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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

“For The Moment, I Am Not F*Cking,” I Am Tweeting: Platforms Of / As Sexuality, Jacob Johanssen Jan 2023

“For The Moment, I Am Not F*Cking,” I Am Tweeting: Platforms Of / As Sexuality, Jacob Johanssen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article develops the argument that digital platforms are significantly infused with originary (and unconscious) residues of the sexual. Drawing on Laplancheian conceptualizations of sexuality, I argue that the digital has always been sexual(ised) in itself – a process that precedes and exceeds the erotic or pornographic. For Laplanche, sexuality is constitutive of the human subject as such. Infantile sexuality is shaped and transformed in an enigmatic relation with the caregiver. Drawing on this model as an analogy, I claim that users are drawn to platforms because they (unconsciously) desire to return to infantile sexuality and a holding environment but …


“Passive Revolutions” After The Crisis Of Globalization: Gramsci And The Current Culture Of Populism, Yuri Brunello Mar 2022

“Passive Revolutions” After The Crisis Of Globalization: Gramsci And The Current Culture Of Populism, Yuri Brunello

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article compares the ways in which two scholars, the anthropologist Kate Crehan and the philosopher Diego Fusaro, analyze Gramsci’s thought, verifying its current relevance and effectiveness in interpreting populism. In Crehan’s recent Gramscian studies the categories of senso comune and buon senso become crucial. Crehan utilizes categories such as “culture” and senso comune to explain both the Tea Party experience and Donald Trump’s election. Fusaro, on the contrary, is an Italian public intellectual who declares himself a sovereignist and who often includes, among the theoretical references of Italian contemporary sovereignism, the author of Quaderni del carcere. In the …


The Meaning And Relevance Of Video Game Literacy, Jeroen Bourgonjon Dec 2014

The Meaning And Relevance Of Video Game Literacy, Jeroen Bourgonjon

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Meaning and Relevance of Video Game Literacy" Jeroen Bourgonjon argues that video gaming deserves scholarly attention as a social practice and a site for meaning-making and learning. Based on an overview of contemporary trends in literacy and cultural studies, he argues that video games cannot be approached like traditional text forms. He contends that video games serve as an important frame of reference for young people and call for informed decision making in the context of culture, education, and policy. Bourgonjon provides an integrated perspective on video game literacy by employing theoretical insights about their distinctive …


Introduction To New Work On Landscape And Its Narration, Sofie Verraest, Bart Keunen Sep 2012

Introduction To New Work On Landscape And Its Narration, Sofie Verraest, Bart Keunen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Bibliography Of Work On Landscape And Its Narration, Sofie Verraest, Bart Keunen Sep 2012

Bibliography Of Work On Landscape And Its Narration, Sofie Verraest, Bart Keunen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


The World Of The Landscape, Bart Verschaffel Sep 2012

The World Of The Landscape, Bart Verschaffel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The World of the Landscape" Bart Verschaffel analyzes the visual logic of the landscape genre in painting as it was developed from the sixteenth century onward. He argues that the structure of a minimal foreground, a middle ground cut off from the foreground, and a background that gives way to the distant, corresponds to a meditative attitude, proper to the nature of the image as such. The landscape is essentially a calm image. Second, Verschaffel puts forward that the middle ground in landscape images is not, as in history painting, a waiting room adjacent to the action …


Landscape, Culture, And Education In Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Geert Vandermeersche, Ronald Soetaert Sep 2012

Landscape, Culture, And Education In Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Geert Vandermeersche, Ronald Soetaert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Landscape, Culture, and Education in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe" Geert Vandermeersche and Ronald Soetaert discuss Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as a narrative that translates nature and our dealings with it into a literary text. Vandeermeersche and Soetaert postulate that the novel can be read as a quintessential fable of humans' cultivation of nature and the creation of individuality, which, at the same time, provides its readers with strategies for describing processes such as education. Robinson Crusoe and its characters, metaphors, and scenarios function in the "auto-communication" of culture as an enduring equipment for living (Burke), a company …


Towards An Urban Narrative Layers Approach To Decipher The Language Of City Films, François Penz Sep 2012

