Comparative Literature Commons^™

Genocidal Rape, Enforced Impregnation, And The Discourse Of Serbian National Identity, Tatjana Takševa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Genocidal Rape, Enforced Impregnation, and the Discourse of Serbian National Identity" Tatjana Takševa analyzes two main processes which contributed to the systematic rape and enforced impregnation of Bosniak women during the Balkan conflict: the discourse of Serbian nationalism articulated in response to the sexual violence that took place in Kosovo preceding the war and the simultaneous diminishing and downgrading of women's political and social autonomy on all territories of the former Yugoslavia. Based on statements in narratives of Bosniak women rape survivors, Takševa argues that these ideologically motivated processes combined to revive, inflame, and militarize long-standing Serbian …

Kaffka's (1880-1918) Life Writing And Objection To The War, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Kaffka's (1880-1918) Life Writing and Objection to the War" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek discusses the Hungarian author's poems, diary entries, and fictional texts. While Kaffka's importance as one of the most influential writers in modern Hungarian literature is recognized, her oeuvre as proto-feminist writing has only been studied only since the 1990s. Further, Kaffka's anti-war writing has not been explored except in a few isolated instances. Tötösy de Zepetnek elaborates Kaffka's objection to the war as seen in her poetry published in 1914 and in her diaries and correspondence and argues that Kaffka's objection to the war …

The War Memoirs Of Rachel Maccabi, Ilana Rosen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The War Memoirs of Rachel Maccabi" Ilana Rosen analyzes the memoirs of Rachel Maccabi (1915-2003) about her sacrifices to fulfill the Zionist creed. Raised in a well-off Zionist family, Maccabi moved to Israel/Palestine in the mid-1930s, served in the Haganah pre-State military organization, and later became an army officer. Her first husband fell in the 1948 War of Independence and her son in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Between 1964 and 1992 Maccabi published five memoirs. Rosen focuses on Maccabi's last three memoirs, in which she responds to the deaths of her husband and son in Israel's …

Holocaust Child Survivors' Memoirs As Reflected In Appelfeld's The Story Of A Life, Dana Mihăilescu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Holocaust Child Survivors' Memoirs as Reflected in Appelfeld's The Story of a Life" Dana Mihăilescu identifies characteristics of child survivors' memoirs in Aharon Appelfeld's writing. Mihăilescu addresses the following main question: is the structure of child survivors' memoirs similar to that of Holocaust memoirs written by adult survivors or is there a tendency to focus on certain aspects given the young age some had at the time? Mihăilescu argues that unlike regular autobiographies by Holocaust adult survivors, child survivors' memoirs are less constructed around factual events of private and public relevance and that they concentrate instead …

Women Writing For Other Women In Colombia’S Current Armed Conflict, María Mercedes Andrade

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Women Writing for Other Women in Colombia's Armed Conflict" María Mercedes Andrade compares Patricia Lara's Las mujeres en la guerra (2000) and Patricia Tovar's Las viudas del conflicto armado en Colombia: Memorias y relatos (2006). Andrade's objective is to compare how these texts of testimonios deal with the question of representing women's experience and of turning oral testimonies into writing. Lara, writing for a popular audience, edits her material in order to make it more literary and mixes fictional accounts with the testimonios she collects. In contrast, Tovar writes for an academic public and reflects about the …

Documentation And Fiction In Hameiri's Accounts Of The Great War, Tamar S. Drukker

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Documentation and Fiction in Hameiri's Accounts of the Great War" Tamar S. Drukker discusses the only surviving Hebrew-language docu-novel of the Great War, written by Avigdor Hameiri (1890-1970), a Hungarian Jewish officer. His 1930 memoir The Great Madness is a wartime personal journal about his life at the Russian front. Many of the episodes described in The Great Madness receive a more styled treatment in Hameiri's wartime short stories which appeared in three collections during the 1920s. These stories are sometimes surreal, symbolic, and carefully crafted. Drukker's study of Hameiri's wartime life writing and his literary rendition …

