Comparative Literature Commons^™

Nation Building, Utopia, And The Latin American Writer/Intellectual, María Odette Canivell

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Nation Building, Utopia, and the Latin American Writer/Intellectual," María Odette Canivell discusses the role of utopia in the foundational myths of Latin American cities and its nations. Nation building, in Latin America, Canivell claims, is tied to European myths regarding the New World, as well as to the function of writers' (escribidores) and intellectuals' (letrados) re-formulation of these myths along with their own desires/dreams as to what the ideal of Latin America means. Escribadores and letradas, who make history while re-writing the story/history of their nations, have a direct effect on the policy making and construction of …

Achebe, Conrad, And The Postcolonial Strain, Eric Sipyinyu Njeng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Achebe, Conrad, and the Postcolonial Strain" Eric Sipyinyu Njeng presents an analysis of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart in a context of postcolonial thought and argues that while Achebe's text is often placed against Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a counter discourse -- thus interrogating Conrad's portraiture of Africans as savages -- Achebe's text in fact represents anti-Africanism and subservience to Occidental values. Examining Achebe's authorial intention in Things Fall Apart, especially as epitomized in the character of Okonkwo, the protagonist, Njeng argues that Achebe corroborates Conrad's portrait of the African. In writing Things Fall Apart, …

Thompson's And Acosta's Collaborative Creation Of The Gonzo Narrative Style, Shimberlee Jirón-King

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Thompson's and Acosta's Collaborative Creation of the Gonzo Narrative Style," Shimberlee Jirón-King presents an analysis of Hunter S. Thompson's and Oscar Zeta Acosta's works and a correction about the origins of Gonzo Journalism. Jirón-King suggests that Thompson's and Acosta's writings express the authors' disillusionment about the loss of the American Dream and that their texts suggest the revolutionary movements they hoped for would transform a disintegrating culture have only fallen prey to the shortsightedness of US-American culture. The counter culture they observe simply develops its own forms of racism, classism, power-mongering, and corruption that re-inscribe hegemonic discourses …

On The Convergence Of Innis's International Political Economy And Sebald's Novels, Joseph S. Pinter

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "On the Convergence of Innis's International Political Economy and Sebald's Novels" Joseph S. Pinter contributes to the development of an area of scholarship on Harold A. Innis and Canadian political economy which deals with issues of representation, landscape, and memory. Pinter draws attention to a specific aspect of Innis's approach to political economy and focuses on ways in which Innis was able to represent fundamental aspects of the settlement process in Canada. Pinter argues that Innis focussed on landscape as a basic element in the European experience of North America (US and Canada) that, in turn, enabled …

The Methodology Of Architectonic Truth-Finding In Grass's The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), Stephan Schaffrath

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Stephan Schaffrath, in his paper "The Methodology of Architectonic Truth-Finding in Grass's The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel)," discusses how Günter Grass's The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) negotiates the treacherous terrains that lie between positivism and nihilistic relativism by means of a truth-finding methodology. Schaffrath proposes that truth-finding methodology applies approximative, and therefore architectonic, approaches to conventional concepts of narration and history. Grass's novel breaks down and reassembles playfully the conventions of narration and history, not to negate or devalue them, but to reappraise them by means of an approximative truth-finding methodology, an approach that corresponds to Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of …

History Of Ricl: Research Institute For Comparative Literature, University Of Alberta 1985-1999, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

「選學」與「香港」 : 香港小說選本初探 = Anthologizing Hong Kong : A Study Of Hong Kong Fiction Anthologies, Kwok Kou, Leonard Chan

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

散文的多元化與開放性 : 以2000年至2007年《香港文學》為考察對象 = The Diversification And Openness Of Prose Writing : A Research On Hong Kong Literary Monthly (2000-2007), Yong Lin Yuan

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.

論戴望舒香港時期的法文小說翻譯 (1938-1949) = A Study On Dai Wangshu's Translation Of French Fiction During His Stay In Hong Kong (1938-1949), Ho Yee, Connie Kwong

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.

香港文學對於「重寫」二十世紀中國文學史的意義 = The Significance Of Hong Kong Literature In The "Re-Writing" Of Chinese Literary History In The 20th Century, Wanhua Huang

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.

走向文學的自覺 : 二十世紀五○年代以後香港文學的演變 = Towards Literary Consciousness : The Evolution Of Hong Kong Literature After The 1950s, Deng Han Liu

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.

