Comparative Literature Commons^™

Computer Mapping Of Geography And Border Crossing In Scandinavia, Øyvind Eide

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Computer Mapping of Geography and Border Crossing in Scandinavia" Øyvind Eide discusses computer based methods for enquiry into a set of border protocols created in the mid-eighteenth century based on interviews with inhabitants of northern Scandinavia. Most of the interviews are with common people: semi-nomadic reindeer herders, fishers, and farmers of Sámi, Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish origin. Eide discusses the value of the interview material as source material which can be used to understand the way people spoke, especially about geographical matters. The data and their analysis suggest the relevance of mediality and materiality with not only …

Dialogue Between Meaning Systems In Intermedial Texts, Cristina Peñamarín

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Dialogue between Meaning Systems in Intermedial Texts" Cristina Peñamarín analyzes visual-verbal texts showing different ways of conceiving and representing the world, that in each case involves certain ways of reinforcing or challenging preconceptions about the object and ways of positioning author and addressee. Peñamarín's aim is to explore a method by which to address presupposed world visions in the texts and to ask how images and plurisemiotic texts are used to confirm, discuss, or expand the boundaries of systems of meaning. She raises the question of the possibilities of dialogue, hybridization, cultural translation, and the change …

Digital Media, 419, And The Politics Of The Global Network, Paul Benzon

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Digital Media, 419, and the Politics of the Global Network" Paul Benzon analyzes advance fee fraud, a scam in which con artists communicate with potential victims via email, promising them a monetary reward in return for financial assistance in extracting an allegedly astronomical (yet ultimately nonexistent) fortune from within a geographical zone often characterized as highly violent and unstable. Advance fee fraud is often referred to simply as 419, in accordance with the section of Nigerian penal code that addresses fraud. Benzon reads advance fee fraud as a practice of epistolary narrative that self-consciously allegorizes central processes …

Intermediality, Rhetoric, And Pedagogy, Kris Rutten, Ronald Soetaert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Intermediality, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy," Kris Rutten and Ronald Soetaert discuss how the notion of intermediality challenges the institutions that traditionally "mediate" culture and they discuss implications for pedagogy. First, they focus on how the museum as an institution is questioned and problematized by describing it as a "medium" that is increasingly influenced by cultural and technological developments. Second, they focus on the implications of new material culture and intermedial practice and how this requires new perspectives on pedagogy. Rutten and Soetaert elaborate on previous work on the curriculum as a "contact zone" (Pratt) by focusing on the …

Intersubjectivity And Intermediality In The Work Of Serra, Rocío Von Jungenfeld

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Intersubjectivity and Intermediality in the work of Serra" Rocío von Jungenfeld examines the intersubjective space in which artworks are conceived and the cross boundaries of media in order to construct a general understanding of intersubjective perception in visual and plastic arts and an understanding of the processes that determine works of art, reflective perception, and intersubjective experience. Although the argument is that perception is subjective and untransferable, (i.e., a unique personal experience) influenced by innumerable factors and bound to a specific context, there are some elements of perception which can be understood intersubjectively as they apply to …

A Case Study Of (Inter)Medial Participation, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "A Case Study of (Inter)medial Participation" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek presents survey data followed by quantitative and qualitative analysis about the daily intake of media in cultural participation. The survey data of the study are the result of questionnaires conducted 2001-2002 with advanced undergraduate students enrolled in media and communication studies at Northeastern University and with advanced undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. As the survey was conducted in 2001-2002, the data and the analysis have "historical" relevance with regard to (inter)medial cultural participation in the digital age. The data are from a mid-size …

Video Games As Equipment For Living, Ronald Soetaert, Jeroen Bourgonjon, Kris Rutten

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Video Games as Equipment for Living" Ronald Soetaert, Jeroen Bourgonjon, and Kris Rutten postulate that with the emergence of new media there is need of a re-evaluation of all modes of communication and the ways in which literacy is conceptualized. Drawing on the concept of multi-literacy they suggest a rhetorical/ anthropological meta-perspective to describe human beings as symbol using animals and focus on particular symbol systems: narrative, drama, and video games. Specifically, they focus on the perspective of drama as a tool to analyze cultural artifacts in general and video games — as a new art form …

