantic Project, Evgeniya A. Koroleva

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation project, The Twilight of the Absolute: Russian Symbolism and the Romantic Project, scrutinizes and interrogates the premises of so called “influence studies” by examining one tangled instance of cultural interaction—the relation between early German Romanticism (the brothers Schlegel, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, and Friedrich Schelling) and the second wave of Russian Symbolism (Andrei Belyi, Aleksandr Blok, and Viacheslav Ivanov). In the scarce secondary literature that touches upon this complex literary-historical problem, Russian Symbolists are often unproblematically represented as proud “neo-Romantics,” passive recipients of the Romantic intellectual legacy. The major claim I advance in my thesis is that Jena Romanticism, …

Creative Nothingness: Dada As Art, Politics And Religion In Interwar Japan, James Mark Shields

Faculty Journal Articles

The decades immediately following the Meiji Restoration of 1868 saw Japan rapidly develop as a “modern” nation — replete with industrial technology, a powerful and sophisticated military, a burgeoning capitalist economy, a broad based educational system, and, by the early twentieth century, a massive influx of contemporary Western political, philosophical, literary and artistic ideals, including socialism, anarchism, and nearly all variations of avant-garde art and aesthetics. By the end of the Meiji period, however, with the crackdown on leftist activities in the wake of the High Treason Incident (1910–1911) and the slow but steady accretion of Japanese imperialist ideology through …

Full Issue

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Shamanic Performancesjoseph Beuys's Der Eurasier, Eurasia Siberian Symphony, And Auschwitz Demonstration, Caroline Rupprecht

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Fatale Monstrum And The Nasty Woman: Gendered Political Representations Of Cleopatra Vii And Hillary Rodham Clinton, Emma Baker

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines the use of gender expectations in representations of two historically significant and politically powerful women: Cleopatra VII and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Though their situations were in some ways quite different, each of these women crafted her public image carefully, using both masculine and feminine gender expectations to represent herself as a powerful, capable leader and as a strong, caring mother. Their political enemies similarly drew on both masculine and feminine gender norms in order to represent these women both as dangerous, emasculating, monstrous figures who had to be conquered and as weak and incapable of leadership. The …

10 Theses On Feminist Economics (Or The Antagonism Between The Strike And Finance), Luci Cavallero, Verónica Gago

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article, “10 Theses on Feminist Economics (or the antagonism between the strike and finance),” Luci Cavallero and Verónica Gago are interested in a feminist economics that is able to redefine, based on the bodies and territories in conflict, labor and exploitation, communal and feminized modes of doing and resisting, and popular innovation in moments of crisis. They write from the position of having formed part of the organizing for the feminist strike that, since 2016, has driven what they characterize as a massive, radical, and transnational movement. They root the theses that they synthesize here in that dynamic …

Readymade Or Made [To Be] Ready, Replicant Or Surplus: Social Reproduction And The Biopolitics Of Abstraction Prefigured In Contemporary Art, Jaleh Mansoor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The artist may be one of the last subject-positions within capitalism to determine their own labour under the sign of “creativity,” and to be held at an oblique angle to value productive labour; they are dialectically “free” to be creative (Adorno, Vishmidt, Stakemeir, Beech). But since 1973 if not 1915, artists mark this creative capacity as a process whereby reification has migrated from that of the object to that of the subject, to the artist-subject, now heightened in a post-industrial era of “feminized” and immaterial labour where service eclipses production. Artists in the “post medium condition” elaborate practices that track …

Detroit’S Water Wars: Race, Failing Social Reproduction, And Infrastructure, Brian Whitener

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this essay, I theorize an emergent urban power dynamic of infrastructural resource grabs or the use of state power to transfer infrastructural resources away from marginalized, racialized, and/or precariously documented populations. As a transfer, rather than a set of cuts or privatizations, I argue this dynamic is distinct from those of neoliberal or “shrinking” states and is a direct attack on the social reproduction capacity of communities and individuals. Focusing on the case of Detroit, where predominantly white suburban elites succeeded under the cover of Detroit’s 2013-14 bankruptcy proceedings to pry the possession of the water and sewage infrastructure …

No Estamos Todas, Faltan Las Presas! Contemporary Feminist Practices Building Paths Toward Prison Abolition, Susana Draper

