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CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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Full-Text Articles in Communication

Osundare's Poetry And The Yoruba Worldview, Christopher Anyokwu Mar 2011

Osundare's Poetry And The Yoruba Worldview, Christopher Anyokwu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Osundare's Poetry and the Yoruba Worldview" Christopher Anyokwu analyses the use of Indegienous Yoruba concepts found in Niyi Osundare's texts. Anyokwu postulates that Osundare appears to combine in his work concepts and traditions of Yoruba culture and Marxist ideology which, as Anyokwu argues, locates Osundare with other revolutionary-minded radical poets such as Pablo Neruda, Octovio Paz, Nicolas Guillén, Agostinho Neto, or Okot P'Biteke. Further, Anyokwu argues that a major aspect of the sources of Osundare's work, this perspective has either been under-theorized or examined only superficially in the critical corpus of Osundare's texts. Anyokwu both analyzes and …


Gender Performance In The Literature Of The Female Beats, Gillian Thomson Mar 2011

Gender Performance In The Literature Of The Female Beats, Gillian Thomson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Gender Performance in the Literature of the Female Beats" Gillian Thomson examines the re-negotiation of gender boundaries within Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters and Hettie Jones's Drive poems; secondary to this is how the male Beats demonstrate a more concrete, dichotomous version of such gender categories. Thomson intend to demonstrate how the women often write themselves into Beat history and how their revised performance of gender modifies the normative tropes regarding females within the Beat enclave. The theoretical backdrop focuses on how language not only records or expresses reality, but also shapes it. This is a decidedly poststructuralist …


Early Twentieth-Century Fashion Designer Life Writing, Ilya Parkins Mar 2011

Early Twentieth-Century Fashion Designer Life Writing, Ilya Parkins

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Early Twentieth-century Fashion Designer Life Writing," Ilya Parkins examines memoirs of major modernist fashion designers in the, finding that the genre is characterized by a strong geographic cleavage between France and America, overlain by perceptions of epistemic difference. She compares Elsa Schiaparelli's and Paul Poiret's work, finding that despite their differences, the opposition between France as a locale of abstract knowledge and America as a site of empiricism allows them to claim, as French designers, a certain privilege in a profession characterized by an unresolvable tension between art and commerce. The encroachment of American industrial models in …


Two Traumas One Aesthetic In Walsh's Operación Masacre And Kaufman's The Laramie Project, Henry James Morello Mar 2011

Two Traumas One Aesthetic In Walsh's Operación Masacre And Kaufman's The Laramie Project, Henry James Morello

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Two Traumas One Aesthetic in Walsh's Operación Masacre and Kaufman's The Laramie Project" Henry James Morello analyzes the stylistic similarities of Walsh's and Kaufman's texts. Walsh's 1957 testimonio Operación masacre was written as a response to the politically motivated violence perpetrated by the military government after the overthrow of Juan Perón, specifically the kidnapping and murder of a group of men thought to be Peronist sympathizers. In 1998 Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project created The Laramie Project, a play about the reactions of the people of Laramie to the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard, …


Echoes Of Sophocles's Antigone In Auster's Invisible, Kathleen Waller Mar 2011

Echoes Of Sophocles's Antigone In Auster's Invisible, Kathleen Waller

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Echoes of Sophocles's Antigone in Auster's Invisible" Kathleen Waller discusses Paul Auster's Invisible, a novel that explores Deleuze's and Guattari's ontological idea of becoming in a virtual world versus merely living in the actual, physical world. Sexual and immortal desires in the protagonist's virtual world show a near achieved nothingness, or "a space which is unlimited" and filled with the being's energy, and a being who is becoming, a "univocal being" as a "free spirit" of energy. However, because these desires are only realized through a repression, Auster asks us not to go as far …


Children's Literature In South-East Europe, Milena Mileva Blažić Mar 2011

Children's Literature In South-East Europe, Milena Mileva Blažić

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Children's Literature in South East Europe" Milena Mileva Blažić begins with an introduction to Maria Nikolajeva's 2000 book From Mythic to Linear: Time in Children's Literature in which a theoretical framework of thematics is defined, systematized, and categorized. Nikolajeva's framework for children's literature suggests attention to characteristics through which the maturation process of becoming adult is accomplished. Following the introduction and application of Nikolajeva's concepts, Blažić first applies the frame to selected texts published in South-East Europe, followed by lists of children's book published in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia.


