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Full-Text Articles in Comparative Literature

Welsh Manipulations Of The Matter Of Britain, Timothy J. Nelson Aug 2014

Welsh Manipulations Of The Matter Of Britain, Timothy J. Nelson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

"Welsh Manipulations of the Matter of Britain" examines the textual relationships between Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae and the Welsh Brut y Brenhinedd in the Cotton Cleopatra manuscript. This thesis initially provides an overview of the existing scholarship surrounding the Welsh translations of Geoffrey's Historia with a specific focus on the Cotton Cleopatra Brut. The textual examination of the two histories begins with an extended commentary on the general textual variations between the two texts before concentrating on the specific changes that were made in the Cotton Cleopatra to reflect the adapter's pro-Welsh nationalistic and political biases. The general …

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Echoes Of Peace: Anti-War Sentiment In The Iliad And Heike Monogatari And Its Manifestation In Dramatic Tradition, Tyler A. Creer Jul 2014

Echoes Of Peace: Anti-War Sentiment In The Iliad And Heike Monogatari And Its Manifestation In Dramatic Tradition, Tyler A. Creer

Theses and Dissertations

The Iliad and Heike monogatari are each seen as seminal pieces of literature in Greek and Japanese culture respectively. Both works depict famous wars from which subsequent generations of warriors, poets, and other artists in each society drew their inspiration for their own modes of conduct and creation. While neither work is emphatically pro-war, both were used extensively by the warrior classes of both cultures to reinforce warrior culture and to inculcate proper battlefield behavior. In spite of this, however, both tales contain a strong undercurrent of anti-war sentiment which contrasts sharply with their traditionally seen roles of being tales …

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"No Goin' Back": Modernity And The Film Western, Julie Anne Kohler Jul 2014

"No Goin' Back": Modernity And The Film Western, Julie Anne Kohler

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is inspired by an ending—that of a cowboy hero riding away, back turned, into the setting sun. That image, possibly the most evocative and most repeated in the Western, signifies both continuing adventure and ever westward motion as well as a restless lack of final resolution. This thesis examines the ambiguous endings and the conditions leading up to them in two film Westerns of the 1950s, George Steven's Shane (1953) and John Ford's The Searchers (1956). Fascinatingly, the tension and uncertainty conveyed throughout these films is also characteristic of life in modernity, a connection which has previously gone …

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Teaching Attentive Reading And Motivated Writing Through Digital Editing, Amanda A. Gailey Jul 2014

Teaching Attentive Reading And Motivated Writing Through Digital Editing, Amanda A. Gailey

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Though English departments, including my own at the University of Nebraska, have been teaching digital humanities (DH) courses for over a decade, hyperbolic claims about the perils and promises of using computers in the study of literature continue to appear in the press. A piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books likens the algorithms used by some digital humanities methods to fascism (Marche). Another, in The Huffington Post, compares the rise of digital humanities to “our uncritical acceptance of drone attacks” (Mohamed). On the other hand, digital humanists such as Franco Moretti, who famously promote “distant reading” as opposed …

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In Search Of An Author: From Participatory Culture To Participatory Authorship, Rachel Elizabeth Meyers Jun 2014

In Search Of An Author: From Participatory Culture To Participatory Authorship, Rachel Elizabeth Meyers

Theses and Dissertations

The question of fidelity, which has long been at the center of adaptation studies, pertains to the problem of authorship. Who can be an author and adapt a text and who cannot? In order to understand the problem of fidelity, this thesis asks larger questions about the problems of authorship, examining how authorship is changing in new media. Audiences are taking an ever-increasing role in the creation and interpretation of the texts they receive: a phenomenon this thesis refers to as participatory authorship, or the active participation of audience members in the creation, expansion, and adaptation of another's creative work. …

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The Subjection Of Authority And Death Through Humor: Carnivalesque, Incongruity, And Absurdism In Cormac Mccarthy's Blood Meridian And No Country For Old Men, Ruth Ellen Covington Jun 2014

