European Languages and Societies | Open Access Articles

La Santa Muerte And The Characteristic Damage Of Canonization, Ellen Webber

Journal of Global Catholicism

Devotion to La Santa Muerte, a Mexican folk saint who personifies Death, has

been condemned by the Catholic Church for its affiliation with Mexican drug

cartels. This article challenges mainstream interpretations of La Santa Muerte

devotion using the theological framework of characteristic damage, as defined

by Lauren Winner and Paul J. Griffiths. This framework understands liturgy

as celebrated by sinners in a damaged world, and therefore necessarily damaged

itself. As much as liturgy and Christian practice form us for good, they also per-

petuate damage. I argue that the sins present in La Santa Muerte veneration are

an expression of …

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Negotiating Plurality: Korean Catholic Funerals As Lived Religion, Jieun Han

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article examines Korean Catholic funeral rites through the lenses of ritual

guidebooks and lived religion, arguing that Catholic funerary practice in Korea

has emerged through sustained engagement with Confucian and Buddhist tradi-

tions as well as modern nationalism. Focusing on Catholic manuals such as the

Sangjang yesik [Rites for Mourning and Funerals] and related texts, it traces how

officially sanctioned liturgical forms coexist with, accommodate, and reinterpret

indigenous ritual logics surrounding mourning, burial, ancestor veneration, and

care for the dead. Rather than viewing Korean Catholic funerals as a simple

localization of Roman rites, the article conceptualizes them as a …

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Editor's Introduction, Brent H. Otto S.J.

Journal of Global Catholicism

No abstract provided.

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From Print To Film: Political Censorship And Nationalism In Nineteenth And Twentieth-Century Central Europe, Kartik Joshi

The Ozark Historical Review

From Print to Film: Political Censorship and Nationalism in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Central Europe examines the relationship between emerging media technologies, state censorship, and nationalist political movements in Central Europe. Focusing primarily on Austria, the German states, and Hungary, this article traces how governments employed increasingly sophisticated systems of press regulation to suppress nationalist and subversive political discourse while political actors developed their own methods for circumventing those restrictions. The article considers censorship of newspapers, satire, lithographs, and other printed materials before examining the transformative effects of cinema in the twentieth century. As film became increasingly difficult to regulate through …

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Ethics Under Siege: The Conflict In Tigray Through The Lens Of Just War Theory, Daniela Widya Purba

Journal of Strategic and Global Studies

This research article explains the ethical principles of the conflict in Tigray based on the Just War Theory. By using the descriptive qualitative methodology, this research article draws data from secondary sources which includes; academic journals, news reports, as well as international legal instruments to analyze the moral trajectory of the conflict. This research begins with jus ad bellum, to assess Ethiopia’s government justification in declaring conflict within Tigray. While the government fulfilled the criteria of just cause and legitimate authority, the question stands on the ambiguous political intentions and the failure to enact peaceful alternatives before resulting in waging …

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Presidential Visits As Foreign Policy Instruments: U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy In Trump’S Second Term, Atar Thaung Htet

Journal of Strategic and Global Studies

Through an analysis of President Donald Trump's October 2025 travel to Asia, this study investigates the consequences of U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy under his second-term diplomacy. The paper examines three significant diplomatic encounters—the ASEAN Summit in Malaysia, bilateral meetings in Japan, and the APEC Summit in South Korea—using a qualitative case study methodology based on role theory and foreign policy analysis. The results show that alliance-centered security cooperation, strategic balancing toward China, and selective economic engagement were U.S. Indo-Pacific goals. Through extremely transactional and bilateralized relations, presidential diplomacy allowed the United States to fulfill a number of foreign policy responsibilities, such …

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A Comparative Critique Of Masculine Domination In Madame Bovary (1856) And Gemma Bovery (1999), Aqeela Hamarthya Czecheska Humayra, Diah Kartini Lasman

International Review of Humanities Studies

This study examines how social construction influences the representation of female autonomy through the transition of medium and temporal context. Its primary focus is to compare the mechanisms of masculine domination in Gustave Flaubert’s classic novel Madame Bovary (1856) with Posy Simmonds’ graphic novel adaptation Gemma Bovery (1999). Utilizing Hutcheon’s adaptation theory (2013) and de Beauvoir’s existential feminism (1949), complemented by Freytag’s dramatic structure analysis (1900) as the main framework, this research proceeds from the premise that the transposition from text to visual medium has significant implications for changes in narrative strategies and plot. This study highlights the differing manifestations …

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Mountains And Mythology: Folklore In The Alps, Arya Karki

Honors Projects

From nature spirits to secret doorways, an air of mystery and magic surrounds the mountains of Austria. All over the world, mountain ranges inspire rich folklore, each set of tales unique to its respective culture. The purpose of this Honors Project is to answer the question: how does mountain-inspired folklore mirror cultural values and fears? A comparative analysis between Austrian Alpine and American Appalachian folktales is conducted in order to isolate the variables that cause folklore to differ region-to-region. Through research consisting of primary-source folklore anthologies, secondary texts on mountain theory, and direct observation from a study abroad experience, this …

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Folk Narratives Of “The Wandering Jew” (Atu 777) In Latvian Folklore, Svetlana Pogodina

