Comparative Literature Commons^™

Basil Bunting And The Challenges Of Literary Translation From Persian Into English: A Case Of Rūdhakī, Emadeddin Naghipour

Languages and Cultures Publications

The purpose of this study is to analyze Basil Bunting's literary translation. It turns to the theories of translation by Steiner, Benjamin, and Eco, among others, to study Bunting’s translation of Rūdhakī’s ‘Dandaniyyeh’ poem, a 10th century qaṣīdah replete with mesmerizing musicality and with a form galvanized in its originating language, time, and locale. A deep contrastive analysis of its translation into English by the poet, Bunting, shows the difficulties that can arise from literal translations of classical Persian poetry.

“What Memory Wants From Me”: Contemporary Female Writers On The Calling To Remember, Daria Smirnova

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the intersections of transnational memory studies and feminist autobiographical writing through the works of Maria Stepanova, Annie Ernaux, and Lea Ypi. It argues that contemporary literature, especially that written by women, provides innovative frameworks for understanding identity, memory, and the sociopolitical context of our time. By examining how these authors intertwine personal and collective histories, the study highlights the shift in memory studies from monumental, nation-centered history to transnational, mobile memory modalities. I have pinpointed three themes to which these authors significantly contribute within the feminist and political discourse on memory: the relationship between gender and memory, …

“Finally Somebody Wants To Hear Us”: Soviet Women And Political Violence In Svetlana Alexievich’S Narratives, Liubov Kartashova

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the emotional and social impact of significant Soviet historical events, including World War II, the Soviet-Afghan War, and the Chornobyl disaster, on collective memory. Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian Nobel Prize laureate, employs a polyphonic narrative technique to challenge official histories of these events and foreground the voices of ordinary people, particularly women. Focusing on her works – The Unwomanly Face of War, Zinky Boys, and Chernobyl Prayer – the study delves into the gendered experiences and narratives of women involved in these events. Integrating feminist scholarship on international relations and security, this research analyzes women’s roles in …

Reimagining Utopia In Post-Utopian China: Chinese Science Fiction And The Reinvention Of Cultural Tradition, Dan Luo

Theses and Dissertations

Despite the end of China’s socialist dream in the late 1970s, utopian expressions about the nation’s rise and progress have continued to emerge in official and popular imaginaries. These expressions find an outlet in the newly popularized sci-fi genre, and especially in literary experiments that evoke cultural resources ranging from premodern and early modern historical and literary records of scientific achievements to figures, tropes, and myths in classical tales, vernacular novels, and ethnic traditions. These experiments at times validate and support, and at times challenge and subvert the nationalist, progressive, and utopian narratives of the state. This dissertation investigates the …

Holding His Attention: Tolkien And "Modern" Science Fiction, Kristine Larsen

Journal of Tolkien Research

In his letters and other venues, Tolkien singled out several works of science fiction as being able to "hold my attention" - those of Isaac Asimov, Sam Youd, Joseph O'Neill, and Brian Aldiss. This paper constructs a checklist of characteristics based on earlier works Tolkien also enjoyed (those of Wells, Lewis, Eddison, Stapledon, and Lindsay) before using it to evaluate the later works.

Wayward Utopias: Time In Wilde And Goethe, Kafi Moghrabi Mr

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I study the dialectical relation between the Utopian imagination and a reality perceived in every way as antagonistic to hope. In the first chapter, I present Ernst Bloch’s Utopian vision, as presented in The Principle of Hope, which offers an exposition of the author’s Romantic Marxism. The second chapter engages Oscar Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, demonstrating how a life devoted to self-gratification only results in the constant deferral of Utopian longing, and how, undone, Dorian’s demise opens up Utopian possibilities as anticipated by Bloch. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s version of the …

Loving 바리데기: A Traveler's Guide To Anthologizing The 여성 시인, Tiffany Hyunkyung Chang