The Subjection Of Authority And Death Through Humor: Carnivalesque, Incongruity, And Absurdism In Cormac Mccarthy's Blood Meridian And No Country For Old Men, Ruth Ellen Covington

Theses and Dissertations

Cormac McCarthy's representation of the comic theories of the carnivalesque, incongruity, and absurdism by the antagonists of Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men demonstrates the unique and ostensible power of humor over (or at least, its awareness of and reconciliation to the absurdity of) death; it also emphasizes the supreme power and influence of humor as a means for destroying other institutions and philosophies which claim knowledge or authority but fail to sustain individuals in times of crisis. This makes humor a formidable factor in determining and justifying the outcome of human interactions and in defining the strengths …

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Agreeable Despair: Modernism And Melancholy, Derrick James Gentry Jun 2014

Agreeable Despair: Modernism And Melancholy, Derrick James Gentry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study considers a group of distinctly modernist philosophers for whom aesthetic and reflective practices represented a way out of the paralysis of a culture dominated by narrowly conceived philosophical values. These modernist philosophers, I argue, helped to give birth to mode of experimental writing that Robert Musil called "essayism." I begin in Chapter One with an account of Walter Benjamin's experimental concept of melancholy and its intersection with the avant-garde practices of French Surrealism. Chapter One begins to contrast Benjamin's concept of melancholy with Friedrich Nietzsche's therapeutic efforts to transform and overcome melancholy on both a personal and a …

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Reading Cruft: A Cognitive Approach To The Mega-Novel, David J. Letzler Jun 2014

Reading Cruft: A Cognitive Approach To The Mega-Novel, David J. Letzler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Reading Cruft offers a new critical model in which to examine a genre vital to modern literature, the mega-novel. Building on theoretical work in both cognitive narratology and cognitive poetics, it argues that the mega-novel is primarily characterized by its inclusion of a substantial amount of pointless text ("cruft"), which it uses to challenge its readers' abilities to modulate their attention and rapidly shift their modes of text processing. Structured into five chapters respectively devoted to subgenres in which mega-novels have been grouped--the dictionary novel, the encyclopedic novel, the Menippean satire, the picaresque and frame-tale, and the epic and allegory--it …

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Literary Adaptations Of James In Roth's, Ozick's, And Franzen's Work, John Carlos Rowe Jun 2014

Literary Adaptations Of James In Roth's, Ozick's, And Franzen's Work, John Carlos Rowe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Literary Adaptations of James in Roth's, Ozick's, and Franzen's Work" John Carlos Rowe posits that Henry James continues to exert a powerful influence on contemporary writers. Given the dramatic social, economic, and political changes from modern to postmodern eras, his continuing influence requires explanation. Rowe considers three US-American novelists—Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Jonathan Franzen—who are influenced by James and presents an interpretation of James's continuing impact. Despite James's reputation as a cosmopolitan modern who influenced global literature in significant ways, US-American writers attempt to "Americanize" him. Their effort expresses the problem of contemporary US-American literary practice …

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Roth's Graveyards, Narrative Desire, And "Professional Competition With Death", Debra Shostak Jun 2014

Roth's Graveyards, Narrative Desire, And "Professional Competition With Death", Debra Shostak

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Roth's Graveyards, Narrative Desire, and 'Professional Competition with Death'" Debra Shostak analyzes Philip Roth's 1954 short story "The Day It Snowed" and surveys a range of his books. Shostak offers a reading of Sabbath's Theater and Everyman to explore Roth's fictional forms and his conception of storytelling, elucidates how the traumatic knowledge of death at graveside initiates the psychoanalytic process of repression, repetition, remembering, and telling, and uncovers several motifs or formal strategies that appear when Roth deploys cemetery scenes: the linear plotting toward death is often embraced within circular narrative structures; the voice of the mother, …

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Jewish History, Us-American Fictions, And "Soul-Battering" In Roth's "Conversion Of The Jews", Sandor Goodhart Jun 2014

Jewish History, Us-American Fictions, And "Soul-Battering" In Roth's "Conversion Of The Jews", Sandor Goodhart