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article focuses on a small but crucial aspect of the question of gendered violence and the multiple injustices that feminist mobilizations have once again brought into mainstream discussion: how do we find ways out of women’s imprisonment and stop the abusive violence that permeates institutional and domestic spheres without relying on those same forms of violence as a solution to the problems we face? This is a question that comes from a long history of knowledge-praxis created by groups of radical Black feminist women, and women of color, trans, and queer people, working together on the problematization of gendered …

Toward An Ecology Of Life-Making: The Re-Membering Of Meridel Le Sueur, Rosemary Hennessy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay advances Marxist feminism’s attention to social reproduction in order to account more fully for the relations that support life-making. The ecology of life-making is, I argue, an under-developed facet of social reproduction theory and an extension of its reach. I begin by clarifying social reproduction theory’s explanations of the value of reproductive labor time to life-making. I then turn to feminist political ecology’s attention to capital’s deregulation of life and to Native feminist onto-epistemologies as they expand the material history of capital’s theft of time and imposition of embodied debt. In the essay’s final section, I consider the …

Fourier, Marx, And Social Reproduction, Blanca Missé

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article establishes a conversation between the work of materialist socialist Charles Fourier and Marxist social reproduction theory (SRT). SRT has laid the ground to explore who produces the producer, in order to analyze and integrate the role of reproductive labor into a comprehensive Marxist view of the capitalist economy. In the context of the critical re-appraisal of the labor of social reproduction, Fourier offers a key materialist perspective which is also present in Marx: the identity between labor and desire in the socialist project. Fourier's materialism, I show, greatly influenced both Marx and Engels, for whom labor was also …

Labor Valorization And Social Reproduction: What Is Valuable About The Labor Theory Of Value?, Kate Doyle Griffiths

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article argues that Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) is the trend best positioned for further developing classical Marxist accounts of the labor theory of value, through a concrete historical account of the family as a capitalist institution. To do so, it traces debates about value within and beyond the range of Marxist-feminist accounts of labor, of the strike tactic and of circulation. These debates include the revival of demands for “wages for housework” and the call for a politics of the commons by Silvia Federici and David Harvey. In particular, Amy D’Aths articulation of a social reproduction account of value …

Social Reproduction Theory And The Form Of Labor Power, Aaron Jaffe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) centers the production and reproduction of labor power under capitalism. This power to labor is determined individually, socially, and in relation to the totality of capital. These powers are produced and reproduced in and through social relations that, while capitalist, have tremendously diverse local conditions and histories. SRT provides a framework to think through the oppressive logics shaping the production, reproduction, and potencies of labor powers understood as diversely constituted. It argues that SRT is committed to the diversity of these labor powers over and against conditions that constrain both these powers and their actualizations in …

Social Reproduction In The Making: Recentering The Margins, Expanding The Directions, Zhivka Valiavicharska

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay aims to broaden existing historical narratives of social reproduction by revisiting Black-feminist, postcolonial feminist, and migrant diasporic writings on social reproduction from the 1970s onwards. Centering on the historical experience of women of color, migrant communities, and women in postcolonial contexts and other parts of the world, these writings develop much-needed critiques of dominant social reproduction themes developed in the capitalist contexts in Western Europe and North America. These alternative feminist methodologies and historical accounts add important correctives to what is becoming the main corpus of social reproduction theory and its historiography today. They contain political potentials that …

The Politics Of Social Reproduction. An Introduction, Cinzia Arruzza, Kelly Gawel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This introduction speaks to political struggle and transformation on the terrain of social reproduction, as presented by the contributors to this special edition of CLCWeb. The concerns of this special issue include critical analysis of international, national and local policies contributing to the gendered, class and racialized dimensions of social reproduction; the articulation of mass movements around social reproductive needs and demands; insurgent forms of care, commoning and autonomous life-making from below and from the margins; the imbrication of immigration, racialization and social reproduction; coalition building between labor and reproductive struggles; ecological and human life between and beyond capitalist forms, …

Perbandingan Terjemahan Metafora Antara Merpati Putih Terbang Lagi Dan Rang Bai Ge Zai Ci Fei Xiang, Othman Nur Akmal

Student Works (2020-2029)

Metafora merupakan bahasa figuratif yang sering kali digunakan dalam karya-karya sastera. Penggunaan metafora menjadikan sesuatu karya itu sukar untuk diterjemahkan, sesuai dengan kenyataan Newmark (1981) yang menyatakan bahawa terjemahan metafora merupakan satu permasalahan utama dalam bidang penterjemahan. Sehubungan itu, analisis terjemahan metafora daripada bahasa Melayu (BM) ke bahasa Cina (BC) dalam karya Merpati Putih Terbang Lagi oleh Khadijah Hashim dan terjemahannya, iaitu Rang Bai Ge Zai Ci Fei Xiang(让白鸽再次飞翔) akan dijalankan. Dalam kajian ini, pendekatan penterjemahan Newmark (1981) digunakan bagi meneliti strategi terjemahan metafora, manakala kerangka kajian Sakina Sahuri Suffian Sahuri (2000) pula digunakan bagi menentukan medan sumber metafora BM …

Sexual Violence, Traumatic Memory, And Speculative Fiction As Action, Kate Rose

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

Starhawk’s speculative novel City of Refuge (2015) depicts rape trauma and its consequences in a dystopian society that is the logical conclusion of patriarchy. French psychiatrist Muriel Salmona’s research on how traumatic memory contributes to inequality and how reconstructing narrative can heal survivors places her similarly at the intersection of story and activism. City of Refuge is a literary experiment focused on survivors of institutionalized sexual assault, while Salmona’s work maps consequences of traumatic memory linked to childhood sexual violence. The basic tenet of narrative medicine that life experience affects mental and physical health coincides with Salmona’s critique of how …

De La Novela Picaresca A El Chavo Del 8, Carlos Aguasaco

Publications and Research

Los albores de la modernidad[i] coincidieron con la emergencia de la novela picaresca en la que temas como la niñez, la educación, la pobreza agravada por el hambre extrema, y la idea de la movilidad social, aparecieron representados en obras muy populares como El Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), El Buscón (1626), El Periquillo Sarniento (1819) y La vida inútil de Pito Pérez (1938). La popularidad de la novela picaresca emanaba de su novedosos realismo social y urbano, sumados a la disponibilidad de copias hecha posible gracias a la imprenta de Gutenberg. El Chavo del 8 (1971-1980) ha tenido una …

Sex, Lies, And Murder: Feminized Detective Fiction And The English Estate Novel, Meaghan Lanctot

The Criterion

In Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Ian McEwan’s Atonement, the protagonists unravel the events of egregious crimes and their own complicity with the central tragedies. Set against the backdrop of crumbling English estates, the crimes highlight the erosion of the British ruling class at the onset of the 20th century. The unnamed narrator of Rebecca and Briony, the narrator of Atonement, are bound by their youth, age, and gender in their respective investigations into the sinister events that plague the history of Manderley and the Tallis estate, respectively. We see how the English estate is a hotbed of illicit …

Bodies In Shame: Writing Trauma And Affective Unsettlement In Post-Genocide Rwanda Fiction, Cole A. Carvour

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis analyzes Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi, le livre des ossements and Véronique Tadjo’s L’Ombre d’Imana: voyages jusqu’au bout du Rwanda. I argue that both authors write trauma by employing both a dominant realist style and the trauma aesthetic with attention to the embodied experiences of genocide victims and survivors in both styles. In doing so, each author contributes to impeding indifference surrounding the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Furthermore, I assert that one effect of writing trauma is that of affective unsettlement or affective travel, or the registering of psychic and physical shame and other related affective responses in the …

Digital Orihon (デジタル折り本): The (Un)Continuous Shape Of The Novel., David T.H. Wright

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

In ‘The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-first Century Literature’, Jessica Pressman (2009) proposes that the aesthetic of ‘bookishness’ is as old as the book form. The Tale of Genji (源氏物語) by Murasaki Shikibu is often considered the world’s first modern novel. The text is presented as an ‘orihon’ (折本): a ‘long strip of paper that is pleated into a stack, with a cover pasted at each end of the stack’ (Atwood, 10). ‘Orihon’ is a combination of the Japanese word for ‘fold’ (折) and ‘book’ or ‘source’ (本). The orihon is often also referred to as an ‘accordion’ book.

Digital …