European Languages and Societies Commons^™

Complicity, Dissent, And The Palestinian Intellectual, Sa'ed Atshan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this article, I draw on the major works of two Palestinian intellectuals—Edward Said and Hanan Ashrawi—and I compare the experiences of Palestinian intellectuals living in the United States with those living under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank. The writings of these two exemplary figures shape the conceptual underpinnings of my exploration of the way Palestinian academics navigate questions of complicity with the different hegemonic political systems that govern their lives. I argue that Said and Ashrawi model a steadfast refusal to be complicit in the state-led repression around them at the same time as they engage in …

Subject, Subjugation, And Subjectivity, Raef Zreik

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper analyzes the ways in which complicity and dissent feed and subvert one another, or the ways in which the subjugated self becomes a political subject. The formative event of Palestinian collective identity is the loss of home and homeland in the aftermath of the Nakba of 1948. “The Catastrophe” divided the Palestinian community to two: Those who remained within the borders of the Israeli state and became Israeli citizens, and the Palestinian refugees, who came to establish the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and led an armed struggle. While examining the two narratives, I also explore two communal modes …

Family Affairs: Complicity, Betrayal, And The Family In Hisham Matar's In The Country Of Men And Nadine Gordimer's My Son's Story, Lital Levy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay undertakes a comparative reading of the dynamics of complicity and resistance in two contemporary Anglophone novels, Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story (1990) and Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men (2006). My analysis pursues three main lines of inquiry: the ostensible public/ private and political/ personal divides; loyalty and betrayal in the family; and the ambiguous status of the child as a witness and a political subject. I argue that in their respective portrayals of the protagonists’ struggles against South African apartheid and authoritarian rule in Libya, both authors use the device of the child narrator to expose …

Facing The Ruler, Facing The Village: On The Roads To Complicity Following Mengzi And Benda, Zvi Ben-Dor Benite

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, “Facing the Ruler, Facing the Village,” Zvi Ben-Dor Benite seeks to broaden the boundaries of the discussion about complicity by taking it away from late 20th-century and contemporary debates about it. At the same time, he wishes to highlight the many faces that the problem of complicity could have in different historical moments. Following Czesław Miłosz, this article understands that there are many roads to complicity that have been articulated in different ways across time and space. This article is, therefore, an integrated meditation on complicity bringing together two radically distant approaches to the question. Reading the …

Remnants Of Dissent, Thomas Docherty

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, “Remnants of Dissent,” Thomas Docherty explores the relation of dissent to guilty complicity in post-war Europe. The article opens with a consideration of the position of Karl Jaspers in 1945 and examines how Jaspers worked through the various modes of guilt that flowed from diverse modes of living under Nazism. Of particular interest is the status of silence in the face of tyrannical Nazi oppression and murders. The essay explores how the workings of language, and its manipulations by the Nazis, helps to normalize such tyranny and to make resistance to it both dangerous and difficult. The …

Introduction: Complicity And Dissent, Or Why We Need Solidarity Between Struggles, Nitzan Lebovic

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Growing pressure from politicians and corporations has thrown into question the very legitimacy of opposition and critique. A language of political affirmation has confused and misled the public, driving many to adopt a cynical attitude to politics. The result has been a rapid decline of legitimate critique, the rise of populism, and a growing tendency to squelch civil disobedience with a militarized police force. The introduction to the special issue considers the role of the complicit/dissenting intellectual in history and literature, politics and law. It explores the genealogy of the terms, as well as conditions for their appearance in our …

Class, Capital And Colonies In India And Palestine/Israel, Amir Locker-Biletzki

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The article “Class, Capital and Colonies in India and Palestine/Israel” studies the way Indian and Israeli Communist intellectuals conceptualized and understood European Colonialism. In contrast to present day settler-colonial theories – that disregarded Marxist critic of European expansion – Indian and Israeli Communists developed a Bolshevik colonial thinking. For Communists the triple forces of imperialism, capital and class devastated the “archaic” native way of life. In doing so they clear a path for European domination, settlement and class differentiation of both colonizers and colonized. The article traces Bolshevik colonial thinking to its origins in Marx’s and Lenin’s writings. It continuous …

