Comparative Literature Commons^™

Without Mandate For Conquest: A Transnational Comparison Of Toni Morrison's Song Of Solomon And Isabel Allende's Eva Luna, Vivianna Noelle Orsini

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In our current age of globalization, multiculturalism is a key component of human relations. Place, when thought of as a geographic concept is more than just coordinates on a map, it is a concentration of a set of social relations. Geographers use this information to see how places are relational to other places. Morrison and Allende are relational because of their consciousness of place especially exhibited in Song of Solomon and Eva Luna. This project examines the disparate histories, politics, and landscapes that both authors emerged from, and argue the complexity of their work stems from thinking geographically, their conscious …

Representations Of Politicians In Contemporary Ghanaian Hiplife Music, Mark Nartey

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Representations of Politicians in Contemporary Ghanaian Hiplife Music" Mark Nartey argues that in Asare Obeng's music politicians in Ghana are depicted as self-seeking, self-serving, and self-centered. Further, he argues that since its emergence on the Ghanaian music scene in the early 1990s, hiplife music now transcends its original purpose of providing an entertainment outlet for its audience, predominantly the youth, offering them a pleasurable and therapeutic means of escaping from the harsh realities and pressures of life. Importantly, Nartey demonstrates that this musical genre has taken on a new and, perhaps, more important role: a legitimate avenue …

Goethe’S World Literature, Universal Particularism, And European Imperialism, Dongho Cha

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Goethe's World Literature, Universal Particularism, and European Imperialism" Dongho Cha tracks the ideology in Goethe's concept of "world literature." Early comparatists claim to stand for the universalism of this concept by understanding it to totalize all literatures across linguistic, territorial, and national boundaries and intended to go beyond European nationalism. Cha argues that Goethe's idea of world literature is not a universal category that includes all of the world nliteratures, but a limited category that includes European literatures only and posits that world literature's and comparative literature's universalism is related to nineteenth-century European imperialism. Contrary to the …

Overt And Covert Shandyism Of Nabokov's Nikolai Gogol, Margarit Ordukhanyan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Overt and Covert Shandyism of Nabokov's Nikolai Gogol" Margarit Ordukhanyan examines Vladimir Nabokov's 1942 novel, an unusual biography of the nineteenth-century Russian author. Ordukhanyan discusses parallels between Nabokov's biography of Gogol and Laurence Sterne's Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. She highlights the direct allusions and textual references Nabokov makes to Sterne's novel and argues that Nabokov uses Tristram Shandy as the model for creating and interpreting his biography of Gogol by fictionalizing Gogol and portraying him as a Shandean character. Further, Ordukhanyan discusses how Nabokov uses Sterne's novel to undermine the genre of literary …

A Theory Of Genre Formation In The Twentieth Century, Michael Rodgers

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "A Theory of Genre Formation in the Twentieth Century" Michael Rodgers explores the relationship between Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading and magical realism in order to theorize about genre formation in the twentieth century. Rodgers argues not only that specific twentieth-century narrative forms are bound intrinsically with literary realism and socio-political conditions, but also that these factors can produce formal commonalities.

Time Distortion In Bierce's "One Of The Missing" And Uroshevic's "Ракописот Од Китаб-Ан" ("The Manuscript From Kitab-An"), Kalina Maleska

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Time Distortion in Bierce's 'One of the Missing' and Uroshevic's 'Ракописот од Китаб-Ан' ('The Manuscript from Kitab-An')" Kalina Maleska examines the relationship between literature and astronomy in the context of time. The two stories share several common elements: they explore the possible manipulations of time in unexpected and extraordinary ways and come close to certain scientific explorations of time. For "One of the Missing," Albert Einstein's theory of relativity provides an interesting foundation for understanding Bierce's treatment of time. For The Manuscript of Kitab-An, the speculations of time travel starting from the Einstein-Rosen concept of the black …

Leisure And Posthumanism In Houellebecq's Platform And Lanzarote, Nurit Buchweitz, Elie Cohen-Gewerc

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Leisure and Posthumanism in Houellebecq's Platform and Lanzarote" Nuriot Buchweitz and Elie Cohen-Gewerc analyze Michel Houellebecq's novels in the context of leisure studies. They posit that in particular in Platform and Lanzarote Houellebecq explores leisure practices available in industrial societies marked by consumer culture. Further, Buchweitz and Cohen-Gewerc argue that the abundant depictions of leisure in Houellbecq's texts is not unintentional because he introduces the concept of the posthuman condition and rethinks agency and human selfhood as a consequence of the collapse of subjectivity. Employing postmodern indeterminacy, Houellebecq explores contemporary mores and debates the extinction of …

Photography, Writing, Literature: A Book Review Article Of New Work By Brunet And Beckman And Weissberg, Geert Vandermeersche

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Borges's Postmodern Landscape, Mario Vrbančić

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Borges's Postmodern Landscape" Mario Vrbančić examines specific constructs of space -- among them heterotopia (Michel Foucault) and hyperreality (Jean Baudrillard) -- and applies them to narration and narrative strategies in Jorge Luis Borges's texts. Vrbančić posits that postmodern mapping undermines our known familiar geography and that authors like Borges who experimented with different spaces and connections in their texts, represent postmodernism avant la lettre.

