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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Purloined Significance: How Recidivism Algorithms Capture, Transform, And Automate Our Intersubjective Unconscious As Data, Macy Mcdonald Jan 2023

Purloined Significance: How Recidivism Algorithms Capture, Transform, And Automate Our Intersubjective Unconscious As Data, Macy Mcdonald

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Ever since ProPublica published their groundbreaking analysis of Northpointe’s Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions Core Risk and Needs Assessment software (COMPAS) in 2016, this web-based decision support system (DSS) has spawned a wide range of critiques and charges of racial bias. COMPAS provides a full suite of decision support applications to the US prison-industrial complex, including algorithmically derived recidivism predictions that increasingly guide parole decisions. The larger conversation surrounding COMPAS raises the question of how we analyze powerful, and yet opaque, data assemblages. In this article, I model an allegorical analysis of data assemblages. I argue the skills …


“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 …


On A Small Glossary Of Academic Anti-Intellectualism, William Díaz Villarreal Mar 2022

On A Small Glossary Of Academic Anti-Intellectualism, William Díaz Villarreal

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article presents the Small Glossary of Anti-intellectualism, where the most common rhetorical strategies and themes of contemporary academic anti-intellectualism are commented on. Anti-intellectualism is as old as intellectual life itself. However, its contemporary version is historically and sociologically rooted in the very structure of modern culture industry. It is a manifestation of a now universal pseudo-culture (Halbbildung) which, according to Adorno, has become the “dominant form of contemporary consciousness.” Arthur Schlesinger said that anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman; today, anti-intellectualism is certainly the antisemitism of several social and political groups, including academia …


Socrates The Degenerate: Irony As Trope Of Decadence, Daniel R. Adler Feb 2022

Socrates The Degenerate: Irony As Trope Of Decadence, Daniel R. Adler

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Decadence is typically associated with a fall from, or an opposition to, ideals of civilization. Western Civilization traditionally traces its roots to the culture of Ancient Greece. While theorists of periodicity from Vico to Nietzsche and Deleuze, to Hayden White and other contemporary scholars, associate decadence with excess, artificiality and over-indulgence, they also recognize that decadence often incorporates pre-civilized, base or “Other” tendencies. Paradoxically, decadence as a degeneration of an original culture’s values can also rejuvenate that culture’s core values through mutation so that a new version of the original culture arises. In literature, degeneration has also been associated with …


“Western Marxism” In Mao’S China, Jun Zeng, Yichen Wang Dec 2020

“Western Marxism” In Mao’S China, Jun Zeng, Yichen Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

China’s reception of “Western Marxism” is a critical part of the global history of Marxism. This paper examines three aspects of the reception of Western Marxism in literary and art criticism during the early years of Mao’s China (1949-65): the Western Marxist critique of surrealism, debates over Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, and Sartrean existentialism and Western Marxism. The impacts of Western Marxist literary thought upon Chinese literary studies during the early years of the PRC are discussed, along with the extensive influx of Western Marxism that began in the reform era of post-Mao China (1978- ) …


A Thin Line Between Sovereign And Abject Agents: Global Action Thrillers With The Sci-Fi Mind-Game War On Terror, Seung-Hoon Jeong Feb 2020

A Thin Line Between Sovereign And Abject Agents: Global Action Thrillers With The Sci-Fi Mind-Game War On Terror, Seung-Hoon Jeong

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Seung-hoon Jeong discusses in his paper global action thrillers about the war on terror. He highlights the biopolitical abjection of counterterrorist agents from their state agencies. This abjection ends up either self-reaffirming in the manner of a sovereign agent (the Bond series) or terrorizing their sovereign system (the Bourne series), while both are trapped in the vicious cycle of terror and counterterror. More notable is the “mind-game” sci-fi genre. Source Code, among others, stages a loop of a traumatic counterterrorist mission with retroactive causality, a closed circuit of neoliberal productivity and pathological abjection in a video-game narrative. The time-travel …


Monstrous Accumulation: Topographies Of Fear In An Era Of Globalization, Robert T. Tally Jr. Feb 2020

