Communication Commons^™

Comparative Literature In Chinese, Xiaolu Wang, Yan Liu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Comparative Literature in Chinese" Xiaolu Wang and Yan Liu describe the development of comparative poetics in Chinese by sketching major publications and the general institutional situation of the discipline. Wang and Liu suggest that comparative work remains impulsive while at the same time dynamic. Like other fields in the humanities, the study of poetics — comparative or other — in Chinese is no longer traditional in terms of discursive form but copied from the West. Although the scholarly achievements in the field within the past thirty years are considerable, problems remain including the issue of translation of …

Comparative Literature In Chinese And An Interview With Yue, Hui Zhang, Daiyun Yue

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Comparative Literature in Chinese and an Interview with Daiyun Yue" Hui Zhang and Daiyun Yue present a review of the discipline of comparative literature based on an interview with Yue (2010). Because Yue's work with comparative literature is intertwined with her personal journey, the interview sheds light on other Chinese scholars and their work who would not be known audiences outside China. The interview also touches on the academic and political reasons why the joint dualisms of "ancient/modern" and "Chinese/foreign" continue to be major structuring principles of the discipline in China, as well as how the development …

Academic Discourse And Literacy Narratives As "Equipment For Living", Kris Rutten

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Academic Discourse and Narratives of Literacy as 'Equipment for Living'" Kris Rutten discusses practices of academic discourse and argues that students entering higher education have to become part of a specific community of institutional discourse. Rutten claims that narratives of and about literacy — narratives that revolve around issues dealing with language and the acquisition of literacy — "dramatize" the tension of moving from one discourse community to another. By charting situations of "type," fictional literacy narratives can be used by students as "equipment for living" in order to reflect on confrontations and difficulties they experience in …

The Writing And Reading Of Fan Fiction And Transformation Theory, Veerle Van Steenhuyse

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Writing and Reading of Fan Fiction and Transformation Theory" Veerle Van Steenhuyse discusses the experience of immersive reading fan fiction offers to fans based on her analysis of fan fiction about the television series House, M.D. (2004-). Van Steenhuyse postulates that a text is immersive when it evokes a mental construct with the presence of a text-independent reality. In the case of fan fiction, this reality is a "transformed universe" that builds on and deviates from particular primary texts. Following the work of Marie-Laure Ryan and Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Van Steenhuyse argues that readers feel immersed when …

A Case Study In Discourse Analysis Of "Community Arts" In Cultural Policy And The Press, An De Bisschop, Kris Rutten, Ronald Soetaert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "A Case Study in Discourse Analysis of 'Community Arts' in Cultural Policy and the Press" An De bisschop, Kris Rutten, and Ronald Soetaert explore theoretical and applied aspects of the phenomenon of community arts. Community arts in Flanders have developed into a professional practice during the past few years and have received increased recognition from policy makers, scholars, and critics. This attention has caused a growing need to define the nature of a practice diverse in form, goal, and process. De bisschop, Rutten, and Soetaert discuss the problematics of community arts projects in comparative discourse analysis in …

Latino Identity In Allende's Historical Novels, Olga Ries

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Latino Identity in Allende's Historical Novels" Olga Ries analyzes the concept of individual and group identity found in five historical novels by Isabel Allende. Ries argues that while Allende's protagonists come from different backgrounds and different epochs, they share a process of psychological transformation and that affects their identity formation. The result is the formation of a transnational "Hispanic" identity, group as well as individual. In Ries's reading of Allende's texts, transnational Hispanic identity is based simultaneously on the Mexican/Hispanic concept of mestizaje and on the US-American concepts of the "melting pot" and the "American Dream."

About The Human Condition In The Works Of Dickens And Marx, Ami E. Stearns, Thomas J. Burns

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "About the Human Condition in the Works of Dickens and Marx" Ami E. Stearns and Thomas J. Burns contribute to the study of Charles Dickens's Industrial Revolution-era fiction by examining his novels in relation to Karl Marx's social philosophy. Stearns and Burns postulate that Dickens relies on Marxist concepts of class consciousness, sacrifice, revolution, social antitheses, and social injustice to weave his narratives and compare and discuss six of Dickens' novels: A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Great Expectations with three works of Marx: Grundrisse, The Communist Manifesto, …

Autoethnography And Garcia's Dreaming In Cuban, Samantha L. Mcauliffe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Authoethnography and Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban" Samantha L. McAuliffe positions Cristina Garcia's novel as a text of self-discovery and cultural reconciliation. McAuliffe examines multilingualism and hybridity in Dreaming in Cuban and postulates that the novel represents what Marie Louise Pratt calls the "contact zone" where cultures meet and clash. As autoethnography, Dreaming in Cuban allows an insider view of what being Cuban American really means. The reader is able to experience the conflict those with a hybrid identity experience through the eyes of one in the midst of that conflict. Further, McAuliffe suggests in her analysis …

