Comparative Literature Commons^™

The Punctum In History: Representing The M(Other)’S Death In Peter Handke’S A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Hivren Demir Atay

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article aims to discuss how Handke’s autobiographical narrative, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972), stages the writer’s literary project through a neutral account of his mother’s suicide. Telling the story of his mother, who witnessed the Second World War and the nazi regime, Handke narrates the traumatic history of an Austrian town along with his own suffering. Concentrating on his attempt at a distanced language and his questioning of history as an objective fact, the article suggests that Handke’s perception of death and mourning parallels his understanding of the acts of writing and reading. Drawing particularly on Barthes’s concept …

Eating And Suffering In Han Kang’S The Vegetarian, Won-Chung Kim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Eating and Suffering in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian” Won-Chung Kim examines how Han investigates suffering through the topic of food and eating. Kim shows that The Vegetarian is a work that thoroughly investigates both what constitutes suffering and what role carno-phallogocentric thinking can play in such suffering: suffering becomes in the novel a psychological, physical, and spiritual effect of dietary resistance to male-dominated Korean society. After offering a working definition of sufferings, Kim argues how the suffering caused by Yeong-hye’s refusal to follow the reigning norms of the meat eating, patriarchal society disintegrates the intactness of …

The Different Representation Of Suffering In The Two Versions Of The Vegetarian, Young-Hyun Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “The Different Representation of Suffering in the two versions of The Vegetarian” the author examines how different the representation of suffering in the original and translated versions of The Vegetarian and explores the reasons for this difference. The author in particular refers to representative episodes which the translator’s strategy distorts even the central concepts of suffering in the original work. Her translated version results in critical misrepresentation of suffering and violence in the original version.

Enduring The Long Take: Tsai Ming-Liang’S Stray Dogs And The Dialectical Image, Louis Lo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay attempts to show that Tsai’s Stray Dogs (2013) offers a social critique of Taipei as a neoliberal, global, consumer city, and by so doing establishes a cinema of contemplation through such cinematic devices as the sustained long-take and slow, virtually still cinematic images. By developing Walter Benjamin’s formulation of the dialectical image, this essay explores the extent to which Tsai’s cinematic aesthetics reveals an aspect of the city which cannot be shown otherwise. It argues that his slow cinema creates a potentially revolutionary awakening in an audience accustomed to an immersive mode of cinematic experience which turns the …

Shelley’S Frankenstein As A Book Of Love And Despair, Shun-Liang Chao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Influenced by Enlightenment philosophes like Rousseau and Smith, Romantic writers, such as Coleridge and Percy Shelley, celebrate the sublime power of sympathetic love to merge the self and the other (be it human or inhuman) into a wondrous whole, thereby precluding the dangers of solitude and solipsism. Not all Romantic writers, however, share the same sanguine view of love. In Frankenstein, for instance, Mary Shelley offers an alternative to the optimistic perspective on the capacity of (mutual) sympathy. She shapes the novel into tales of bitter solitude, one caused by the lack of sympathetic understanding between Victor and nature, …

Mediating Suffering: Buddhist Detachment And Tantric Responsibility In Michael Ondaatje’S Anil’S Ghost, Justin M. Hewitson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Mediating Suffering: Buddhist Detachment and Tantric Responsibility in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” Justin Hewitson argues that the global mediation of suffering following human rights abuses creates the offender-victim binary. The way in which moral judgments drive urgent peacemaking is seldom connected to long-term victimhood narratives. This psychology can exacerbate cyclical patterns of anger, exploitation, and violence by deferring responsibility. Ondaatje’s controversial novel, Anil’s Ghost, which reflects these charged accusations, refuses to settle blame on any side of the Sri Lankan conflict; instead, it offers the troubling recognition that offenders, victims, and mediators are all causal agents. Hewitson …

Narrating Animal Suffering In Ye Guangqin’S Animal Stories, Chao Xie

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Narrating Animal Suffering in Ye Guangqin’s Animal Stories,” Chao Xie analyzes animal suffering depicted in the contemporary Chinese writer Ye Guangqin’s animal story collection The Tiger Dafu (2004). Through reading the interconnected suffering of animals and humans represented in Ye’s works, Xie argues that Ye expresses an attitude of posthumanism which is needed to examine animal suffering. The shared victimhood between animals and humans in Ye’s works, which is largely due to the process of Chinese modernization, provides a new insight into the idea of the Anthropocene.