Monstrous Accumulation: Topographies Of Fear In An Era Of Globalization, Robert T. Tally Jr.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The predominance of the horror genre, broadly conceived, in recent years attests to the profound sense of anxiety and dread permeating late capitalist societies. As the processes and effects of globalization become more viscerally experienced, they are also often rendered invisible or unknowable, and individuals and groups find themselves subject to an immense array of forces beyond their control. The contemporary scene is crowded with monsters, from alien invaders to the zombie apocalypse, set against the backdrop of darkly fantastic landscapes and dystopian visions. Drawing upon a variety of Marxist cultural theory, Robert T. Tally Jr. explores the topographies of …


Introduction To The Monstrous Global: The Effects Of Globalization On Cultures, Ju Young Jin, Jae Roe Feb 2020

Introduction To The Monstrous Global: The Effects Of Globalization On Cultures, Ju Young Jin, Jae Roe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This special issue on “The Monstrous Global: The Effects of Globalization on Cultures” explores representations of the monstrous effects and products of globalization. The monstrous (as in The Monstrous Feminine by Barbara Creed) in this sense alludes to the ways in which local or national displays of fear and anxiety about the Other are embedded in struggles and tensions of global scale; the inability to cognitively map the effect of such global forces on local/national problems produces monstrous representations of the global. Global forces such as neoliberalism and reactionary nationalism, technology, climate change, migration and displacement lead to accelerating instability …


The Different Representation Of Suffering In The Two Versions Of The Vegetarian, Young-Hyun Lee Sep 2019

The Different Representation Of Suffering In The Two Versions Of The Vegetarian, Young-Hyun Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “The Different Representation of Suffering in the two versions of The Vegetarian” the author examines how different the representation of suffering in the original and translated versions of The Vegetarian and explores the reasons for this difference. The author in particular refers to representative episodes which the translator’s strategy distorts even the central concepts of suffering in the original work. Her translated version results in critical misrepresentation of suffering and violence in the original version.


Resistance To Neocolonialism In Contemporary Chinese Literary Theory, Zeng Jun Dec 2018

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, …


Regaining The Subject: Foucault And The Frankfurt School On Critical Subjectivity, Miguel Alirangues Dec 2018

Regaining The Subject: Foucault And The Frankfurt School On Critical Subjectivity, Miguel Alirangues

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Regaining the Subject: Foucault and the Frankfurt School on Critical Subjectivity” Miguel Alirangues sketches a possible meeting place in which two currents of critical thought (Adorno and Horkheimer, on the one hand, and Foucault, on the other) can come into dialogue. Without these two currents and, more crucially, without the dialogue between them, as he points out, we cannot today think of political antagonism towards the social structures of domination and therefore we cannot think of praxis and agency. The essay proceeds as follows: firstly, the author notes the places in which Foucault spoke of his relationship …


"The Politics Of Literature In Michel Foucault: Veridiction, Fiction And Desire", Azucena G. Blanco Dec 2018

"The Politics Of Literature In Michel Foucault: Veridiction, Fiction And Desire", Azucena G. Blanco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article is based on two hypotheses. The first is that in the later Foucault we would find a reformulation of the status that literature had occupied in his work and the development of a politics of literature (already developed in Sujetos irregulares: ficción y política en el Sade de Michel Foucault”). The second considers that fiction and desire are inseparably joined, which leads me to analyse the logic of Sade as logic of desire in the lectures that Foucault gave on the author at the University of Buffalo (1970). A reading of both aspects together needs to be …


The Eventualization Of Political Thinking: From The Arab Revolutions To The Trump Era, Oscar Barroso Dec 2018

The Eventualization Of Political Thinking: From The Arab Revolutions To The Trump Era, Oscar Barroso