Women's Wartime Life Writing In Early Twentieth-Century China, Li Guo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Women's Wartime Life Writing in Early Twentieth-Century China" Li Guo discusses military diaries, prison memoirs, and autobiographical reportages. These documents offer rich insights into the political endeavors and military mobility of women. Guo analyzes Bingying Xie's 1928 war diary about the Chinese nationalists' northern expedition, Langi Hu's 1937 book about anti-Japanese activism, and Lang Bai's 1939 reportage about the Sino-Japanese War and argues that these texts allow women to reconfigure the discourse of nation through experimental life writing in order to develop the genre with tales of valor, hope, struggle, and heroism. Guo argues that contrary to …

Narrating Wartime Rapes And Trauma In A Woman In Berlin, Agatha Schwartz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Narrating Wartime Rapes and Trauma in A Woman in Berlin" Agatha Schwartz examines the reception of the controversial wartime diary published anonymously first in 1954 in English translation. The book is a narrative representation of the mass rapes committed by Red Army soldiers during the siege of Berlin in 1945. Schwartz argues that A Woman in Berlin's portrayal of the rapes and the rapists, although not unbiased, leaves room for the initiation of the healing of trauma and forgiveness. Schwartz reflects on how life writing, particularly by women about a difficult chapter of German history …

"Being Singular Plural" In Chi's 巨流河 (The Great-Flowing River), Tsu-Chung Su

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "'Being Singular Plural' in Chi's巨流河 (The Great-Flowing River)" Tsu-Chung Su explores the way Pang-yuan Chi organizes her life stories in her 2009 autobiography. Born in Mainland China, Chi is a renowned Taiwanese editor, scholar, and writer who started her autobiographical novel at age 81. In her text Chi describes life stories in a war-torn era, features her migration from the north to the south (1930 to 1950), her experiences in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and the Chinese Civil War (1927-1950) culminating in her successful academic career in Taiwan (1950-). Chi's life stories are infiltrated with …

En-Gendering Memory Through Holocaust Alimentary Life Writing, Louise O. Vasvári

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "En-gendering Memory through Holocaust Alimentary Life Writing" Louise O. Vasvári aims to underline the cultural and gendered significance of the sharing of recipes as a survival tool by starving women in concentration camps during the Holocaust and the continuing role of food memories in the writing of Holocaust survivor women she considers a genealogy of intergenerational remembrance and transmission into the postmemory writing of their second generation daughters and occasionally their sons. Vasvári argues that the study of multigenerational Holocaust alimentary life writing becomes important today because as direct survivors of the Holocaust disappear there is a …

History Or Fictionalized Truth In Fenyő'S Diary Az Elsodort Ország (A Country Swept Away), Judy Young

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "History or Fictionalized Truth in Fenyő's Diary Az elsodort ország (A Country Swept Away)" Judy Young examines Miksa Fenyő's diary as an example of life writing with particular emphasis on the intermingling of the documentary, testimonial elements with the self-reflexive, literary, and fictive ones which give this diary its particular flavor. A founder of the literary journal Nyugat (The West), Fenyő was at home in the literary world, as well as in economic and political life. His diary covers the period from 1944 when nazi Germany occupied Hungary and Fenyő had to go into hiding to 1945 …

Introduction To Life Writing And The Trauma Of War, Louise O. Vasvári, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

African American Masculinity In The Wartime Diaries Of Two Vietnam Soldiers, Sharon D. Raynor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "African American Masculinity in the Wartime Diaries of Two Vietnam Soldiers" Sharon D. Raynor discusses an unpublished diary (1967-68) written by her father, Louis Raynor with the diary (1965-66) of David Parks that was revised and published as a memoir. By contextualizing the traditions of African American autographical writing and wartime diaries, Raynor analyzes how African American masculinity permeates the autobiographical structure in the Raynor and Parks diaries as each soldier interweaves a collective experience with a unique personal experience in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam experience challenged their ideologies about racial politics, but affirmed their masculine …

Selected Bibliography For The Study Of Life Writing, Louise O. Vasvari, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

A Companion To Australian Aboriginal Literature Edited By Belinda Wheeler, Jose-Carlos Redondo-Olmedilla

The Goose

José-Carlos Redondo-Olmedilla reviews A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature, edited by Belinda Wheeler.

