Comparative Literature Commons^™

Course Syllabus (W17 Online) Coli 211m: "Superhero Film And Contemporary Culture", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description:

What might the current popularity and ubiquity of superhero film say about contemporary culture? This course will explore three possible implications of this question: (1) that the superhero genre reflects a moment in our species’ history of reconciling the human being-technology relation, which we shall view as a complex system constituted by our productive relations to material and ideological tools and their ensembles, the needs and aspirations that determine how we conceptualize and activate these relations, and the technically rationalized social reality that is their result, (2) that this ongoing process of reconciliation evinces, at once, the …

Strangers With Cameras: The Consequences Of Appalachian Representation In Pop Culture, Chelsea L. Brislin

Theses and Dissertations--English

Representations of the Appalachia region in literature, art and pop culture have historically shifted between hyperbolic, colorful caricatures to grotesque, sensationalized, black and white photography. This wide spectrum of depictions continually resonates within the North American psyche due to its shared commonality of Appalachia as the cultural “other.” This othering frequently leaves audiences with a kind of relief that this warped representation of backwards, rural poverty is not their own progressive, present-day reality. Countless artists have exploited the region in order to show the impoverished side of rural Appalachia and spin a failed capitalistic way of life into a romanticized, …

Letras De Uma Resistência: Fantasmas Transgeneracionais E Ditadura. Brasil, Argentina E Cuba 1964-2002, Fabrício Silva

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

During the period of military government in Argentina, Brazil (1964 –1982) and the present day communist Cuban regime, a machinery of cultural repression was established in these countries, these states had a systematic plan of cultural repression of any kind of opposition, dictatorships had an organized and sophisticated operating control over the press and all publications. The dissident writers examined in this dissertation developed strategies of resistance that depended largely on allegory to carry their messages against their respective oppressive regimes. By means of a detailed rhetorical analysis, our study examines the lookings of allegory and cultural resistance under the …

Beyond Diversity In Young Adult Fiction: Neoliberal Depoliticization Of Social Movements In Hannah Moskowitz’S Not Otherwise Specified, Hannah Doermann

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

No abstract provided.

The Poetics Of Indian Feminine Migrant Identity In Sonali Dasgupta’S Altro Mondo, Prashansa Taneja

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

No abstract provided.

Finding Esu: A Diasporic Approach To Luiz Gama And Brazilian Black Literary Tradition, Sughey Ramirez

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

No abstract provided.

The Poetics And Politics Of Dissolution: Beyond Queer Identities And Re-Imagining The Nocturnal Community In Nightwood., Pan (Helena) Hu

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

No abstract provided.

Violence And Edification In 19th Century Fiction: An Analysis Of The Novels Of Charles Dickens And Leo Tolstoy, Caroline Fassett

Honors Theses

This Thesis argues that violence is essential to the structures and plots of Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities and of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and is particularly essential to the edification, or the moral and intellectual improvement, of principal characters in these four novels. Additionally, this Thesis contends that this edification is both anticipated and reinforced by the novelists’ incorporation of counterparts whose demeanor and/or narrative overtly mirror that of the principal characters.

To support this argument, I bring the theory of Thomas Carlyle into conversation with the novels of Dickens …

Nature And Human Flourishing In The Laws Of Manu And The Daodejing, Qijing Zheng

Honors Theses

By comparing the interpretation of dharma in the ancient Indian Laws of Manu (Manusmṛti) with the concepts of dao in the Chinese classic, Daodejing, this thesis discusses that, despite the plausible perception that the former represents despotic, hierarchical governance while the latter promotes freedom (and even anarchy), the two texts in fact share a similar envision of human flourishing through the following of one's nature, as well as a foundational belief that both laws and political ideals emerge from nature.