Israeli Literature And The Time Of "Post-Post-Zionism", Oded Nir

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this essay, I argue that contemporary Israeli literature possesses a more “advanced” historical imaginary than that of contemporary “post-post-Zionist” Israeli historiography, and I relate this gap to the neoliberalization of the Israeli economy. I begin by arguing that contemporary literature’s historical imaginary marks a departure from its 80s and 90s postmodern predecessors. I show that this departure is evident in contemporary Israeli literature’s explicit recognition of an inability to relate subjective experience to larger history. This recognition constitutes a dialectical overcoming of Israeli postmodernism’s playful dismantling of the national historical narrative. I then argue that Israeli “post-post-Zionist” historiography constitutes …

"You Prefer Your Enemies Simple And Well Defined": Reading Anton Shammas’ Arabesques As A Novel That Strategically Resists Interpellation, Yiftach Ashkenazi, Omri Grinberg

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Anton Shammas’s 1986 novel Arabesques has been the subject of much literary criticism and on-going discussions in Hebrew literature circles. This article argues that existing interpretations of this work share a fundamental similarity to the extent that they assume Arabesques to be a novel whose primary aim is to depict a certain kind of subject, in accordance with the complicated emplacement of Shammas as a Palestinian writing in Hebrew. Against such interpretations, we suggest that Arabesques is better understood as a text that resists the process of subject formation as linked to Althusser’s notion of ideology. Instead, Shammas explores the …

The Materiality And Embodiment Of Violence: Ronit Matalon’S Poetics Of Responsibility, Shiri Goren

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her essay “The Materiality and Embodiment of Violence: Ronit Matalon’s Poetics of Responsibility” Shiri Goren discusses Matalon’s novel Bliss (Sarah-Sarah, 2000) as a complex and bleak account of domestic and political decline. On the backdrop of the first Intifada, a Tel Avivian marriage falls apart and a lifelong powerful and intimate friendship between two women ends abruptly. In another geographical location and slightly different timeframe, early November 1995, a French-Jewish family prepares for the cremation of one of its sons, who died of AIDS. Rejecting potential interpretations of national allegory, Goren argues that one of the foundational …

Subjectivity, Institutions And Language In Contemporary Israeli Film, Ari Ofengenden

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Subjectivity, Institutions and Language in Contemporary Israeli Film" Ari Ofengenden analyzes the transnational characteristics of contemporary Israeli films (from 2000 until today). He claims that a new regime of globally networked production and distribution of Israeli film has articulated a specific kind of subjectivity presented in these films. In this article, he will concentrate on two characteristics of this subjectivity: the relations of protagonist with social institutions and use of language. Relations with social institutions starts with the highly prevalent representations of a sensitive and individualist protagonist who suffers under collective and coercive institutions like the army, …

Watching Fight Club In Tel Aviv: Or The 2011 Social Protests In Israel, A Political Postmortem, Eran Kaplan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Watching Fight Club in Tel Aviv: Or The 2011 Social Protests in Israel, a Political Postmortem,” Eran Kaplan provides an analysis of the ideological underpinnings of the social protests that swept Israel in 2011 and the failure of these protests to bring about actual political change. The article draws on the manner by which David Fincher’s film Fight Club exposes the ideological dimensions of modern, neoliberal consumerist society as a way to understand the driving forces behind the Israeli protests and to suggest a possible way out of the ideological quagmire that the protesters and their leaders …

Coping With Fear: Frontier Kibbutzes And The Syrian-Israeli Border War, Orit Rozin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Coping with Fear: Frontier Kibbutzes and the Syrian-Israeli Border War,” Orit Rozin discusses the practices and norms of border kibbutzes coping with daily hostilities. The Israel-Syrian border was a constant point of friction. Hostilities erupted over the cultivation and the control of the demilitarized zones and over water resources. Northern Kibbutzes both took part in triggering Syrian violence and were victims of that violence. Covering the interwar period 1956-1967, Rozin traces the subjective emotional reaction of kibbutz members exposed to Syrian violence. Focusing on fear and employing Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of emotional communities, she shows that members …

The Catastrophic Horizon: Contemporary Israeli Cinema's Critique Of Neo-Liberal Israel, Yael Munk

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, Munk analyzes the gradual decline in social solidarity of the once-socialist Israeli society has become discernible in arts and society alike. This process has been voiced in films that described the dangers of a segregated society in a graphic manner, pointing an accusing finger at what Israeli society has become. In these films, the prolonged Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories considered by some as the source of all evil, has been removed from the intellectual foreground in order to provide by a deeper look into the catastrophic outcomes of the social dead end Zionism has reached. …

