Comparative Literature Commons^™

Peter Severinus: From Humours To Chemistry In The Sixteenth Century, Michael T. Walton, Robert M. Fineman

Quidditas

The re-discovery of the works of Mendel and others has added greatly to our understanding of genetics. Such is now the case of Peter Severinus, with the recent recovery (or re-discovery) of his seminal work, Idea Medicinae Philosophicae (1571). Severinus concurred with Paracelsus’s (1493-1541) concept of seeds (little chemical factories) that worked on matter to form living things; but he was also aware of transplantation (grafting and cross-pollination) that changed phenotypes and genotypes in plants. Severinus applied this understanding to hereditary diseases in humans and extended Paracelsian theory. He believed that certain diseases in one’s offspring were caused by a …

Tracing Shakespeare’S Sea-Change: From The Tempest To The New York Times, Joshua L. Comer

Quidditas

An historical approach to the changing use of a Shakespearean phase, like “sea- change,” offers a case study in the long-standing power and evolving meaning of Shakespeare’s language. While all sea-changes today are not so major as those of which Ariel sang in The Tempest, the rich language of Ariel’s song has acquired a significant place in the history of American journalism.

Lady Caroline Lamb’S Revisions To Her Novel Glenarvon: Some Observations, Paul Douglass

Faculty Publications, English and Comparative Literature

No abstract provided.

Türk Edebiyatı Kanonu Ve Ulusal Kimliğin Sınırları (The Canon Of Turkish Literature And The Limits Of National Identity), Pelin Basci

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

The article is written in Turkish.

Written for the special issue of the journal Pasaj Edebiyat on the canon of Turkish literature, the article explores the relationship between the formation of the literary canon and the forging of the national identity. It argues that the modern canon of Turkish literature, much like other national literatures in the Balkans and the Middle East, has been politically constructed after the break with the Ottoman past. Turkish literature has been fashioned through a "literary exchange," much like the 1924 “population exchange” between Greece and Turkey, insulating and sanitizing it from other literary traditions …

Liminal Butlers: Discussing A Comic Stereotype And The Progression Of Class Distinctions In America, Katie Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will prove how the male domestic servant shows a conservative evolution of class freedom through early American films. As an individual thrust into a liminal sphere, these characters paradoxically become a character type for both keeping class-consciousness as well as breaking up notions of class, albeit in a slow process. In comedy, domestic male servants have always been on duty to help their masters while also becoming sources of mischief as tricksters. In early American films, these characters embody the anxiety of a classless body of men who become scapegoats, trickster-figures, and mask-wearing sages in order to survive—attracting …

Literary And Cinematic Responses To The Crime Story In Contemporary France, Deborah Streifford Reisinger

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Literary and Cinematic Responses to the Crime Story in Contemporary France," Deborah Streifford Reisinger examines society's relationship to violence in an era of increased media dominance. Reisinger's interdisciplinary approach integrates media, cinema, and literary studies to analyze how the crime story functions as a site of discursive struggle. Reisinger focuses on the sensational Paulin and Succo affairs that became mobile signifiers about crime, insecurity and the Other in France in the 1980s. By situating these crime stories in a larger historical and political context, she analyzes how media and politicians use the crime story as a tool …

Gustav Shpet's Literary And Theatre Theory, Galin Tihanov

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Gustav Shpet's Literary and Theatre Theory," Galin Tihanov introduces Shpet's theoretical work on literature and theatre, until recently little studied. Neither has been sufficient attention paid to Shpet's overall presence on the Russian cultural scene in the 1910s-1930s. As a result, our knowledge and appreciation of the scope of his writings and the variety of Russian literary and theatre life in the first third of the twentieth century have remained less rich and well-informed than they could otherwise have been. Tihanov explains that Shpet's participation in contemporary literature and theatre assumed different forms: he wrote both from …

Chinese Feminisms And Adaptation-As-Translation Readings Of Letter From An Unknown Woman, Jinhua Li

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Chinese Feminisms and Adaptation-as-Translation Readings of Letter from an Unknown Woman," Jinhua Li investigates the complex cultural and political issues engendered by an increasingly popular phenomenon of transnational film adaptations. Through a comparative reading of Jinglei Xu's 2004 adaptation of Stefan Zweig's novella Brief einer Unbekannten (Letter From an Unknown Woman), Jinhua Li argues that the adaptation-as-translation approach, as a valuable theoretical model for feminist cultural studies of Eastern-Western dynamics, allows the film to be read not only as a "translated/adapted" literary discourse that functions on different narrative levels, but also as a trope for the reimagination …

Unreliable Narration Through Representations Of The Grotesque In Lagerkvist's The Dwarf, Nitya Morales Vázquez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Nitya Morales Vázquez, in her paper "Unreliable Narration through Representations of the Grotesque in Lagerkvist's The Dwarf," begins with the hypothesis that most direct expression of ideology in discourse is found in the semantics of discourse. In literature, one can analyze this ideology by examining whether the narration is reliable or whether it is unreliable. Based on these presuppositions, Morales Vázquez analyses discourse in Pär Fabian Lagerkvist's novel, The Dwarf. Morales Vázquez argues that through the use of the conceptual frames of characterization, voice, and focalization the dwarf's character offers an unreliable narration. Through representations present in the novel, Morales …