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Jewish History, US-American Fictions, and 'Soul-Battering' in Roth's 'Conversion of the Jews'" Sandor Goodhart discusses Philip Roth's story in which an innocent question raised in a Hebrew school discussion in the early 1950s gets wildly out of control. It leads the student into a screaming fight with his Rabbi, which propels the child into a confrontation with his mother, which in turn leads to a second violent confrontation with the Rabbi (who ends up slapping the child), and the episode culminates in a rooftop exchange over the synagogue where the boy’s thought of escape is suddenly converted …

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European Literary Tradition In Roth's Kepesh Trilogy, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales Jun 2014

European Literary Tradition In Roth's Kepesh Trilogy, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

in his article "European Literary Tradition in Roth's Kepesh Trilogy" Gustavo Sánchez-Canales discusses the significance of European literature in Philip Roth's novels. Sánchez-Canales analyses the influence of Nikolai Gogol's "The Nose" and Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" on Roth's The Breast and in Roth's The Professor of Desire of Anton Chekhov's tales and Franz Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" and The Castle. Further, Sánchez-Canales elaborates on the impact of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and W.B. Yeats's poem "Sailing to Byzantium" on Roth's The Dying Animal.

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Reverse Anti-Semitism In The Fiction Of Bellow And Roth, Jay L. Halio Jun 2014

Reverse Anti-Semitism In The Fiction Of Bellow And Roth, Jay L. Halio

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Reverse Anti-Semitism in the Fiction of Bellow and Roth" Jay L. Halio discusses anti-Semitism in Philip Roth's fiction that what might be called reverse anti-Semitism: the active reaction by Jews who are subjected to anti-Semitism. This aspect of Roth's work is not often discussed: it is not the same as philo-Semitism, which takes a different form entirely. Since Roth was an admirer of Saul Bellow, Halio begins by considering reverse anti-Semitism in Bellow's early novel The Victim. In the novel the protagonist, Asa Leventhal, is accused by a character named Allbee of costing him his job …

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Roth’S Humorous Art Of Ghost Writing, Paule Levy Jun 2014

Roth’S Humorous Art Of Ghost Writing, Paule Levy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Roth's Humorous Art of Ghost Writing" Paule Lévy analyses Philip Roth's Exit Ghost, the last novel featuring Nathan Zuckerman, in which Roth reassesses his favorite alter ego's itinerary while exploring the troubled relation between writing and aging. Lévy considers Exit Ghost as an ironic sequel to The Ghost Writer and posits that in the light of Derrida's theories of writing and "hauntology" the central motifs of ghosts and "spectrality" in the novel are a means for Roth to reflect anew on the ambiguous relation between autobiography and fiction. Lévy asks whether Exit Ghost should be …

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Bibliography For The Study Of Phillip Roth's Works, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales, Victoria Aarons Jun 2014

Bibliography For The Study Of Phillip Roth's Works, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales, Victoria Aarons

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

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Cathy Trask, Monstrosity, And Gender-Based Fears In John Steinbeck’S East Of Eden, Claire Warnick Jun 2014

Cathy Trask, Monstrosity, And Gender-Based Fears In John Steinbeck’S East Of Eden, Claire Warnick

Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, the concept of monstrosity has received renewed attention by literary critics. Much of this criticism has focused on horror texts and other texts that depict supernatural monsters. However, the way that monster theory explores the connection between specific cultures and their monsters illuminates not only our understanding of horror texts, but also our understanding of any significant cultural artwork. Applying monster theory to non-horror texts is a useful and productive way to more fully understand the cultural fears of a society. One text that is particularly fruitful to explore in this context is John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel, …

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Roth's Contribution To The Narrativization Of Illness, Miriam Jaffe-Foger Jun 2014