การแปลนวนิยายเรื่อง Beloved : ปัญหาและแนวทางการแก้ไข, ประภาศรี เจตทรงกุล

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

สารนิพนธ์ฉบับนี้มุ่งศึกษาการแปลนวนิยายซึ่งใช้รูปแบบการนำเสนอเป็นเครื่องมือสำคัญในการถ่ายทอดสารในต้นฉบับ โดยนำนวนิยายเรื่อง Beloved มาเป็นกรณีศึกษา เพื่อแสวงหาแนวทางการแปลและวิธีการแก้ปัญหาในการแปลที่เหมาะสมกับตัวบทลักษณะดังกล่าว กรอบทฤษฎีหลักซึ่งนำมาใช้ในการศึกษาตัวบทต้นฉบับ ได้แก่ การแปลวรรณกรรมตามแนวคิดของฟอร์ตูนาโต อิสราแอล และทฤษฎีภาษาศาสตร์สังคม นอกจากนี้ ผู้วิจัยยังได้นำเอาทฤษฎีการแปลพื้นฐานอื่นๆ มาประกอบการศึกษาตัวบทต้นฉบับด้วย ซึ่งได้แก่ ทฤษฎีวาทกรรมวิเคราะห์ ทฤษฎีการแปลแบบยึดความหมาย การแปลวรรณกรรมตามแนวคิดของวัลยา วิวัฒน์ศร และทฤษฎีวัจนกรรม หลังจากที่ได้นำทฤษฎีข้างต้นมาประยุกต์ใช้แล้ว พบว่า แนวทางการแปลวรรณกรรมของฟอร์ตูนาโต อิสราแอลและทฤษฎีภาษาศาสตร์สังคมสามารถนำมาประยุกต์ใช้ร่วมกันในการแปลและแก้ปัญหาที่พบในตัวบทประเภทนี้ได้เป็นอย่างดี

A Critical Review Of Japanese Scholarship On Modern Chinese Fiction And Translation Studies, César Guarde-Paz

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

This paper introduces Western readers to Japanese scholarship on late Qing and early Republican fiction and translation. It begins with a historical background on the development of modern Chinese literature studies in Japan, covering research societies, publications, and scholars in the field. Next, it discusses questions related to new directions in the study of the May Fourth Movement. Then, it addresses groundbreaking studies on writers and translators outside the main stream of research, covering Lin Shu, Liu Tieyun, and Li Boyuan. Further discussion examines thematic studies, including detective novels and Japanese political fiction.

Can We Say An Ear Of Cabbage : On Translating Wordplay In Xi Xi’S Poetry, Jennifer Feeley

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

This article reflects on the translation of wordplay in the poetry of Hong Kong author Xi Xi. Xi Xi is a highly imaginative poet: much of her poetry hinges upon specificities of the Chinese language, and one might well ask if this makes her work “untranslatable.” This article identifies various techniques for translating Xi Xi’s wordplay, detailing how I mine the potential of English for ways to recreate Xi Xi’s puns, puzzles, and playful subversion of language in a new linguistic and cultural environment. It encourages readers and translators to become unshackled from rules, assumptions, and conventions as they reflect …

Translation In Distraction : On Eileen Chang’S “Chinese Translation: A Vehicle Of Cultural Influence”, Christopher Lee

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

This essay focuses on a previously obscure and only recently republished English text held at USC that offers an unparalleled window into Chang’s engagement with translation. The untitled manuscript, typed with handwritten additions and corrections, is contained in a folder marked “Untitled article or speech” and appears to be the script of an oral presentation in which Chang surveys the development of translation in China from the late-Qing period, through the 1911 revolution, the May Fourth period, the war with Japan, the 1949 revolution and the Cultural Revolution. Her speech emphasizes how translation functioned as an index to China’s fraught …

The Migrant Voice : The Politics Of Writing Home Between The Sinophone And Anglophone Worlds, Kenny K. K. Ng

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

This paper addresses the politics of language, identity, and diasporic Chinese writing in old and emerging Chinese migrant literature. I opt for the idea of a “migrant subject” as brought up by Ha Jin to underscore a diverse verbal strategy and mobile literary creativity: that of the migrant writer who initiates linguistic and literary perversions to actively intervene in the cultural politics of both the host country and the motherland. The article proceeds to recuperate the diasporic narratives of Sinophone authors Bai Xianyong and Nie Hualing as two earlier examples of migrant writers before Ha, which exemplified the Cold War …

Contributors

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.