National And Regional Identities In Central And East Europe After 1989: A Review Of Books By Donskis, Foster And Wigmore, And Koczanowicz And Singer, Agata Anna Lisiak

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Mythic Symbols Of Batman, John J. Darowski

Theses and Dissertations

Batman has become a fixture in the popular consciousness of America. Since his first publication in Detective Comics #27 in 1939, he has never ceased publication, appearing in multiple titles every month as well as successfully transitioning into other media such as film and television. A focused analysis of the character will reveal that Batman has achieved and maintained this cultural resonance for almost seventy years by virtue of attaining the status of a postmodern American mythology. In both theme and function, Batman has several direct connections to ancient mythology and has adapted that form into a distinctly American archetype. …

Post Resistance: Cyberspace And Women's Voices In The Arab World, Hanin Hassan Hanafi

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Democracy's Promise And The Politics Of Worldliness In The Age Of Terror, Henry A. Giroux

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Democracy's Promise and the Politics of Worldliness in the Age of Terror," Henry A. Giroux draws attention to how the crisis in US-American democracy has been heralded and exacerbated by the nation's increasing skepticism -- or even overt hostility -- toward the educational system. Part of such a challenge means that educators, artists, students, and others need to rethink and affirm the important presupposition that higher education is integral to fostering the imperatives of an inclusive democracy and that the crisis of higher education must be understood as part of the wider crisis of politics, power, and …

Globalizing Compassion, Photography, And The Challenge Of Terror, Ariel Dorfman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Globalizing Compassion, Photography, and the Challenge of Terror," Ariel Dorfman reflects on the use of photography to make global violence visible and to mourn the losses caused by acts of terror. Dorfman draws on events that range from the attacks on the World Trade Center to Pinochet's dictatorship to other similar atrocities and he shows that, while these events always feel singular in the moment, they are best understood comparatively. At the core of the paper is a central question: does the shared practice of using photos to represent terror help build bridges across humanity or does …

Ziya Gökalp On Modernity And Islam: The Origins Of An Uneasy Union In Contemporary Turkey, Üner Daglier

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

The "Teucer Paradigm" And The Eastern Other In Western Literature, Maria Beatrice Bittarello

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "The 'Teucer Paradigm' and the Eastern Other in Western Literature," Maria Beatrice Bittarello argues that modern representations of characters with mixed-blood heritage (Western and Eastern) are rooted in classical representations of the Middle East and that such representations are thematically re-cast from a literary thematic archetype elaborated on in the ancient Greek and Roman cultures. Bittarello examines how Greek and Roman authors portray the Greek mythological hero Teucer, son of Telamon and the Trojan princess Hesione. Teucer's liminal position allows him to be used in already in Greek and Roman culture both as colonizer and "bridge" between …

African Literature And The Role Of The Nigerian Government College Umuahia, Terri Ochiagha

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Terri Ochiagha, in her paper "African Literature and the Role of the Nigerian Government College Umuahia," discusses how the college contributed towards nurturing the talent of some of the most relevant authors in African literary history. With the help of the testimonies of these authors in interviews, correspondence, essays, autobiographies, and with the aid of literary critics and scholars who realized the role the Umuahia College played in creating a literary elite, Ochiagha analyses this literary phenomenon and takes us on a journey through the school's literary ambience: its library and the novels which were later to prompt the authors' …

The Dream Scene And The Future Of Vision In The City Of Lost Children And Until The End Of The World, Donna Wilkerson-Barker

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "The Dream Scene and the Future of Vision in The City of Lost Children and Until the End of the World," Donna Wilkerson-Barker examines how these films investigate the place of imagination (or representation) in postmodern visual culture through their portrayal of technologized vision as an obstacle to experience. Drawing parallels between the dream scenes in these films and virtual reality and cyberspace, she argues that image technologies in The City of Lost Children and Until the End of the World lead to a dissociation of experience from corporeal reality, a dissociation that is ultimately linked to …

Twain's A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court And U.S. Imperialism, Jennifer A. O'Neill

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Twain's novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and U.S. Imperialism," Jennifer A. O'Neill argues that while it Twain's text is commonly viewed as an attack on monarchy and the Catholic church, one of the book's primary focuses is U.S. imperialism. In the scholarship of Twain's text some have acknowledged the text as a discussion of colonialism, most tend to see it as an exaltation of "civilizing" efforts rather than the scalding indictment it was clearly intended to be. Indeed, Twain embraced U.S. colonial efforts in the Pacific early in his life but by the time …

Chaos Theory And Literature From An Existentialist Perspective, Yasser Khamees Ragab Aman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Yasser Khamees Ragab Aman proposes in his article "Chaos Theory and Literature from an Existentialist Perspective" that in literature the relation, principles, and processes of chaos and order can be analyzed from an existentialist perspective. Chaos lies at the heart of nothingness and order is the appearance of the achievement it tries to realize, temporary it may seem. Aman argues that with the application of chaos theory to works of literature may yield new insight and applies in his paper aspects of chaos theory reading three literary works which represent three different literatures and cultures, namely Arabic, English, and French. …

