Comparative Literature Commons^™

Front Matter

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Symbiotic Werewolves And Cybernetic Anchoresses: Premodern Posthumans In Medieval Literature, Jennifer K. Cox

Quidditas

This paper examines how individual agency in medieval society might be expanded through posthuman configurations; in so doing, it pushes the boundaries of traditional practices in medieval research to include more contemporary ideas. Although as scholars, we must avoid anachronistic readings of these texts, ignoring modern thinkers like N. Katherine Hayles (How We Became Posthuman) and Donna Haraway (“A Cyborg Manifesto”) too easily disregards their valuable – and timeless – insights. While the term “posthuman” can evoke images of cyborgs or superhuman mutants using wormholes to traverse space and time, this pop culture perspective often overlooks less technoscientific examples of …

Domestic Cruelty: Saevitia And Separation In Medieval France, Kristi Diclemente

Quidditas

This article examines the role cruelty played in marriage separation cases in fourteenth-century Paris. Cruelty was an effective and relatively successful means for women to initiate separation litigation. The archdeacon’s court regularly cited saevitia as a reason for its decision to legally separate marriages. Marital cruelty, however was a complicated issue and what constituted cruelty was not defined within the text. Through an examination of the use of saevitia in the legal cases,in conjunction with contemporary exempla of abusive marriages, such as the vita of Godelieve of Gistel, the author finds that it was a complicated term representing a variety …

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (2015)

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Alaina L. Bupp

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

“I Am I”: The Allegorical Bastard In Shakespeare’S King John, Alaina Bupp

Quidditas

Shakespeare’s King John provides readers with a particularly interesting, though relatively unexamined character: Philip Falconbridge, the bastard. This character exists somewhere between the allegorical forbears of medieval morality plays and the intensely interior specificity of the likes of Hamlet. Philip begins the play with a specific, though fictional, identity, but consciously decides to become allegorical. We can see this transformation at the intersection of text and context, of the words spoken by Philip as he becomes Bastard (the allegorical figure) and the First Folio’s construction of that transformation. Bastard employs particular rhetoric to firstly shed his old, specific identity and …

Vergilian Allusions In The Novels Of Willa Cather, Nathaniel Wagner

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This work aims to explore the nature of Vergilian allusion in the novels of Willa Cather - how the author implicated classical language in her own texts as well as the purpose and efficacy of such allusions. By surveying traces of Vergilian passages and rhetorical techniques such as ecphrasis and anacolouthon across three of the writer's major novels, My Antonia, The Professor's House and Shadows on the Rock, this study reveals an important and persistent aspect of Cather's artistic program. The author intentionally and regularly uses Vergilian language and figures to lend a sense of grandeur to the small, individual …

Focusing The Village: Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali And Prafulla Mohanti's My Village, My Life, Geoffrey Kain

Publications

Gandhi insisted that the spirit of India lives in its villages, but the drift away from the village and toward urbanization in post- independence India continues. Questions arise regarding the ideological motivations driving artists’ treatments of the village in various notable works in the modern South Asian canon. A comparison is drawn between Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali [1955] and Orissan artist and author Prafulla Mohanti’s My Village, My Life [1973]. While at first glance the two may seem to have little to do with another, a close consideration reveals some striking similarities between them, providing some compelling insights into Ray’s …

Unexpected Zeus, Adam Lambert

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Dwelling Poetically, Proceeding Orphically: The Platonic Tradition And The Heideggerian Humanism Of Ernesto Grassi, Geoffrey Alexander Leeves Bain

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Martin Heidegger exerted an immense influence over twentieth century thought by providing profound insights into the nature of Being as well as scathing social critiques, focused on the destructive force of late modern technological reductionism. As part of Heidegger’s project, he elaborated upon a sophisticated history of Being in which two great monsters of Platonism and Humanism are cast as Antichrist and False Prophet. Subsequently, however, his own student Ernesto Grassi argued that Renaissance Humanism was not a stepping stone towards subjectivism and technological thinking, but rather stood in conformity with the fundamental essence of Heidegger’s own project. This study …

Bibliography For The Study Of Literature, East Asia, And Globalization, Zhaomei Zheng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Canon Formation In The Study Of The Environment In China And Taiwan, Peter I-Min Huang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Canon Formation in the Study of the Environment in China and Taiwan" Peter I-min Huang discusses how the canon of ecocriticism taught in English studies in China and Taiwan is becoming increasingly of a local perspective by scholars who publish in Mandarin, address environmental issues specific to Mainland China and Taiwan, and thus engage with ecocriticism based on local perspectives rather than Western ones. The study and teaching of English-language literature in China and Taiwan inevitably encounters charges of neocolonialism or other argumentation that it is being used in ways that betray the legacy of past colonialist …

Introduction To New Work On Electronic Literature And Cyberculture, Maya Zalbidea, Mark C. Marino, Asunción López-Varela

