Critical and Cultural Studies Commons^™

Self Enlightenment In Woolf, Joyce, And Nietzsche, Gabriel V. Rupp

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Self Enlightenment in Woolf, Joyce, and Nietzsche" Gabriel V. Rupp analyzes texts drawn from late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a critical period of change characterized by an explosive set of dramatic, historically unique, and complicated transformations in society and technology. Rupp argues that in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, in James Joyce's Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and in Friedrich Nietzsche's last three "strangely beautiful but mad" letters (Kaufmann), these writers' self enlightenment of a unified and discrete self is disrupted, calling into question simultaneously the constructed nature of that unity of …

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 …

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 …

About Intermedialities: A Review Article Of New Work By Paech And Schröter, Chapple And Kattenbelt, And Ellerström, Arno Gimber, Asunción López-Varela Azcárate

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Veni, Vidi, Wiki: Expertise As Knowledge And A Technocratic Generation, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

This project stems from two intersecting strands. The statement, "I can always find out," neatly summarizes the intersection. Not surprisingly, it has two distinct but simultaneous meanings. The first, in which "always" means "every time," considers the ways in which the ability to find knowledge has become synonymous with expertise and examines the elements that have fostered this situation. In this regard, factors such as the range of software and hardware-from Wikipedia and FAQs to cellphones and Ipods-which anticipate or "think" for the user but also require constant updating are both rationale and outcome for their youthful consumers. When combined …

Contesting Sphere Boundaries Online: Private/Technical/Public Discourses In Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome Discussion Groups, Kittie E. Grace

Department of Communication Studies: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The internet is fast becoming a means for people to obtain information, creating a unique forum for the intersection of the public, technical, and private spheres. To ground my research theoretically, I used Jürgen Habermas’s sphere theory. Habermas (1987) explains that the technical sphere colonizes the private sphere, which decreases democratic potential. In particular, the internet is a place for altering technical colonization of the private and public spheres.

My research focuses on women’s health because it is a particularly useful case study for examining sphere tensions. Historically, the biomedical health establishment has been a powerful agent of colonization, resulting …

The World’S Most Perfectly Developed Man: Charles Atlas, Physical Culture, And The Inscription Of American Masculinity, Jacqueline Reich

CMS Faculty Publications

The major wave of Italian immigration between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries coincided with the growth of the physical culture movement in the United States. A principal participant in both phenomena was the Italian male, with a particularly fascinating case being that of the bodybuilder and fitness guru Charles Atlas. Born Angelo Siciliano in Calabria, Italy, Atlas provides an interesting window into how the Southern immigrant became American and how that Americanization was written on the muscled, male body. This article examines how Siciliano/Atlas transformed himself into the world’s most perfect white man at a time when Italians’ whiteness was …

L’Irruption De La Violence Dans Saint-Germain Ou La Négociation: L’Esthétique Néoclassique Belge En Question, David Vrydaghs

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This paper analyses the novel Saint-Germain ou la négociation, which appears to hide a controversial discourse under a classic form. a special attention is given to the last chapter to show how this end modifies the novel’s reception. Finally, it is the whole neoclassic aesthetics that seems to be violate.

Mémoire Du Duel Dans À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, Yan Hamel

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This paper analyses the duel as a central motive in Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu. In the novels cycle, it appears that the occasions the men have to fight or to watch a duel help to understand why that violent practice increased during the last decade before the second World War. The practice seems to be monstrous morally and socially.

Je E(S)T L’Autre, Nadia Duchêne

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Immigration and otherness represent core concerns in contemporary society and, as such, give rise to debate and discussion in many disciplines. the question of otherness also arises as a recurrent and key subject in the field of literature. Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel Partir is replete with the ambivalence of otherness: attraction/aversion; difference/similarity; lack/exile; native/foreigner; close/distant; normal/deviant and as such provides a laboratory where the expression of otherness in discourse can be dissected. We will examine the perception and the issue of otherness in the novel as well as the strength of its representations.

Bahasa Dan Gender Dalam Komik Humor Kanak-Kanak., Mohd Nazim Najmuddin

Student Works (2010-2019)

This research is on language and gender in children’s humorous comic books. The methodology of this research is through analyzing the content of the comic books that is whether they can improve their language skills. This research is limited to Doraemon humorous comic books which are written in Malay because the emergence of various types of comic books which are now available in the market have been of great concern among parents as to whether they should their children to have access to such books. This research focuses on the language aspect used and also on the social behavior characteristics …

Modern Migration In Two Arabic Novels, Ikram Masmoudi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Modern Migration in Two Arabic Novels" Ikram Masmoudi proposes that twentieth-century Arab fiction is marked by the theme of the journey in literal and figurative ways. This motif features the theme of departure and arrival through characters crossings borders from East to West and from the periphery to the center (i.e., the metropolis) in order to acquire knowledge, understanding, and empowerment and to get a sense of Western modernity. The departure and arrival of the main characters becomes the central aesthetic preoccupying with a focus on their arrival back home and their rediscovery of their own idea …