Towards An Urban Narrative Layers Approach To Decipher The Language Of City Films, François Penz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Towards an Urban Narrative Layers Approach to Decipher the Language of City Films" François Penz investigates how film narratives may provide us with the perceptual tools to grasp complex urban phenomena. He posits that, in order to elicit the mechanisms that make up the projected image of city films, new analytical tools need to be devised. Penz demonstrates that the cinematic image is composed of a succession of narrative layers and suggests that the eye of the unsuspecting film spectator encounters a succession of narrative layers recomposed seamlessly into a single movie image on the screen. Penz …


The Instrumentality Of Gibson's Medium As An Alternative To Space, Raymond Lucas Sep 2012

The Instrumentality Of Gibson's Medium As An Alternative To Space, Raymond Lucas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Instrumentality of Gibson's Medium as an Alternative to Space" Raymond Lucas analyzes the alternative to space presented by James J. Gibson and the potential role of narrative in a more holistic process of design. The concept of space exerts a powerful influence on architecture, urban design, and other disciplines concerned with the environment. Many recent critiques have measured space against place, recognizing the deficit in memory and identification within space, but the problems with the concept are more deeply felt. Understanding the medium rather than space offers architects and theorists opportunities to examine the role of …


English Architectural Landscapes And Metonymy In Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child, Bart Eeckhout Sep 2012

English Architectural Landscapes And Metonymy In Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child, Bart Eeckhout

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "English Architectural Landscapes and Metonymy in Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child" Bart Eeckhout analyzes Alan Hollinghurst's novel in light of Hollinghurst's interest in architectural representation. Eeckhout analyzes the novel's principal scenario of architectural change in the course of the twentieth century and postulates that Hollinghurst employs unconventional genre codes and queers the social realist novel, the family saga, and the country house novel. Eeckhout analyzes The Stranger's Child as a comedy of metonymies which impresses upon its readers the structural necessity of diverse perspectives, labyrinthine metonymical constructions, and the dynamics of place. Further, Eeckhout argues that Hollinghurst …


The Erotic Conception Of Ancient Greek Landscapes And The Heterotopia Of The Symposium, Jo Heirman Sep 2012

The Erotic Conception Of Ancient Greek Landscapes And The Heterotopia Of The Symposium, Jo Heirman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Erotic Conception of Ancient Greek Landscapes and the Heterotopia of the Symposium" Jo Heirman discusses the conception of natural landscapes in ancient Greek lyric poetry from the seventh until the fifth century BC and its ideological background. Heirman analyzes lyric poems by Sappho, Ibycus, and Theognis in which landscapes of fields, gardens, and meadows are presented. Heirman's analysis reveals a recurrent erotic pattern in the conception of ancient Greek landscapes constructed as places which suggest various forms of eroticism ranging from lesbian desire to homosexuality. Further, Heirman discusses the preoccupation with eroticism by suggesting a connection …


Tell-Tale Landscapes And Mythical Chronotopes In Urban Designs For Twenty-First Century Paris, Bart Keunen, Sofie Verraest Sep 2012

Tell-Tale Landscapes And Mythical Chronotopes In Urban Designs For Twenty-First Century Paris, Bart Keunen, Sofie Verraest

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Tell-tale Landscapes and Mythical Chronotopes in Urban Designs for Twenty-first Century Paris" Bart Keunen and Sofie Verraest outline a methodology for the examination of narrative structures projected onto landscapes and exemplify it by analyzing four urbanist projects submitted for the international workshop for Greater Paris launched by President of France Nicholas Sarkozy in 2009. Keunen and Verraest focus on phantasmagorical urban spaces considered to be profane remnants of what Ernst Cassirer referred to as "mythical thought." Since the spatiotemporal structure of these phantasmagorical places is understood as fundamental to their affective appeal and seductiveness, they are treated …


Urban Landscape And The Postsocialist City, Krzysztof Nawratek Sep 2012

Urban Landscape And The Postsocialist City, Krzysztof Nawratek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Urban Landscape and the Postsocialist City" Krzysztof Nawratek discusses contemporary capitalism as shaping the urban environment of Riga, a multiethnic and bilingual postsocialist, post-Soviet, and postindustrial city. When communism collapsed at the end of the twentieth century the majority of European socialist cities in central and East Europe adopted two ideas: 1) the idea of neoliberal deregulated management based on private, multi-agent ownership of land (and on land speculation) and the weakened role of the city council and 2) the "cultural turn" rejecting the industrial heritage of the socialist city and the ideology of the proletariat and …


