Comparative Literature Commons^™

Islands: Jewish Themes And Images In Selected Poems Of Muriel Rukeyser, Wendy Susan Howard Gray

Theses & Honors Papers

An exploration of Rukeyser's work is a transformative experience. The reader need not come to see the world through the same lenses that Rukeyser saw it in order to be transformed. That is, one need not agree with Rukeyser that 1) the world is a place of Oneness that embraces all (even the ugliness and evil) that appears to divide it; 2) that observation is given voice by poetry; and 3) that the poet who sees suffering must, out of love, give poetry that speaks for those who cannot speak for themselves. One need only put on Rukeyser's lenses for …

The Italian Homiliary: Texts And Contexts, Michael Thomas Martin

Dissertations

For the Carolingians, preaching was the best manner in which to teach good, Christian behavior orally to the largely illiterate masses. Studying early medieval sermon collections then can provide historians with a great amount of information on, for example, the intended audience and current moral instruction, who wrote the sermons, and the intended impact of the reform requirements. Too often however these early collections are grouped into a rather generalized classification of being little more than an exposition of Scripture composed with little or no originality. Some scholars claim we have no evidence for sermons produced for popular preaching prior …

Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz In Seventeenth-Century New Spain And Finding A Room Of One's Own, Deborah Weagel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Seventeenth-Century New Spain and Finding a Room of One's Own," Deborah Weagel examines the life of the seventeenth-century nun and compares her life with the ideals Virginia Woolf portrays in A Room of One's Own. Woolf asserts that in order for a woman to develop innate gifts, she needs a certain degree of financial freedom and private space in which to create. The concept of having one's own room, or space, that can be segregated from the activities of home and public life can be considered both literally and metaphorically. …

An Introduction To The Work Of Elfriede Jelinek, Nobel Laureate In Literature 2004, Andrea Bandhauer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "An Introduction to the Work of Elfriede Jelinek, Nobel Laureate in Literature 2004," Andrea Bandhauer explores reactions of the press to the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek after she received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature. Bandhauer discusses how the extreme irritation following this announcement was frequently directed at the author's public persona rather than at her work. Against this background, Bandhauer explores the ambivalent relationship of the public towards a politically and socially engaged and outspoken public figure who in her literary work produces highly hermetical texts. As a writer, Jelinek is preoccupied with language and form …

The Arachne Myth In Oral And Written Literature, José Manuel Pedrosa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "The Arachne Myth in Oral and Written Literature," José Manuel Pedrosa explores the folktale about a person who prides himself being the most intelligent individual and whom the gods punish with a metamorphosis into spider. Pedrosa discusses similar myths in existence in modern oral traditions and in literary works such as the Bible, Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Quran, and García Márquez's masterpiece Cien años de soledad. The universality of the myth is underlined by the existence of a folktale registered among the Bubi people of Equatorial Guinea. Not known about it until the twentieth century, the oral transmission …

Generic Identity And Intertextuality, Marko Juvan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Generic Identity and Intertextuality," Marko Juvan proposes that an anti-essentialist drive -- a characteristic of recent genology -- has led postmodern scholars to the conviction that genre is but a system of differences and that its matrix cannot be deduced from a particular set of apparently similar texts. Juvan argues that the concept of intertextuality may prove advantageous to explain genre identity in a different way: genres exist and function as far as they are embedded in social practices that frame intertextual and meta-textual links/references to prototypical texts or textual series. In Juvan's view, genres are cognitive …

Modernism And The Issue Of Periodization, Leonard Orr

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Modernism and the Issue of Periodization," Leonard Orr describes how literary theorists, historians, and anthology editors have put forward many conflicting models for literary periodization, while simultaneously expressing their doubts about the categories they have created. They are caught between intellectual despair and pragmatic necessity, scholarly journals and presses and academic departments imagine they are working at the cutting edge of thinking about their subjects but period concepts remain in place, even while every article focused on the subject expresses strong objections to the terms. Orr traces in his paper these problems and issues through the twentieth …

Domesticating Translation Can Make A Difference : A Case Study Of Foreign Film-Title Translation In Hong Kong And Taiwan, Ka Ian, Justina Cheang