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Electronic Literature And The Effects Of Cyberspace On The Body, Maya Zalbidea, Xiana Sotelo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Electronic Literature and the Effects of Cyberspace on the Body" Maya Zalbidea and Xiana Sotelo discuss how new technologies are facilitating the emancipation of subjugated subjects aimed at transforming unequal social relations through an intersectional and performative approach. This perspective is discussed through the exploration of the so-called intersectional approach described by Berger and Guidroz, Haraway's situated knowledges, and Butler's performative agency based on transgressions. Framed within the posthuman, post-biological deconstruction of social and cultural hierarchies, Zalbidea and Sotelo argue for the value of a conjuncture between postcolonial post-modern/post-structuralist literature and the field of feminist cultural studies. …

Gender Identity Construction Through Talk About Video Games, Sara M. Cole

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Gender Identity Construction through Talk about Video Games" Sara Cole discusses the construction of gender identity in terms of experiences of digital media and interactive play. Digital literacy expresses, shares, and reaffirms gendered self-identification through experiences of video game play with narratives that either confirm or deny stereotypical biases. In-depth interviews were used to explore the effects of play practices on conceptions of masculinity and personal identity in males who grew up in the 1980s by focusing on a linguistic analysis of the pragmatics of their shared thoughts on play, fantasy, use of digital media, and violence. …

Towards A History Of Electronic Literature, Urszula Pawlicka

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Towards a History of Electronic Literature" Urszula Pawlicka investigates the development of theoretical frameworks of and for the study of electronic literature. Pawlicka's objective is show how electronic literature developed and posits that the field underwent to date three transitional phases including several sub-phases where certain aspects and perspectives overlapped. She argues that by distinguishing developments in different phases we can see that electronic literature moved from text to technotext, from text as decoding meaning to text as a process of information and information system, from an interpretation to experience, from visual perception to performativity, from close …

The Racial Formation Of Chatbots, Mark C. Marino

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Racial Formation of Chatbots" Mark C. Marino introduces electronic literature known as chatbot or conversation agent. These programs are all around us from automated help centers to smartphones (e.g., Siri). These conversation agents are often represented as text or disembodied voices. However, when programmers give them a body or the representation of a body (partial or full), other aspects of their identity become more apparent—particularly their racial or ethnic identity. Marino explores the ways racial identity is constructed through the embodied performance of chatbots and what that indicates for human identity construction on the internet.

Introduction To Western Canons In A Changing East Asia, Simon C. Estok

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The Canon Of East Asian Ecocriticism And The Duplicity Of Culture, Hannes Bergthaller

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Canon of East Asian Ecocriticism and the Duplicity of Culture" Hannes Bergthaller begins with the premise that ecocritical scholarship often locates the roots of environmental crisis in Western modernity and that it looks towards pre-modern or non-European traditions for a remedy. Bergthaller argues that such forms of cultural critique tend to reiterate a quintessentially modern gesture. Following Niklas Luhmann's account of culture, Bergthaller examines how these reiterations functions as a semantic mechanism for coping with the contingency of social forms. To describe a social practice as cultural, Bergthaller contends, is to valorize it as a marker …

Environmental Literature And The Change Of Its Canon In Korea, Won-Chung Kim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Environmental Literature and the Change of Its Canon in Korea" Won-Chung Kim examines how US-American ecocritical writings were introduced and received in Korea and how the change of educational curricula in Korea is influenced by changes owing to globalization. Kim shows that the limited reception of US-American ecocritics' works led Korean scholars to reformulate the canon of works in Korean ecocriticism and how they reinvestigate their own cultural heritage and ecological ideas. Kim refers in particular to the thought of thirteenth-century Kyubo Lee and today's Chiha Kim and argues that Korean ecological discourse has the potential to …

Metalanguage In Carroll's "Jabberwocky" And Biggs's Reread, Asunción López-Varela

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Metalanguage in Carroll's 'Jabberwocky' and Biggs's reRead" Asunción López-Varela discusses Simon Biggs's installation reRead <http://www.littlepig.org.uk/reRead/reRead.htm> in relation to Lewis Carroll's poem. López-Varela posits that both works draw attention to the functioning of self-reflexive semiotic mechanisms present in human discourse and gestures. Based on the examples of the poem and the installation, López-Varela discusses how the human mind creates narratological coherence out of random and recursive patterns and argues that it does so by including other media which enable formats beyond the textual and the iconic. Further, López-Varela discusses how we are pre-disposed to process any semiotic …

Pullinger's And Joseph's Inanimate Alice And Intercultural Engagement, Ana Abril

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Pullinger's and Joseph's Inanimate Alice and Intercultural Engagement" Ana Abril analyzes Kate Pullinger's and Chris Joseph's digital graphic novel and game. Inanimate Alice offers a model for online education environments and has been widely acclaimed. However, Abril's ana-lysis suggests possible ways for improving the empathic and educational potential of the novel/game for interpersonal and intercultural benefit. Abril bases her analysis on the theories of human interpersonal communication and then applies these findings to Inanimate Alice and suggests improvement so that participants would be able to decide if they want to play from the viewpoint of their own …