A Postmodern Solzhenitsyn?, William H. Thornton

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

William H. Thornton undertakes in his article, "A Postmodern Solzhenitsyn?," to bring Solzhenitsyn in from the cold, critically speaking, by closing the gap between him and his many postmodern detractors. That gap has been premised on the rough equivalence of poststructuralism and postmodernism. The postmodern realism advanced in this study challenges not only Solzhenitsyn's critics but his own stated aversion to postmodernism. Operating on both a microhistorical and macrohistorical plane, Solzhenitsyn's literary historiography testifies to the awesome scope of the gulag while never losing sight of its human factor.The double vision of Solzhenitsyn's proto-postmodern referentiality, a simultaneous centering and decentering, …

Erring Knights Of Desire: The Romance In Santa Teresa's Libro De La Vida And Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Emily Marie Stanfill

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores how romance opens the texts of two sixteenth-century authors. The first is the autobiography, Libro de la vida, of Spanish nun, mystic, and reformer, Santa Teresa de Jésus. Amidst the narrative of her life and her instructions on how to better live the mystical life, Teresa uses the mode of romance to construct herself and God in complicated and often conflicting roles: she the wandering (sinning) knight-errant who quests towards the ideal lady, Christ; she the walled garden into which her lover enters for fleeting moments of bliss; she the passive feminine recipient of God's forceful loves; …

The Writing On The Wall: Chinese-American Immigrants' Fight For Equality: 1850-1943, Elizabeth Lyman

Theses and Dissertations

Early in the 1850s, a greater number of Chinese immigrants began to enter the United States, leading to a Sinophobic frenzy that would continue for decades. Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, Americans sought to exclude the Chinese literally and figuratively. Americans employed negative imagery to demonstrate the necessity of excluding the Chinese in order to “protect" white America. The negative imagery that became Americans' common view of the “Chinaman," enabled the United States to enact discriminatory laws without compunction. In the face of intense persecution and bitter discrimination, many …

Boudjedra, Écrivain De Langue Arabe?, Touriya Fili-Tullon

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This paper is devoted to bilingualism in R. Boudjedra’sliterary practice. Our aim is to show how French and Arabic versions of his books may be read as hypertexts of metadiscoursive value. Considered from this point of view, the differing versions neutralize any genetic approach and make the rules of an “authoritative” translation obsolete.

Empathy Versus Abstraction In Twentieth-Century German And Russian Aesthetics, Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Empathy versus Abstraction in Twentieth-Century German and Russian Aesthetics," Thorsten Botz-Bornstein argues that Alexander Koyré has shown how the crisis of belief incited by Bacon, Montaigne, Pascal, and Descartes made that "man lost his place in the world." The German term Einfühlung (empathy) played an important role in the transformation of the relationship between the person and his/her world at the moment when modern science began to emerge. Botz-Bornstein examines the conceptual links between empathy and Verfremdung (in Russian ostranenie), and style by showing how German and Russian literary critics of the 1910s attempted to retrieve the …

Selected Bibliography Of Work On Canadian Ethnic Minority Writing, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek, Asma Sayed, Domenic A. Beneventi

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Radical Theology And The Reorganization Of The Us-American Religious System, Philippe Codde

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Radical Theology and the Reorganization of the US-American Religious System," Philippe Codde uses the example of the highly popular movement of death-of-God theology in the 1960s to demonstrate the wide applicability for cultural research of Itamar Even-Zohar's polysystem theory and to illustrate the validity of Even-Zohar's assertion that peripheral elements in any system can yet occasion a dramatic shift in the system's central repertoires. Although Richard Rubenstein's reality model never made it to the center of the US-American religious system, his radical theology did impel the more traditional theologians in the center of the system finally to …

The Cognitive Construction Of The Self In Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Patrick S. Bernard

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "The Cognitive Construction of the Self in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God," Patrick S. explores the conception and representation of the self as a cognitive construct in Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. By this approach, Bernard proposes that cognitive paradigms, such as knowing, seeing, thinking, and speaking, for example, and their capacities to engender knowledge and perception, identity and consciousness, memory and narrative, language and speech, are central to the novel's exploration of the self as an epistemological and ideological product. Using tools of interpretation adapted from cognitive psychology and radical constructivism, …

Globalisation, Empire, And The Vampire, Mario Vrbančić

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Globalisation, Empire, and the Vampire," Mario Vrbančić opens up the question of the possibility of a dialectical utopian thinking in postmodernism. Following Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Vrbančić analyses the vampire as the nation looking both at Hardt and Negri's theory of Empire and Žižek psychoanalytically inclined theory of nationalist identification. The vampire always occurs in the wake and decay of Empires: Dracula embodies Victorian fears of the infestation of the undead by invading the imperial centre; in America vampires disperse and multiply in popular culture and the mass media; in a newly emerging global order (Empire) they may …

Carmen: Debating The Femme Fatale, Jala Sameh El Hadidi

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.