Salam Neighbor: Syrian Refugees Through The Camera Lens, Lava Asaad

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper examines the documentary Salam Neighbor (2015), which celebrates the will of Syrian refugee women who are displaced in Jordan. The collective experience of the refugees portrayed in the documentary solicits a reaction from the Western viewer. To counteract the images of refugees in the media, documentaries can be a good alternative for mass media, which has been perpetuating a binary of the West and the Rest. The argument tackles the issue of this new representation of refugees in documentaries within a postcolonial paradigm of how we represent or speak to/with the Other in our technological age, as well …

Introduction To Suffering, Endurance, Understanding: New Discourses Within Philosophy And Literature, Douglas S. Berman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Literature is generally seen as depicting the lives of human subjects through their unique narratives. And that, while its endpoint may be universal, it is typically grounded in the specificity of a human being (or, occasionally, an animal). Philosophy is tasked with providing the foundational cognitive tools to grasp the meaning of experience for the whole. In Hegelian terms, it unfolds the history of the concept. Yet, as George Steiner, Jacques Derrida, and other recent authors have shown, both philosophy – along with its agonistic cousin, religion -- evoke literary themes, rhetorics, and struggles. Over the past fifty years, Continental …

Ritualisation Du Langage Et Métaphores Naturelles : Paradigmes Ou Écueils Pour Construire Un Discours Propre Au Sud ?, Cécile Chapon

Artl@s Bulletin

L'article envisage les conditions de possibilité d'une méthodologie propre à l'espace littéraire et artistique du Sud, à partir du cas particulier de la Caraïbe et de la double perspective du langage et de l'espace déjà élaborée dans la langue de Caliban. Les discours théoriques ou critiques qui partent de la Caraïbe créent souvent des images-concepts tantôt à partir d'un modèle linguistique hybride, tantôt à partir d'un modèle élémentaire ou géographique. L'article tâche de dégager la portée et les limites de ce double paradigme, de ritualisation du langage d'une part, et de métaphore naturelle d'autre part, pour construire un discours propre …

Imagining Afghanistan: Global Fiction And Film Of The 9/11 Wars, Alla Ivanchikova

Purdue University Press Book Previews

Imagining Afghanistan examines how Afghanistan has been imagined in literary and visual texts that were published after the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent U.S.-led invasion—the era that propelled Afghanistan into the center of global media visibility. Through an analysis of fiction, graphic novels, memoirs, drama, and film, the book demonstrates that writing and screening “Afghanistan” has become a conduit for understanding our shared post-9/11 condition. “Afghanistan” serves as a lens through which contemporary cultural producers contend with the moral ambiguities of twenty-first-century humanitarianism, interpret the legacy of the Cold War, debate the role of the U.S. in the rise of …

The Ends Of Plot: Rupture And Entanglement In L’Amica Geniale, Victor X. Zarour Zarzar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation employs narrative theory to contextualize Elena Ferrante’s successful saga, L’amica geniale, within the larger tapestry of European novelistic discourses. It engages with conceptions of narrative structure put forth by critics like Ortega y Gasset, Brooks, and Winnett to understand how L’amica geniale offers cutting commentary on our exegetic practices and advances a geometry of narrative entanglement. I contend that Ferrante recuperates and italicizes nineteenth-century modes of storytelling, displaying a form of epistemological tension rooted in a movement away from a belief in plot’s semantic potentialities and into the postulation of a poetics of smarginatura or rupture. I …

Unlearning Don Carlos: Historical And Fictional Elements Of Innovation In César Vichard De Saint-Réal’S 'Dom Carlos, Nouvelle Historique,' Friedrich Schiller’S 'Don Karlos, Infant Von Spanien,' And Giuseppe Verdi’S 'Don Carlos', Maria-Cristina Necula

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The story of the sixteenth-century Spanish prince, Don Carlos, has inspired numerous literary and musical adaptations that, despite the artistic limitations of historically-based content, reflect an astonishing scope of creative freedom. The myth created around Don Carlos originated in European consciousness as early as 1568. Various theories recorded in political reports and in historical works insinuated that the prince had been murdered while incarcerated by orders of his father, King Philip II. Simultaneously, hatred of Spain, intensified by Philip’s violent suppression of the revolt in the Netherlands, determined exiled Flemish nobles to launch an anti-Philip propaganda. The mystery of Don …

Staging English Affairs In Early Modern Italy: History, Politics, Drama, Fabio Battista

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at the creation and dissemination of alternative versions of English history through the means of dramatic fiction, and contextualizes them in the panorama of the intellectual debates of seventeenth-century Italy. Staging English Affairs in Early Modern Italy studies the ways in which the reinvention of Tudor and Stuart affairs in dramatic literature mirrored the ambitions, fears, and fantasies of a century in disquieting transformation. This research documents how news and information from England entered the Italian states, how they were perceived, and what their repurposing can reveal about the potentialities of intercultural exchange. Anglo-inspired drama became a …

Short Stories Of Latin America From Antilles To Southern Cone, Mariana Romo-Carmona

Open Educational Resources

The study of the short story genre in Latin American literature. Literary currents in 20th century, from the Vanguards to The Boom, fiction of post dictatorships, exile, and entry into the 21st century.

