Comparative Literature Commons^™

The Translator-Function: Translating Bande-Dessinée For The Anglophone Reader, Ryan C. Gomez

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis focuses on the question of translator roles in literary theory. I characterize these roles between positions that have traditionally been described by literary and philosophical theorists such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. By examining the products of translation (French-language bandes-dessinées and their English translations), and considering critical literary and translation theories, I demonstrate the unique position held by translators and their work through the proposal of what I call the translator-function (modeled after Foucault’s author-function). The principal aim of this thesis is to problematize preconceived ideas about translators and to examine the unique position of the …

Why I Write In Yiddish, Karen Alkalay-Gut

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

A Hebrew Poet Writes In English About The Holocaust, Avraham Balaban

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The Hope Of Salman Masalha: Re-Territorializing Hebrew, Yael Dekel, Eran Tzelgov

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Israeli poetry can be depicted as a triangle composed of three elements: territory (the State of Israel); language (Hebrew); and identity (Jewish). In his Hebrew collection of poetry Eḥad Mikan (in place, 2004), Salman Masalha—a bilingual author publishing in both Arabic and Hebrew—challenges this interrelation of territory, language and identity. The debate between the literary scholars Hannan Hever and Reuven Snir explore the central expressions of this challenge. For it points, on the one hand, to the subversive potential of such work towards the Israeli canon while, on the other hand, to its connection to Arabic literature. Writing in the …

“The Poem Is What Lies Between A Between”: Mahmoud Darwish And The Prosody Of Displacement, Ayelet Even-Nur

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish grew up in Israel as an internal refugee living under Israeli military rule, legally classified as a “present-absentee alien.” This article focuses on his 1995 volume of poetry, Limādhā tarakta al-ḥiṣān waḥīdan? (Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?), to study the manner in which Darwish’s cultivation of the musical and aural aspects of poetry serves as a means of poetically attending to the effects of dispossession and displacement. Through a discussion of the poems in the collection’s fourth section, Ghurfa l’il kalām maʿ al-nafs (A Room to Talk to Oneself …

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 …

Life Is A Story: Narrative And Identity In The War Poetry Of Dan Pagis And Charles Simic, Chanita Goodblatt

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The use of the conceptual metaphor of “life is a story” can be conceived as reciprocally or bidirectionally transforming both life and story. Thus this metaphor structures life into a coherent narrative—with a linear, and causally-related, progression of events and relationships—while also realizing the varied interpretive potentials of “a story as life.” Such aspects of this metaphor are essential to understanding how the two poets, the Israeli Dan Pagis and the American Charles Simic, shape their identities not only as the poetic speaker or the “I” of poetry but also as that of a storyteller. The lives of both these …

Natan Zach’S Poetics Of Erasure, Michael Gluzman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Natan Zach has often been described as the most influential Hebrew poet in the second half of the 20th century. Indeed, the scholar Dan Miron described him as a poet who had “reached the deepest part within us,” and as a “cultural leader” and “cultural hero.” Yet when Miron went on to detail Zach’s immense influence on other poets, he described his poetic legacy in exceedingly limiting formal terms such as “the use of enjambment” or “the magic of the unexpected rhyme, seemingly out of place.” Miron’s reading is symptomatic in the way it uses, indeed echoes, Zach’s own critical …

Poetry In Response To The “Disengagement Plan”: Identity, Poetics And Politics, Tamar Wolf-Monzon

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article will examine the corpus of poems written in the years 2004-2005, in response to the Israeli government’s Disengagement plan that unilaterally evacuated all Israeli communities from Gush Katif in the southern Gaza Strip. These poems are explored as a political speech act, whose purpose is to bring about an extra-linguistic outcome: to impact upon the feelings and thoughts of the addressees, as well as to influence them in relation to issues of identity and social affiliation. Indeed, these poems are part of a long and complex tradition of Hebrew political poetry, characterized not only by a response to …

Introduction: Poetry In Israel: Forging Identity, Chanita Goodblatt

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The focus of this special issue is poetry—written in Israel during (and somewhat preceding) its Statehood—perceived as reflecting the worlds of poets in their personal, communal, ideological and poetic dimensions. This issue will focus on the ways in which poetry in Israel relates the stories, and expresses the positions, of individuals and groups who arrived from different countries (Europe, North Africa, Asia), lived through different experiences (the Holocaust, war, resettlement), and who express different cultures and religions (Jewish, Muslim).