Comparative Literature Undergraduate Senior Theses

This thesis retells the folktale of the Korean shaman goddess 바리데기’s (Paridegi) as my journey through Korean literature. It follows Korean feminist poet Kim Hyesoon’s typology of the three deaths that 바리데기must experience to become a shamanic goddess and mediator with Death. I map these three deaths (the Death of Losing Your Name, the Death of Diaspora, and the Death of Immortal Crossings) onto the three stages of my development as a second-generation Korean American literary scholar, translator, and artist. Through connecting my personal journeys with the disciplinary concerns facing comparative literature, Asian American studies, Asian area studies, and Korean …

From History To Memory: Comparative Discourse Of Proust's Le Temps Retrouvé And Michelet's Histoire De La Révolution Française, Jose F. Lopez Cochachi

Comparative Literature Undergraduate Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

Star Power: An Analysis Of Digital Astrology Content As An Instrument Of Political Tractability, Aliza Phillips

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

In an essay from 1953 titled, The Stars Down to Earth, Theodor Adorno performed an exacting analysis of the weekly horoscopes published in The Los Angeles Times to illuminate the latent authoritarianism embedded in the rhetoric of astrology. One of Adorno’s primary arguments is that an insidious form of political tractability is forged through the simultaneous determinism and individualism of astrology. Seventy years after The Stars Down to Earth, the genre of short-form astrology videos has skyrocketed in popularity across social media platforms. This essay offers a series of close readings of digital astrology videos to theorize both …

Past * An Introduction To The Problem, Zelimir Zilnik, Boris Buden, New Media Center Kuda.Org, Olivera Jokic

Publications and Research

Who can know what is in the past? Is it what historians can tell us? Should we also trust what we can remember? Past • An Introduction to the Problem proposes that the problem of the past now concerns everyone. Visions of a different, brighter future defeated in the Cold War and its heated afterlives, we are being offered the past as the only horizon of possibility. And what are we supposed to find in that past? Philosopher Boris Buden considers these questions in a series of essays and conversations with filmmaker Želimir Žilnik, one of the most prominent filmmakers …

The Animated Cinema Of Bruno Bozzetto, Emilia Gambardella

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The principal aim of this dissertation is to insert Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto into the established narrative of Italian cinema. Although in American and British Film Studies animation has enthusiastically been at the center of many important conversations for the last thirty years, animation has received scant attention within Italian Studies. As such, in the dissertation I discuss a selection of Bozzetto’s animations in relation and comparison to live-action Italian films of the same decades which have been discussed and written about extensively. My dissertation fills this gap in Italian cinema scholarship by drawing on interdisciplinary sources to locate Bozzetto …

Failure To Mourn: Challenges To The Work Of Mourning In Twentieth-Century Italian Literature, Mattia Mossali

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project brings together, in a novel combination and through a comparative and transnational perspective, three Italian authors from the Twentieth century who around the same years have produced texts in an effort to verbalize the pain caused by the loss of a loved one: Gina Lagorio (1922-2005), Lalla Romano (1906-2001), and Pier Vittorio Tondelli (1955-1991). Through a variety of literary forms, from fictional self-representations in “autobiographical” novels to the desire for authenticity that characterizes so-called grief memoirs, each of them confronts the challenge of how to write about the deeply painful experience of mourning. After witnessing death, they look …

Antisocial Femininity: Writing The Relational In Isolation, Chelsea K. Largent

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates a trope and positionality I call antisocial femininity as a way to see how it may be a useful positionality and not antisocial at all. The point of departure for my project is located in 19^th century French decadence and responds to two complementary aspects of decadent subjectivity against which antisocial femininity is defined: the need to withdrawal from the natural world and a retreat into intellectual abstraction. These definitions demand an explicit withdrawal from society and extol a self-imposed isolation that allows the subject to recreate oneself uniquely outside of the structures of modernity. This …

When Critics Are Artists: Ekphrasis In Erotic Art Criticism, Joanna A. Ligon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag argues for an erotics of art in art criticism in place of hermeneutics. In this thesis, I examine erotics of art, a focus on form and experiencing art instead of exclusively on content, in practice. Drawing on other essays by Sontag, specifically the essay “Godard” in comparison with the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s own filmic criticism in Breathless, criticism according to an erotics of art becomes a new artwork itself. Subsequently, I present a definition of erotic through Anne Carson and Roland Barthes and juxtapose the term with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. The comparison ultimately undoes …

