Critical and Cultural Studies | Open Access Articles

Slave To Fashion: Masculinity, Suits And The Masciste Films Of Italian Silent Cinema, Jacqueline Reich

CMS Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Go to article

The Case Of The Dangerous Detective, Ronald S. Green, D. E. Wittkower

Philosophy and Religious Studies

No abstract provided.

Go to article

Investigating Trait Attribution Through Gendered Avatar Play: An Analysis Of The Sims 3, Erika M. Behrmann

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This study investigates whether the life-simulation videogame, The Sims 3, enables the deconstruction of the gender binary. The Sims 3 permits its players the capability to attribute similar traits to male or female avatars. In doing so, players can experiment with taboo trait attributions and potentially defy a male-female binary. A group of 82 The Sims 3 players was surveyed to determine their overall male and female Sims trait selections during gameplay. Participants were questioned on how their trait selection related to their personal identities. Results indicated that players tend to select traits that maintain a gender binary. This …

Go to article

Labor Pains In The Academy, Lisa M. Tillmann Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

This piece offers autoethnographic reflections on crossroads to which many academics come: whether to seek (or postpone or avoid) parenthood and when. The author deeply explores the personal (her own trajectories from daughter and sister to potential mother and from graduate student to full professor) in order to reflect on structural constraints associated with graduate education, the academic job market, and institutional policies and politics.

Go to article

Martha Stewart's Graphic Design For Living, Melanie Mcnaughton

Bridgewater Review

A living brand or a force of darkness, Martha Stewart is an indomitable figure in 20thcentury domestic life and her place in North American domestic history is tied to the success of Martha Stewart Living, the flagship publication of the Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSLO) empire. The success of Living is tied to its graphic design. Living typographically enacts the values it argues for by fusing traditional elements with modern edges to present a vision of homemaking that is soft and appealing yet also a statement of skilled precision and quality. Tacking between broad, more theoretical analysis and close …

Go to article

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 …

Go to article

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

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Go to article

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 …

Go to article

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.

Go to article

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 …

Go to article

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 …

Go to article

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 …

Go to article

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 …

Go to article

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 …

Go to article

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 …

Go to article

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 …

Go to article

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 …

Go to article

Sexuality, Exoticism, And Iconoclasm In The Media Age: The Strange Case Of The Buddha Bikini, James Mark Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

No abstract provided.

Go to article

Curated Exhibit: Absolute Poison, Laura J. Hall

Posters and Presentations

The Absolute Poison exhibit, curated by Laura J. Hall, MFA, delved into the fascinating and deadly world of poisons. From the ancient Sumerian goddess Gula, to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and the infamous cyanide-laced Tylenol case of 1982, poisons have long held a place in our collective imagination. The exhibit explored the history, symbolism, and cultural impact of poisons, featuring materials such as Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and Eve with its skull and crossbones motif symbolizing death. On display from September 2010 to August 2011 at the UNM Domenici Center, the exhibit examined how poisons have shaped narratives of danger and mystery. September …

Go to article

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 …

Go to article

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 …

Go to article

A Consilient Science And Humanities In Mcewan's Enduring Love, Curtis D. Carbonell

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "A Consilient Science and the Humanities in McEwan's Enduring Love" Curtis D. Carbonell provides a reading of a Third Culture novel that foregrounds the relationship of the sciences and the humanities. In Ian McEwan's novel we see a perfect example of how literary thinkers are listening to the world of science and speaking to it in return. This article responds to Stephen Greenberg's ideas about how Neo-Darwinian themes in the novel point to social themes by arguing that what underlies both of these is a deeper structure: the tension between C.P. Snow's Two Cultures, which is only …

Go to article

Authorship, Collaboration, And Art Geography, Martin De La Iglesia

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Authorship, Collaboration, and Art Geography" Martin de la Iglesia explores the connection between geographical spaces and works of art, a connection often made, but hardly theorized, by scholars in the field of art geography. He suggests that the link between space and object is established by the creator of the object. A feasible method is devised to determine the creator's geographical identity, which in turn determines which space is assigned to the object. Particularly, the implications of multiple authorship for such a methodology are considered. The procedure is exemplified by a geographical analysis of the comic book …