Blurring The Boundaries Between City And Countryside In Photography, Steven Jacobs Sep 2012

Blurring The Boundaries Between City And Countryside In Photography, Steven Jacobs

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Blurring the Boundaries between City and Countryside in Photography" Steven Jacobs discusses how, in recent decades, a new landscape has emerged in which the differences between city and countryside have been blurred. As a result, the urbanized environment is increasingly viewed and interpreted as a landscape. It is because of the hybridity of this contemporary cityscape that urban planners such as Mirko Zardini have argued for a revaluation of the notion of the picturesque linked with a sensitivity to irregularity and a mixture of the cultural and the natural. Since the late 1960s, the post-urban landscape has …


Jenck's "Enigmatic Signifier" And Cathartic Narrative, Emmanuel Rubio Sep 2012

Jenck's "Enigmatic Signifier" And Cathartic Narrative, Emmanuel Rubio

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Jenck's 'Enigmatic Signifier' and Cathartic Narrative" Emmanuel Rubio takes Charles Jencks's definition of the "enigmatic signifier" as a point of departure. For Jencks, the post-modern "iconic building" should present a "redundancy of popular signs and metaphors" that allows for multiple interpretations. But these numerous metaphorical references could also be inserted in a less simultaneous network to construct a narrative sequence. As one of these sequences, the "cathartic narrative," which is particularly adapted to the troubled era of post-modernity, is defined as a narrative that brings back, in a symbolic way, memories and experiences of past suffering, before …


Narratives Of Loss And Order And Imaging The Belgian Landscape 1900-1945, Bruno Notteboom, David Peleman Sep 2012

Narratives Of Loss And Order And Imaging The Belgian Landscape 1900-1945, Bruno Notteboom, David Peleman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Narratives of Loss and Order and Imaging the Belgian Landscape 1900-1945" Bruno Notteboom and David Peleman analyze a number of publications on landscape, focusing on narratives constructed by means of landscape images published in Belgium. With the work of Jean Massart and Emile Vanderwelde as a point of departure, Notteboom and Peleman discuss popularizing publications in the fields of botany, agricultural education, and tourism, as well as an urban planning. They address the three realms of landscape narratives defined by Matthew Potteiger and Jamie Purinton as story, context/intertext, and discourse. Notteboom and Peleman distinguish three recurrent operations …


The Avatar As A Methodological Tool For The Embodied Exploration Of Virtual Environments, Kris Pint Sep 2012

The Avatar As A Methodological Tool For The Embodied Exploration Of Virtual Environments, Kris Pint

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Avatar as a Methodological Tool for an Embodied Exploration of Virtual Environments" Kris Pint proposes a theoretical framework for the analysis of environments which cannot be entered physically because they are fictional, inaccessible, or destroyed. As phenomenology has already emphasized, the analysis of space has to take into account the bodily involvement of the researcher. Pint introduces the notion of the avatar to compensate for the impossibility of actually accessing the aforementioned spaces. Borrowed from game design, the avatar allows us to include this bodily aspect in the exploration of virtual environments, without neglecting the specific …


Ancient Hindu Society And Eliot's Ideal Christian Society, Anita Bhela Jun 2012

Ancient Hindu Society And Eliot's Ideal Christian Society, Anita Bhela

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Ancient Hindu Society and Eliot's Ideal Christian Society" Anita Bhela examines the influence of Hindu thought and Hindu philosophy on T.S. Eliot's critical writings. In The Idea of a Christian Society Eliot gives a hypothetical account of an ideal society that would contribute towards the well-being of all its members, while in Notes towards the Definition of Culture he enumerates the essential conditions needed for the growth and survival of culture. Bhela argues that religion and culture were inseparably interrelated in Eliot's mind. She then traces similarities in the concepts of family, culture, and religion as expressed …