From “Total Destruction” To “Total Dictatorship”: The Influence Of Ernst Jünger’S Visionary Fascism, Nick Schiff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper seeks to answer one central question: How can the life and work of Ernst Jünger help illuminate the development of fascist ideas, culture, politics, and power across Europe from 1920-1945? The components of that question are: what were the core elements of Jünger’s aesthetics, morality, and politics? How did he synthesize these elements to create his influential vision of German fascism? What were Jünger’s interactions and exchanges with other European fascists, as well as influential Nazis including Carl Schmitt, Joseph Goebbels, and Adolph Hitler himself? How did Jünger’s new Fascist politics and aesthetics affect them? I argue that …

The Redemption Of History: Poetics And Politics In The Modern Epic, Giacomo R. Bianchino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation, “The Redemption of History: Poetics and Politics in the Modern Epic.” provides a materialist theory of the modern epic, focusing on the way that the poets deployed this form towards political ends. Building on theories of the epic going back to the German Romantics, it argues that the modern form is predicated on the idea that it has departed from the conditions that made the ancient form possible. It examines the way that writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century developed the idea that the immediacy of the social “totality” expressed by the ancient epopee was …

Questioning Modernity’S Episteme: A Comparative Literary Analysis Towards Planetary Spiritualism, Pumho Karimi

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

How do the modern era’s sociopolitical and technological developments, from the Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution to the Industrial Revolution, influence our contemporary 21st century views on truth? How do they relate to the technological, sociopolitical, and ecological predicaments faced in the 21st century? My project, through comparative literary analysis, offers a critique of modernity by paying attention to its imperial and colonial character and how it establishes its epistemological power to define what is fact and truth at the expense of other ways of knowing, seeing and being that offer potential solutions to 21st century predicaments. I argue …

Displaced Ukrainian Writers After 2014, A Postcolonial Perspective, Sophie Ivanka Shields

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This paper analyzes post-2014 Ukrainian displacement literature from a postcolonial perspective. I argue that Ukrainian writers, displaced with the 2014 invasion of Eastern Ukraine and/or 2022 full-scale invasion by Russia, transform literature into a tool of cultural resistance against Russia, forging a postcolonial Ukrainian identity in their works that unites those displaced since 2014. I particularly focus on two long-form works by displaced writers: the novel Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love (2019) by Volodymyr Rafeyenko, who was displaced in 2014 from Donetsk to Kyiv and again in 2022 to Pittsburgh, USA on the City of Asylum Exiled Writer and …

Transcreation In World Of Warcraft’S China Localization: Echoes Of Poetry Across Two Worlds, Yilu Ren

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

The official trailer for the globally popular MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) World of Warcraft Patch 5.2: The Thunder King featured an original English poem, subsequently translated into 10 other languages. All versions retained a poetic form, with the one release in mainland China creatively borrowing the tetrasyllabic verse style akin to that used in Shijing, the first anthology of Chinese poetry. This unprecedented adaptation of a literary genre in the localization of a non-literary video game product blurred the conceptual boundary between Lawrence Venuti's binary notions of foreignization and domestication in translation theory.

Viewed in light of …

Eliot’S Raid On The Ineffable, Louie Alexandris

The Criterion

In the poem Four Quartets, T.S Eliot employs a fragmentary form to dramatize the disjointed continuity of time. Within the poem though, the fluctuation or fragmentation of the form is also in service to the whole by showing the unending exploration of man to reach the “still point” of divine contemplation. For Eliot, the fragmentary nature of the form in Four Quartets is in service to the whole, because the continual fluctuation of musicality embodies a journey or exploration for the “still point” of the world to achieve true contemplation. In that sense, Eliot’s poem is an artistic success, …

Downfall To Friendliness?: Analyzing Common Tropes In The Boy Who Loved Too Much, Heather Paglia

The Criterion

One of the most commonly held misconceptions regarding the disabled population is that living with any disability automatically decreases the quality of life. It is assumed that any deviation from society’s established norm for the perfect brain and body must be a burden. Both the physical and social implications associated with disability have forged in the minds of many the idea that a disabled life could not possibly be a good life. This overarching negativity, however, is turned on its head when considering Williams Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder more accurately described as happy syndrome. This so-called disability is not …

The Criterion (2024)

The Criterion

No abstract provided.