Orientalism In Hispanic Literatures, Araceli Tinajero

Open Educational Resources

This course will examine Hispanic (including Brazilian) literary and cultural representations pertaining to China, India, Korea, and Japan. Students will read novels, short stories, poems, essays, and chronicles of prominent writers of the Hispanic world in order to have a deeper understanding of the “East/West” divide conceptualized as Orientalism. Students will be exposed to films, music, and visual representations so they can have a better understanding of the historical, geographic, and transnational connections between the Hispanic world and the Far East.

Japanese-English Translation: Kitaōji Rosanjin—Why I Became A Potter (1933), Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

A translation of「なぜ作陶を志したか」、北大路魯山人著、1933年

Source, Aozora Bunko (a digital archive of public-domain Japanese-language works):

General website: https://www.aozora.gr.jp

Current text: https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/001403/files/55082_54782.html

All rights reserved, Christopher Southward, 2019

Female Experience Of Trauma And Mourning In Two Postconflict Novels Of El Salvador And Peru: Roza, Tumba, Quema By Claudia Hernández, And La Sangre De La Aurora By Claudia Salazar, Raquel Castro Salas

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on how literature approaches the Salvadoran and Peruvian armed conflicts and contributes with perspectives of the female experience while offering illustrations of mourning processes. It is based on a close analysis of two postconflict novels that emerged after the publication of the corresponding truth commissions final reports. These novels are Roza, tumba, quema (2017) by Claudia Hernández from El Salvador, and La sangre de la aurora (2013) by Claudia Salazar from Peru. The contributions studied in this analysis focus on two areas: (1) a problematization of the female experience of the armed conflicts, and (2) a focus …

Archive And Repertoire Of The Esala Perahera Performance In Sri Lanka, Hashintha Jayasinghe

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project examines the archive and the repertoire of the Esala Perahera in Sri Lanka and charts the ideological and cultural implications of the performance. The archival analysis begins with the interrogation of the historical chronicles and the recorded history of the performance in the Sinhala and English texts. Thereafter, travel literature and the dissemination of cultural knowledge on the Perahera are discussed. The study of the repertoire and the photographic archive explores key performances in the Esala Perahera in 2016 and 2017. Postcolonial theory, theories on cultural anthropology, and performance theory are used to analyze the archive and the …

Representations Of Domestic Workers In Modern Arabic Fiction, Samaher Aldhamen

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this study, I have examined the representations of domestic workers in a number of Arabic mid-century and contemporary novels, using feminism and intersectionality as my overarching framework. I employed several scholarships of feminism such as Marxist and postcolonial feminism to examine the discourse on working-class women. The initial assumption of this study is that there is a noticeable invisibility of domestic workers in Arabic novels. If these characters manage to find their way into a text, they are typically ahistorical figures whose subjectivity is not centered.

Among the Arabic novels I have examined, I found that the tradition of …

Of Faith And Faithlessness: Adaptive Fidelity In Shusaku Endo's Martin Scorsese's Silence, Teng-Kuan Ng

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Adapted from the 1966 novel by the Japanese Catholic writer Shusaku Endo, Martin Scorsese’s Silence offers a timely occasion for expanding the critical discourse on adaptive fidelity. This article explores the ways that both texts draw from historical and scriptural sources within the Christian tradition—most notably the biblical tale of Judas—to clarify the meaning of faith in their respective contexts. Employing Andre Bazin’s theory of adaptation, I argue that alongside their source texts, both novel and film compose an intertextual ‘ideal construct’ of religious fidelity as dynamically lived across time and place, a fidelity paradoxically performed via various modes and …

Narrating Refugee Lives: Political Asylum In 21st Century France, Susmitha Udayan

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This dissertation examines representations of refugees in legal and aesthetic texts. Using the notion of chronotope as a conceptual framework, it studies the use of time and space in various refugee narratives to argue that aesthetic texts about refugees foreground the concept of spatiality to materialize and historicize the refugee condition. These texts, I contend, provide a necessary counternarrative to the depersonalized, dehistoricized representations of refugees encountered in legal texts and media discourses. Comparative analysis of legal and literary texts shows that adventure-time, which dominates legal asylum narratives, contributes to produce coherent, linear, singularized legal asylum stories. Such a narration …

Overlapping Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature As A Global Assemblage, Wai-Chew Sim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Overlappinig Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature as a Global Assemblage,” Wai-Chew Sim offers a globalist vision or understanding of Chinese literary studies/Sinophone studies. Deploying the notion of scriptworld (Damrosch), he examines how the Chinese, English, and Malay-language scriptworlds interact in the Southeast Asian context. He traces the rhizomatic connections between Joo Ming Chia’s Exile or Pursuit, a Singapore Sinophone text that explores multiple belongings, and two novels: M. L. Mohamed’s Confrontation (originally published as Batas Langit), and T.H. Kwee’s The Rose of Cikembang (originally published as Bunga Roos dari Cikembang). Tracing the sinophonicity of the latter …