Chekhov As A Founder Of The Comedy Of A New Type, Vera Zubarev Mar 2011

Chekhov As A Founder Of The Comedy Of A New Type, Vera Zubarev

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Chekhov as a Founder of the Comedy of a New Type" Vera Zubarev discusses Chekhov's innovations within the framework of general systems thinking and the predispositioning theory. To this end, the notion of the positional style is used as a subject of systems analysis. Zubarev postulates that Chekhov's innovative style signified a new era of thinking now known as systems thinking. The main principles of the style correspond to those offered by the positional style in chess speedily developed at the time Chekhov worked on his stories and plays. Chekhov's reconstruction of the comedic genre had nothing …


Marjory Scott Wardrop And Early Twentieth-Century Georgian History, Shorena Stoyer Mar 2011

Marjory Scott Wardrop And Early Twentieth-Century Georgian History, Shorena Stoyer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Marjory Scott Wardrop and Early Twentieth-century Georgian History" Shorena Stoyer presents documents and translations of Marjory Scott Wardrop (1869-1909), of hitherto unpublished manuscripts archived in the Wardrop Collection of the Oxford Bodleian Library. The manuscripts attest to Wardrop's role as an outside observer of matters Russian and Georgian in the early twentieth century and show her commitment to support the aspirations towards freedom by the Georgian people against tzarist invasion. Wardrop's manuscripts reveal valuable information about Russian and Georgian history, as well as Wardrop's views from a British angle. Thus, the Wardrop manuscripts are important for the …


Comparativism And Cyberculture: A Review Article Of New Books By Płaszczewska And Zawojski, Michał Ostrowicki Mar 2011

Comparativism And Cyberculture: A Review Article Of New Books By Płaszczewska And Zawojski, Michał Ostrowicki

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Widows In Eighteenth-Century Romania: A Review Article Of New Books By Răsuceanu And Vintilă-Ghiţulescu, Silvia Dumitrache Mar 2011

Widows In Eighteenth-Century Romania: A Review Article Of New Books By Răsuceanu And Vintilă-Ghiţulescu, Silvia Dumitrache

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Translating Enlightenment: A Review Article Of New Books By Stockhorst, Vidal Claramonte, And Tortosa, Mónica Bolufer Mar 2011

Translating Enlightenment: A Review Article Of New Books By Stockhorst, Vidal Claramonte, And Tortosa, Mónica Bolufer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Disambiguating The Sublime And The Historicity Of The Concept, Vrasidas Karalis Dec 2010

Disambiguating The Sublime And The Historicity Of The Concept, Vrasidas Karalis

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Disambiguating the Sublime and the Historicity of the Concept" Vrasidas Karalis explores the notion of sublime or sublimity as the field of colliding signifiers and of experiential frameworks in conflict. Instead of treating the traditional notion as a structural element of style of ideology, he analyses it from the point of its contextual validation and its very historicity: what makes sublimity emerge is the extra-lingual unease, the existential dysphoria of the world outside the text, as refracted through specific works of art. Such dysphoria is expressed through ungrammatical language or/and through the attempt in specific moments in …


The Chi Complex And Ambiguities Of Meeting, Paul Carter Dec 2010

The Chi Complex And Ambiguities Of Meeting, Paul Carter

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Chi Complex and Ambiguities of Meeting" Paul Carter develops a discussion of interpersonal encounters by mobilizing an apparatus of references, ranging from Jean Genet to Lévinas, Derrida, Bachmann, Merleau-Ponty, and Arendt. The hypothesis is that meeting another person entails and subsumes a non-meeting; a resistance and a refusal. The article pursues the ambiguity at the heart of encountering the other through an investigation of the urban spaces that are allegedly designed to invite and facilitate meetings. The argument put forward is that these spaces are paradoxically designed to avert encounters. This is especially true in the …


Ambiguity, Children, Representation, And Sexuality, Catharine Lumby Dec 2010

Ambiguity, Children, Representation, And Sexuality, Catharine Lumby

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Ambiguity, Children, Representation, and Sexuality" Catharine Lumby considers current and historical scholarly and popular debates about the representation of children, including concerns about their sexualisation in such representations. The article begins by examining images taken by photographers in the Victorian era, including Charles Dodgson and Julia Cameron, and asks not only how the gaze of the photographer frames the child but how the child returns the adult gaze. Lumby seeks to problematize our understanding of the ways in which images "sexualize" children. Drawing on the work of James Kincaid, it examines discourses that frame children as, on …


Introduction To Ambiguity In Culture And Literature, Paolo Bartoloni, Anthony Stephens Dec 2010

Introduction To Ambiguity In Culture And Literature, Paolo Bartoloni, Anthony Stephens

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


The Rhetoric Of Dilemma And Cavafean Ambiguity, Anthony Dracopoulos Dec 2010

The Rhetoric Of Dilemma And Cavafean Ambiguity, Anthony Dracopoulos

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Rhetoric of Dilemma and Cavafean Ambiguity" Anthony Dracopoulos examines the techniques of expression developed in Cavafy's poem "Young men of Sidon." By the beginning of the twentieth century, Cavafy, like other modernist poets, had become acutely aware of the human inability to grasp essence in its entirety and developed various techniques of expression to accommodate the polyphony of perspectives and the ambiguity inherent in modern society. The article argues that Cavafy structures a number of his poems in the form of binary oppositions or dilemmas. However, contrary to expectation, this form of expression does not aim …


