Critical and Cultural Studies Commons^™

Teaching Merchant-Class Virtues With Chushingura And The London Merchant, David S. Escoffery

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Teaching Merchant-Class Virtues with Chushingura and The London Merchant," David S. Escoffery examines the different styles of teaching merchant-class virtues in eighteenth-century Japan and England through an analysis of the classical Japanese play Chushingura and the didactic British play The London Merchant. He holds that in both Europe and Japan, the eighteenth century saw the rise of a whole new class, the middle class, to either economic or social power or both. That century was also a didactic age for the theatre. For the first time, the audience could see characters from the new merchant class on …

Science, Sexuality, And The Novels Of Huxley And Houellebecq, Angela C. Holzer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Science, Sexuality, and the Novels of Huxley and Houellebecq," Angela C. Holzer begins with an introduction to recent discourse about contemporary culture by Francis Fukuyama, notably in his book Our Posthuman Future (2001). Next, Holzer introduces twentieth-century literary representations of genetic engineering. Focusing on Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and on Houellebecq's Les Particules élémentaires (1998), Holzer discusses differences in "utopian" literature when linked to metaphysical aspects of reproduction and that are owing to changes in the life sciences and medicine. Further, Holzer explores the implications for poetics resulting from scientific developments and relates Houellebecq's perspectives to …

Negotiating Boundaries In Divakaruni's The Mistress Of Spices And Naylor's Mama Day, Susana Vega-González

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Negotiating Boundaries in Divakaruni's The Mistress of Spices and Naylor's Mama Day," Susana Vega-González analyzes the intertextual connections between these two novels. In Vega-González's view, the texts discussed transcend their authors' different ethnic and ethno-cultural backgrounds and appeal to universalisms found in literature. Vega-González proposes that writing from a bi-cultural perspective, Indian American Chitra B. Divakaruni and African American Gloria Naylor share both content and stylistic features in their acclaimed novels. Their conscious effort to dissolve established boundaries as well as their ethno-cultural legacies leads these authors to a magic realistic approach, an apt means to reflect …

Corpi, Murakami, And Contemporary Hardboiled Fiction, Cathy Steblyk

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Corpi, Murakami, and Contemporary Hardboiled Fiction," Cathy Steblyk discusses comparatively texts by contemporary detective fiction writers, one an ethnic-minority US-American and the other Japanese. Steblyk proposes that in detective fiction since the late 1980s, morally or ethically contestable sites of history have been given a postmortem by contemporary authors who are interested in restoring the lost parts of cultural histories. Detective fictions by feminist US-Chicana author Lucha Corpi and Japanese writer Murakami Haruki show how recent fiction from around the globe uses the hardboiled genre for the purposes of exploring past injustices and offering revisionist histories. The …

Adventure Tales, Colonialism, And Alexander Montgomery's Australian Perspective, Christine Doran

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Adventure Tales, Colonialism, and Alexander Montgomery's Australian Perspective," Christine Doran discusses an early nineteenth-century example of Australian literature dealing with Southeast Asia. The text analysed is about Borneo, in a collection of short stories by Alexander Montgomery entitled Five-Skull Island and Other Tales of the Malay Archipelago, published in Melbourne in 1897. In the paper, Doran's focus is on Montgomery's adventure tales and she situates the texts within their literary and cultural contexts. Montgomery's writing is then analyzed in the light of postcolonial scholarship. Doran argues that in several important ways this author's work runs counter to …

Professional Wrestling: From Sport To Sports Entertainment, Ryan Diesem

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

Paratextuality And Economic Disavowal In Dave Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity, Sarah Brouillette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Dave Eggers' recent novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002), concerns two friends who suddenly stumble upon a lot of money, feel guilty about it, and travel around the world trying to give it away. Like almost all of what Eggers is involved in producing, Velocity is profoundly self-justifying. In fact, if we follow Gerard Genette's model and understand a work's paratexts to be all the physical and social texts that attend its existence, controlling its dissemination and reception, then Velocity thematizes paratextuality and practices it, as a text about Eggers' career and his overriding concern with the …

Text As Technology: Reading N. Katherine Hayles' Writing Machines, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

N. Katherine Hayles' Writing Machines is a beautiful little book. Thanks to the innovative spirit of MIT Press' Peter Lunenfeld, the graphic design prowess of Anne Burdick, the multimedia talents of Sean Donahue (creator of the book's website ), and the insights of N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines arrives as one of the first installations of the Mediawork Pamphlet Series, and offers one possible line of development to follow for any scholar concerned with the future of The Book.

Review Of Subject, Society, Culture, By Roy Boyne, Michael Ian Borer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Time Wounds All Heels: Duncan, Ballet, And Bataille, Joanne Pearson

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Any study of the birth of modern dance draws upon the work of Isadora Duncan and for too long her dance has been placed in opposition to ballet. Even today the contemporary Duncan dancer reifies the image of Duncan as natural, harmonious, unique and rounded [1]. This opposition of free dance versus ballet presents a two-dimensional portrait of past representations of femininity. I aim to re-think Duncan's disdain for the pointe shoe and her belief that barefoot dancing would encourage a liberated movement that would in turn free woman from her disgraceful position in dance and …

Review Of Burger With The Works, Please! A Webjournal For Students Of The Humanities, Alexandra Ganser