Suburban Realities: The Israeli Case, Tamar Berger

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Suburban Realities: The Israeli Case" Tamar Berger discusses the nature of the new building in Israel in the last 3-4 decades. Israel, she claims, has been going through a process of massive suburbanization, which is drastically changing the face of the country. Some of the features of the new space are similar to those of other places, globally, but it has its particularity, the result of both the local spatial history and the nature of Israeli society. Suburbs in general are hard to define. Still, a set of typical features of the Israeli suburbs can be noted: …

Irony, Revenge, And The Naqba In Yehuda Amichai’S Early Work, Hannan Hever

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article offers a materialist reading of the poetry of Yehuda Amichai, the most well-known Israeli poet outside Israel. The article explores the political role of irony in Amichai’s early work, situating him as a prominent member of the “State Generation” poetry. Challenging accepted readings, the essay argues that Amichai’s poems that deal with the 1948 war, should be read as a post-traumatic response, which uses irony and rich and bold metaphorical devices to distance itself from the horrors of the war, and therefore also form the political and ethical meanings of the Naqba. That Amichai’s poetry translates the language …

Introduction: Israeli Critical Reflection After Post-Zionism, Or The Opening As Interpretive Horizon, Oded Nir, Ari Ofengenden

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay attempts to situate this special issue as an intervention, from a materialist perspective, in the field of Israeli cultural studies. We interrogate the common periodizations of Israeli culture, and its contemporary characterization as “post-post-Zionist.” We try to show that the latter betrays an unacknowledged failure of historical narration, present throughout Israeli cultural production. We then argue that rather than being satisfied with this failure, the goal of Israeli cultural critique today should be to search for new ways to narrate “big” history, to reassert the indispensability of relating personal experience of the present, in all its details, to …

Why Study Language? Discussing Language And Its Influence On Gender Discrimination, Katelyn Eisenmann

Honors Projects

An applied research project, with the culminating piece being a panel discussion that focused on the ways in which language use and structure contribute to attitudes and perceptions of gender within our society, and the politics that surround concepts of gender.

A Pilgrim’S Progress For The Digital, Post-Human(Ist) Age?: Social And Religious Allegory In Russell Banks’S Lost Memory Of Skin, David J. Buehrer Dr.

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

In Lost Memory of Skin (2011), his twelfth novel, Russell Banks continues his exploration of the dark underbelly of American society—in this instance, the moral wilderness of a group of convicted sex offenders exiled to living beneath a concrete causeway in the south Florida city of Calusa, a fictionalized Miami. Banks, who has long been “our premier chronicler of the doomed and forgotten American male” (Schulman 8), focuses in Lost on a twenty-two-year-old parolee referred to throughout only as “The Kid.” While guilty and duly convicted of propositioning an underage girl online for sex, The Kid is still presented in …

Realismo Y Exasperación: Un Estudio De Los Personajes Femeninos En La Pata De La Sota Y La Nona De Roberto Cossa, Mariana Pensa

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

En esta presentación analizamos las obras teatrales La pata de la sota (1967) y La Nona (1977), del dramaturgo argentino Roberto Cossa. Estos textos se constituyen en textos-faro del subsistema teatral del realismo reflexivo. El primero, uno que define la ortodoxia del universo realista, mientras que el segundo la supera, incorporando un universo muy cercano al absurdo y el sin sentido. Trabajando, entonces, desde las coordenadas del realismo y su evolución, nos focalizamos aquí en la relación madre-hija, para señalar cuáles y cómo son los cambios en la construcción de los personajes femeninos en el pasaje de una fase a …

Seccll Conference Program 2019, Seccll Conference

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

Conference Program 2019

Child’S Play: A Service Learning Project Conducted At Roroš, Nové Mešto Pod Smrkem, Sanaya Attari

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

For my Independent Study Project, I designed a board game for young children inspired by the service learning activities held at ROROŠ. ROROŠ is a private organization located in the town of Nové Mešto pod Smrkem, offering different activities for children which provide a meaningful use of their leisure time. For a period of three weeks, I lived in Nové Mešto with Yveta Svobodová, one of the head directors of the organization. During my stay, I partook in several activities each week and used my experiences to generate new ideas when designing the final game. The game was completed by …

Basque Nationalism And Education: The Influence Of Euskara On Student Achievement In The Basque Country, Amanda Flores

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Between 2012 and 2015, Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test scores in the Basque Country have dropped significantly. In reading, the average score dropped 7 points and in math, scores fell by 13 points. Most notably however, science proficiency plummeted 23 points between 2012 and 2015. With 2018 PISA data yet to be published, this downturn in the educational success of the Basque Country is drawing significant concern from educators, parents, and policymakers alike.