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "The Eventualization of Political Thinking: From the Arab Revolutions to the Trump Era", Óscar Barroso maps out some of the most important contemporary philosophies of the Event: those of Rancière, Badiou, Hardt and Negri and Žižek. These philosophies of the event are defined as post-humanist political proposals that entrust emancipation not to the realization of anthropological ideas but to the emergence of difference. Examining the pessimistic interpretation that these authors make of what has happened since the events of 2011, the author questions whether too much trust has been placed in the supposed virtue of difference and, …


Disability, Victorian Biopolitics And Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, Hiu Wai Wong Dec 2018

Disability, Victorian Biopolitics And Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, Hiu Wai Wong

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “Disability, Victorian Biopolitics and Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray,” Hiu Wai Wong discusses The Picture of Dorian Gray as Oscar Wilde’s life writing of the androgynous beauty. Extending his praise of Lord Alfred Douglas in De Profundis, Wilde’s descriptions of Dorian as the androgyne can be read as the demonstration of Michel Foucault’s techniques of the self. She argues that the androgynous beauty can be a strategy of bodily practice that overthrows the Victorian biopolitics which enforces a rigid gender role. Moreover, she explores the notion of camp and Judith Butler’s theory of performance to explain the …


Changez/Cengiz's Changing Beliefs In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Valerie Kennedy Dec 2018

Changez/Cengiz's Changing Beliefs In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Valerie Kennedy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Changez/Cengiz's Changing Beliefs in The Reluctant Fundamentalist” Valerie Kennedy analyzes the interrelation of individual subjectivity and global capitalism and the conflict between two belief systems in Mohsin Hamid’s novel. These are, first, a neoliberal system that sees individuals as rationally self-interested, mobile, economic units, and, second, a system based on a humanist definition of individuals as defined by nation, family, and tradition. Changez, the novel’s protagonist, initially endorses the first, but later rejects it for the second, due to his growing awareness of the impact on Pakistan of American geopolitics after 9/11. The essay also examines …


Politics Of Feminist Revision In Di Prima's Loba, Polina Mackay Dec 2016

Politics Of Feminist Revision In Di Prima's Loba, Polina Mackay

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Politics of Feminist Revision in di Prima's Loba" Polina Mackay explores Diane di Prima's two-volume epic Loba (1998) and, through a comparison of di Prima to the work of Adrienne Rich, argues that Loba practices a politics of feminist revision. Further, Mackay examines the ways in which di Prima starts to move away from the recovery project of female voices in patriarchal culture, associated with late twentieth-century Feminism, towards a women's literature which need not be defined entirely through its resistance to patriarchal narratives of gender in men's literature. Here it focuses on di Prima's revisionist …


Ecocriticism And Persian And Greek Myths About The Origin Of Fire, Massih Zekavat Dec 2014

Ecocriticism And Persian And Greek Myths About The Origin Of Fire, Massih Zekavat

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Ecocriticism and Persian and Greek Myths about the Origin of Fire" Massih Zekavat argues that some contemporary ecological biases are rooted in ancient thought. Further, Zekavat argues that the study of mythology is relevant to the understanding of culture and ecology thus assisting ecocriticism. The investigation of man/woman, culture/nature, and human/nature binary oppositions conveys that Greek and Persian myths are mostly anthropocentric and androcentric. Zekavat postulates that one way to revise contemporary ecological conceptions is to study myths to shed light on the mind and context of their creators and believers, their representation of natural phenomena, and …


Wilde And The Model Of Homosexuality In Mann's Tod In Venedig, James P. Wilper Dec 2013

Wilde And The Model Of Homosexuality In Mann's Tod In Venedig, James P. Wilper

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Wilde and the Model of Homosexuality in Mann's Der Tod in Venedig" James P. Wilper examines the influence of Oscar Wilde and the effeminate homosexual identity which cohered as a result of Wilde's trials for act of "gross indecency" in 1895, in Mann's classic homoerotic short novel. Drawing on Alan Sinfield's The Wilde Century (1994) and recent scholarship into the impact of Wilde on German-language writers, as well as German homosexual communities of the early twentieth century, Wilper explores Mann's ambivalent response to Wilde's homosexual legacy. Later in his career, Mann writes of Wilde with Nietzsche …