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

This essay reports field-collected texts of “The Wandering Jew” (ATU 777) recorded in the twentieth century in Latvia to determine if they are distinctive within the global tradition of the folk narrative. The Archives of Latvian Folklore (Latviešu folkloras krātuve) collection contains versions of the narrative recorded in the 1920s and 1930s. These texts have not previously been published in English translation. An interpretation is made that the narratives borrow elements from Jewish stereotypes that exist in a local folklore tradition. Comparing the Latvian material to the European and Slavic versions of the story of the Eternal Jew, a major …

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Hindu Poetry And The Project Of An Inter-Spiritual Catholic Theology, Francis X. Clooney

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article engages the work of the Indian south Indian Tamil-language Vaiṣṇava poet saints known as the Alvārs. The article specifically focuses the First HundredHoly Linked verses of Poykai Ālvār to argue for inter-spiritual learning between Catholics and Hindus. The article concludes with personal reflections on this encounter within the context of the global Catholic Church

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Regarding World(S): A Review Of Elisha Cohn’S Milieu: A Creaturely Theory Of The Contemporary Novel (2025) And Daniel Wright’S The Grounds Of The Novel (2024), Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

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World Literature According To Its Poster Children, Jernej Habjan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Some of the most influential pronouncements on world literature have been made by the kind of authors who are most likely to emerge as representatives of world literature once we agree on a definition, including Goethe, the young Marx, Tagore, Gorky, Hesse, Kundera, and the distinguished signatories of the manifesto for a world-literature in French. Breaking out of this vicious circle by referring to the authority of pure theorists of world literature is not the solution, as this would only pull us into a new vicious circle where most of these theorists would mostly remind us of the names that …

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A Crisis For Utopia: Jameson, The Collective, And The Future Of World Literature, Trevor Jackson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Working with Fredric Jameson’s influential discussions of utopia and world literature, the essay suggests that the prospect of utopia is frightening and also possibly boring insofar as it threatens to drain away the already waning possibility of experience in a postmodern, globalized world. In this world, resentment of the present seems to go hand in hand with a nostalgia for a fictitious past, underscoring the difficulty of conceptualizing new social, cultural, and economic arrangements. Viewing world literature as a possible source of a new utopian thought, a utopia unlimited to its contemporary dystopian guises, the essay retraces Jameson’s pronouncements on …

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The Proletarian Moment In World Literature, Anna Björk Einarsdóttir

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

During the interwar period (1918–1939), an international literary movement emerged in relation to internationalist and socialist politics and political struggles. Writers around the world saw themselves as contributors to a new proletarian moment within the historical unfolding of world literature. This movement was international, and writers situated on the peripheries of both the capitalist core and the emerging socialist world looked toward revolutionary Russia and other centers of the socialist world. This paper focuses on three such authors, the American Richard Wright, the Argentinian Roberto Arlt, and the Icelander Halldór Laxness. During the interwar period, all three were involved in …

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An Arc Stretched Between East And West: World (Or Universal?) Literature In Maxim Gorky’S Publishing Utopias, Francesca Lazzarin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The Vsemirnaia Literatura publishing house was founded in Petrograd by Maxim Gorky less than a year after the October Revolution. Aligned with the objectives of the new regime, its mission was to translate and publish a substantial body of European and Asian poetry and prose, thereby contributing to the broad cultural education of the emerging Soviet generations. These ambitions clearly reflect a key element of Gorky’s conception of culture as well: for Gorky, culture in its broadest sense (encompassing literature, art, music, and science) had the potential to unite humanity under the ideals of peace and harmony. Within this new …

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Reconsidering Karl Marx’S Concept Of World Literature, Kenneth Cheng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

It is widely assumed that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels regarded world literature as an epiphenomenal product of the capitalist world market, and therefore as a symptom of rather than potential cure to the crisis of modern society. However, this conflicts with the fact that they designated the Communist Manifesto itself as a world-literary production—the joint work of communists of various nationalities—and opposed it to the national limitations of German socialist literature. This article challenges existing interpretations by outlining how Marx and Engels incorporated the humanistic idealism of the Goethean Weltliteratur tradition into the theoretical framework of historical materialism. It …

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World Literature: From Perpetual War To Perpetual Peace (And Back Again), Sándor Hites

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this article, I address the relationship between world literature theories and questions of peace and war. I argue that the genesis of the concept of world literature in the 1790s was informed by profound transformations, in political theory, of the issue of the relevance and meaning of war and peace and their public perception. Theorists such as Wieland, Novalis, Jean Paul, and Fichte offered their concepts in response to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, adjusting them to shifting frontlines and the change of military fortune. Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur already reflected on the geopolitics of the post-Napoleonic age, …

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Introduction: World Literature As World Crisis, Jernej Habjan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

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Discourse Representation Of Self And Other In The 2020 Trump-Biden Presidential Debates, Victor Babajide Ogunleye, Adesina B. Sunday

Journal of English and Applied Linguistics

Presidential aspirants in the United States engage in debates during campaigns as a medium of enlightening the electorate. Existing studies on the American presidential debates have largely focused on politeness, rhetoric, syntax, and gender, with little attention to the strategies employed to construct the self and opponent(s). Therefore, this research investigates the discourse representation in the presidential debates between Trump and Biden using van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model of critical discourse analysis. Ten excerpts were purposively selected for their relevance in illustrating representation strategies. The analysis revealed positive self-representation and negative other-representation. Positive self-representation featured the self as competent, honest, altruistic, …

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Book Review: Yamin Hu, The Contemporary Construction Of The Chinese Form Of Marxist Literary Criticism , Paul R. Patton

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

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