Intermediality And Aesthetic Theory In Shklovsky's And Adorno's Thought, Oleg Gelikman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Intermediality and Aesthetic Theory in Shklovsky's and Adorno's Thought" Oleg Gelikman places the concept of intermediality in the context of the unresolved conflict between philosophical aesthetics and aesthetic theory. The conflict originated in the response of an influential generation of thinkers to the crisis of the neo-Kantian schools and the emergence of modernism in the 1910s. Despite superficial similarities, aesthetic theory is neither a revamped aesthetics of the subject nor a theoretical vindication of modernism. By severing the connection between subject-object epistemology and theory of artworks, the practitioners of aesthetic theory such as Victor Shklovsky and Theodor …

Intermediality, Translation, Comparative Literature, And World Literature, Erin Schlumpf

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Intermediality, Translation, Comparative Literature, and World Literature" Erin Schlumpf postulates that the study of literature today is best performed in a framework of comparative literature and world literature including intermediality particularly in the case of translated texts. Schlumpf contends that working in comparative and world literature today demands a reexamination of translation and the teaching of works in translation. Following her theoretical postulates, Schlumpf analyzes two films, Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise (1966) and Xiaolu Guo's She, a Chinese (Zhongguo guniang) (2009).

Old And New Medialities In Foer's Tree Of Codes, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Old and New Materialities in Foer's Tree of Codes" Kiene Brillenburg Wurth analyzes how intermediality works — not what it "is" — in the analysis of literary texts. How intermedial can texts "do," precisely when they consist only of words? Do such texts compel us to reconsider literature as a verbal art? Her analysis focuses on a recent book by Jonathan Safran Foer: Tree of Codes (2010), a literary work cut out of the remains of Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles (1934). Brillenburg Wurth points out how intermediality works as a productive interaction not only between …

Intermedial Representations In Asian Macbeth-S, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Intermedial representations in Asian Macbeth-s" I-Chun Wang discusses three Asian versions of Macbeths that exemplify the cultural meanings through the interaction of landscape, body, and spectacles of power. Shakespeare remains one of the most popular playwrights in the Eastern world, and playwrights in the Asian world find Shakespearean plays attractive to the Asian audience. Among Shakespearean plays, Macbeth fascinates its Asian audience with its theme on kingship, territory of social relationships as well as moral and emotional development. These adaptations oftentimes become cross-cultural reproductions because each adapted text manifests not only cross-cultural interpretations but also highlights …

The Spirit Of Matter In Büchner, Barbara Natalie Nagel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Spirit of Matter in Büchner" Barbara Natalie Nagel investigates different vectors of Georg Büchner's materialism: historical, philosophical, ethical, physiological. The analysis of what Büchner presents to be a necessary link between physiology and revolution aims to show how Büchner has a tendency first to entangle two relatively static, binary oppositions — literal/figurative and material/spiritual — in order then to play them against one another. Büchner thus uses the dynamics of literalization to evoke necessity: for example, if the revolution is conceived of in physiological terms, then the will either has to become physiological or biology has …

Musical, Rhetorical, And Visual Material In The Work Of Feldman, Kurt Ozment

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Musical, Rhetorical, and Visual Material in the Work of Feldman" Kurt Ozment compares early and late scores by Morton Feldman and argues that Feldman's interest in the visuality of the score was not limited to his experiments with graphic notation. More specifically, Projection 3 (1951) and String Quartet (II) (1983) suggest that Feldman experimented with notation from beginning to end. Up until the early 1980s, one of Feldman's main strategies for commenting on his music was to refer to painting. In his essay "Crippled Symmetry" and in an interview with the percussionist Jan Williams, Feldman also turns …

Intermediality As Cultural Literacy And Teaching The Graphic Novel, Geert Vandermeersche, Ronald Soetaert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Intermediality as Cultural Literacy and Teaching the Graphic Novel" Geert Vandermeersche and Ronald Soetaert argue for the inclusion of the graphic novel for the teaching of cultural literacy and literature. As the printed book is no longer the sole carrier of cultural literacy, Vandermeersche and Soetaert postulate that literary culture must be repositioned in intermedial culture and practices. In order to do so, Vandermeersche and Soetaert apply Werner Wolf's typology of intermediality, aspects of narratology, and scholarship about comics. Following a theoretical discussion they analyze the graphic novel series The Unwritten, a text that thematizes the …

Hambatan Penerjemahan Teks Bahasa Arab Ke Dalam Bahasa Indonesia: Pengalaman Mahasiswa Sastra Arab Universitas Negeri Malang, Irhamni Irhamni

Bahasa dan Seni: Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, dan Pengajarannya

This paper is intended to describe the results of a study focusing on students’ translation problems in translating Arabic texts into Indonesian. The problems result from students’ understanding and retelling (re-expressing) the results of that understanding during the translation process. In this study, the researcher applies a descriptive qualitative method. The results show that students’ problems in translation are closely related to (1) their understanding of linguistic and non-linguistic structures, and (2) their difficulties in retelling (re-expressing) the results of their reading regarding linguistic and non-linguistic issues.