Lingnan Theses

This thesis seeks to examine the translation of selected foreign film-titles in Hong Kong and Taiwan from 1990 to 2002. Lawrence Venuti’s theory on “domesticating translation” and “foreignizing translation” will be taken as the conceptual framework for the study. Building on Friedrich Schleiermacher’s perspective on translation and on his observations about the Anglo-American publishing industry, Venuti asserts that “foreignizing translation”, being a strategy to bring the target-text audience toward the original text, should be preferred over “domesticating translation” as the former would guarantee difference by introducing foreign elements to the text recipients. By doing so, people will have more chances …

Exilic Perspectives On "Alien Nations", Sophia A. Mcclennen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Sophia A. McClennen's paper, "Exilic Perspectives on 'Alien Nations'," is an excerpt from her book, The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language and Space in Hispanic Literatures (Purdue UP , 2004). In the paper, McClennen summarizes her theory that exile writing is inherently dialectical. Focusing on writers working in the latter part of the twentieth century who were exiled during a historical moment of increasing globalization, transnational economics, and the theoretical shifts of postmodernism, McClennen proposes that exile literature is best understood as a series of dialectic tensions about cultural identity. Through a comparative analysis of Juan Goytisolo (Spain), Ariel …

The Search For Identity Through Self-Alienation In Charles Dickens's Great Expectations And Naguib Mahfuz's Palace Of Desire, Sahar Salah El-Din El-Khatib

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Death Of The Hero: A Study In Modern And Postmodern Literature, Sarah R Yeslam

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Otto Gründler: In Memoriam (1928-2004), Richard Utz

Medieval Institute Affiliated Faculty & Staff Publications

Eulogy on Director of the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University.

Review Essay: Rodney Stark’S Vision Of Medieval Christianity, Elspeth Whitney

Quidditas

Rodney Stark. For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003, 504 pages, and The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. New York: Random House, 2005, 304 pages.

Enchanted Islands Floating On The Foam Of Perilous Seas, Jean Macintyre

Quidditas

In localizing The Tempest on “an uninhabited island,” the 1623 Shakespeare Folio associates the setting with the floating island that some masque machines represented. Such machines acted as movable stages to transport masquers from within the set to the spot from which their dances would begin; other masques allege that their immobile sets were also floating islands. Though the stages, permanent or temporary, on which The Tempest was performed were not mobile, they nonetheless were a kind of island surrounded by spectators, on which the magician Prospero, aided by Ariel, writes, casts, and directs a play whose roles are unwittingly …

Romancing The Chronicles: 1 Henry Iv And The Rewriting Of Medieval History, Bradley Greenburg

Quidditas

This essay explores the ways Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV deploys Welshness as a counterforce to English national stability. I argue that the critical habit of equating the genre of romance with untruthfulness or silliness does not pay close enough attention to what Shakespeare does in his history plays. The Hal he gives us, whose youth and military training in Wales he suppresses, is, generically, a romance character. But, instead of a knight in his father’s service (where his adventures would be securely in the service of the realm), or knight errant, he is an errant haunter of bad company, an …

Editor's Foreword, Michelle Yeh

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

No abstract provided.

Sheila Cornelius. New Chinese Cinema : Challenging Representations; And Tani E. Barlow And Jing Wang Eds. Cinema And Desire : Feminist Marxism And Cultural Politics In The Work Of Dai Jinhua, Stephanie Deboer

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

No abstract provided.

Rhythm, Sound And Sense : Narrativity In Sun Wenbo, Maghiel Van Crevel

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

No abstract provided.

Liu Kang. Aesthetics And Marxism : Chinese Aesthetic Marxists And Their Western Contemporaries, Lan Feng

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

No abstract provided.

Delno C. West Award Winner (2004)

Quidditas

James H. Forse

The Delno C. West Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a senior scholar at the annual conference.

Translingual Literature: The Bone People And Borderlands, Jill Marie Murphy

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis proposes that by producing and existing within a translingual text, the ethnofeminist has found a way to subvert others' construction of her and redefine her identity. In particular, the ethnofeminist uses code switching to select and reinvent meaning from the language system of the dominant culture while maintaining the language system of the "marginal" group. In combining two (or more) language systems within a literature she has created her own language.