Fernández And Cinematic Propaganda In The U.S. And Mexico, Renae L. Mitchell

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Fernández and Cinematic Propaganda in the U.S. and Mexico" Renae L. Mitchell discusses the competing ideologies on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. As one of the foremost filmmakers of the Mexican Golden Age of cinema, Emilio Fernández established what would is recognized as "Mexicanness" by means of Indigenous characters in his films, most apparent in the film María Candelaria. RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) Pictures, as the principal purveyor of US-American propagandist cinema, led Hollywood into the cinematic market of Mexico revealing its intentions by means of the RKO film The Falcon in Mexico. Fernández sought to …

Dante's Linguistic Detail In Shelley's Triumph Of Life, Anita O'Connell

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Dante's Linguistic Detail in Shelley's Triumph of Life" Anita O'Connell analyzes Shelley's attention to detail in Dante's poetic style and presents a close textual analysis of the ways Shelley draws on the beauty of Dante's texts. When Dante's Divine Comedy re-emerged into the public sphere in Britain through Henry Cary's 1814 translation, his reputation was as a stern, dark, Medieval poet and readers and writers alike shared a love of the perceived gothicism particularly of The Inferno. Shelley, however, differed from this general view of Dante: despite the grotesque descriptions in his Triumph of Life …

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.

About Society: A Book Review Article Of Work On Roth And Kundera By Shostak And Ivanova, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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.

So, What Is Terrorism? Framing The 9/11 Attacks In African Editorial Cartoons, Duncan Mainye Omanga

Re-visioning Terrorism

As artifacts of political culture, editorial cartoons reveal prevalent public opinion on a particular issue with direct or indirect effects to members of society. The central question addressed in this paper is how editorial cartoons in Kenya’s press framed the 9/11 event and the extent to which such framing accorded or denied terrorists, government agencies and other stakeholders legitimacy. Specifically, the section probes the extent to which the dominant frames careered, and whether framing tilted away or towards legitimizing or delegitimizing terrorism. From these, conclusions are drawn on the extent to which particular aspects of knowledge, opinion or ideologies were …

Tele-Visioning Terror, Caroline Zekri

Re-visioning Terrorism

This paper is devoted to the relationship between terrorism and media, with a special focus on the theoretical notions of “icon”, “mass” and “distance”. It aims to show how the phenomenon of modern terrorism calls into question the essence of modern democracies and their systems of information, based on the distance between vision and event.

Marco Bellocchio's Buongiorno Notte And The Language Of Terrorists, Cosetta Gaudenzi

Re-visioning Terrorism

This essay investigates Marco Bellocchio’s Buongiorno, notte (2003), a movie which exploits language and soundtrack to fictionalize and revisit the historical 1978 kidnapping and murder of the Christian Democrat President Aldo Moro by the 1970s Italian left terrorist group Brigate Rosse. As I demonstrate, Bellocchio relies greatly on the language and soundtrack of Buongiorno, notte to convey his negative response to the BR’s kidnapping and murder of Moro, as well as to come to terms with his own political and cinematic past.

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, Translation, Comparative Literature, And World Literature, Erin Schlumpf

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Intermediality, Translation, Comparative Literature, and World Literature" Erin Schlumpf postulates that the study of literature today is best performed in a framework of comparative literature and world literature including intermediality particularly in the case of translated texts. Schlumpf contends that working in comparative and world literature today demands a reexamination of translation and the teaching of works in translation. Following her theoretical postulates, Schlumpf analyzes two films, Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise (1966) and Xiaolu Guo's She, a Chinese (Zhongguo guniang) (2009).

Old And New Medialities In Foer's Tree Of Codes, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Old and New Materialities in Foer's Tree of Codes" Kiene Brillenburg Wurth analyzes how intermediality works — not what it "is" — in the analysis of literary texts. How intermedial can texts "do," precisely when they consist only of words? Do such texts compel us to reconsider literature as a verbal art? Her analysis focuses on a recent book by Jonathan Safran Foer: Tree of Codes (2010), a literary work cut out of the remains of Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles (1934). Brillenburg Wurth points out how intermediality works as a productive interaction not only between …

Intermedial Representations In Asian Macbeth-S, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Intermedial representations in Asian Macbeth-s" I-Chun Wang discusses three Asian versions of Macbeths that exemplify the cultural meanings through the interaction of landscape, body, and spectacles of power. Shakespeare remains one of the most popular playwrights in the Eastern world, and playwrights in the Asian world find Shakespearean plays attractive to the Asian audience. Among Shakespearean plays, Macbeth fascinates its Asian audience with its theme on kingship, territory of social relationships as well as moral and emotional development. These adaptations oftentimes become cross-cultural reproductions because each adapted text manifests not only cross-cultural interpretations but also highlights …

Plotting The Pixel In Remediated Word And Image, Sarah Wyman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Plotting the Pixel in Remediated Word and Image" Sarah Wyman argues that art's historic negotiation of culture continues into the new digital media age as it both asserts the materiality of the medium and acknowledges the impact of embodied perception. She demonstrates that however revolutionary, the new digital media still relate to many traditional paradigms of aesthetic expression. Problems of representation and simulation continue to catch on questions of time, space and human perception. The contingent relationships between categories and entities once kept separate — word/image, observer/observed — determine and define the process of globalization. The new …