Domestikasi Ideologi Dalam Penerjemahan Injil: Inggris-Bali, Frans I Made Brata

Bahasa dan Seni: Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, dan Pengajarannya

The Bible’s translator expects his translation to be not only accurate, but also acceptable in accordance with the norms and cultural values of its readers. This study aims to describe the domesticating ideology in translation. Tu–Vous Theory combined with Attitude, as part of Appraisal Theory in Systemic Functional Linguistics, is used to investigate how words should be used. Dynamic Equivalence Theory is utilized to describe word usage in society. A descriptive qualitative approach in determining two principal orientations of translation techniques, methods, and ideologies was applied in analyzing the data. Questionnaires containing sentences with English terms of address in Luke’s …

Konsep Skopos Dan Aspek Fungsionalnya Dalam Penerjemahan, Masduki Masduki

Bahasa dan Seni: Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, dan Pengajarannya

It is often said that Skopos theory has abolished the position of the source text. Nevertheless, translators still have to translate source texts, and to do this, they must identify translation units and decide what to do with them in the translation process. The same applies to translation description and criticism or even quality assessment. In order to compare source and target texts and achieve a fair judgment of a translation, translators need the communicative function of the translation unit. This article deals with the basic concept of Skopos and the functional aspects that come into play both in translation …

Uncle Tom’S Cabin In The National Era: Commentary On Chapter 1 And 2, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In the first chapter of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe warns her readers that the “indulgence” of slave owners and the “affectionate loyalty” of the slaves themselves towards their masters have misled some observers to believe the “poetic legend” of slavery as a benevolent “patriarchal institution.” She does not deny the genuineness of these emotions, but she warns that “the shadow of a Law” makes a mockery of the human relationships that develop between masters and slaves: “So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to a …

Postmodern Subjects And The Nation: Contemporary Arab Women Writers' Reconfigurations Of Home And Belonging, Ghadir Khalil Zannoun

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A lot has been said about the declining status of national paradigms. Most recently, the forces of change have been located in the transnational and global phenomenon. Contemporary Arabic literature, however, identifies globalism as only one among many factors undermining the existing national formations in the Arab countries. Among these factors is the postcolonial condition, and in the case of Palestine, the struggle against the continuing military occupation of Palestinian lands, wholesale and unsystematized modernization, and complex internal Social, cultural, religious and racial differences exacerbated by neo-colonialism. The contemporary Arab women writers' fiction analyzed in this dissertation posits yet another …

Literary Love(R)S: Recognizing The Female Outline And Its Implications In Roman Verse Satire, Kaitlyn Marie Klein

Theses and Dissertations

The existence of a metaphoric female standing in for poetic style was only plainly discussed in a paper from 1987 concerned with Roman elegiac poetry. This figure is given the title of scripta puella or written woman, since her existence depends solely on the writings of an author. These females often appear to have basis in reality; however there is insufficient evidence to allow them to cross out of the realm of fantasy. The term scripta puella in poetry refers to a perfected poetic form, one the author prefers over all others, and a human form creates the illusion of …

Fishermen, Chigozie Obioma

Department of English: Faculty Publications

We were fishermen.

Father first called us so after he whipped us sore for fishing at the Ala stream in the summer of May 1995. Earlier that year, the bank had transferred him from our hometown of Akure to Yola, a volatile and violence-prone city in the north of Nigeria. Father wouldn't move us with him so he lived apart and visited only once in two weeks, always coming at midnight on Fri- days and disappearing at dawn on Sundays. Each time he returned, mother would detail how the house had fared in his absence - a breakdown of home …

Superman's Ancestors - Beowulf, Odysseus And Roy Hobbs: Application And Analysis Of Joseph Campbell's Monomyth Theory, Michael Kealy

All Student Theses and Dissertations

Heroes have been with us since the beginning of time with some becoming more well known than others. Each and every culture seems to have their own type of hero that embodies their ideals, values and beliefs. It is this truth that Joseph Campbell, author of the 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, uses as a foundation to discuss his take on why heroes have had and will always have a place within the human fabric regardless of geographical location, religious affiliation or cultural idiosyncrasies. This thesis will apply Campbell’s monomyth theory to literary classics such as …