Women's Worlds In The Novels Of Kandukuri And Gilman, Suneetha Rani Jun 2012

Women's Worlds In The Novels Of Kandukuri And Gilman, Suneetha Rani

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Women's Worlds in the Novels of Kandukuri and Gilman" Suneetha Rani discusses Veeresalingam Kandukuri's Satyaraja Poorvadesayatralu (Satyaraja's Travel to the Distant Lands) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland. While the novels were published in two different contexts — one in pre-independence India and the other in pre-World War I in the U.S., one in Telugu and the other in English, one by a man and the other by a woman — there is an interesting connecting thread that brings them together. Both were satires on the contemporary male chauvinistic world. While the Telugu novel pleads for a better …


The Idea Of England In Eighteenth-Century Indian Travel Writing, Amrita Satapathy Jun 2012

The Idea Of England In Eighteenth-Century Indian Travel Writing, Amrita Satapathy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Idea of England in Eighteenth-century Indian Travel Writing" Amrita Satapathy discusses how Dean Mahomed's 1794 The Travels of Dean Mahomed maps out territories of the mind of the colonizer and the colonized, how the narrative redefines contours of two diverse communities and cultures, and determines forms of cultural representations. Mahomed's Travels presented for the first time the idea of England from an Indian immigrant's point of view and altered the prejudiced outlook of early Western travel writings about the East. Mahomed's narrative opened an alternative vista for the wide-eyed Easterner of the world of the West …


Elements Of Hinduism In Chandra’S Red Earth And Pouring Rain, Corinne M. Ehrfurth Jun 2012

Elements Of Hinduism In Chandra’S Red Earth And Pouring Rain, Corinne M. Ehrfurth

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Elements of Hinduism in Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain" Corinne M. Ehrfurth explores how Hindu tenets in the Bhagavad-gītā continue to provide a didactic framework that inspires contemporary Indian literature. Ehrfurth highlights the similarities between characters, consumed with doubt and seeking understanding, in the ancient Indian text and Vikram Chandra's novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain where protagonists represent the diversity and complexity of Hinduism to a global audience. In examining how the novel's protagonists handle dilemmas, Ehrfurth presents Chandra's novel as illuminating how healthy and destructive actions affect one's ability of achieving the peaceful …


The Indian Diaspora And Reading Desai, Mukherjee, Gupta, And Lahiri, Amit Shankar Saha Jun 2012

The Indian Diaspora And Reading Desai, Mukherjee, Gupta, And Lahiri, Amit Shankar Saha

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Indian Diaspora and Reading Desai, Mukherjee, Gupta, and Lahiri" Amit Shankar Saha argues that displacement produces a point of encounter between the alien and authority. Saha analyses aspects of (im)migration in texts about the Indian diaspora: if the host society is intolerant then it is through reactionary self-fashioning that the (im)migrant asserts his/her ethnicity as a defensive mechanism to rescue self-respect. However, while the host society is welcoming, it does not guarantee ready assimilation because there is always the question of severing the (im)migrants ties with his/her home land. (Im)migrants start living in two worlds simultaneously …


Gender Anxiety And Contemporary Indian Popular Fiction, Elen Turner Jun 2012

Gender Anxiety And Contemporary Indian Popular Fiction, Elen Turner

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Gender Anxiety and Contemporary Indian Popular Fiction" Elen Turner discusses two examples of Indian "popular literature" which reflect contemporary Indian middle-class anxieties surrounding globalization and social change. The recent proliferation of foreign business process outsourcing companies in India has changed the financial and lifestyle opportunities available to young, urban Indians. While sociological and ethnographic studies have found that workers embrace what they perceive to be westernized lifestyles, the novels under discussion present a more nuanced picture. Chetan Bhagat's One Night at the Call Centre (2005) and Shruti Saxena's Stilettos in the Boardroom (2010) demonstrate that young workers …


History And Politics In Parthasarathy's Play Aurangzeb, Shubh Brat Sarkar Jun 2012