Intermediality, Rewriting Histories, And Identities In French Rap, Isabelle Marc Martínez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Intermediality, Rewriting Histories and Identities in French Rap" Isabelle Marc Martínez analyzes aspects of French hip hop culture. As an example of resistant cultural manifestations, hip hop scenes all over the world develop strategies to subvert mainstream values and to replace them by new de-localized, contesting identities via intermedial and intertextual processes. In France during the 1990 rap was intended to reassess French national history and national self-perception. Foundational hip hop bands such as Assassin, Ministère AMER, IAM, and NTM aimed at discrediting official narratives concerning the French culture's colonial and social past. hip hop artists, who …

Introduction To New Perspectives On Material Culture And Intermedial Practice, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek, Asunción López-Varela, Haun Saussy, Jan Mieszkowski

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Computer Mapping Of Geography And Border Crossing In Scandinavia, Øyvind Eide

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Computer Mapping of Geography and Border Crossing in Scandinavia" Øyvind Eide discusses computer based methods for enquiry into a set of border protocols created in the mid-eighteenth century based on interviews with inhabitants of northern Scandinavia. Most of the interviews are with common people: semi-nomadic reindeer herders, fishers, and farmers of Sámi, Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish origin. Eide discusses the value of the interview material as source material which can be used to understand the way people spoke, especially about geographical matters. The data and their analysis suggest the relevance of mediality and materiality with not only …

Dialogue Between Meaning Systems In Intermedial Texts, Cristina Peñamarín

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Dialogue between Meaning Systems in Intermedial Texts" Cristina Peñamarín analyzes visual-verbal texts showing different ways of conceiving and representing the world, that in each case involves certain ways of reinforcing or challenging preconceptions about the object and ways of positioning author and addressee. Peñamarín's aim is to explore a method by which to address presupposed world visions in the texts and to ask how images and plurisemiotic texts are used to confirm, discuss, or expand the boundaries of systems of meaning. She raises the question of the possibilities of dialogue, hybridization, cultural translation, and the change …

Video Games As Equipment For Living, Ronald Soetaert, Jeroen Bourgonjon, Kris Rutten

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Video Games as Equipment for Living" Ronald Soetaert, Jeroen Bourgonjon, and Kris Rutten postulate that with the emergence of new media there is need of a re-evaluation of all modes of communication and the ways in which literacy is conceptualized. Drawing on the concept of multi-literacy they suggest a rhetorical/ anthropological meta-perspective to describe human beings as symbol using animals and focus on particular symbol systems: narrative, drama, and video games. Specifically, they focus on the perspective of drama as a tool to analyze cultural artifacts in general and video games — as a new art form …

(Inter)Mediality And The Study Of Literature, Werner Wolf

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "(Inter)mediality and the Study of Literature" Werner Wolf elaborates on the "intermedial turn" and asks whether this turn ought to be welcomed. Wolf begins with a discussion about the definitions of "medium" and "intermediality" and the impact these concepts and practices exert on scholarly, as well as student competence. He argues that despite of the fact that literary studies ought not simply turn into media or cultural studies, mediality and intermediality have become relevant issues for both teaching and the study of literature especially in the fields of comparative literature and (comparative) cultural studies. Following his postulate …

Discourses And Models Of Intermediality, Jens Schröter

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Discourses and Models of Intermediality" Jens Schröter discusses the question as to what relations do different discourses pose between different "media." Schröter identifies four models of discourse: 1) synthetic intermediality: a "fusion" of different media to super-media, a model with roots in the Wagnerian concept of Gesamtkunstwerk with political connotations, 2) formal (or transmedial) intermediality: a concept based on formal structures not "specific" to one medium but found in different media, 3) transformational intermediality: a model centered around the representation of one medium through another medium. Model 3) leads to the postulate that transformational intermediality is not …

Making Sense Of The Digital As Embodied Experience, Serge Bouchardon, Asunción López-Varela

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Making Sense of the Digital as Embodied Experience" Serge Bouchardon and Asunción López-Varela discuss a digital creation — Loss of Grasp <http://lossofgrasp.com/> — created by Serge Bouchardon and Vincent Volckaert. The work is about the notions of grasp and control. Through an analysis of Loss of Grasp, Bouchardon and López-Varela Azcárate show how the Cartesian understanding of private isolated experience, independent of reality external to it, has given way to a communal understanding of experience in which the subject constitutes itself by mirroring himself/herself on its objects, producing a mutual engagement or co-creativity among interdependent intersubjects: …

Intermediality And Human Vs. Machine Translation, Harry J. Huang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Intermediality and Human vs. Machine Translation" Harry J. Huang analyzes translation as a process of transferring meaning and/or information. The process and the translated text represent a new medium. When machine translation originating from human translation is integrated into the world wide web, it becomes part of global media. Accordingly, machine translation may best be studied within the context of intermediality, especially its quality vs. that of human translation. Based upon data generated from an international survey of 300 translators, writers, editors, and translation scholars, Huang analyses the participants' expectations and their acceptance of imperfection in the …