Staging Sex Or Fighting Foreignness? Marlowe's Edward Ii As Xenophobic Drama, James D. Baker

Master's Theses

Christopher Marlowe’s drama Edward II has long been known for its representation of a close male, arguably homosexual, friendship between King Edward II and his favorite, the French Piers Gaveston, as well as their union’s negative effects on the court. Indeed much criticism exists on the common belief that the characters’ relationship is problematic in early modern England both because the two characters are male and because there is an obvious class divide. However, critics have seemed to overlook Gaveston’s being French, even in light of the massive immigration to England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This …

How Does Poetry Confess? Zhai Yongming's Poems And The Landscape Of "Confession", Xin Xu

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

In the 1980s, a Chinese poet, Zhai Yongming (翟永明), published a linked suite of nineteen poems. Zhai entitled this sequence “Women” (Nǚren女人) and claimed that her poems were largely influenced by American confessional poets such as Sylvia Plath. Chinese critics suggest that Zhai inaugurates the trend of confessional poetry in China. This paper will first contextualize the Chinese translation of American confessional poetry in the Mao and post-Mao age, and then problematize the concept of “confession” in Chinese poetry criticism by making American confessional poetry a counter point. Under the term of confessional poetry it is “the illusion of a …

“Carried In The Arms Of Standing Waves:" The Transmotional Aesthetics Of Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Billy J. Stratton

English and Literary Arts: Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, Native, Indigenous, First Nations, and Aboriginal scholars and writers have forged alliances to initiate and support decolonization efforts and the reassertion of native survivance. Native and non-Native scholars have responded to modern challenges by reconceptualizing notions of peoplehood, identity, and nationalism. Following these intellectual contours, rather than conceiving of native culture as totalizing, static, and/or incommensurable—as always already foreign—responsive readings informed by the critical work of Gerald Vizenor can support more sophisticated understandings of native literary production while revealing sites of native transmotion. Through a thusly informed examination of the work of the Tlingit poet, Nora Marks …

The Sober Joy Of Thieving, Jennifer Stob

Criticism

Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings by Judith F. Rodenbeck. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Pp. 312, 47 illustrations. $34.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.

On Writing Neo-Victorian Fiction: James Miranda Barry (1999) And Sophie And The And The Sibyl: A Victorian Romance (2015), Patricia Duncker

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is the text of the Forty-Fourth George Eliot Memorial Lecture delivered at the Chilvers Coton Heritage Centre on 10 October, 2015. An extended version of this article will appear in late 2016 or early 2017 as an interview/essay in the series 'anglistik & englischunterricht': Christina Flotmann and Anna Lienen (eds.), Victorian Ideologies in Contemporary British Culture, Heidelberg: Winter Verlag.

My first historical novel - lames Miranda Barry (1999) was not born a Neo-Victorian novel, but became one. And it had a very personal link to my own life. Barry was a nineteenth-century colonial doctor and medical reformer, who had …

Recovering The Beauty Of Medusa, Alexander M. Schlutz

Publications and Research

This essay presents a close analysis of P.B. Shelley’s fragmentary ekphrastic poem “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery.” It places Shelley’s text in its aesthetic, mythological and historico-political contexts to demonstrate how Shelley aims to undo the ideological and representational structures of power that inform human language, art, and history, and which turn Medusa into the monstrous Other as which she appears. In Shelley’s text by contrast, Medusa becomes a figure for a revelatory beauty that cannot become visible in the distorting parameters of a discourse of power that informs our very perception of what …

Course Syllabus (Fa15) Coli 211 Literature & Psychology: "Material Aesthetics", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

An examination of questions concerning aesthetic experience from the standpoint of the structural and functional logics of the capitalist mode of production

El Marqués De Villeroy, Oráculo De La Razón De Estado. Una Traducción Española Con Escolios De Pedro Van Der Hammen, Adrian Izquierdo

Publications and Research

The translations of French historian and politique Pierre Matthieu fostered the circulation of ideas on the best practices of government and stimulated the introduction of political theories such as reason of state, political prudence and sovereignty at a moment when all Europe struggled to reconcile the interests of state and religion. Matthieu´s Remarques d’Estat et d’histoire sur la vie et les services de Monsieur de Villeroi (1618) were translated in 1624 by Pedro van der Hammen, and adapted to the particular Spanish context. In this paper we study how the translation and the illustrations by van der Hammen combine the …

Moria De Erasmo Roterodamo. A Critical Edition Of The Early Modern Spanish Translation Of Erasmus’S Encomium Moriae. Ed. Jorge Ledo And Harm Den Boer. Leiden: Brill, 2014, Adrian Izquierdo