Delno C. West Award Winner (2005)

Quidditas

Susan Stakel

The Delno C. West Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a senior scholar at the annual conference.

Monasteries As Financial Patrons And Promoters Of Local Performance In Late Medieval And Early Tudor England, Christine Sustek Williams

Quidditas

The elaborate cycle plays produced in the larger, wealthy municipalities of York, Chester, Wakefield and Coventry receive the lion’s share of attention among scholars of medieval theatre. Until recently, performance activities in smaller communities have received little or no attention, except perhaps as something of antiquarian interest. And one area of theatre history that has been largely overlooked is the involvement of monasteries in local performance activities. Yet the precious few, fragmentary, monastic records that survived the dissolutions of the monasteries under Henry VIII and Edward VI, suggest that several monasteries gave active financial support to local theatre in England …

Everyman In Production: A Dance Of Death A Staging At California State University, Chico (2004), Jan Hawkley

Quidditas

Medieval dramatic works, while historically significant and intellectually interesting, may seem irrelevant and even incomprehensible in our day. The language is problematic in pronunciation, phrasing and word meaning. Allegory today often is considered didactic and overly simplistic, yielding only one- dimensional characters. Medieval society appears obtuse to modern students, functioning with a totally different worldview and social hierarchy; medieval concepts of comedy and religion are difficult for us to grasp today. Additionally, we obviously have no recordings of actual performances, so we do not know how a given play was staged; we must surmise medieval staging from descriptions of performances …

Entertaining Yet Erudite Social History, Ginger L. Guardiola

Quidditas

Barbara A. Hanawalt. Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. 300 pages. $18.95.

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (2005)

Quidditas

Bradley Greenburg

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

Review Of George Eliot's Dialogue With John Milton, Anna K. Nardo

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This, despite some blemishes and limitations indicated in passing below, is an examination of selected writings by Milton, the stories about him, and the engagement with his life and works which is reflected in the life and works of George Eliot. Nardo's primary aim is to show how Eliot's 'strenuous dialogue with Milton's life and art ... animated the epic novels she wrote for an age of unbelief' (1). Immediately we are struck by the large claims implied by 'animated' and 'epic' and the convenient but dubious definition of 'an age of unbelief'. The statement does scant service to the …

Romantic Love As A Spiritual Companionship? A Buddhist Re-Reading Of George Eliot, Richard Winter

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Introduction

Like most of George Eliot's fiction, Daniel Deronda can be read as a story about the possibility of redemption. Gwendolen Harleth' s vanity and ambition make her vulnerable to Grandcourt' s desire for dominance, and their marriage is a disaster. Belatedly, Gwendolen comes to recognise that a marriage to Daniel Deronda instead of Grandcourt might have rescued her from her egotism and led to her moral and emotional salvation. But for Deronda finding a wife is part of exploring a wider social and spiritual significance for his existence - i.e. his Jewish cultural origin and the Zionist religious, historical, …

Review Of Our Daughters Must Be Wives: Marriageable Young Women In The Novels Of Dickens, Eliot And Hardy, Britta Zangen

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Adopting the' 1st Gent's' maxim from the epigraph to chapter ten of Eliot's Daniel Deronda: 'Our daughters must be wives and to be wives must be what men will choose:/ Men's taste is women's test [ ....] ‘, Britta Zangen sets out to test the accuracy of this epigram throughout the Victorian period. The book is ambitious in scope, placing analysis of the marriageable woman in the complete works of Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy, within a thorough socio-historical framework which details shifting attitudes to the Woman Question from the 1840s to the 1890s. These weighty sections of historical 'context' are …

Adam Bede, Geoffrey Beevers

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Adam Bede is not easily adaptable to the stage. Its structure is essentially narrative rather than dramatic, and much of its interest consists in the probing of moral issues and analysis of motive. A straightforward retelling of the plot without any sort of commentary (as often happens with television adaptations) would leave it an empty shell. Geoffrey Beevers is well aware of this and is concerned to preserve as much of George Eliot's own voice as he can. One way of doing this would have been to include a 'voice over' explaining, commenting and interpreting (as was done for example …