Go to article

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 …

Go to article

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. …

Go to article

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 …

Go to article

The Stereotyped Image Of Christ In Villiers's "Les Amants De Tolède", Graciela Susana Boruszko

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Stereotyped Image of Christ in Villiers's 'Les Amants de Tolède'" Graciela Susana Boruszko discusses images in Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's text. The embedding of icons of foreign cultures, histories, and religions into a literary narrative results in a work of art enriched by the images fashioned by the "foreign eye." The narrative strategy of Villiers creates a kaleidoscopic representation of themes and images that merge the fields of religion, literature and history. These themes and images — transposed into the domain of littérature fantastique — follow the initiation of the reader to a supernatural world that …

Go to article

Erotic Mourning And Post-Traumatic Sexual Desire, Gila G. Ashtor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Erotic Mourning and Post-traumatic Sexual Desire" Gila Ashtor investigates the ways Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 2000 memoir contains an alternative logic of affectivity that locates possibilities for mourning in the ambivalent directionalities of post-traumatic sexual desire. Ashtor links dominant conceptualizations of post-traumatic working-through and regimes of heteronormative sexual reproductivity in order to argue that Eggers's self-exhibitionistic spectacle of failed post-traumatic healing, precisely as a drama of undoing that replaces the cumulative acquisition of psychic cohesion with survival incoherent gestures, produces a version of what this paper will call "radical mourning." To particularize the …

Go to article

Gender In Winterson's Sexing The Cherry, Paul Kintzele

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Gender in Winterson's Sexing the Cherry" Paul Kintzele examines the ways in which Jeanette Winterson's 1989 novel explores and critiques aspects of gender and sexuality. While acknowledging the importance of the performance theory of gender that derives from the work of Judith Butler, Kintzele contends that such an approach must be complemented with a psychoanalytic approach that insists on a particular distinction between sex and gender. Although some scholars map the sex/gender distinction onto the perennial nature/nurture binary and thus reduce sex to biology or anatomy, scholars of psychoanalysis such as Joan Copjec and Charles Shepherdson, read …

Go to article

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 …

Go to article

Full-Text Articles in Critical and Cultural Studies

Slave To Fashion: Masculinity, Suits And The Masciste Films Of Italian Silent Cinema, Jacqueline Reich

CMS Faculty Publications

The Case Of The Dangerous Detective, Ronald S. Green, D. E. Wittkower

Philosophy and Religious Studies

Investigating Trait Attribution Through Gendered Avatar Play: An Analysis Of The Sims 3, Erika M. Behrmann

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Labor Pains In The Academy, Lisa M. Tillmann Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

Martha Stewart's Graphic Design For Living, Melanie Mcnaughton

Bridgewater Review

Ambiguity And Morality In Jelinek's Bambiland, Andrea Bandhauer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Blanchot And Ambiguity, Paolo Bartoloni

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Ambiguity Now, Martin Harrison

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Silence, The Utmost In Ambiguity, Mario Perniola

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The Rhetoric Of Dilemma And Cavafean Ambiguity, Anthony Dracopoulos

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The Chi Complex And Ambiguities Of Meeting, Paul Carter

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Ambiguity, Children, Representation, And Sexuality, Catharine Lumby

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Sexuality, Exoticism, And Iconoclasm In The Media Age: The Strange Case Of The Buddha Bikini, James Mark Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

Curated Exhibit: Absolute Poison, Laura J. Hall

Posters and Presentations

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

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

A Consilient Science And Humanities In Mcewan's Enduring Love, Curtis D. Carbonell

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Authorship, Collaboration, And Art Geography, Martin De La Iglesia

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The Stereotyped Image Of Christ In Villiers's "Les Amants De Tolède", Graciela Susana Boruszko

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Erotic Mourning And Post-Traumatic Sexual Desire, Gila G. Ashtor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Gender In Winterson's Sexing The Cherry, Paul Kintzele

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

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

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture