Comparative Literature Commons^™

The Tartu School And Catalan Scholarship: A Book Review Article Of New Work In Reception And Communication Studie, Christopher Larkosh

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Academic Discourse And Literacy Narratives As "Equipment For Living", Kris Rutten

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Academic Discourse and Narratives of Literacy as 'Equipment for Living'" Kris Rutten discusses practices of academic discourse and argues that students entering higher education have to become part of a specific community of institutional discourse. Rutten claims that narratives of and about literacy — narratives that revolve around issues dealing with language and the acquisition of literacy — "dramatize" the tension of moving from one discourse community to another. By charting situations of "type," fictional literacy narratives can be used by students as "equipment for living" in order to reflect on confrontations and difficulties they experience in …

About The Human Condition In The Works Of Dickens And Marx, Ami E. Stearns, Thomas J. Burns

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "About the Human Condition in the Works of Dickens and Marx" Ami E. Stearns and Thomas J. Burns contribute to the study of Charles Dickens's Industrial Revolution-era fiction by examining his novels in relation to Karl Marx's social philosophy. Stearns and Burns postulate that Dickens relies on Marxist concepts of class consciousness, sacrifice, revolution, social antitheses, and social injustice to weave his narratives and compare and discuss six of Dickens' novels: A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Great Expectations with three works of Marx: Grundrisse, The Communist Manifesto, …

Dante's Linguistic Detail In Shelley's Triumph Of Life, Anita O'Connell

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Dante's Linguistic Detail in Shelley's Triumph of Life" Anita O'Connell analyzes Shelley's attention to detail in Dante's poetic style and presents a close textual analysis of the ways Shelley draws on the beauty of Dante's texts. When Dante's Divine Comedy re-emerged into the public sphere in Britain through Henry Cary's 1814 translation, his reputation was as a stern, dark, Medieval poet and readers and writers alike shared a love of the perceived gothicism particularly of The Inferno. Shelley, however, differed from this general view of Dante: despite the grotesque descriptions in his Triumph of Life …

A Study Of The Early American Author Judith Sargent Murray, Her Role In Early American Print Culture And Her Misappropriation By Twentieth-Century Feminism, Robert Allen Fowler

Master's Theses

In 1798, Judith Sargent Murray published a three-volume collection of one hundred miscellaneous essays on topics ranging from social politesse to women’s education to international politics. Her diligence, forethought and manipulation of pseudonyms in the print-hungry post-Revolutionary America create a unique place for her in the history of American letters. However, in the twentieth century, modern feminism has attempted to claim Murray as one of their own, choosing between one and four examples of her work as proof of her forward-looking philosophy, while ignoring significant pieces of those same works as well as much of her oeuvre as a whole …

The Writing And Reading Of Fan Fiction And Transformation Theory, Veerle Van Steenhuyse

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Writing and Reading of Fan Fiction and Transformation Theory" Veerle Van Steenhuyse discusses the experience of immersive reading fan fiction offers to fans based on her analysis of fan fiction about the television series House, M.D. (2004-). Van Steenhuyse postulates that a text is immersive when it evokes a mental construct with the presence of a text-independent reality. In the case of fan fiction, this reality is a "transformed universe" that builds on and deviates from particular primary texts. Following the work of Marie-Laure Ryan and Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Van Steenhuyse argues that readers feel immersed when …

A Case Study In Discourse Analysis Of "Community Arts" In Cultural Policy And The Press, An De Bisschop, Kris Rutten, Ronald Soetaert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "A Case Study in Discourse Analysis of 'Community Arts' in Cultural Policy and the Press" An De bisschop, Kris Rutten, and Ronald Soetaert explore theoretical and applied aspects of the phenomenon of community arts. Community arts in Flanders have developed into a professional practice during the past few years and have received increased recognition from policy makers, scholars, and critics. This attention has caused a growing need to define the nature of a practice diverse in form, goal, and process. De bisschop, Rutten, and Soetaert discuss the problematics of community arts projects in comparative discourse analysis in …

About Society: A Book Review Article Of Work On Roth And Kundera By Shostak And Ivanova, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Psychology, Science, Feminisms, And Cultural Studies: A Book Review Article Of New Books By Bell And Hardin, Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Returning The Ticket: Rejecting God In Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov And Hardy's Jude The Obscure, Molly Throgmorton

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Fyodor Dostoevsky and Thomas Hardy both explored the intricacies of the burgeoning spiritual crisis of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in their works. The two most prominent of these works, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Hardy's Jude the Obscure, show the stories of two characters, Ivan and Jude respectively, that choose to reject God. This thesis explores the connection between these two characters, specifically as they represent the two authors' outsider characters. It looks at the reasons behind their rejection, the ways that their rejection plays out in their lives, and the novels' alternatives, namely Christianity and selfless …

Indigenismo In The Mexican Photographs Of Tina Modotti: The Revolutionary And The Indigenista, Shannon Dame

Theses and Dissertations

During Tina Modotti's time in Mexico in the 1920s, much of her photography and political activities focused on and fought for the rights of those who had been previously overlooked and marginalized, namely the indigenous people of Mexico. Many government officials, artists and intellectuals at the time believed that it was through the indigenous culture that Mexico could redeem itself and create its own national identity. Indigenismo, the philosophy that supported this claim, was of interest to Modotti and was a recurring theme throughout her photography. Following the Mexican Revolution of 1910, indigenismo appeared to be the solution to …

Huff, Toby E., Intellectual Curiosity And The Scientific Revolution - A Global Perspective., Laina Farhat-Holzman

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Tom Holland, The Forge Of Christendom: The End Of Days And The Epic Rise Of The West., Laina Farhat-Holzman

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Johnson, Ian, A Mosque In Munich: Nazis, The Cia, And The Rise Of The Muslim Brotherhood In The West., Laina Farhat-Holzman

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Terrorist Or Victim? Comparative Analysis Of The Characters In Jess Walter’S The Zero And Khaled Khalifa’S In Praise Of Hatred, Chloé Tazartez

Re-visioning Terrorism

The characters of Jess Walter’s novel and Khaled Khalifa’s are built as figures of terrorist or victim. According to Bertrand Gervais’ theory, a figure is first of all an object of obsession. The characters of these novels obsess us, questioning our cultural references which permit us to define who represents the terrorist and who represents the victim. Both novels play with these categories, underlining the manipulations of the images through various discourses. This questioning of usual conceptions is built through the use of lost characters, unable to communicate or simply live. These characters illustrate a crisis of the contemporary imaginary …

Totalitarian Threats And Colonial Geography: The Politics Of Defining Terrorism In Beauvoir, Camus, And Dib, Araceli Hernandez-Laroche

Re-visioning Terrorism

Can terrorism be justified as a means for social justice? Can a so-called democratic state engaged in indiscriminate bombardments of civilian populations be held accountable for terrorist acts? How is political crime different from senseless murder? Can and should genocide be defined differently from a civil war operation? Who has the right to decide for the life or death of others?

This paper compares important representations in prose and theater of moral dilemmas that plagued war-torn Europe and France during the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Algerian War. I analyze the complexities and divergences of existential writers …

Songs And Intellectuals: The Musical Projects Of Alain Locke, Alejo Carpentier, And Mário De Andrade, Luiza Franco Moreira

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Smashing The Mirror Of Yamato: Sakaguchi Ango, Decadence & A Postmetaphysical Buddhist Critique Of Culture, James Mark Shields

Faculty Journal Articles

This article focuses on several key philosophical themes in the criticism of Sakaguchi Ango (1906–1955), one of postwar Japan’s most influential and controversial writers. Associated with the underground Kasutori culture as well as the Burai-ha of Tamura Taijirō (1911–1983), Oda Sakunosuke (1913–1947) and Dazai Osamu (1909–1948), Ango gained fame for two provocative essays on the theme of daraku or “decadence”—Darakuron and Zoku darakuron—pubished in 1946, in the wake of Japan’s traumatic defeat and the beginnings of the Allied Occupation. Less well-known is the fact that Ango spent his student years studying classical Buddhist texts in Sanskrit, Pali and …

Digital Humanities In Developed And Emerging Markets, Verena Laschinger

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Digital Humanities in Developed and Emerging Markets" Verena Laschinger discusses the impact e-culture has on humanities pedagogy both in affluent countries and emerging markets. Claiming that e-literacy training generally offers opportunities to recover the traditional agency of the humanities thus catapulting the disciplines into the educational forefront of the creative economy, special attention is given to the chances digital humanities education offers in Turkey’s emerging market economy. Given that technology promotes the country's economic development, which includes a rapidly growing private educational sector, digital humanities education helps citizens to adjust to critical democratic exchange, to facilitate and …

Plotting The Pixel In Remediated Word And Image, Sarah Wyman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Plotting the Pixel in Remediated Word and Image" Sarah Wyman argues that art's historic negotiation of culture continues into the new digital media age as it both asserts the materiality of the medium and acknowledges the impact of embodied perception. She demonstrates that however revolutionary, the new digital media still relate to many traditional paradigms of aesthetic expression. Problems of representation and simulation continue to catch on questions of time, space and human perception. The contingent relationships between categories and entities once kept separate — word/image, observer/observed — determine and define the process of globalization. The new …

Making Sense Of The Digital As Embodied Experience, Serge Bouchardon, Asunción López-Varela

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Making Sense of the Digital as Embodied Experience" Serge Bouchardon and Asunción López-Varela discuss a digital creation — Loss of Grasp <http://lossofgrasp.com/> — created by Serge Bouchardon and Vincent Volckaert. The work is about the notions of grasp and control. Through an analysis of Loss of Grasp, Bouchardon and López-Varela Azcárate show how the Cartesian understanding of private isolated experience, independent of reality external to it, has given way to a communal understanding of experience in which the subject constitutes itself by mirroring himself/herself on its objects, producing a mutual engagement or co-creativity among interdependent intersubjects: …