แนวคิดนิเวศสำนึกในวรรณกรรมของนิรันศักดิ์ บุญจันทร์, ศุภิสรา เทียนสว่างชัย

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

วิทยานิพนธ์ฉบับนี้มีจุดประสงค์เพื่อศึกษาวิเคราะห์งานเขียนของนิรันศักดิ์ บุญจันทร์ ภายใต้กรอบแนวคิดนิเวศสำนึก โดยมุ่งศึกษาบทบาทและภาพแทนของธรรมชาติและมนุษย์ที่ผู้เขียนใช้นำเสนอ เพื่อแสดงให้เห็นความสัมพันธ์ที่ดำเนินไปภายใต้บริบทสังคมที่เปลี่ยนแปลงไปในด้านต่างๆ จากการศึกษาพบว่า วรรณกรรมของนิรันศักดิ์ บุญจันทร์นำเสนอแนวคิดนิเวศสำนึกที่แสดงให้เห็นปัญหาทางธรรมชาติและสิ่งแวดล้อม โดยการนำเสนอความสัมพันธ์ระหว่างธรรมชาติกับมนุษย์ที่ตั้งอยู่บนความเหลื่อมล้ำภายใต้โลกที่ยึดมนุษย์เป็นศูนย์กลาง ซึ่งภาพแทนของธรรมชาติมักจะถูกนำเสนอให้มีลักษณะเป็นคู่ตรงข้ามกับแนวคิดหรือวิวัฒนาการทางด้านต่างๆ ของมนุษย์ และมีการปฏิสัมพันธ์ในเชิงอำนาจอยู่ตลอดเวลา ภาพแทนของธรรมชาติมักถูกทำให้อ่อนแอและยอมจำนนเพื่อแสดงให้เห็นบทบาทของมนุษย์ในฐานะผู้ควบคุม เปลี่ยนแปลง กำหนดคุณค่าและความหมายให้กับธรรมชาติ จนนำไปสู่การเปลี่ยนแปลงทางธรรมชาติและวิกฤตสิ่งแวดล้อม ซึ่งปัญหาเหล่านี้ล้วนเกิดจากความสัมพันธ์ระหว่างธรรมชาติกับมนุษย์ที่ไม่สมดุลและความเพิกเฉยของมนุษย์ที่ยึดเอาตัวเองเป็นศูนย์กลาง นอกจากนี้ งานเขียนของนิรันศักดิ์ยังนำเสนอแนวคิดเชิงอนุรักษ์ที่อยู่ภายใต้กระบวนทัศน์แบบองค์รวม นำเสนอให้เห็นถึงบทบาทและความสำคัญของธรรมชาติผ่านผลกระทบจากวิกฤตสิ่งแวดล้อม โดยการใช้ฉากโลกที่ล่มสลายและหายนะที่ตกสู่มนุษย์ แสดงให้เห็นสถานะของธรรมชาติที่อยู่ในบทบาทของผู้ควบคุมการดำรงอยู่ของมนุษย์ ในขณะเดียวกัน พื้นที่ธรรมชาติยังเป็นพื้นที่แห่งการเยียวยาฟื้นฟูชีวิตและสภาพจิตใจของมนุษย์และสังคมให้หลุดพ้นจากการครอบงำของความเจริญ รวมไปถึงการตระหนักถึงตัวตนแห่งธรรมชาติที่ธรรมชาติมีบทบาทสำคัญในการประกอบสร้างตัวตนและจิตวิญญาณของมนุษย์ แสดงให้เห็นความสัมพันธ์ของมนุษย์และธรรมชาติที่เชื่อมโยงกันทั้งทางกายภาพและทางจิตวิญญาณ เป็นการแสดงแนวคิดการมองธรรมชาติแบบองค์รวมเพื่อกระตุ้นให้ตระหนักถึงความสำคัญของธรรมชาติและสิ่งแวดล้อมอันนำไปสู่การปลูกฝังแนวคิดเชิงอนุรักษ์และการอยู่ร่วมกับธรรมชาติอย่างสันติ