Silence, The Utmost In Ambiguity, Mario Perniola Dec 2010

Silence, The Utmost In Ambiguity, Mario Perniola

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Silence, the Utmost in Ambiguity" Mario Perniola presents a historical perspective on the meanings and development of the term "ambiguity" from ancient Greek to the modern age. Perniola's perspective is not a review of different approaches and schools of thought; instead, he presents an alternative philosophical and aesthetic discourse he counter-poses to modern and contemporary cultural positions which he considers useful in order to explain the state of today's art and intellectual discourse. Perniola does so by stressing the significance of silence as the aesthetic attitude that combines contemplation and action. Drawing on the work of Pascal …


On Ambidextrousness, Or, What Is An Innovative Action?, Brett Neilson Dec 2010

On Ambidextrousness, Or, What Is An Innovative Action?, Brett Neilson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "On the Ambiguity of Ambidextrousness, or, What is an Innovative Action?" Brett Neilson explores the significance of the fact that the technical equality of the hands is realized above all in the act of manual labor, revisiting an influential essay by Robert Hertz, a student of Emile Durkheim and associate of Marcel Mauss, published in 1909 and entitled "The Pre-Eminence of the Right Hand." In his text, Hertz argued that the basic spatial distinction between the left and right hand acquires the polarity of a social hierarchy owing not to the physiology or psychology of motor asymmetry …


Blanchot And Ambiguity, Paolo Bartoloni Dec 2010

Blanchot And Ambiguity, Paolo Bartoloni

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Blanchot and Ambiguity" Paolo Bartoloni investigates the enigmatic and ambiguous turn of the famous Blanchotian statement "existence without Being." The intention of the article is to locate Blanchot's remark in the context of a discussion on history and its possible end, famously initiated by Alexandre Kojève in a lecture on 4 December 1937 at the College of Sociology in Paris; and provide insights into the difference that distinguishes Kojève's reflection on the end of history, Bataille's subsequent interpretation of it, and Blanchot's original conceptualization of a state of being suspended between nature and culture, history and the …


Ambiguity Now, Martin Harrison Dec 2010

Ambiguity Now, Martin Harrison

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Ambiguity Now" Martin Harrison focuses on the pivotal place which modernist critical theory ascribed to ambiguity in the definition of meaning and structure in poetry. In particular, Harrison considers the way in which the category of experience is deployed in the discourse of ambiguity but is limited to only certain narratives of so-called experience. Harrison argues for a contemporary practice less focused on ambiguity and more on notation and provisional structure, demonstrating key elements of such practice in the work of modern poets Leslie Scalapino and Frank Bidart and the poet-artist Alex Selenitsch.


Ambiguity, The Literary, And Close Reading, David G. Brooks Dec 2010

Ambiguity, The Literary, And Close Reading, David G. Brooks

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Ambiguity, the Literary, and Close Reading" David G. Brooks approaches the matter of literary ambiguity from two directions: firstly by presenting the question of what we might learn if we look at ambiguity not so much from the angle of the author as that of the reader, a question which may appear obvious and inoffensive on the surface, but which becomes intricate and captivating as Brooks, arguing that literary ambiguity cannot be discussed without attention to the idea of close reading, peels layer upon layer of commonsensical assumptions away from reading practice, to arrive at the point …


Ambiguity, The Artist, The Masses, And The "Double Nature" Of Language, Elizabeth Rechniewski Dec 2010

Ambiguity, The Artist, The Masses, And The "Double Nature" Of Language, Elizabeth Rechniewski

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Ambiguity, the Artist, the Masses, and the 'Double Nature' of Language" Elizabeth Rechniewski discusses the function of the European intellectual elite through a close reading of two very different yet related books, John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses, and Pierre Bourdieu's Les Règles de l'art. Through a contrapuntal reading of the arguments of these two critics, she argues that Symbolist experiments may actually be read as reactionist; in celebrating art's supposed conquest of independence and refinement, they are replete with nostalgia for a time when the artist and the intellectual were able to ignore the pressure …


Ambiguity And Morality In Jelinek's Bambiland, Andrea Bandhauer Dec 2010

Ambiguity And Morality In Jelinek's Bambiland, Andrea Bandhauer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Ambiguity and Morality in Jelinek's Bambiland" Andrea Bandhauer begins by noting that the language of Elfriede Jelinek's play Bambiland (2004) is characterized by experimentation and a propensity for complex and ambiguous word plays. In this play, her critique of the media is directed against the international, or rather, Western press and its role in the Iraq war. The text of Bambiland, conceptualized as a "work-in-progress," in which Jelinek posed as an "embedded writer," started to appear on her website at the beginning of the war and Jelinek continued writing it through 2003. In the text of the …