An Intermedial Reading Of Paley's Sita Sings The Blues, Ipshita Chanda

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "An Intermedial Reading of Paley's Sita Sings the Blues" Ipshita Chanda discusses the film text of Nina Paley's 2008 animation film, a culturally reconceptualized version of Válmíki's Sanskrit epic Rámáyana. Chanda discusses the film as an intermedial retextualization of the Rámáyana in the film where media boundaries and genres are crossed in "textual," audio, and visual media. The basic premise from which Chanda proceeds is that the condition of intermediality in film is produced by a "conceptual fusion" of different media which, in turn, are analyzed using theories of reception and contact between different media …

Intermediality, Rewriting Histories, And Identities In French Rap, Isabelle Marc Martínez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Intermediality, Rewriting Histories and Identities in French Rap" Isabelle Marc Martínez analyzes aspects of French hip hop culture. As an example of resistant cultural manifestations, hip hop scenes all over the world develop strategies to subvert mainstream values and to replace them by new de-localized, contesting identities via intermedial and intertextual processes. In France during the 1990 rap was intended to reassess French national history and national self-perception. Foundational hip hop bands such as Assassin, Ministère AMER, IAM, and NTM aimed at discrediting official narratives concerning the French culture's colonial and social past. hip hop artists, who …

Introduction To New Perspectives On Material Culture And Intermedial Practice, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek, Asunción López-Varela, Haun Saussy, Jan Mieszkowski

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Towards A Multimodal Analysis Of Da Rimini's Dollspace, Maya Paniagua Zalbidea

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Towards a Multimodal Analysis of da Rimini's Dollspace" Maya Zalbidea Paniagua analyzes Francesca da Rimini's Dollspace <http://dollyoko.thing.net/> (1997-2001). By analyzing Dollspace Zalbidea Paniagua reinforces the proposition that studies on material aesthetics and intermediality encompass a process of rethinking the notion of boundaries across material structures. This is clearly shown in da Rimini's Dollspace, where ambivalence cuts across discursive genres and distinct material formats of image, text, and audio. Hypertext engages the user/participant in a dialogue with the machine and, in the case of Dollspace, across people's sexual attitudes. Dollspace seeks to do more than …

Discourses And Models Of Intermediality, Jens Schröter

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Discourses and Models of Intermediality" Jens Schröter discusses the question as to what relations do different discourses pose between different "media." Schröter identifies four models of discourse: 1) synthetic intermediality: a "fusion" of different media to super-media, a model with roots in the Wagnerian concept of Gesamtkunstwerk with political connotations, 2) formal (or transmedial) intermediality: a concept based on formal structures not "specific" to one medium but found in different media, 3) transformational intermediality: a model centered around the representation of one medium through another medium. Model 3) leads to the postulate that transformational intermediality is not …

(Inter)Mediality And The Study Of Literature, Werner Wolf

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "(Inter)mediality and the Study of Literature" Werner Wolf elaborates on the "intermedial turn" and asks whether this turn ought to be welcomed. Wolf begins with a discussion about the definitions of "medium" and "intermediality" and the impact these concepts and practices exert on scholarly, as well as student competence. He argues that despite of the fact that literary studies ought not simply turn into media or cultural studies, mediality and intermediality have become relevant issues for both teaching and the study of literature especially in the fields of comparative literature and (comparative) cultural studies. Following his postulate …

Intermediality, Architecture, And The Politics Of Urbanity, Virgilio Tortosa Garrigós

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Intermediality, Architecture, and the Politics of Urbanity" Virgilio Tortosa Garrigós discusses aspects of the exponential development of large cities, the neoliberal economy, and the "spectacle" of architecture in the context of intermediality. With the connivance between land speculators and politicians — which has led not only to the loss of spatial identity but to irreversible pollution and geographic degradation — urbanity is epitomized on the Mediterranean coast line. In reaction to this development, a series of anti-globalization organizations and social movements, rooted in urban neighbourhoods, resist the homogenization of taste with anti-billboards and anti-advertising against consumerism and …

Intermediality And Human Vs. Machine Translation, Harry J. Huang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Intermediality and Human vs. Machine Translation" Harry J. Huang analyzes translation as a process of transferring meaning and/or information. The process and the translated text represent a new medium. When machine translation originating from human translation is integrated into the world wide web, it becomes part of global media. Accordingly, machine translation may best be studied within the context of intermediality, especially its quality vs. that of human translation. Based upon data generated from an international survey of 300 translators, writers, editors, and translation scholars, Huang analyses the participants' expectations and their acceptance of imperfection in the …

Bibliography Of Publications In Media And (Inter)Mediality Studies, Geert Vandermeersche, Joachim Vlieghe, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.