Why Get Lost In Translation? On The English Translations Of Wen Yiduo's Poems, Choi Yung Ng

Lingnan Theses

The debate over the translatability of poetry has been a long-standing issue for decades. Relatively few discussions, however, have focused on the concrete reasons of poetry being translatable (or untranslatable). Moving beyond traditional ways of elucidating the matter through theoretical argument, this study aims to investigate the question of poetry translation in a more solid, empirical manner by looking into linguistic and language-based aesthetic differences between Chinese and English, in particular their prosodic features and capacities. Part One seeks to answer the question “Why does poetry get lost in translation?” from a linguistic and language-based aesthetic perspective, using the English …

Taking My Parents To College, Jennine Capó Crucet

Department of English: Faculty Publications

I was a first-generation college student as well as the first in our family to be born in America — my parents were born in Cuba — and we didn’t yet know that families were supposed to leave pretty much right after they unloaded your stuff from the car. We all made the trip from Miami, my hometown, to what would be my new home at Cornell University. Shortly after arriving on campus, the five of us — my parents, my younger sister, my abuela and me — found ourselves listening to a dean end his welcome speech with the …

Introduction: A Legacy Of Raised Expectations, Leif Stenberg, Christa Salamandra

Book Chapters / Conference Papers

No abstract provided.

Inadequate Translations: Spanish/English Discrepancies In The Translated Sonnets Of Garcilaso De La Vega, Jessica V. Palmer

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The intimate relationship one develops with his or her native language is an experience which cannot be replicated through any amount of education. Diction, vocabulary, intonation and the connotations which accompany the many facets of language all develop along with us as we progress through life's experiences. Because of this deeply ingrained personal understanding, each individual's perspective towards a work of art, namely poetry, is completely unique to his or her experiences with the language in which it is written. Therefore, no amount of diligent translation can make a poem inhabit the same sentiment and effect in any language other …

Anime And Identity: The Reception Of Sailor Moon By Adolescent American Fans, Darrah M. Hewlett

East Asian Studies Summer Fellows

This project looks at the way fans think, talk, and feel about the anime they watch and the manga they read. Specifically, it looks at fans of Sailor Moon, a series of Japanese anime and manga made in the 1990s that have been dubbed and translated into English and have been met with an enthusiastic reception among girls and young women in the United States. Sailor Moon is considered one of the first mass cultural productions to present images of girl power and gender equality and has generated a large and enthusiastic online community of fans. Most of its …

Women’S Tanci Fiction In Late Imperial And Early Twentieth-Century China, Li Guo

Comparative Cultural Studies

In Women’s Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Modern China, Li Guo presents the first book-length study in English of women’s tanci fiction, the distinctive Chinese form of narrative written in rhymed lines during the late imperial to early modern period (related to, but different from, the orally performed version also called tanci) She explores the tradition through a comparative analysis of five seminal texts. Guo argues that Chinese women writers of the period position the personal within the diegesis in order to reconfigure their moral commitments and personal desires. By fashioning a “feminine” representation of subjectivity, …

The Distorted Lens: Immigrant Maladies And Mythical Norms In Edwidge Danticat’S Breath, Eyes, Memory, Isabel Valiela

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications

The immigrant experience is riddled with the complexities of uprooting, and the challenges of fitting into a new environment where the issue of difference plays an important role. An immigrant’s life is multireferential in terms of how he or she views difference and is viewed as different. Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat’s first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory has instances of extreme disfunctionality due to the interplay of past experiences in Haiti and new encounters in New York City, and it includes many scenes in which characters express and negotiate different sets of cultural expectations, trying to reconcile their differences. [excerpt …

The Fascination Of Manga: Cross-Dressing And Gender Performativity In Japanese Media, Sheena Marie Woods

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The performativity of gender through cross-dressing has been a staple in Japanese media throughout the centuries. This thesis engages with the pervasiveness of cross-dressing in popular Japanese media, from the modern shōjo gender-bender genre of manga and anime to the traditional Japanese theatre. Drawing on theories from gender-studies and performance aesthetics to delineate the female gender in traditional Japanese theatre, I follow the roles of, representation of, and media for women, concentrating on (1) manga, a form of sequential art featuring illustrations with corresponding text, (2) anime, animated productions (where the word anime is the abbreviated pronunciation of “animation” in …

The Literary Unconscious: Ideology And Utopia In The Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel In England And Russia, Isra Ahmed Daraiseh