Final Words, Final Shots: Kurosawa, Bortko And The Conclusion Of Dostoevsky’S Idiot, Saera Yoon, Robert O. Efird

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Final Words, Final Shots: Kurosawa, Bortko, and the Conclusion of Dostoevsky’s Idiot" Robert O. Efird and Saera Yoon discuss film adaptations of Dostoevsky’s novel. Both in his homeland and abroad, the major works of Fyodor Dostoevsky have largely made for disappointing film adaptations. This article examines the cultural diversity and aesthetic motivations underlying two very different adaptations of his novel Idiot, with particular attention to the concluding scenes. Both Akira Kurosawa and Vladimir Bortko follow the novelist's lead by hinting at some form of hope and future redemption amidst the tragedy but, for different reasons, …

Retro-Future In Post-Soviet Dystopia, Sergey Toymentsev

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Retro-Future in Post-Soviet Dystopia” Sergey Toymentsev explores the vision of retrospective future in such Russian novels as Tatiana Tolstaya’s The Slynx, Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, Olga Slavnikova’s 2017, and Dmitry Bykov’s Zhd. Unlike Zamyatin’s and Platonov’s anti-Soviet satires, post-Soviet dystopias do not respond to any utopian narrative, but project the historical and ideological reality of Russia’s violent (predominantly Soviet) past into the future. Such a traumatic reenactment of the Soviet past in the dystopian future testifies to the rise of authoritarianism in contemporary Russia as well as its incomplete collective memory …

On Imaginary Content Analogies In Musico-Literary Imitation, Rodrigo Guijarro Lasheras

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "On Imaginary Content Analogies in Musico-Literary Imitation,” Rodrigo Guijarro Lasheras analyzes "imaginary content analogy," a term often used in musico-literary studies to describe a type of imitation of music in literature. His paper aims to examine and characterize this important concept, establishing several of its features that musico-literary criticism has not normally paid attention to, such as its static or dynamic character, its implicit or explicit musical correlate, and its relation to vocal music. He argues that all imaginary content analogies must have a correlate, and that, despite the fact that we normally think of them as …

The Disenchantment Of History And The Tragic Consciousness Of Chinese Postmodernity, Alberto Castelli

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Magic Realism brings fantastic events into the frame of the narration. Yet it cannot quite be defined. At the very start of the process of definition, there is a question: Magic Realism is a mode of narration, or rather a post-colonial movement rising sociological issues alternative to the logic of power? The paper parallels and juxtaposes Latin American Magic Realism and the literary experience of Chinese literary Avant-garde in the 80s, similar apocalyptic thematic, but different narrative structures. Relating to the fictional universe of Can Xue and Yu Hua, the aim is to illuminate an exclusive mode to narrate history: …

Okonkwo’S Reincarnation: A Comparison Of Achebe’S Things Fall Apart And No Longer At Ease, Mary J. N. Okolie, Ginikachi C. Uzoma

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Abstract: The reincarnation myth is a global concept, founded basically in religion and tradition. It was especially vibrant in the ancient times in places like Egypt, Greece, and in continents like Asia and Africa, which possess varying understandings of the myth. In Igbo tradition, for example, it is believed that reincarnation occurs within a family. And that some of the marks of reincarnation are usually the possession of the birthmark or certain other physical features and the exhibition of character and behavioral traits of a deceased person by a living member of his/her immediate or extended family. Thus, reincarnation entails …

Thinking With Adorno [Table Of Contents], Gerhard Richter

Philosophy & Theory

What Theodor W. Adorno says cannot be separated from how he says it, and what he thinks cannot be isolated from how he thinks it. Richter’s book teaches us to think with Adorno—both alongside him and in relation to his diverse contexts and constellations, from aesthetic theory to political critique, from the problem of judgment to the question of how to lead a right life within a wrong one.

Thinking with Adorno’s uncoercive gaze not only means following the fascinating paths of his own work; it also means extending hospitality to the ghostly voices of others. As this book shows, …

Camp De Thiaroye Ou La Déconstruction Du Mythe Colonial Par Le Truchement De La Langue Française, Maurice Tetne Mr.

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The history between France and Africa has been peppered with numerous irregularities and crimes. Senegalese filmmaker Sembene Ousmane’s film Camp de Thiaroye (1988) returned to this painful story of the Thiaroye tragedy. That film chronicles the criminal massacre by the French of returning Senegalese soldiers. The latter, having sacrificed themselves for France during WWII, demanded treatment and compensation equal to their French counterparts. Interestingly, one of the significant details of this film is the multitude of languages and “patois” that the various African soldiers speak. At the same time, the lingua-franca, a kind of “pidgin” called Français-tirailleur, is simultaneously …