“No Friend Like A Sister”: Christina Rossetti’S Fantastic Departure From Pre-Raphaelite Poetics And Art In “Goblin Market”, Anna M. Lee

The Criterion

Christina Rossetti’s poetics and artistic vision in her seminal poem, “Goblin Market,” have yielded a range of critical theories, from positions on sisterhood to the ambiguous position of capitalist markets. While considering the socioeconomic and cultural context behind the poem’s development and resonance among contemporary feminist movements, readers also ought to consider the actual “goblin brotherhood” — the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) — behind Rossetti’s authorial ventures. This paper argues that Rossetti’s fantastical methods draw influence from and participate in the PRB’s poetics and artistic traditions, while subverting the same conventions within a feminist paradigm. Rossetti not only envisions a homosocial …

Moving “Passed” Life For Death, Gwyneth Morrissey

The Criterion

The paper Moving “Passed” Life for Death explores Emily Dickinson's poem #479, "Because I could not stop for Death," focusing on the theme of movement expressed through the word "passed." It analyzes the contradictory qualities of movement and stopping and how they interplay. At the same time, it looks into how the poem's periodic stopping points highlight the natural cycle of life and death, challenging the conventional and fearful understanding of dying. Dickinson's use of "passed" ultimately alludes to the persistence of life after death, altering readers' perceptions of mortality. The essay presents an intriguing interpretation of life, death, and …

The Configuration Of Society In "The Dispossessed" And "Blindness", Patrick Ryan

The Criterion

In both Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed and José Saramago’s Blindness, character’s are posited into scenarios where the structure of society is either foreign, dilapidated, or outright missing. This essay aims to rationalize why the authors arranged their respective worlds this way, and illuminate points of comparison and contrast between the two works. To achieve this goal, this essay specifically analyzes the types of societies seen within the two novels, and what role individual characters have in shaping them. Additionally, through a supplementary examination of related secondary sources, this essay hopes to answer fundamental questions about the portrayal …

Milton’S Exploration Of The Demonic Consciousness, Niall Mckenna

The Criterion

No abstract provided.

The Facade Of Names In Benjamin Clark’S “The Emigrant”, Brad Donegan

The Criterion

No abstract provided.

Language And The Lord Of The Rings: The Expansion Of A Universe, Thomas Beutz

The Criterion

Tommy Beutz’s essay, “Language and The Lord of the Rings: The Expansion of a Universe” explores J.R.R. Tolkien’s world-building through the lens of linguistics. Beutz argues that Tolkien’s creation of Middle-Earth, anchored in his invented languages, extends beyond the bounds of the text. Drawing on Tolkien’s background as a philologist, Beutz contends that the languages of Middle-Earth are not mere literary devices but rather the foundation of its entire mythology. By examining linguistic markers embedded in the primary text, Beutz reveals how Tolkien hints at a larger world outside the narrative. Through an analysis of historical accounts and characters’ …

The Search For Worth: How Relationship Conflicts Reveal The Universal Nature Of Insecurity, Grace C. Conroy

The Criterion

Since the beginning of time, romantic relationships and their dynamics have taken center stage in media--whether in books, plays, or other forms of literature. In this essay, a comparison of couples' relationships in James Joyce's "The Dead" and Marina Carr's play "The Mai" reveals the core human element of insecurity, prevalent in moments of marital conflict.

“The World Withers And The Wind Rises”: Apocalyptic Language In 'The Homecoming Of Beorhtnoth' And 'The Fall Of Arthur', Kristine Larsen

Journal of Tolkien Research

As previously explored by the author, Tolkien’s 1930’s alliterative verses published as The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún and The Fall of Arthur make direct and repeated references to the End Times, paralleling the prominence of the apocalyptic Second Prophecy of Mandos in revisions to his Middle-earth legendarium written at that time. Similar themes can be found in Tolkien’s verse-dialogue The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth. The Homecoming’s genesis dates to the same general time period, and both The Fall of Arthur and The Homecoming describe a war-tainted world in apocalyptic tones, the environment dark (literally, figuratively, and in terms of men’s …