The Egyptian Enlightenment And Mann, Freud, And Freund, Rebecca C. Dolgoy Mar 2013

The Egyptian Enlightenment And Mann, Freud, And Freund, Rebecca C. Dolgoy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Egyptian Enlightenment and Mann, Freud, and Freund" Rebecca C. Dolgoy discusses various ways in which ancient Egypt is used in three works from the 1930s: Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism, and Karl Freund's film The Mummy. By showing the similarities and differences in how these works use Egypt, Dolgoy develops the concept that memory is the way in which the past is used. Dolgoy follows the structure of a cinematic shot casting: The Mummy as the long shot which both sets up the general Egyptomania characteristic of …


Evoking A Memory Of The Future In Foer's Everything Is Illuminated, Doro Wiese Dec 2012

Evoking A Memory Of The Future In Foer's Everything Is Illuminated, Doro Wiese

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Evoking a Memory of the Future in Foer's Everything is Illuminated" Doro Wiese discusses Jonathan Safran Foer's novel. In the text a photograph plays a decisive role: the image of two young people drives the Jewish American Jonathan to visit the Ukraine. The photograph is presumably of Jonathan's grandfather Safran and a woman named Augustine who saved Safran's life during a nazi raid of his village: the photograph becomes an ekphrasis, a description of a visual work of art in another medium which transforms the generic characteristics of written and photographic representations. According to Anselm …


The Role Of The Intellectual In Contemporary Turkish Women's Narratives, Adile Aslan Mar 2012

The Role Of The Intellectual In Contemporary Turkish Women's Narratives, Adile Aslan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Role of the Intellectual in Contemporary Turkish Women's Narratives" Adile Aslan analyzes the figure of the woman intellectual in two of the most widely praised novels written in Turkish, Adalet Ağaoğlu's 1971 Ölmeye Yatmak (Lying Down to Die) and Leyla Erbil's 1985 Karanlığın Günü (The Day of Darkness). Aslan discusses how the two authors represent in their texts intertwined personal histories with political history. The novels present, as well as surmount the obstacles that the current socio-historical conditions impose on people in general and intellectuals in particular and how these circumstances have a bearing on their …


Psychology, Science, Feminisms, And Cultural Studies: A Book Review Article Of New Books By Bell And Hardin, Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo Dec 2011

Psychology, Science, Feminisms, And Cultural Studies: A Book Review Article Of New Books By Bell And Hardin, Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


The Tartu School And Catalan Scholarship: A Book Review Article Of New Work In Reception And Communication Studie, Christopher Larkosh Dec 2011

The Tartu School And Catalan Scholarship: A Book Review Article Of New Work In Reception And Communication Studie, Christopher Larkosh

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Commodity And Waste As National Allegory In Recent South African And Post-Soviet Fiction, Alla Ivanchikova Dec 2011

Commodity And Waste As National Allegory In Recent South African And Post-Soviet Fiction, Alla Ivanchikova

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Commodity and Waste as National Allegory in Recent South African and Post-Soviet Fiction" Alla Ivanchikova analyzes the issue of commodity in its relation to identity. The article contains a reading of two novels: The Quiet Violence of Dreams by K. Sello Duiker and Dukhless. Povest o nenastoiaschem cheloveke (Douh-Less: The Tale of an Unreal Person) by Sergey Minaev. Rapid political changes, both in South Africa and the former Soviet Bloc were accompanied both by rapid changes in the practices of consumption and also by often inconsistent cultural efforts to establish the meaning of these practices. Ivanchikova …


Inanimate Speech From Lovecraft To Žižek, Apple Z. Igrek Dec 2011

Inanimate Speech From Lovecraft To Žižek, Apple Z. Igrek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Inanimate Speech from Lovecraft to Žižek" Apple Z. Igrek explores an influential line of reasoning associated with our contemporary loss of the Real. The argument describes how the contingencies and nuances of social life have been reduced to an operational, friction-free, and homogeneous realm of signs. Slavoj Žižek contends that our inherently traumatic relationship with the Other is being foreclosed and replaced by an omnipresent technological screen of virtual communication. The danger of this shift, identified as the "digital break," is that it facilitates an extraordinary form of divine violence which strikes back at the social system …