Roth's Contribution To The Narrativization Of Illness, Miriam Jaffe-Foger

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Roth's Contribution to the Narrativization of Illness" Miriam Jaffe-Foger argues that Philipp Roth's fiction represents him as an empath, a writer who prescribes for modern medicine a dose of humanity in listening to the pain of others. Using Roth's The Anatomy Lesson, The Dying Animal, and Exit Ghost as primary source material in combination with theories from medical anthropology, Jaffe-Foger suggests that Roth is an inspiration for the field of narrative medicine. Jaffe-Foger examines the art in organizing narratives to tell these stories. Jaffe-Foger also argues against misogynist views of Roth as he represents woman's …

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Philip Roth, Henry Roth And The History Of The Jews, Timothy Parrish Jun 2014

Philip Roth, Henry Roth And The History Of The Jews, Timothy Parrish

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Philip Roth, Henry Roth and the History of the Jews" Timothy Parrish argues that while Roth's status as a Jewish American writer has been a pressing issue since his career began and that while in recent scholarship Roth's achievement as a US-American writer is stressed, the durability of Roth's work depends more on its implied submission to a Jewish tradition. From "The Conversion of the Jews" (1959) to Nemesis (2010), his characters challenge endlessly the ethical and moral constructs of their Jewish community to acknowledge the fact that they exist inside of it. One might choose any …

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Roth's Fiction From Nemesis To Nemesis, Emily Budick Jun 2014

Roth's Fiction From Nemesis To Nemesis, Emily Budick

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Roth's Fiction from Nemesis to Nemesis" Emily Budick discusses Philip Roth's novel Nemesis as the culminating work of a career in which one nemesis or another has afflicted almost all of the author's protagonists. During the bulk of Roth's career, the hero's nemesis was generally, as in the ordinary, literary usage of the term, the protagonist's enemy, whether Judge Wapter in The Ghost Writer or the alter-Roth in The Counterlife. In Nemesis Roth restores the word nemesis to its classical meaning: Nemesis, as the goddess of revenge and cosmic balance. The nemesis in Roth's novel, therefore, …

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The Succubus And The Suckers: The Soul-Siphoning Leeches In The Stories Of Modernist Text., Victoria Bonilla May 2014

The Succubus And The Suckers: The Soul-Siphoning Leeches In The Stories Of Modernist Text., Victoria Bonilla

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores the various relationships found in John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men," Tennessee Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire," Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night." The exploration of each demonstrates the common theme of parasitic relations and the toll this dynamic takes on the persons involved.

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Ergonomically Designing Art Objects, Ambika Subramaniam May 2014

Ergonomically Designing Art Objects, Ambika Subramaniam

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

The following thesis examines the work of Ambika Subramaniam, in particular her thesis installation Ergonomically Designing Art Objects, for the Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture at Washington University in St. Louis. Based within a discussion of semiotics, the thesis researches furniture signification and tracks its evolution through traditional form, ergonomic function, and consumed product. Major points include the ways in which objects are capable of collapsing and retaining the semiotic divide between a sign and referent, and how that signification relates to contemporary design-oriented products. Using the chair as the exemplifying object, the thesis installation questions how objects have …

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Funny Or French: How Humor Varies Across Cultures, Audrey Mefford May 2014

Funny Or French: How Humor Varies Across Cultures, Audrey Mefford

Honors Theses

This paper examines the works of four cartoonists (Saul Steinberg, Jean-Jacques Sempé, Roz Chast, and Claire Bretécher) in order to determine similarities and differences between French humor and American humor. It incorporates compiled data from each of the above artist's lifetime works, as well as knowledge from the fields of cartoons and comics, sociology, and cross-cultural psychology, to answer the question "What is funny?" in each of these two disparate cultures.

