Communication Commons^™

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 …

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 …

An Intermedial Reading Of Paley's Sita Sings The Blues, Ipshita Chanda

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "An Intermedial Reading of Paley's Sita Sings the Blues" Ipshita Chanda discusses the film text of Nina Paley's 2008 animation film, a culturally reconceptualized version of Válmíki's Sanskrit epic Rámáyana. Chanda discusses the film as an intermedial retextualization of the Rámáyana in the film where media boundaries and genres are crossed in "textual," audio, and visual media. The basic premise from which Chanda proceeds is that the condition of intermediality in film is produced by a "conceptual fusion" of different media which, in turn, are analyzed using theories of reception and contact between different media …

Towards A Multimodal Analysis Of Da Rimini's Dollspace, Maya Paniagua Zalbidea

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Towards a Multimodal Analysis of da Rimini's Dollspace" Maya Zalbidea Paniagua analyzes Francesca da Rimini's Dollspace <http://dollyoko.thing.net/> (1997-2001). By analyzing Dollspace Zalbidea Paniagua reinforces the proposition that studies on material aesthetics and intermediality encompass a process of rethinking the notion of boundaries across material structures. This is clearly shown in da Rimini's Dollspace, where ambivalence cuts across discursive genres and distinct material formats of image, text, and audio. Hypertext engages the user/participant in a dialogue with the machine and, in the case of Dollspace, across people's sexual attitudes. Dollspace seeks to do more than …

The Spirit Of Matter In Büchner, Barbara Natalie Nagel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Spirit of Matter in Büchner" Barbara Natalie Nagel investigates different vectors of Georg Büchner's materialism: historical, philosophical, ethical, physiological. The analysis of what Büchner presents to be a necessary link between physiology and revolution aims to show how Büchner has a tendency first to entangle two relatively static, binary oppositions — literal/figurative and material/spiritual — in order then to play them against one another. Büchner thus uses the dynamics of literalization to evoke necessity: for example, if the revolution is conceived of in physiological terms, then the will either has to become physiological or biology has …

Musical, Rhetorical, And Visual Material In The Work Of Feldman, Kurt Ozment

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Musical, Rhetorical, and Visual Material in the Work of Feldman" Kurt Ozment compares early and late scores by Morton Feldman and argues that Feldman's interest in the visuality of the score was not limited to his experiments with graphic notation. More specifically, Projection 3 (1951) and String Quartet (II) (1983) suggest that Feldman experimented with notation from beginning to end. Up until the early 1980s, one of Feldman's main strategies for commenting on his music was to refer to painting. In his essay "Crippled Symmetry" and in an interview with the percussionist Jan Williams, Feldman also turns …

Digital Media, 419, And The Politics Of The Global Network, Paul Benzon

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Digital Media, 419, and the Politics of the Global Network" Paul Benzon analyzes advance fee fraud, a scam in which con artists communicate with potential victims via email, promising them a monetary reward in return for financial assistance in extracting an allegedly astronomical (yet ultimately nonexistent) fortune from within a geographical zone often characterized as highly violent and unstable. Advance fee fraud is often referred to simply as 419, in accordance with the section of Nigerian penal code that addresses fraud. Benzon reads advance fee fraud as a practice of epistolary narrative that self-consciously allegorizes central processes …

Intermediality As Cultural Literacy And Teaching The Graphic Novel, Geert Vandermeersche, Ronald Soetaert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Intermediality as Cultural Literacy and Teaching the Graphic Novel" Geert Vandermeersche and Ronald Soetaert argue for the inclusion of the graphic novel for the teaching of cultural literacy and literature. As the printed book is no longer the sole carrier of cultural literacy, Vandermeersche and Soetaert postulate that literary culture must be repositioned in intermedial culture and practices. In order to do so, Vandermeersche and Soetaert apply Werner Wolf's typology of intermediality, aspects of narratology, and scholarship about comics. Following a theoretical discussion they analyze the graphic novel series The Unwritten, a text that thematizes the …

Digital Humanities In Developed And Emerging Markets, Verena Laschinger

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Digital Humanities in Developed and Emerging Markets" Verena Laschinger discusses the impact e-culture has on humanities pedagogy both in affluent countries and emerging markets. Claiming that e-literacy training generally offers opportunities to recover the traditional agency of the humanities thus catapulting the disciplines into the educational forefront of the creative economy, special attention is given to the chances digital humanities education offers in Turkey’s emerging market economy. Given that technology promotes the country's economic development, which includes a rapidly growing private educational sector, digital humanities education helps citizens to adjust to critical democratic exchange, to facilitate and …