Intermediality, Architecture, And The Politics Of Urbanity, Virgilio Tortosa Garrigós Sep 2011

Intermediality, Architecture, And The Politics Of Urbanity, Virgilio Tortosa Garrigós

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Intermediality, Architecture, and the Politics of Urbanity" Virgilio Tortosa Garrigós discusses aspects of the exponential development of large cities, the neoliberal economy, and the "spectacle" of architecture in the context of intermediality. With the connivance between land speculators and politicians — which has led not only to the loss of spatial identity but to irreversible pollution and geographic degradation — urbanity is epitomized on the Mediterranean coast line. In reaction to this development, a series of anti-globalization organizations and social movements, rooted in urban neighbourhoods, resist the homogenization of taste with anti-billboards and anti-advertising against consumerism and …


Intermediality And Aesthetic Theory In Shklovsky's And Adorno's Thought, Oleg Gelikman Sep 2011

Intermediality And Aesthetic Theory In Shklovsky's And Adorno's Thought, Oleg Gelikman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Intermediality and Aesthetic Theory in Shklovsky's and Adorno's Thought" Oleg Gelikman places the concept of intermediality in the context of the unresolved conflict between philosophical aesthetics and aesthetic theory. The conflict originated in the response of an influential generation of thinkers to the crisis of the neo-Kantian schools and the emergence of modernism in the 1910s. Despite superficial similarities, aesthetic theory is neither a revamped aesthetics of the subject nor a theoretical vindication of modernism. By severing the connection between subject-object epistemology and theory of artworks, the practitioners of aesthetic theory such as Victor Shklovsky and Theodor …


Intermediality, Rhetoric, And Pedagogy, Kris Rutten, Ronald Soetaert Sep 2011

Intermediality, Rhetoric, And Pedagogy, Kris Rutten, Ronald Soetaert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Intermediality, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy," Kris Rutten and Ronald Soetaert discuss how the notion of intermediality challenges the institutions that traditionally "mediate" culture and they discuss implications for pedagogy. First, they focus on how the museum as an institution is questioned and problematized by describing it as a "medium" that is increasingly influenced by cultural and technological developments. Second, they focus on the implications of new material culture and intermedial practice and how this requires new perspectives on pedagogy. Rutten and Soetaert elaborate on previous work on the curriculum as a "contact zone" (Pratt) by focusing on the …


Japanese Science Fiction And Conceptions Of The (Human) Subject, Maria Poulaki Sep 2010

Japanese Science Fiction And Conceptions Of The (Human) Subject, Maria Poulaki

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Japanese Science Fiction and Conceptions of the (Human) Subject" Maria Poulaki discusses the crisis that almost all essentialist categorizations have been facing in late modernity, in the context of which science fiction texts offer fertile ground to investigate the transitions brought about with the intensified invasion of the "human self" by its "nonhuman other." The analysis of a Japanese science fiction film draws a seemingly paradoxical connection between the Japanese version of modernity and self-identity with the relevant "Western" articulations found in the work of Bruno Latour and Alain Badiou. This connection points at a broader re-conceptualization …


Pain And Mourning In Vogel's Baltimore Waltz And Lavery's Last Easter, Catalina Florina Florescu Sep 2010

Pain And Mourning In Vogel's Baltimore Waltz And Lavery's Last Easter, Catalina Florina Florescu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Pain and Mourning in Vogel's Baltimore Waltz and Lavery's Last Easter" Catalina Florina Florescu argues that there is something of a contrapuntal, contradictory nature when a person lives with or visits someone who spends most of his days in bed. Sitting next to a patient, his attendee faces the burdensome ticking of clocks, the ache of waiting, and the dagger-piercing questions of one's meaning. In other words, it is not only the pain of the other that intrigues and baffles us. It is also narrating and performing our reactions to that pain. In Florescu's reading, the focus …