冷戰年代與香港文學 : 二十世紀五○年代香港現代詩 = The Cold War Era And Hong Kong Literature : Hong Kong Modernist Poetry In The 1950s, Guangming Wang

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

香港是一個迅速發展的商業化海港城市，其耀人的經濟成就，曾是英國殖民者的驕傲。但殖民銃治者對香港的看重，主要是它作為「轉運港」經濟利益和政治上的戰略意義，對於文化和文學，除在大學推行英國體制外，基本上採取不干預的政策。游離於殖民者的文化秩序之外，超脫於家國政治爭鬥之上，冷戰時代的香港的文化與文學似乎有大陸與台灣所沒有的自由與超然性。李歐梵先生站在自由知識份子的視野，曾著文提出，香港夾在兩個政權之間，形成了一種政治上的邊緣空間：「在兩岸政府言論的控制之下，大陸和台灣不准談的，香港可以談；換言之，香港反而形成了一種可以在報章雜誌上論政的『公共空間』。」他認為這種邊緣性不僅使香港成了政治上的「飛地」，也使之具有了文化上混雜性和超越性：「它可以在幾種文化的邊緣——中國、美國、日本、印度——卻不受其中的宰制，甚至可以『不按理出牌』，從各種形式的拼湊中創出異彩。」

李歐梵先生的觀點富有真知灼見，對研究九七「回歸」之前的香港文學很有啟發。但「三不管」的邊緣實際上也是各種政治勢力角力的場所；而文化的混雜性，一方面有助於通過「國際視野」克服自己的封閉性，但另一方面也可能受時尚和市場的牽引，影響文化探索的重心和持續性。本文試圖通過冷戰時代香港文學的複雜性，探討其在現代中文文學格局中的特點、位置和問題。

Hong Kong Literature As Sinophone Literature = 華語語系香港文學初論, Shu Mei Shih

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.

粵語文學資料初探 (1900-1970) = Introduction To Cantonese Dialect Literature (1900-1970), Chung Ming Wong

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.

早期中文報刊與近代香港文學的開拓 = Early Chinese Periodicals And The Development Of Hong Kong Literature, Yixin Xu

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.

香港專欄散文的嬗變興未來 = The Metamorphosis And Future Of Column Writing In Hong Kong, Hye Joon Kim

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

筆者在文中要探討主導香港專欄文學的專欄散文之特 徵與現狀，並展望其未來。當然這中間也會根據需要涉及到香港專欄文學 的變遷狀況的一部分內容。不過筆者要在此説明一點。筆者雖然對香港文 學多年關注，有客居香港的經歷，也經常訪問香港，但是在長期接觸專欄散文這樣的文學現象而獲得的實際體驗上還是非常不足的，因此筆者在實 感方面就不得不利用香港作家或研究者的經驗和成果。

Resistance In Rundi Oral Literature: The Case Of Emmanuel Nkeeshimaana’S Songs Imiduri, Emmanuel Nkurunziza

Digitized Theses

Umudúri is a Rundi oral genre that normally features laudatory texts; however, in Emmanuel Nkeeshimáana’s songs, it is resistance to the iniquities generated by colonial and postcolonial powers that predominates. Engaging Albert Lord’s approach to sung poetry, which is based on formulas and themes, this study addresses the place of umudúri in oral literature, focusing on the performance and enunciation. By translating Emmanuel Nkeeshimaana’s texts, basing on André Lefévère’s poetic and cross-cultural translation theory, it proves the limitations to the rendering of Emmanuel Nkeeshimaana’s resistance message. Thus, the study suggests ways for a fuller grasp of the resistance nature of …

Tintoretto And James: Exposing The Shattered Subject, Phyllis E. Vanslyck

Publications and Research

Though “influence” may be too strong a word, the compositional affinities between James and Tintoretto are pervasive and worthy of comparative analysis, especially because both artists capture the moment when wonder gives way to the lonely and final uncertainty of our knowledge—of self, of others, of secular or spiritual truth.

Separated by three centuries, these two artists both stage a forceful assault on the conventions of their medium and engender in the viewer or reader (as well as internal “perceivers”) a kind of vertigo—a visual and psychological dislocation that is the basis of a new kind of insight. In Tintoretto, …

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (2008)

Quidditas

Alice Blackwell

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

Gaiwan's Five Wits: Technological Difficulties In The Endless Knot, Alice Blackwell

Quidditas

Traditionally, the “five wits” of the endless knot on Gawain’s shield in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” have been read as the five senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. The present paper, following recent work by Peter Whiteford, Simon Kemp, and Garth Fletcher, contends that the five wits may be interpreted as the five internal wits, which include imagination and memory and determine perception. This identification of the five wits as the five internal wits calls into question Gawain’s self-identity, predicated as it is upon the five wits’ faultlessness. In this context, Gawain’s self-understanding is really a self-misunderstanding, and …