Introduction To New Modernities And The "Third World", Valerian Desousa, Jennifer E. Henton, Geetha Ramanathan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Modernizing The Colonial Labor Subject In India, Valerian Desousa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Modernizing the Colonial Labor Subject in India" Valerian DeSousa discusses how the colonial project in India sought to counter the labor movement's evolving anti-colonial consciousness through law, the primary signifier of British dominance. DeSousa argues that colonial labor law was an instrument of "governmentality," a way of deploying the authority of the state, both in India and in Africa where the law encoded meanings of property and subjectivity. In India, labor law was the means to "reconstruct" the "traditional" worker and to constitute a "modern" and "efficient" labor subject to fit into the new industrial vision taking …

Aesthetics, Nationalism, And The Image Of Woman In Modern Indian Art, Kedar Vishwanathan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Aesthetics, Nationalism, and the Image of Woman in Modern Indian Art" Kedar Vishwanathan discusses how developments in visual culture impacted India's configuration as nation. Between 1880-1945 in Bombay (Mumbai) and Calcutta (Kolkata) a burgeoning visual culture developed in service of anti-colonial nationalism. Used as a method to imagine a nation free of colonial rule, in particular images of women proliferated in private and public spaces. Crucial to this development was the reformulations of modernity based on an ambivalent combination of British and Indian vernacular art. Vishwanathan focuses on how the female was appropriated for the cause of …

Robert Clive And Imperial Modernity, Nigel Joseph

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Robert Clive and Imperial Modernity" Nigel Joseph analyzes the work of Robert Clive by postulating the questions of why Clive would be emblematic of the bleak modernity of Tocqueville, Weber, and Foucault? Rapacious yet docile, personally ambitious yet capable of curbing ambition in others, Clive seems to be an anomalous figure. Joseph posits that Clive's career is a metaphor for both the trajectory of the imperial state and for the imperial subject. In order to retain his Indian-derived wealth, Clive is forced into a series of paradoxical postures: beginning as the archetypal private marauder, he transforms himself …

Nordestina Modernity In The Novels Of Freitas, Queiroz, And Lispector, Fernanda Patricia Fuentes Muñoz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Nordestina Modernity in the Novels of Freitas, Queiroz, and Lispector" Fernanda Patricia Fuentes Muñoz discusses aspects of the Nordeste — the northeastern region of Brazil — in Emília de Freitas's A Rainha do Ignoto (1899), Rachel de Queiroz's O Quinze (1930), and Clarice Lispector's A Hora da Estrela (1977; The Hour of the Star, 1992, Trans. Giovanni Pontiero). The region has traditionally been seen as located on the margins of modernity and as a site of underdevelopment in the Brazilian imaginary in opposition to the affluent Southeastern region. The construction of this binary opposition suggests a model …

Modernity In Márquez And Feminism In Ousmane, Geetha Ramanathan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Modernity in Márquez and Feminism in Ousmane" Geetha Ramanathan analyzes Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Sembène Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood. Ramanthan argues that if Márquez presents the semblance of the signs of modernity as fantasy and delusion, Ousmane's investment in the train as an instrument of the future in realist terms seems to challenge the modernist dictum that imperialism can be challenged only through modernist decenterings and through tricking and trumping. Yet, Ousmane's refusal to engage in the hallucination of the modern in his novel offers us a version of modernity that …

Danticat's The Dew Breaker, Haiti, And Symbolic Migration, Jennifer E. Henton

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Danticat's The Dew Breaker, Haiti, and Symbolic Migration" Jennifer E. Henton analyzes Edwidge Danticat's novel with Lacanian thought. It is assumed frequently that literatures of the non-West "arrive" when they move from political and didactic traditions to the "aesthetic" and experimental models that delve into the terrain of the psyche. In The Dew Breaker, the Haitian family's move to the U.S., executed self consciously, indicates loss in a different sense than lack. In the case of Denticat's novel, loss or lack represent not a source of anxiety that evokes matters read in a psychoanalytical framework; instead, Henton …

New Modernity, Transnational Women, And Spanish Cinema, Maria Van Liew

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "New Modernity, Transnational Women, and Spanish Cinema" Maria Van Liew discusses aspects of migration to Spain in the context of histories of colonialism, racism, and sexism as represented in Spanish filmic narration. The flow of human traffic defies two aspects of European modernity: Non-linear time is reflected in the cycle of arrival/return/return as the nation relies on liminal subjects to determine its status as a progressive "First World" nation and in the effort to align representations of these cultural encounters accordingly, illusions of autochthonous national identity formations become dependent on practices of inclusion and, at times, cooptation …

Political Modernism, Jabrā, And The Baghdad Modern Art Group, Nathaniel Greenberg

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Political Modernism, Jabrā, and the Baghdad Art Group" Nathaniel Greenberg discusses how the art and literature of the late Palestinian novelist Jabrā Ibrahīm Jabrā challenged the normative perception of Arab modernism both within and outside the Middle East. Greenberg evaluates the influence of French existentialism on Jabrā's political vision of modernism and discusses the impact and nature of existentialism on Jabrā and on the Middle East. Educated in Europe, Jabrā returned to the Middle East in 1948 to live permanently in Baghdad where he was a member of the influential Baghdad Modern Art Group, established in 1951 …