Embodied Culture: An Exploration Of Irish Dance Through Trauma Theory, Erica Burgin

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines traditional Irish dance as a locus of cultural memory, inscribed on the body. The native people of Ireland experienced invasion and oppression for nearly a millennium, beginning with Viking invasions at the end of the 8th century and ending in the 1940s, when the British finally departed Ireland, now an independent country. During the years of English rule, the British imposed harsh laws and sought to eradicate all vestiges of Irish culture in an attempt to diminish Irish identity. Through the ages, the definition of what it means to be Irish has changed widely, frequently resulting in …

Voices In Australia's Aboriginal And Canada's First Nations Literatures, Kim Scott, Eden Robinson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Kim Scott suggests in his text "I Come from Here" by means of "yarning" that the authority of Indigenous people and language is primary to an authentic "sense of place." Scott uses an accumulative, episodic, and personal narrative style to argue that the return "to," and consolidation of cultural material "in," a "community of descendants of the informants" must be founded upon principles of community development. Collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people by sharing of ancestral material with ever widening, concentric circles is how this process results in respect and partnership that empowers community life.

Eden Robinson explores in her …

Aboriginal Australian And Canadian First Nations Children's Literature, Angeline O'Neill

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Aboriginal Australian and Canadian First Nations Children's Literature" Angeline O'Neill discusses Canadian First Nations and Australian Aboriginal children's picture books and their appeal to a dual readership. Inuit traditional storyteller and writer Michael Kusugak, Nyoongar traditional storyteller and writer Lorna Little, and Wunambal elder Daisy Utemorrah are cases in point. Each appeals to Indigenous and non-Indigenous, child and adult readerships, thus challenging two assumptions in Western scholarship on literature that 1) the picture book genre is necessarily the domain of children and 2) that traditional Indigenous stories are, similarly, best suited to children. O'Neill considers the ways …

Collaborative Authorship And Indigenous Literatures, Albert Braz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Collaborative Authorship and Indigenous Literatures" Albert Braz discusses the duality of the writer. As suggested by Roland Barthes in his "The Death of the Author," the distinction between writer and author — the first being the historical person behind the text and the second a figure in the text — the duality of the author remains a paradigm of contemporary critical analysis. Braz argues that this new emphasis is not germane when it comes to Indigenous literatures, a field in which one often cannot determine who are the material producers of texts and/or their writers. Braz postulates …

Towards Transnational Native American Literary Studies, Hsinya Huang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Towards Transnational Native American Literary Studies" Hsinya Huang discusses how Native American literature can be adapted, translated, articulated, and interpreted in a transnational/trans-Pacific context, using the recently emerging Native American scholarship in Taiwan as a point of departure. Through collaboration across institutional lines, exploration of the community production of local knowledge, and our obligation and desire to participate meaningfully as intellectuals in the international initiatives in Native Studies, can we conceive of an expansive indigenous region across the Pacific? How can indigeneity be both rooted in and routed through particular places and articulated? Through envisioning an expanding …

Indigenous Literature And Comparability, Katherine Durnin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Indigenous Literature and Comparability" Katherine Durnin discusses some of the barriers to the comparative study of Indigenous literature alongside non-Indigenous literature. These barriers include the Eurocentrism of traditional comparative literature, certain aspects of postcolonial theory and, above, all the assumption that Indigenous and Western epistemologies belong to separate and incommensurable worlds. Durnin examines some recent theoretical and critical approaches that offer ways to bridge the two worlds and make comparative literature an ethical space of mutual respect and understanding.

On Reading Grace's Potiki, Eva Rask Knudsen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "On Reading Grace's Potiki" Eva Rask Knudsen takes as her point of departure the critical impasse of postcolonial analyses of Indigenous literatures and the claim made by some (Indigenous) commentators that non-Indigenous scholars and critics often re-colonize the texts they deem to be "postcolonial" because — in their theoretical concern with issues of marginalization and resistance — they overlook (and so overwrite) the specific indigenous knowledges and ontologies that the literatures draw on. Through an analysis of the 1986 novel Potiki by Māori writer Patricia Grace, Rsak Knudsen looks in other directions than those catalogued by …

Introduction To About Indigenous Literatures, Angeline O'Neill, Albert Braz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.