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 …

Intersubjectivity And Intermediality In The Work Of Serra, Rocío Von Jungenfeld

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Intersubjectivity and Intermediality in the work of Serra" Rocío von Jungenfeld examines the intersubjective space in which artworks are conceived and the cross boundaries of media in order to construct a general understanding of intersubjective perception in visual and plastic arts and an understanding of the processes that determine works of art, reflective perception, and intersubjective experience. Although the argument is that perception is subjective and untransferable, (i.e., a unique personal experience) influenced by innumerable factors and bound to a specific context, there are some elements of perception which can be understood intersubjectively as they apply to …

A Case Study Of (Inter)Medial Participation, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "A Case Study of (Inter)medial Participation" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek presents survey data followed by quantitative and qualitative analysis about the daily intake of media in cultural participation. The survey data of the study are the result of questionnaires conducted 2001-2002 with advanced undergraduate students enrolled in media and communication studies at Northeastern University and with advanced undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. As the survey was conducted in 2001-2002, the data and the analysis have "historical" relevance with regard to (inter)medial cultural participation in the digital age. The data are from a mid-size …

Bibliography Of Publications In Media And (Inter)Mediality Studies, Geert Vandermeersche, Joachim Vlieghe, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Bibliography Of Scholarship On Indigenous Literatures And Cultures, Angeline O'Neill, Albert Braz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Indigenous Literature And Comparability, Katherine Durnin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Indigenous Literature and Comparability" Katherine Durnin discusses some of the barriers to the comparative study of Indigenous literature alongside non-Indigenous literature. These barriers include the Eurocentrism of traditional comparative literature, certain aspects of postcolonial theory and, above, all the assumption that Indigenous and Western epistemologies belong to separate and incommensurable worlds. Durnin examines some recent theoretical and critical approaches that offer ways to bridge the two worlds and make comparative literature an ethical space of mutual respect and understanding.

On Reading Grace's Potiki, Eva Rask Knudsen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "On Reading Grace's Potiki" Eva Rask Knudsen takes as her point of departure the critical impasse of postcolonial analyses of Indigenous literatures and the claim made by some (Indigenous) commentators that non-Indigenous scholars and critics often re-colonize the texts they deem to be "postcolonial" because — in their theoretical concern with issues of marginalization and resistance — they overlook (and so overwrite) the specific indigenous knowledges and ontologies that the literatures draw on. Through an analysis of the 1986 novel Potiki by Māori writer Patricia Grace, Rsak Knudsen looks in other directions than those catalogued by …

Collaborative Authorship And Indigenous Literatures, Albert Braz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Collaborative Authorship and Indigenous Literatures" Albert Braz discusses the duality of the writer. As suggested by Roland Barthes in his "The Death of the Author," the distinction between writer and author — the first being the historical person behind the text and the second a figure in the text — the duality of the author remains a paradigm of contemporary critical analysis. Braz argues that this new emphasis is not germane when it comes to Indigenous literatures, a field in which one often cannot determine who are the material producers of texts and/or their writers. Braz postulates …

Towards Transnational Native American Literary Studies, Hsinya Huang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Towards Transnational Native American Literary Studies" Hsinya Huang discusses how Native American literature can be adapted, translated, articulated, and interpreted in a transnational/trans-Pacific context, using the recently emerging Native American scholarship in Taiwan as a point of departure. Through collaboration across institutional lines, exploration of the community production of local knowledge, and our obligation and desire to participate meaningfully as intellectuals in the international initiatives in Native Studies, can we conceive of an expansive indigenous region across the Pacific? How can indigeneity be both rooted in and routed through particular places and articulated? Through envisioning an expanding …

Politics Of Indigeneity In Fogarty's Poetry, Sean Gorman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Politics of Indigeneity in Fogarty's Poetry" Sean Gorman discusses Indigenous themes and issues with regards to the poetry of Murri writer Lionel Fogarty. As Fogarty is seen as a poet who writes complex prose, his material challenges non-Indigenous readerships by subverting Standard English and conventional reading practices. Gorman suggests strategies by which to engage with Fogarty's material and, employing the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, namely heteroglossia and dialogism, to arrive at a better understanding of the rich and complex nature of Fogarty's work. Gorman executes his analysis in relation to the political debates that have arisen since …

Voices In Australia's Aboriginal And Canada's First Nations Literatures, Kim Scott, Eden Robinson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Kim Scott suggests in his text "I Come from Here" by means of "yarning" that the authority of Indigenous people and language is primary to an authentic "sense of place." Scott uses an accumulative, episodic, and personal narrative style to argue that the return "to," and consolidation of cultural material "in," a "community of descendants of the informants" must be founded upon principles of community development. Collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people by sharing of ancestral material with ever widening, concentric circles is how this process results in respect and partnership that empowers community life.