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Confronting Moral And Literary Perspectives In 'La Fuerza De La Sangre', José Nayar Rivera Méndez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The aim of this thesis is to argue that Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra used literary and artistic models to create the hybrid novella "La fuerza de la sangre" (The force of blood) in order to deal with moral and legal issues related to the representation of rape and subsequent marriage of the victim to the rapist. An explicit aim of Cervantes' Novelas Ejemplares is to mix the useful to the entertaining, and he intended to elaborate forms of fiction that could transcend moral dilemmas. The legal and moral implications of marriage as the best restitution after a rape, and the …

Cuckolds And Codpieces: Early Modern Anxieties In Male Potency, Doris Barkin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation is an exploration of male potency through a close examination of the tropes of the cuckold and the codpiece as presented in English dramatic works of the early modern period: I examine codpiece and cuckoldry discourses side by side, to see how one informs the other, and to perceive to what extent masculinity is affected and communicated by these discourses. My purpose here is to explore early modern views of masculinity, marriage, and sexuality through various theoretical frameworks, from Freud to Foucault.

My study argues that while the codpiece may emphasize or articulate sexual power and virility, that …

Contemporary Albanian-Italian Literature: Mapping New Italian Voices, Anita Pinzi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work thematically analyzes literary texts written in the Italian language by Albanian migrants in the last three decades. This recent body of works is here defined as Contemporary Albanian-Italian Literature. It is analyzed in its literary and theoretic specificities, while being placed in the larger contexts of both Italian Migration Literature and Italian Literature. Four major themes -- namely memory, borders, language, and body -- are analyzed through relevant critical theory in the areas of autobiography, post-colonial studies, Mediterranean studies, gender studies, and translation studies to show how Albanian-Italian literature lives at the intersection of multiple literary and theoretical …

Sisters In Sublime Sanctity: Schiller's Jungfrau, Euripides's Iphigenia Plays, And Joan Of Arc On The Stage, John Martin Pendergast

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Schiller reinvented the image of Joan of Arc in his play, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, with consequences that affected theatrical representations of Joan for the rest of that century and well into the twentieth. Regarding representations of Joan of Arc to be found in Shakespeare or Voltaire as unworthy of her nobility, Schiller set out to create a more powerful character who suffers at the hands of fate but changes history by sheer force of will. He took as his allegorical model the characterization of Iphigenia made famous by Euripides in …

Revision In The Multiversity: What Composition Can Learn From The Superhero, David Hyman

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Constant and ongoing revision is the compositional tactic through which many contemporary superhero narratives negotiate the powerful struggle between reiteration of the genre’s past, and creative expression of its future. Instead of a gradual succession of improved renditions of a text, each one effacing and superseding the imperfections of its predecessors, revision is revealed as the production of multiple versions whose differences and diversities are “capable of being in uncertainties”, as Keats describes the creative attitude which he terms Negative Capability: ontologically equal textual variations that wear their inconsistencies openly, and reject the pressure to resolve their multiplicities into the …

Pim Pedagogy: Toward A Loosely Unified Model For Teaching And Studying Comics And Graphic Novels, James B. Carter

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

The article debuts and explains "PIM" pedagogy, a construct for teaching comics at the secondary- and post-secondary levels and for deep reading/studying comics. The PIM model for considering comics is actually based in major precepts of education studies, namely constructivist foundations of learning, and loosely unifies constructs inherent therein with other available frames and frameworks for studying comics. As such, the article fills a dire need in the scholarly literature on comics pedagogy and paves a way for those who seek to teach comics courses in the future but who need direction and for those who seek to study/read comics …

Civilizational Trauma And Value Nihilism In Boccaccio's "Decameron", David J. Rosner

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Andrew Targowski, The Deadly Effect Of Informatics On The Holocaust, Peter Hecht

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Of Sonnets And Archives: Robert Graves, Laura Riding, And The Erasure Of Modern Poetry, Margaret Konkol

English Faculty Publications

In the nearly eighty years since Laura Riding and Robert Graves ceased their collaborative endeavors there has been much speculation as to the nature and extent of their literary partnership. Graves retold the past to his biographers, constructing Laura Riding as a queen yogi figure wielding an almost sinister influence. In response to these accusations Riding returned fire with volley after volley of “corrective” letters which she sent to Graves’s biographers as well as any magazine or student that she found to be sympathizing with Grave’s account of the creative partnership. At the time of her death in 1991, Riding …

Barry Cunliffe, Europe Between The Oceans: 9000 Bc To Ad 1000, Laina Farhat-Holzman

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

John Keegan, The First World War, Laina Farhat-Holzman

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Introduction To And Bibliography For The Study Of Alimentary Life Writing And Recipe Writing As War Literature, Louise O. Vasvari

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Introduction to and Bibliography for the Study of Alimentary Life Writing and Recipe Writing as War Literature" Louise O. Vasvári defines the concept of "alimentary life writing" and locates it in the broader multidisciplinary context of alimentary history, the history of everyday life, gender studies, trauma, and war and holocaust studies. She also underlines and exemplifies the cultural and gendered significance of alimentary life writing in particular in grounding personal and collective identity formation in the female immigrant and ethnic and multicultural writing. Vasvári also compares and contrasts such life writing to wartime food memoirs, as well …