These concerns are bolstered by the fact that Basque public schools spend €3,712 more per pupil than average expenditure of Spain, yet perform slightly lower …

Six Word Stories Through Spain And Morocco, Pola Isabelle Bonete, Astrid Gaytan, Jessica Cannon

Student Engagement Posters

Pola Isabelle Bonete, Astrid Gaytan, and Jessica Cannon discuss student engagement at Linfield College with regard to intercultural competence and cultural sensitivity gained through their January Term 2019 course in Spain and Morocco.

Motherhood, Vulnerability And Resistance In The Elysium Testament By Mary O’Donnell, María Elena Jaime De Pablos

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Mary O’Donnell’s novel The Elysium Testament (1999) narrates the story of Nina, an accomplished grotto restorer, but a neglectful wife and mother according to the Irish patriarchal symbolic order –the “register of regulatory ideality” (Butler, Bodies that Matter 18). Estranged from her husband, Neil, she sends him a series of letters, her “testament,” where some of the most significant aspects of her life are exposed. Readers discover that Nina’s and Neil’s marriage begins to crumble after the birth of their second child, Roland, to whom Nina attributes a frightening dual nature, which she tries to control through physical and psychological …

Chase Riboud’S Hottentot Venus (2003) And The Neo-Victorian: The Problematization Of South-Africa And The Vulnerability And Resistance Of The Black Other, Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article touches upon issues of captivity, suppression, misrepresentations and exclusion of black people from a historical and cultural point of view through the analysis of Chase-Riboud’s neo-Victorian novel Hottentot Venus (2003). It also focuses on the implications and consequences for contemporary South Africa of situations of slavery and exploitation of African descended peoples. Notions of identity and moral and legal inclusion of black women into past and contemporary societies and communities will be also discussed from the point of view of postcolonial and gender and sexuality studies. The complexities of blackness and the violation of human rights as a …

The Commodified Body And Post/In Human Subjectivities In Frears’S Dirty Pretty Things And Romanek’S Never Let Me Go, Rocio Carrasco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Following new materialist analysis, this article takes the body as the central locus of analysis, and relates it to broader questions such as ethics, ideology, power and/or technologies. Specifically, it revolves around the idea of embodied subjectivity as articulated by scholars Rosi Braidotti, Sherryl Vint or Cary Wolfe, whereby body and subjectivity are indissolubly and interestingly connected. Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (2010) exploit the idea of the commodified body, understood here as a vulnerable body, a disposable commodity at the service of powerful and/or wealthy people. Victims of the cruelties inflicted …

Introduction, Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz, Manuela Coppola

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This special issue addresses contemporary representations of “vulnerable” bodies in transit in Anglophone literature and culture and explores their strategies of resistance. The use of the expression “bodies in transit” in this issue has to be understood both as a reference to the materiality of diasporic, exiled, migrating, trafficked bodies, and as an allusion to the metaphorical transition of these marginalized subjects from alienation to regeneration in multiple contexts. The interdisciplinary contributions in this special issue tackle vulnerability as a marginal(ized) and potentially enabling condition entailing the crossing of bodily, sexual, mental, ethical, cultural, and national borders. Ranging from literature …

Resistance To Neocolonialism In Contemporary Chinese Literary Theory, Zeng Jun

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Resistance to Neocolonialism in Contemporary Chinese Literary Theory" Jun ZENG claims that the introduction of Western Literary Theory in the past forty years of China's reform and opening up was carried out under the background of neo-colonialism. "Western imagination" in the discourse of contemporary Chinese literary theory was an important aspect of the strategy of cultural resistance under the overwhelming influence of Western neocolonialism. Contemporary Chinese literary theory no longer simply regards Western literary theory in the twentieth century as a bourgeois literary ideology; instead, it adopts a "de-ideological" attitude to return to the issues of literature, …

Mo Yan’S Reception In China And A Reflection On The Postcolonial Discourse, Binghui Song

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Mo Yan's Reception in China and a Reflection on the Postcolonial Discourse" Binghui Song argue that the controversial style and themes of Mo Yan's works are necessitated by the interconnected yet different contexts of China and the rest of the world, only by means of which Mo Yan can let his voice be heard. As one of the most excellent and unique contemporary Chinese writers, Mo Yan has exerted extensive influence on Chinese readers, and his works have also caused various controversies over the past 30 years. His winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature, rather than …