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Reflective Tales : Tracing Fairy Tales In Popular Culture Through The Depiction Of Maternity In Three “Snow White” Variants., Alexandra O'Keefe May 2014

Reflective Tales : Tracing Fairy Tales In Popular Culture Through The Depiction Of Maternity In Three “Snow White” Variants., Alexandra O'Keefe

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

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The Dakini Project, Kimberley Harris Idol May 2014

The Dakini Project, Kimberley Harris Idol

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation merges creative writing with scholarship using the novel, The Dakini Project, to provide the subject matter to which the criticism applies. It will focus on the source of mystery format as that codified by Edgar Allan Poe that is later taken in hand by his fellows Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett (as novelists), authors of the hard-boiled American style, and it will use Chaos theory to assess to idea of catastrophe in terms of emergence rather than disintegration. Though the format comes from American beginnings, the scope of the stories discussed here are tangled around …

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Heroes To Horrors: Metamorphosis As Combat Trauma In The Mythology Of The West, Thomas Passarelli May 2014

Heroes To Horrors: Metamorphosis As Combat Trauma In The Mythology Of The West, Thomas Passarelli

Honors Scholar Theses

In an attempt to show how Western mythological depictions of metamorphosis in fighting men often serve as an early discussion on the psychosocial ramifications of warfare on veterans, this research holds early Norse, Celtic, and Anglo-Saxon texts in comparison with contemporary PTSD research and anecdotes from American veterans of the Vietnam War.

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Sleeping Beauty Through The Ages, Sarah Semsar Apr 2014

Sleeping Beauty Through The Ages, Sarah Semsar

Ellipsis: A Journal of Art, Ideas, and Literature

The Quarante Club Prize

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Dürer’S Window: The Renaissance Problem Of Seeing The Word Through Perspective-Colored Glasses, Laura Hatch, Dr. Matt Ancell Apr 2014

Dürer’S Window: The Renaissance Problem Of Seeing The Word Through Perspective-Colored Glasses, Laura Hatch, Dr. Matt Ancell

Journal of Undergraduate Research

I organized this research project in order to better understand the philosophical implications of linear perspective in Western Renaissance art. Artists and theorists have long understood linear perspective as a specific artistic technique, but my research was an exploration of what linear perspective represents in terms of how human beings construct and represent knowledge. By performing a phenomenological reading of German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut Draughtsman Drawing a Recumbent Woman (1525),1 it was my initial hope to show how this ubiquitous image could be read as a recognition of and exposure of linear perspective’s failure to capture and truly …

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Building The Unsinkable Understanding: Margaret ‘Molly’ Brown And Her Legacy Through Architecture, Adam Lloyd, Dr. Kerry Soper Apr 2014

Building The Unsinkable Understanding: Margaret ‘Molly’ Brown And Her Legacy Through Architecture, Adam Lloyd, Dr. Kerry Soper

Journal of Undergraduate Research

On a visit to Denver, Colorado in November 2011, my girlfriend requested that we visit the Molly Brown House Museum as she had grown up watching the musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown. As we toured the museum, the architecture and interior design of the house caught my attention as it reminded me of the Gilded Age cottages in New England that I had learned about in my American Humanities class. My project was originally intended to explore the Gilded Age homes of Mining Age Colorado but, as I visited Denver in the summer of 2013, I was intrigued by the …

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Best Integrated Writing 2014 - Complete Edition Apr 2014

Best Integrated Writing 2014 - Complete Edition

Best Integrated Writing

Best Integrated Writing includes excellent student writing from Integrated Writing courses taught at Wright State University. The journal is published annually by the Wright State University Department of English Language and Literatures.

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“Never In History Did Ill-Breeding Contribute So Much Towards The Dissolution Of Empire”: Cultural Attitudes In A Passage To India, Leigh Meister, Dr. Francesca Lawson Apr 2014

“Never In History Did Ill-Breeding Contribute So Much Towards The Dissolution Of Empire”: Cultural Attitudes In A Passage To India, Leigh Meister, Dr. Francesca Lawson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

I can honestly say that this ORCA-sponsored research has turned out to be one of the most valuable aspects of my undergraduate career. While several elements of my finished project did not meet my initial expectations, this research opportunity taught me to be adaptable and observant. My ORCA research is the foundation for my Honors thesis, which will be submitted in its final form in the upcoming months for graduation with University Honors in April 2012. This completed thesis will be available in the Harold B. Lee Library for reference by future library patrons.

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