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this volume, I have examined a number of works of nineteenth-century realist fiction from England and Russia, using the double interpretive method recommended by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious. In particular, I have employed the dialectical double hermeneutic suggested by Jameson, who argues that the most productive approach to literary texts is to consider them from the double perspective of ideology and utopia. That is, critics should approach literary texts by seeking out the ideological roots that lie beneath the textual surface and from which the texts grow, while at the same time keeping a careful eye out …

Dramatizing Power And Resistance: Images Of Women In Pakistani And Indian Alternative Theater, Sobia Mubarak

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes Pakistani and Indian plays that illustrate the nexus of power relations that operate in Pakistan and India to disempower women and the way women resist by creating dialogic spaces or fissures in the exploitative system. I have selected plays by Ajoka Theater in Pakistan and plays dealing with the similar thematic concerns by notable Indian playwrights to explore common grounds and points of departure. I have chosen four images of women depicting diverse modes of oppression associated with women’s bodies that are dealt with in these plays.

Chapter 1 examines Barri/The Acquittal by Ajoka theater, and Mother …

What The Fuck Is This?: Aesthetic Nature Of Being Or Ontology In The Poetry Of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Alexis Stephenson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“What the Fuck is This?” examines the intersection of phenomenology and poetry arguing for an aesthetic nature of Being and focuses on how we know or experience the world instead of Cartesian absolutes. This subjective knowledge does not compete against objective knowledge but simply recognizes the use that poetic language has for communicating the subjective knowledge from experience of being as it unfolds for us. The major movements of the thesis focus on aesthetic objects, aesthetic intersubjectivity, and the aesthetic self. These are labeled “aesthetic” because a phenomenological methodology reveals a dialectic between that which is unfolding and that which …

Glimpses Of World War Ii In Denmark: Memory And History In Frayn's Copenhagen And Sibbern's Resistance Scrapbook, Adriana Pinegar

Theses and Dissertations

The relationship between history and memory is long and complex. While some theorists argue that they are at odds with one another, this thesis explores the necessary relationship between the two. Using Michael Frayn's 1998 play, Copenhagen, and the scrapbook of a Danish police officer and resistance fighter during World War II, the author posits the central role of uncertainty in the negotiation of individual memory and history. The position of the observer or witness to history affects the way the past is remembered and recorded. Individual witnesses, even and perhaps especially where they stray from the accepted historical narrative, …

Past Traumas, Present Griefs: Exploring The Effects Of Colonialism, Microaggressions, And Stereotyping From Wild West Shows To Indigenous Literature, Kimberly Dawn Allen

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Native Americans have long been, and continue to be, victims of racism, microaggression, and stereotyping. This continued exposure to violence, degradation, belittling, and discrimination work in the forefront to historical trauma and unresolved grief which has led to an increase in the numbers of individuals suffering from mental illness within the Indigenous population. Colonization created a long history of trauma and genocide that effects generations of Native American people, not just the individuals on which the horrific sins were committed. Using the lens of disability studies, this project will examine the ways in which portrayals of Native American people in …

Dionysus In Spain: The New Divinity In Unamuno’S San Manuel Bueno, Mártir, David Delbar, Roger Macfarlane

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Few characters are as enigmatic as the protagonist of Miguel de Unamuno’s San Manuel Bueno, mártir, and many scholars have attempted to discern the motivations of the saintly Catholic priest who does not believe in an afterlife. Because of the overt biblical allusions in the text and the personal struggles of the author with the Catholic faith, many approach the novella and its protagonist with a Christian interpretation, ignoring Unamuno’s extensive classical background. While Unamuno clearly modeled don Manuel as a Christ figure, he also embedded Dionysian characteristics that have thus far been unexamined in academic treatises of the …

Turn Of The Century Sweden And The Ecological Imaginarytopic Modeling Ecological Thought In Swedish Nature Texts, Benjamin Holt, Dane Christensen, Dr. Christopher Oscarson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The roots of ecology in Scandinavia begin with the botanist Linnaeus in the 18th century, who developed the notion of the economy of nature. Throughout the 19th century, proto-ecologists carried the movement that would eventually be recognized as a legitimate and viable science, studying the interaction between organisms and their environment. Leading up to the turn of the century, the climate in Scandinavia was ripe for organizations to emerge such as the Svenska Turistföreningen (Swedish Tourist Society) and the Svenska Naturskyddsföreningen (Swedish Nature Protection Society), both of which are committed to improving and preserving nature in Sweden.