History And Politics In Parthasarathy's Play Aurangzeb, Shubh Brat Sarkar

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "History and Politics in Parthasarathy's Play Aurangzeb" Shubh Brat Sarkar analyzes the use of history in a dramatic text, the underlying politics and ideology of a literary product, and the modes by which the materials are shaped through dramaturgy. The name Aurangzeb, the title of the play, has a strong presence in history textbooks and has perhaps become an integral part of a grand historical, "Indian" nationalist discourse. In the play multiple contradictions co-exist and find new projections in translations and theater adaptations in different historical contexts. Indira Parthasarthy's 1974 play is based on events leading …


Redefinitions Of India And Individuality In Adiga's The White Tiger, Kathleen Waller Jun 2012

Redefinitions Of India And Individuality In Adiga's The White Tiger, Kathleen Waller

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Redefinitions of India and Individuality in Adiga's The White Tiger" Kathleen Waller discusses Indian individualism as being supported by a democratic and secular society, but also stymied by traditions and socioeconomic realities which keep most of its people living in poverty. In The White Tiger, Adiga challenges Indian culture to create a society in which individuals are truly free. Waller argues that the relevance of Adiga's novel is that it is social structure and practices of hierarchy keep many people in the lower classes of Indian society and that this state of affairs is counter …


World Literature And The Case Of Joyce, Rao, And Borges, Bhavya Tiwari Jun 2012

World Literature And The Case Of Joyce, Rao, And Borges, Bhavya Tiwari

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "World Literature and the Case of Joyce, Rao, and Borges" Bhavya Tiwari discusses the work of James Joyce and poses the question why Joyce is considered an important figure in Latin America and South Asia. Have Indian languages (e.g., Bengali and Hindi) responded differently to Joycean aesthetics? If yes, can there be political reasons behind this difference? Joyce's own position in Europe as a modernist aesthetician complicates his reception in the "periphery," India and Latin America. Hence, Tiwari queries as to what happens when Joyce's texts are received on two different continents. In this context, Tiwari discusses …


Shakespeare Reception In India And The Netherlands Until The Early Twentieth Century, Vikram Singh Thakur Jun 2012

Shakespeare Reception In India And The Netherlands Until The Early Twentieth Century, Vikram Singh Thakur

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Shakespeare Reception in India and The Netherlands until the Early Twentieth Century" Vikram Singh Thakur locates Shakespeare in two different cultural contexts by looking at its reception in The Netherlands and India. His analysis is based on the fact that Shakespeare was a foreign playwright to both cultures yet both have gradually assimilated his works into their respective cultures and made him, probably, the most performed foreign playwright since the 1870s. Thakur aims at understanding how the reception of a work in different cultures is mediated by various social, cultural, historical, and ideological sieves through which the …


Duality Of Illusion And Reality In Desai's In Custody, Narinder K. Sharma Jun 2012

Duality Of Illusion And Reality In Desai's In Custody, Narinder K. Sharma

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Duality of Illusion and Reality in Desai's In Custody," Narinder K. Sharma analyses Anita Desai's internal confrontation of choices. In the novel, Desai's narration offers various options at every step and the author suggests that it becomes difficult to decide what actually should be done. The attempt is to personalize impersonal time and space thereby brings it into the domain of conflicting choices signifying an existential desire to manifest freedom. Going a step further, it can be deciphered that the individual desires to make an ideal choice to experience "authenticity"; however, the desire of making an …


Africa And India In The Novels Of Dai And Emecheta, Debarshi Prasad Nath, Juri Dutta Jun 2012

Africa And India In The Novels Of Dai And Emecheta, Debarshi Prasad Nath, Juri Dutta

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Africa and India in the Novels of Dai and Emecheta" Debarshi Prasad Nath and Juri Dutta discusses the work of two writers belonging to different continents, India and Nigeria. Interestingly, the novels of the two writers Dutta is analyzing — Lummer Dai and Buchi Emecheta —never heard of each other. Both novels are based on the custom of bride price, both writers speak out against the stifling rigidity of traditional customs, and uphold aspects of modernity in languages other than their native tongues. At the same time, both writers affirm the sanctity of the traditional institutions and …


Introduction To New Work In Comparative Indian Literatures And Cultures, Mohan G. Ramanan, Tutun Mukherjee Jun 2012

Introduction To New Work In Comparative Indian Literatures And Cultures, Mohan G. Ramanan, Tutun Mukherjee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.