Politics And Culture At The Jacobean Court: The Role Of Queen Anna Of Denmark, Courtney Erin Thomas

Quidditas

Until recently, analyses of the Jacobean court marginalized the important role played by James I and VI’s queen consort, Anna of Denmark. While historians and literary critics now acknowledge that Anna was a key player in patronage networks and artistic circles at the time, the extent of her political involvement remains largely unexplored in favor of portraying her solely as a cultural figure. This essay seeks to examine the connections between Anna’s cultural and political activities and suggests that, by viewing Anna’s involvements thorough a dichotomous lens as being either political or cultural, a truly textured and nuanced understanding of …

Maria Fairfax And The “Easy Philosopher”: Action And Indolence In Andrew Marvell’S “Upon Appleton House”, Byron Nelson

Quidditas

Andrew Marvell dramatizes the difficult choice between action and indolence in his long pastoral poem, “Upon Appleton House.” The nameless nun’s rhetorical temptation of Isabel Thwaites, as narrated in an apparent digression from the past history of the house, anticipates the poet’s own self-seduction in the woods later in the poem. Both Isabel and the poet need to be rescued from their fallen state. The tension between action and passivity is resolved by the redemptive appearance of “Maria.” The model for her providential intervention is the Shakespearean romance, in which an innocent daughter, who is rescued from danger and degradation, …

Alphabetical Lives: Early Modern German Biographical Lexicons And Encyclopedias, Richard G. Cole

Quidditas

Those who appear obvious to us as “major players” in past eras may in part result from an unintended consequence of the work of early modern biographical lexicographers. By the eighteenth century, there were enough printed sources and available archival materials to deluge or even overwhelm historians and biographers with information about past actors of sixteenth century history. Those biographical lexicographers made choices about whom to give prominence and whom to minimize or ignore in their works.

Review Essay: Bringing The Middle Ages Into The World History Survey Course: Some Suggestions, Tiffany A. Trimmer

Quidditas

Too often World Historians neglect coverage of the European Middle Ages, and medieval history courses tend to lose sight of the ways in which medieval Europe played a part in the wider world to which it belonged. Part of this results from the artificial pre/post 1500 CE split that dominates the organization of the typical world history survey, and part from the reluctance of World Historians to realize the potential of a global history approach to the era before the age of exploration and colonization. The works included in this essay attempt to rectify the absence of earlier European historical …

Books Recommended For Courses: Denis De Rougement. Love In The Western World, J. M. Anderson

Quidditas

Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World has become something of a classic since it first appeared in 1939. Rougemont traces the development of romantic love from its origins in the twelfth century to its mutated condition in the twentieth. His thesis is that romantic love and marriage are fundamentally opposed. “My central purpose,” he wrote in his Preface to the 1956 revised edition, “was to describe the inescapable conflict in the West between passion and marriage; and in my view that remains the true subject, the real contention of the book as it has worked out.” Whereas romantic …

Books Recommended For Courses: Elena Levy-Navarro. The Culture Of Obesity In Early And Late Modernity: Body Image In Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, And Skelton, Holly Overturf

Quidditas

If next semester’s reading list is feeling a bit thin, consider fattening it up with The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity: Body Image in Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Skelton, an important new book by Elena Levy-Navarro. The book consists of six chapters, followed by extensive endnotes and a useful index. The first two chapters introduce the next four, and seek to build a history from which a fat culture can be formed. In the last four chapters, Levy- Navarro flexes her (fat-blanketed) literary anthropologist muscles by looking for symbolic meanings of fat in selected works of …

The Appropriation Of St Cuthbert: Architecture, History-Writing, And Ecclesiastical Politics In Durham, 1083-1250, John D. Young

Quidditas

This paper describes the use of the cult of Saint Cuthbert in the High Middle Ages by both the bishops of Durham and the Benedictine community that was tied to the Episcopal see. Its central contention is that the churchmen of Durham adapted this popular cult to the political expediencies of the time. In the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, when Bishop William de St. Calais ousted the entrenched remnants of the Lindisfarne community and replaced them with Benedictines, Cuthbert was primarily a monastic saint and not, as he would become, a popular pilgrimage saint. However, once the Benedictine …

文學史的編撰與香港文學在華文文學中的定位 = The Writing Of Literary History And The Position Of Hong Kong Literature In Sinophone Literature, Hsiao Yen Peng

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.

導言 = Foreword, Ping Kwan Leung

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.