The Rise And Fall (And Rise Again) Of Vernacular Happiness, Haiyan Lee

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

This article delineates the vicissitudes of vernacular happiness in China across the crucial transitions of the early 20^th century. Traditionally, vernacular happiness was symbolized by a triune of gods, fu-lu-shou, standing for progeny, wealth, and longevity. Happiness was thus a matter of good fortune, ardently prayed for rather than programmatically pursued. The ruling elite patronized this folk cult of happiness through a discourse of virtue and benevolence, but were themselves inclined to pursue more transcendent goals (Dao, de) and refined pleasures (lequ).

To the May Fourth generation, the traditional social order was founded …

Chinese Poetry And Translation : Moving The Goalposts, Maghiel Van Crevel

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

Poetry + translation will trigger claims the size of office blocks, all the way from Robert Frost (censored here) to Eliot Weinberger (Poetry is that which is worth translating). Add Chinese to the mix, and things get even better.

The translation of poetry is fun to bounce around in conversation, but winds up frequently in dead-end discourse full of zombie notions of equivalence, faithfulness, servitude, and so on— not to mention the specter of the genre’s “inherent untranslatability.” In June 2017, a dozen scholars and translators held a workshop at Lingnan University, assuming primariness and agency for translation instead. Most …

Old Tales, Untold : Lu Xun Against World Literature, Daniel M. Dooghan

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

World literature has smiled on Lu Xun 魯迅. He stands, if not as the foremost, then as a major representative of modern Chinese literature in anthologies. Though anthologies are not the ultimate arbiters of literary worldliness, they are influential discursive sites because of their accessibility and classroom utility. To wit, he is a common figure on university syllabi in world literature surveys. Professionally, scholarship on Lu Xun’s work reaches far beyond disciplinary Chinese studies. His works have been translated and retranslated many times in less than a century. All this is perhaps fitting considering his extraordinary services rendered to world …

Strong And Weak Interpretations In Translating Chinese Poetry, Lucas Klein

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

Are classical Chinese and modern Chinese one language, or two? Is translating classical Chinese poetry the same as or different from translating modern Chinese poetry? I have earlier argued that modern Chinese poetry is in some ways a translation of premodern Chinese poetics through the filter of international poetics—but if this is the case, then should translation of classical and modern poetry into English be more similar than they are? Looking at Lydia Liu’s notion of the “supersign” alongside my experiences translating contemporary poets Ouyang Jianghe and Xi Chuan as well as Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin, I discuss what …

“Indigenismo And Futurism In Latin America: José Carlos Mariátegui And The Peruvian Avant-Garde.”, Giovanna Montenegro

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Abstract: This essay explores the encounter between Latin American indige- nismo and avant-garde movements such as Futurism through an analysis of avant-garde literary magazines and Peruvian avant-garde poetry with Futurist tendencies. The first section begins with the Amauta magazine (1926–30), edited by the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930), who promoted an indigenous agenda while also censuring and applauding Futurism. The second section briefly investigates the Chilean literary journal Nguillatún (1924), whose founding manifesto toyed with Futurist principles while simultaneously turning to Chile’s indigenous culture. In addition, I analyse Gamaliel Churata’s Boletín Titikaka (1926–29), which promoted linguistic experimentation with indigenous …

The Hemispheric Muse. A Conversation With Antonio Barrenechea, Giorgio Mariani, Antonio Barrenechea