Haitian Zombie, Myth, And Modern Identity, Kette Thomas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Haitian Zombie, Myth, and Modern Identity" Kette Thomas analyzes texts by Zora Neale Hurston, Alfred Metraux, and Wade Davis. In these narratives we are re-introduced to the zombie not as a metaphor for lost consciousness, but, rather, as a common system that replaces personal subjectivity with an influence alien to our natural development. The discourse on subjectivity has become a central focus in the modern era but attention to fiction in "third world" cultures is neglected because they are studied almost exclusively through historical, political, sociological, or anthropological lenses or because their collective identities leads scholars to …

Bibliography Of Work In Modernity And "Third World" Studies, Valerian Desousa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The Anti-Colonial Revolutionary In Contemporary Bollywood Cinema, Vidhu Aggarwal

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Anti-Colonial Revolutionary in Contemporary Bollywood Cinema" Vidhu Aggarwal discusses several contemporary films including Rakesh Omprakash Mehra's Rang de Basanti with focus on the figure of the revolutionary hero. The Bollywood film is a cultural form that combines several aesthetic styles, from within India and from the outside. With its formal heterogeneity and as a product of one of India's largest cities, Mumbai Bollywood has had an ongoing fascination with "arrival," that is, with India's status as a contemporary nation-state. While some Bollywood films seem to celebrate fantasy scenarios of India's arrival on the global scene, at …

Philosophy Of Modernity And Development In Jamaica, Novella Z. Keith, Nelson W. Keith

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Philosophy of Modernity and Development in Jamaica" Novella Z. Keith and Nelson W. Keith postulate that a combined philosophico-practical inquiry is necessary to reduce the systemic asymmetries found in the North-South divide and to promote global interdependence. Proceeding from a deconstruction of European-inflected modernity, Keith and Keith sketch an alternative epistemology of uncertainty and unknowability and illustrate aspects of these epistemologies in theories and practices of modernization and its counter movements, dependency, and underdevelopment while also using them to discuss current practices of an NGO they created, Edu-Tourism , to bridge global divides as experienced in Jamaica. …

Solace In St. Louis: A Case Study In Heroic Cultural Nostalgia, Amanda J. Pinney

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis examines the response of American popular culture to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. By utilizing the September 17, 2001 pre-game ceremony, held at Busch Stadium as a case study example, larger generalizations are made about the role popular culture played in the days following the tragedy. In order to analyze this example, I have developed heroic cultural nostalgia, a framework that combines elements of myth, nostalgia and national identity. Heroic cultural nostalgia provides an explanation of how popular culture plays a role in crisis response. The framework highlights the role of individuals with heroic characteristics in …

Literary Studies From Hermeneutics To Media Culture Studies, Siegfried J. Schmidt

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Literary Studies from Hermeneutics to Media Culture Studies" Siegfried J. Schmidt discusses aspects of hermeneutics, the systemic and empirical (contextual) approach to literature and culture, radical constructivism, and his postulates for the field of media culture studies. Schmidt describes his understanding of the transformation of literary studies towards media culture studies in the context of overall developments of society. His argumentation with regard to move from hermeneutics to media culture studies offers the postulate that research ought to be empirical and contextual in order to foster intuition, invention, innovation, and socially relevant scholarship. He concludes that the …

Anti-Nationalism In Scott's Old Mortality, Montserrat Martínez García

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Anti-Nationalism in Scott's Old Mortality," Montserrat Martínez García examines national identity through war in Walter Scott's Old Mortality in order to illustrate that war was one of the main catalysts of nationhood and show, simultaneously, the disparity between the institutional and the popular attitude toward war. Martínez García pays attention to the way Scott portrayed war and identity and to what extent this literary representation coincided with or faced the uniform ideology of nationalism. Based on the historical background of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Martínez García analyses Scott's novel to uncover focus his narrative of cracks …

Sartre, Marcuse, And The Utopian Project Today, Robert T. Tally Jr.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Sartre, Marcuse, and the Utopian Project Today," Robert T. Tally Jr. discusses the philosophical legacy of the May 1968 revolution in Paris with respect to the power of the imagination and the possibilities for utopian thought in our own time. Although the rhetoric of the 1968 militants may seem dated, the underlying theoretical and political concepts are surprisingly timely in the twenty-first century. Among these, existential angst or anxiety has perhaps a heightened salience in the era of globalization and of global economic crisis, and the utopian desire for a life without anxiety has become more pressing. …

Bassani's The Garden Of The Finzi-Continis And Italian "Queers", John Champagne

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and Italian 'Queers'" John Champagne argues for a reading of the novel as not gay, but queer. Champagne argues that such a reading strategy emphasizes the ways in which the novel deconstructs normative gender, sexual, and even religious identities in an attempt both to resist the tyranny of the normal and to cope with the trauma of the Italian Shoah. A psycho-analytically inflected queer theory in this instance gives us access to the complexity of the novel's portrayal of Italian Jewish identity in fascist Italy and opens up onto a reflection …