Naturalistic Images In The Novel “Sister Carrie” By The American Writer Theodore Dreiser, Ulugbek Sayfulloevich Ochilov

Scientific reports of Bukhara State University

The article is dedicated to the problem of study of naturalistic images in the novel “Sister Carrie” by the American writer Theodore Dreiser. In the world literature there is no common approach to the naturalistic literary works. The author of the article tries to consider this problem on the basis of his own research. In his opinion, not only Hurstwood, but Carrie, who had a great success in life, also a naturalistic image because of her moral degradation

Publicistic Ideas Of “The Tale Of Bygone Years”, Dmitry Vladimirovich Popov

Scientific reports of Bukhara State University

The article is devoted to the study of Russian publicism of the XII century in the historical and linguistic aspect. On the example of “The Tale of Bygone Years” considered the issue represents the formation of publicism at the intersection of literary and business languages as the special form of the Russian language that includes the image of the author who is focused on the Russian rhetoric ideal. The author expresses his position and gives evaluation of established facts and these are constitutive features of publicism.

Good Bye, Socialist Paradise: Representations Of Postreunification Nostalgia In Sonnenallee And Good Bye, Lenin!, Hannah L. Garver

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis analyzes the experiences constituting the protagonists’ adolescence in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as portrayed in Thomas Brussig’s book Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee, Leander Haußmann’s film Sonnenallee, and Wolfgang Becker’s film Good Bye, Lenin!. These narratives challenge assumptions that the phenomenon Ostalgie indicates a desire to return to the actual conditions of life in the former East. Using Svetlana Boym’s work on post-communist nostalgia as a theoretical framework, I argue that the representations of life in the East as presented in these texts are the protagonists’ reinterpretations of the past. The protagonists develop nostalgia for their youth …

Scrivere Di Islam. Raccontare La Diaspora, Simone Brioni Dr., Shirin Ramzanali Fazel

Department of English Faculty Publications

Scrivere di Islam. Raccontare la diaspora (Writing About Islam. Narrating a Diaspora) is a meditation on our multireligious, multicultural, and multilingual reality. It is the result of a personal and collaborative exploration of the necessity to rethink national culture and identity in a more diverse, inclusive, and anti-racist way. The central part of this volume – both symbolically and physically – includes Shirin Ramzanali Fazel’s reflections on the discrimination of Muslims, and especially Muslim women, in Italy and the UK. Looking at school textbooks, newspapers, TV programs, and sharing her own personal experience, this section invites us to change the …

Hawthorne’S Faith, Cecelia Little

English Student Scholarship

Major: English and Philosophy

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Margaret Reid, English

This project is an examination of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writings, particularly focused on Hawthorne’s identity, philosophy, and spirituality. Placing these ideas in the context of early American history as well as in the context of Hawthorne’s biography, Cecelia Little focuses on how Hawthorne offers pieces of a new and complex philosophy of the individual human soul within the human community. This powerpoint includes a structured compilation of many, but by no means all, of her findings, and she plans to delve much further into Hawthorne’s life and works. The primary focus …

Blake’S Method: Blake Imagining Milton In The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell, Micaela Freeman

English Student Scholarship

Major: English

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Bruce Graver, English

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is William Blake’s articulation of his reaction to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. After analyzing Blake’s reaction to Paradise Lost, I will suggest how Blake’s reading of Milton helped shape 20th-century criticism, specifically post-war Miltonic criticism. My paper will begin by considering Blake’s rewriting of Milton in the ‘Argument’ of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, starting at the Adamic myth. I will continue my analysis with looking at the famous passage on Plate 6 when Blake writes, “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote …

Fascist Aesthetics From 1940 To Contemporary Times, Anna M. Gellerman

Publications and Research

Movies and literature all over the world share some common aesthetics: militarization, romanticization of death, beauty of perfection, and even purity. What most don't think about is how these tropes rose to popularity due to Nazi Germany's propaganda films. This work describes these fascist aesthetics, and uses famous publications from the 1940s until now to paint just how common these themes are.

Teaching Don Quixote Online - Course Redesign (Span 290 Literatue In Translation), Jesus-David Jerez-Gomez

Q2S Enhancing Pedagogy

This course syllabus was developed thanks to the E-Learning Academy workshop in course redesign and Quality Matters online workshop for online teaching innovative development. The redesigned course, SPAN 290: Spanish Literature in Translation, was piloted in Fall 2019, and it is being offered again with improvements and revisions this Spring 2020.

Writing After The Human: Marie Darrieussecq’S And Anne Garréta’S Posthumanisms, Annabel L. Kim

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

In our current moment of climate catastrophe and impending planetary doom, the posthuman seems like a harbinger of an all too imminent reality (felt especially keenly in the age of COVID-19). In the twenty-first century, the humanities, grappling with the multifarious failures and excesses of traditional humanism, are attempting to abandon the anthropocentric epistemologies and practices that have characterized Western thought and culture and to create new models for thinking the world—models that are able to accommodate the nonhuman and welcome other forms of life and matter as objects of focus, moving thus from an imperialist vertical mode of conquering …

La Dimension Cinématographique Du Paysage Dans L’Œuvre Littéraire De Julien Gracq, El Arbi El Bakkali

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Classé parmi les maîtres de la littérature contemporaine en France, Julien Gracq de son vrai nom Louis Poirier (professeur de géographie) a pu marquer sa carrière d’écrivain sans qu’il s’inscrive à aucun courant littéraire précis. Sa production littéraire est protéiforme et s’étale sur deux grandes périodes littéraires: la première (1938-1967) prenait du surréalisme et de la fiction comme cadre principal de création littéraire tandis que la seconde période (1967-1992) était axée sur des fragments d’autobiographie, réflexions sur la littérature et médiations géographiques. Il est important de souligner que le point commun entre ces deux périodes artistiques de l’auteur est l’omniprésence …

“Nous Étions Ici Pour Durer”: Memorialization And Environmental Advocacy In Véronique Tadjo’S En Compagnie Des Hommes, Marda Messay

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Detected for the first time in 1976 in Northern Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) and in Southern Sudan (now South Sudan), the Ebola virus has reemerged periodically mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa. The deadliest outbreak of Ebola occurred in Guinea, eventually spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone from 2014-2016. At the end, there were 28, 652 cases and 11, 325 deaths (cdc.gov). The outbreak generated international news coverage and sparked panic, especially once cases were reported in the U.S., in Spain and in the UK. It also incited Veronique Tadjo’s latest work, En compagnie des Hommes (2017), as she …

Intégration Du Genre Dans La Gestion Des Ressources En Eau Au Maroc (Nord-Ouest D’Afrique), El-Mostafa Mili

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Au Maroc 92% des individus âgés de plus de 5 ans ont un téléphone (2018), alors que 80% de Marocains ont accès à l’eau potable et 38% disposent d’un accès aux installations d’assainissement améliorées (2017) ! Le Maroc a une grande expérience en matière de développement de l’offre des ressources en eau. Malgré cela, les problèmes de pénurie d’eau sont devenus une réalité. Malheureusement, les intérêts particuliers et la corruption généralisée entre les gouvernements et les entrepreneurs privés génèrent trop souvent une situation déséquilibrée. Est-ce que cela a pour cause la mauvaise gestion des ressources en eau ? L’objectif de …

Pour Une Reconstitution De La Mémoire Du Paysage Naturel De La Ville D’Oujda (Maroc Oriental) À Partir De La Perception Des Voyageurs Français De La Fin Du XixÈme Et Du Début Du XxÈme Siècles, Bouchra Benbella

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Objectifs de cette étude-- Oujda: ville à la frontière avec l’Algérie, cité oubliée où le peu d’espaces verts qui reste rétrécit comme peau de chagrin. - Montrer des paysages naturels disparus ou dépéris de la ville d’Oujda, décrits par des voyageurs français avant et après le Protectorat français (1912), parce que préserver et avant tout connaître. - Sensibiliser la génération Z marocaine à son patrimoine national (local) et les exhorter à agir.

Corpus:

BERNARD, A. Les confins Algéro-marocains, Paris : Emile Larose, 1911

CANAL, J. La frontière marocaine. Oudjda 1885, Oran : Paul Perrier, 1886 ;

ELABBASSI, Ali Bey. …

Time And The Bibliographer: A Meditation On The Spirit Of Book Studies, Matt Cohen

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In light of the global return of tribalism, racism, nationalism, and religious hypocrisy to power’s center stage, it is worth returning to the question of the relevance of bibliography. It is a time when, at least at the seats of power in the United States and some other places, books seem to have become almost meaningless. Bibliographic pioneer D.F. McKenzie’s strategy was not to constrain bibliography in self-defense, but to expand it, to go on the offense. What is our course? This essay explores bibliography’s past in order to suggest ways in which it can gain from an engagement with …

Sylvain Tesson : La Consolation De La Forêt, Sylvie Blum-Reid

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Sylvain Tesson est né sous les constellations du blaireau et de la forêt.2 Cet écrivain-voyageur, géographe de formation, a passé six mois dans une cabane en Sibérie, à la suite desquels il a publié son journal Dans les Forêts de Sibérie traduit en anglais par The Consolation of the Forest en 2011 (prix Médicis 2011). En plus de ses écrits, il est l’auteur de plusieurs documentaires filmés Aral: Chronique d’une mer asséchée, 2002 (Aral, the Sea than Ran dry, dir. Nicolas Millet, 42 min. , CNC),3 qui dénonce la catastrophe écologique de la mer d’Aral, asséchée depuis …

World Humanities 1, Joseph Boisvere

Open Educational Resources

OER Syllabus for World Humanities 1 (WHUM 1)

Expropriation And Forced Migrations: The Displacement Of Colonial Agricultural Laborers In Mohammed Dib’S Algerian Trilogy, Benjamin Sparks

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Mohammed Dib, in his Algerian trilogy, demonstrates the effects of expropriation and mendicancy on the patterns of migration of agricultural laborers, illustrating the historical context of colonial Algeria through the act of storytelling. Mohammed Dib in 1949 devised the idea to write “un roman aux proportions assez vastes qui devait présenter une sorte de portrait divers de l’Algérie” (Déjeux 145) which would later become what constitutes the Algerian trilogy consisting of La Grande maison published in 1952, L’Incendie in 1954, and finally Le Métier à tisser in 1957. The trilogy tells the story of Omar’s upbringing in colonial Algeria surrounded …

“Traduit De L’Américain” As Text And Paratext, Mort Guiney

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

The online translation forum Wordreference.com contains a thread that began in July of 2005, discussing the use and possible abuse of the expression “traduit de l’américain” as it often, though not always, appears in the front matter of French translations of American literature. The discussion contains 197 posts covering a period of more than eight years; clearly, the use of “américain” in this context elicits strong reactions among literary experts, both Anglophone and Francophone. Does it imply that “Américain” is a different language from “Anglais”? Or that it is an inferior version of English? Why are some American novels published …

Remembering And Experiencing The Land In Exile In Marie-Célie Agnant’S La Dot De Sara And Gisèle Pineau’S L’Exil Selon Julia, Marie Paillard

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

In novels that stage migratory pathways, the exploring characters can perform circulation through different channels and processes, without necessarily operating a physical movement. A geographical and a corporeal process exist, but even when the concrete, physical exploration stops, it is somehow also both lived, experienced, reconstructed and imagined differently through the body and through corporeal exploration. In this paper, I argue that embodied memory can circulate through points of entanglement without any process of movement physically occurring, and these points of entanglement can all be observed interacting in the body of the migrant. For instance, sensations enable the characters to …

Claiming The Land: The Spanish Presence In Colonial Algeria, Lavinia Horner

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Emmanuel Roblès: Both parents – Spanish descent

Albert Camus: Father – French; Mother – Spanish descent

Roblès’ and Camus’ literary as well as epistolary testimonies disrupt the French-Arab/Berber dichotomous colonial narrative, thus expanding pied-noir legacies and unraveling little-known aspects of the mostly forgotten, yet indelible Spanish presence in colonial Algeria.

The theoretical framework follows a multidisciplinary approach drawing from literature, psychology and legal studies to investigate how assertive literary testimonies can switch perspectives on what will be remembered.

If the understanding of history is not finalized, but open, then bringing to light little-known testimonies extant in both Roblès’ and Camus’ …