Canon Formation And The Reception Of William Blake's And Dickinson's Poetry In Korea, Hyesook Son

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Canon Formation and the Reception of Blake's and Dickinson's Poetry in Korea" Hyesook Son examines a range of aspects with regard to the reception and scholarship of William Blake's and Emily Dickinson's poetry. Son demonstrates by what process these two poets have become canonized and what intellectual factors and ideologies have produced this canonization. The reception of Blake's and Dickinson's work has symptomatically displayed the characteristic Korean interpretive frames working through the last six decades and their limits and inherent possibilities. Today, Korean scholars are examining both their literary inheritance and reconstitute literary scholarship in general in …

Huang's And Donaldson's Global Shakespeares And The Digital Turn, Tsu-Chung Su

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Huang's and Donaldson's Global Shakespeares and the Digital Turn" Tsu-Chung Su explores the Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive <http://globalshakespeares.org> founded by Alexander C.Y. Huang and Peter Donaldson. Su traces the nature and history of the Archive and its raison d'être of the two founders' concern with archives and archival performance. Further, Su examines how authority and order are exercised in the project with regards to its purposes, cybernetic laws, digital logics, and the overall organizing principles concerning the Archive, its potentials, gains, and prospects, as well as its limits, difficulties, and disadvantages. Overall, …

Canon Formation And Children's Literature During The May Fourth Period, Chu Shen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Canon Formation and Children's Literature during the May Fourth Period" Chu Shen discusses the translation of children's literature as a site in which nationalism is mirrored and is in turn constructed. For the New Culturalists during the May Fourth Period (1915-1927), nationalism was mirrored through a progressive cultural and literary agenda that included the translation of foreign literatures and hence contributed to canon formation. Shen's study refers to the importance of the study of translation with regard to topics of nationalism in the May Fourth period and it advances our knowledge not only about an important transitional …

E-Literature, New Media Art, And E-Literary Criticism, Janez Strehovec

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "E-Literature, New Media Art, and E-Literary Criticism" Janez Strehovec explores the commonalities between electronic literature and new media art. Rather than deploying the traditional conceptual apparatus of e-literary criticism directed first and foremost to the new media elements of e-literature, Strehovec takes into account approaches from current theories in the social sciences and humanities. In doing so, he draws upon examples of new media art as a practice in which the novel's social paradigms change the way of art-making and challenge the very function of art. Close-readings of some new media art projects including Bookchin's Mass Ornament …

Canonization And Ba Jin's (李堯棠) Work In Chinese And Us-American Scholarship, Miaomiao Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Canonization and Ba Jin's (李堯棠 1904-2005) Work in Chinese and US-American Scholarship" Miaomiao Wang discusses the reception of and scholarship on a major Chinese author. Wang explores similarities of and differences in studies on Ba's work in China and the U.S. and analyses the reasons for different viewpoints including research methods and reasons which motivates(d) Chinese and U.S. scholars to study Ba's work. Wang argues that her analysis will be beneficial for Chinese scholars in order to learn about the present situation of studies on Ba's work in US-American scholarship and thus effect a change—as limited this …

Translation And The Canon Of Greek Tragedy In Chinese Literature, Rongnü Chen, Lingling Zhao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Translation and the Canon of Greek Tragedy in Chinese Literature" Rongnü Chen and Lingling Zhao discuss when and how ancient Greek drama were introduced and merged into Chinese literature. Since Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound was first translated into Chinese and published in 1932 up to now, it has been translated eight times in China from 1932 to 2013. Starting from the Chinese translations and reception of Prometheus Bound, Chen and Zhao explore why so many translators have chosen to translate it in the past eighty years. Chen and Zhao also discuss how these translating activities advanced the …

The Meaning And Relevance Of Video Game Literacy, Jeroen Bourgonjon

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Meaning and Relevance of Video Game Literacy" Jeroen Bourgonjon argues that video gaming deserves scholarly attention as a social practice and a site for meaning-making and learning. Based on an overview of contemporary trends in literacy and cultural studies, he argues that video games cannot be approached like traditional text forms. He contends that video games serve as an important frame of reference for young people and call for informed decision making in the context of culture, education, and policy. Bourgonjon provides an integrated perspective on video game literacy by employing theoretical insights about their distinctive …

Review Article About Chinese Comparative Humanities Journals Published In 2013, Yuan Liu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Reception And Variations Of Classical Narratology In Chinese Scholarship, Biwu Shang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Reception and Variations of Classical Narratology in Chinese Scholarship" Biwu Shang discusses the field's impact starting in the 1970s to today. Shang's survey includes translations of Western frameworks including introductions published during three waves (the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s respectively). While Shang posits that Chinese narratology owes a debt to English-language Western scholarship, as it stands in the last decades this is counterbalanced with the development of Chinese narratology and Western scholarship started to show interest in Chinese scholarship: indeed, the more exchanges between Chinese scholarship and that of the West develop, the more beneficial the dialogue …