Mahfouz Between Lukácsian And Brechtian Approaches To Realism, David F. Dimeo Sep 2010

Mahfouz Between Lukácsian And Brechtian Approaches To Realism, David F. Dimeo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Mahfouz between Lukácsian and Brechtian Approaches to Realism" David F. DiMeo compares the interpretations of realism by the leading Arabic author of socially committed fiction to the theories of Bertolt Brecht and György Lukács. The early works of novelist Najib Mahfouz feature a Lukácsian approach, embracing critical realism to present a totalizing view of the social system, as experienced by credible, sympathetic characters. By the 1960s, disillusioned with this method, Mahfouz turned to a more Brechtian approach, seeking to highlight social injustices by alienating the audience from identification with the characters or particular situations through ambiguous narratives …


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 …


The Metaphysics Of Electronic Being, Michał Ostrowicki [Aka Sidey Myoo] Sep 2010

The Metaphysics Of Electronic Being, Michał Ostrowicki [Aka Sidey Myoo]

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Metaphysics of Electronic Being" Michał Ostrowicki discusses the electronic environment as a sphere of being. To this end, the notion of the "electronic sphere" is used as a subject of ontological analysis. Ostrowicki postulates that the problematics of the electronic sphere represents a part of ontology and designates it as "ontoelectronics." He makes a distinction made between an electronic image and an electronic being, thus indicating that they differ from each other in their existential status and thereby deny any metaphysical equivalence between the two. This distinction between an electronic image and an electronic being is …


Photography In Wang's Chang Hen Ge (The Song Of Everlasting Sorrow), Hong Zeng Sep 2010

Photography In Wang's Chang Hen Ge (The Song Of Everlasting Sorrow), Hong Zeng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Photography in Wang's Chang Hen Ge (Song of Everlasting Sorrow)" Hong Zeng analyzes Wang's novel in the context of imagery following the theoretical framework of photography as proposed in the work of Xun Lu and Roland Barthes. According to both Xun Lu and Roland Barthes, the spectacle of photography is tied to the notion of the "the theater of the dead." Further, according to Walter Benjamin, photography is linked with the motif of exile: it is the estrangement between self and image under the spotlight, the daily enlarged disparity between the perennial life preserved by the photograph …


Nationhood And Women In Postcolonial African Literature, Elda Hungwe, Chipo Hungwe Sep 2010

Nationhood And Women In Postcolonial African Literature, Elda Hungwe, Chipo Hungwe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Nationhood and Women in Postcolonial African Literature" Elda Hungwe and Chipo Hungwe, through an analysis of Pepetela's Mayombe, Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah, and Ngugi's Petals of Blood discuss nationhood and nation in postcolonial African literature within the framework of the postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory negates master narratives of nation and nationhood, hence it deconstructs such narratives as problematic. Hungwe and Hungwe discuss problems associated with definitions of nation where groups or members are peripheralized. While Hungwe and Hungwe acknowledge that nationalism served a critical role during decolonization, their conclusion is that in postcolonial Africa notions of …


Do Medieval And Renaissance Androids Presage The Posthuman?, Kevin Lagrandeur Sep 2010

Do Medieval And Renaissance Androids Presage The Posthuman?, Kevin Lagrandeur

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Do Medieval and Renaissance Androids Presage the Posthuman?" Kevin LaGrandeur analyzes the relationships between literary images of artificial humans associated with medieval alchemists and alchemy, their modified reemergence in the Renaissance, and how such androids may forecast the idea of a posthuman subjectivity that is connected with their present-day descendents. For example, the talking brass heads in Robert Greene's two Renaissance plays, The Honorable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Alphonsus, Prince of Aragon have their roots in Arabic sources, and the former derives specifically from legends concerning the thirteenth-century alchemist and philosopher Roger Bacon. …


Sapphic Consciousness In H.D. And De Noailles, Catherine O. Clark Sep 2010

Sapphic Consciousness In H.D. And De Noailles, Catherine O. Clark

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Sapphic Consciousness in H.D. and de Noailles" Catherine Clark discusses how female modernists, like their male counterparts, re-evaluated their artistic position in relation to the Greeks and Romans as they explored experimental modes of aesthetic and literary expression. However, many women writers at the turn of the century developed a unique palimpsest with their predecessors, specifically Sappho, that deconstructed and destructed conventional approaches to classical legacy and myth. Clark analyzes selected poems by modernists H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Anna de Noailles in which they evoke a Hellenistic past and that collapses the artificial constructions of a largely …