Eden Robinson explores in her …

Textual Fantasies And Culturality In Native American Fiction: A Review Article Of New Books By Treuer And Justice, Angeline O'Neill

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Introduction To About Indigenous Literatures, Angeline O'Neill, Albert Braz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Australian Indigenous Philosophy, Stephen Muecke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Australian Indigenous Philosophy" Stephen Muecke discusses the fact that neither Australian philosophy nor Indigenous Australian philosophy exists as a field of study. Settler Australians have imported their philosophical traditions and have left it up to other disciplines to undertake the translation work of knowledge in the long-lived Indigenous traditions. Here, anthropology, history, and cultural studies have taken up the challenge. Muecke revisits his 2004 book Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy in order to refine some of his arguments about philosophical practice and the damaging periodization into "ancient" and "modern" cultures in colonial societies like …

Aboriginal Australian And Canadian First Nations Children's Literature, Angeline O'Neill

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Aboriginal Australian and Canadian First Nations Children's Literature" Angeline O'Neill discusses Canadian First Nations and Australian Aboriginal children's picture books and their appeal to a dual readership. Inuit traditional storyteller and writer Michael Kusugak, Nyoongar traditional storyteller and writer Lorna Little, and Wunambal elder Daisy Utemorrah are cases in point. Each appeals to Indigenous and non-Indigenous, child and adult readerships, thus challenging two assumptions in Western scholarship on literature that 1) the picture book genre is necessarily the domain of children and 2) that traditional Indigenous stories are, similarly, best suited to children. O'Neill considers the ways …

Tropologies Of Tradition And (Post)Modernity In Nwagwu's Forever Chimes, James Tar Tsaaior

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Tropologies of Tradition and (Post)modernity in Nwagwu's Forever Chimes" James Tar Tsaaior explores Mark Nwagu's novel and postulates that the author succeeds in constructing a novelistic universe both concrete and fluid in its re-invention or re-fabrication of cultural traditions and identity formation processes. This universe is simultaneously traditional/indigenous and (post)modern. However, rather than to delineate these cultural formations through difference as oppositional categories, Nwagu suggests grounds for multicultural interactions and transactions. In this cultural schema, none of the cultures claims exclusive preserve or pre-eminence over the other as what exists is a democratic space for the …

Science Fiction And A Rhetorical Analysis Of The 'Literature Myth', Kris Rutten, Ronald Soetaert, Geert Vandermeersche

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Science Fiction and a Rhetorical Analysis of the 'Literature Myth'" Kris Rutten, Ronald Soetaert, and Geert Vandermeersche discuss what we can learn from science fiction about cultural literacy in general and literary culture in particular. From a theoretical and methodological perspective the authors start from the work of rhetorician Kenneth Burke. First, the authors conceptualize literature as "equipment for living" followed by a discussion of science fiction as "equipment for living" based on a description of the genre as "satire by entelechy." Second, they analyze a selection of science fiction narratives using the "dramatistic pentad" as …

Globalization, Pedagogical Imagination, And Transnational Literacy, Ezra Yoo-Hyeok Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Globalization, Pedagogical Imagination, and Transnational Literacy," Ezra Yoo-Hyeok Lee explores the juncture of comparative literature, globalization and postcolonial studies as to how creative writers, literary critics, and cultural theorists respond to globalization and its challenges. Arjun Appadurai expounds that globalization has demanded new research conceptualization and invention in academia. Subsequently, Lee investigates methods through which educators and scholars in comparative literature take up such a demand. In turn, Lee proposes a transnational literacy which offers a responsible form of cultural explanation, through which to explore the interrelations between the national and the postcolonial or global paradigms, both …

Motherhood In African Literature And Culture, Remi Akujobi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Motherhood in African Literature and Culture" Remi Akujobi analyzes the place and the role of women in African Religion and tradition and also interrogates the place of Motherhood in the production, circulation and consumption of items in African tradition. Akujobi examines Motherhood as a sacred as well as a powerful spiritual component of the woman's life. Emphasis is put on literary discourse where motherhood is a recurrent theme, where motherhood is also a lifelong commitment. The article particularly explores motherhood as a discourse in African women creative efforts. A key intention of the article is to explore …