English & Linguistics Articles

Antonio Barrenechea is an Associate Professor at the University of Mary Washington, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he was hired to design a teaching curriculum in the Literatures of the Americas in 2005. He holds a PhD in comparative literature from Yale University and is the author of various essays on both North and South American literature, and, most recently of America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies, his first book, published last year by the University of New Mexico Press. Professor Barrenechea, who is currently spending the year as a resident fellow at the Institut Américain Universitaire in Aix-en-Provence, France, …

Letting In The Night: The Moon, The Madwoman, And The Irrational Feminine In Jane Eyre And Wide Sargasso Sea, Sophia Rosenthal

Scripps Senior Theses

This analysis examines Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea through the lens of lunar imagery and the irrational feminine, arguing that both texts are aspects of an extended, collective narrative in which both heroines rescue and reclaim their feminine essence from the construction of a masculine idealism.

(An) Unsettled Commons: Narrative And Trauma After 9/11, Chinmayi Kattemalavadi

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation examines fictional responses to the events of September 11, 2001. It argues for the importance of one kind of fictional response, one which focuses on representing the feeling of "unsettledness" that can be one effect of trauma, with the aim of making that unsettledness itself a locus of a shared common experience. I posit that in articulating the events of 9/11 in the context of, in relation to, and as one in a series of traumas, violences, and histories, these narratives make the unsettlements shareable. Focusing on four works of fiction that were published after 9/11 – Joseph …

Archival Resistance: A Comparative Reading Of Ulysses And One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Maria-Josee Mendez

Theses and Dissertations

Much of the comparative scholarship on the works of Gabriel García Márquez assumes the position that he was most significantly influenced by the works of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. However, beyond the citation of techniques shared extensively by other Modernists and dependence upon superficial comparisons between texts, the connections between García Márquez and these writers frequently remain tenuous. I suggest that to privilege Faulknerian or Hemingwayan readings of García Márquez is to overlook his position as a postcolonial Latin American novelist; I therefore consider in relationship with García Márquez the Irish writer James Joyce. Both writers participate in what …

“Mon Rire Vole Haut”: Joyce Mansour And Black Humor, Sarah Domenick

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

No abstract provided.

Domesticating The Foreign:Porcelain And Tea In Britain, Hua Zhao

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

No abstract provided.

The Myth Of Persephone: Body Objectification From Ancient To Modern, Melanie Daifotis

CMC Senior Theses

Implications surrounding body ownership prove to be an enduring struggle from their prevalence in ancient literary sources through more modern, contemporary works. I analyze the notions of body ownership and its lack thereof set forth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Homeric “Hymn to Demeter” regarding the myth of Persephone. Then, I consider larger meanings through analysis of the following contemporary works, approached in terms of the narrators: Rita Dove’s Mother Love, Louise Glück’s Averno, A.E. Stallings’s “Hades Welcomes His Bride” and “Persephone Writes a Letter to Her Mother,” and D.M. Thomas’s “Pomegranate.”

The complexities within the myth itself …

Allen D. Breck Award

Quidditas

The Breck Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a junior scholar at the annual conference.

Recipient of the Breck Award for 2017

Steven Hrdlicka

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

“Me Thinks If I Were A Man”: An Analysis Of Dorothy Leigh’S Mother’S Blessing As A Response To Joseph Swetnam, Julia Combs

Quidditas

As one of the first and most popular female-male authored conduct manuals of the seventeenth century, Dorothy Leigh’s The Mother’s Blessing is usually placed in the company of private, domestic literature. However, it does not sit comfortably there. Leigh claims to forget herself, as she rhetorically navigates her way through the constraining but enabling genre of the conduct manual. In this paper, I position Leigh as one of the initial respondents to Joseph Swetnam’s pamphlet The Arraignment of Lewd, idle, froward and unconstant women . Swetnam also claimed forget himself, as he stirred up the ire of writers in …