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Nobel In Literature 2000 Gao Xingjian's Aesthetics Of Fleeing, Mabel Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Nobel in Literature 2000 Gao Xingjian's Aesthetics of Fleeing," Mabel Lee explores the aesthetic dimensions of Gao Xingjian's play Taowang (Fleeing 1990), and its significance in establishing the recurring motif of "fleeing" in Gao's later writings on literature. Lee argues that the intensely emotional times during which Gao wrote Fleeing were comparable to those seventy years earlier confronting May Fourth writers. Urging his compatriots not to be "bystanders," Lu Xun, the most influential of May Fourth writers, had chosen to allow his creative self to suicide, as shown in the prose-poems of Yecao (Wild Grass 1927). For …

Cultures Matter: A Review Article Of Books By Harrison And Huntington, Segesváry, And Breckenridge, Pollock, Bhabha, And Chakrabarty, William H. Thornton

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Comparing Anew: A Review Article Of New Work By Kushner, Zhang, Halio And Siegel, And San Román, Nicoletta Pireddu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

And The 2002 Nobel Prize For Literature Goes To Imre Kertész, Jew And Hungarian, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "And the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature Goes to Imre Kertész, Jew and Hungarian" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek presents an introduction to the recepient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature, Imre Kertész, and his work. Tötösy de Zepetnek places Kertész's work in the context of Central European culture and within that in the genre of Central European Jewish memoir literature (but not autobiography). In Tötösy de Zepetnek's opinion the cultural and social relevance of Jewish memoir writing today is of particular importance precisely for the same reasons Kertész articulates when he says, "I am a survivor. …

Nobel In Literature 2002 Imre Kertész's Aesthetics Of The Holocaust, Sára Molnár

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Nobel in Literature 2002 Imre Kertész's Aesthetics of the Holocaust," Sára Molnár discusses aspects of Nobel Laureate Imre Kertész's reception in Hungary. In her analysis, Molnár discusses aesthetic features of the author's use of language. Molnár's study illuminates the problem of authorship and questions relating to intersections of fiction and autobiography in Kertész's oeuvre. Molnár's argument is that although the author's personal history is indeed important in his texts, this "author" should not be identified with Kertész himself and that although Kertész's themes and subjects appear to be autobiographical, not even his diaries should or can be …

The Horlas: Maupassant's Mirror Of Self-Reflection, Edward J. Lusk, Marion Roeske

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their co-authored paper, "The Horlas: Maupassant's Mirror of Self-Reflection," Edward J. Lusk and Marion Roeske present a comparative analysis of three works of Maupassant: Lettre d'un fou, Le Horla of 1886, and Le Horla of 1887. The authors argue that these works form a trilogy by which Maupassant expresses his struggle to resolve the issues that seem to haunt him during the time that he pens the Horla trilogy. This introspective search is crafted around the failure of a mirror to provide a reflected image and the assessment of the likelihood that the strange events presented in the trilogy …

Reading War With Nietzsche And Reading Nietzsche With Kant, Rimbaud, And Bataille, Adrian Gargett

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Reading War with Nietzsche and Reading Nietzsche with Kant, Rimbaud, and Bataille," Adrian Gargett discusses the aspects of poetry, communication, and notion that the apparition of Nietzsche manifested in Bataille is not a locus of secular reason but of necromantic religion: a writer who escapes philosophical conceptuality in the direction of unidentified zones, and dispenses with the "thing in itself" because it is an article of intelligible representation with no importance as a vector of becoming/of travel. Necromancy resists the transcendence of death opening territories of "voyages of discovery never reported." Against the strain of inert and …

Translation Studies And Agamben's Theory Of The Potential, Paolo Bartoloni

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Translation Studies and Agamben's Theory of the Potential," Paolo Bartoloni discusses the interstitial space of translation by drawing on literary and philosophical preoccupations, especially Giorgio Agamben's notion of "potentiality." The first part of the article is devolved to defining and discussing "potentiality" and the significance that it has for a general re-thinking of translation theory. Bartoloni moves on to ask what would happen if the focus of translation shifts from the final product, or from the relation between the original and the translation, to the process of translating, that is the middle ground, the in-betweenness where two …

Queer/Crip: The First Queer Disability Conference, Walter (Peter) Penrose

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

The Queer Disability Conference, the first conference of its kind ever, held on June 2 and 3 at San Francisco State University, began with great enthusiasm of the participants, many of whom identified as both disabled and queer in some fashion or another. The opening plenary included an intersex activist, who discussed feelings of not being safe in a world where binary notions of sex and gender make being intersex perilous, and hoping that s/he would feel safe at the conference. A diverse group of activists, academics, and disabled queers provided for an interesting mix of perspectives.

Dread, Route And Time: An Autobiographical Walking Of Everything Else, Phil Smith

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

This response to Reconstruction's Summer 2002 edition, Volume 2, Number 3, autobiogeography: considering space and identity, particularly to the papers of Matthew Wolf-Meyer and Davin Heckman, Subhash Jaireth, Deirdre Heddon and Sally Munt, is an attempt to establish provisionally whether a discourse that sets critical theory, autobiographical practice and a poetics of space in performative motion orbiting each other can add anything to the critical discussion of autobiogeography. Part of my motivation is an antipathy toward criticism that can be applied to everything but itself. Given that hybridity will be an important part of a critical discourse about …

You Still My Girl?: Adolescent Femininity As Resistance In Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Sophie Levy

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

History is where the dead things are. Buffy, as her Watcher Rupert Giles tells her mother Joyce, resists the historical. She lives very much in the now, and history of course, is very much about the then he stammers, aware perhaps of the history echoing in his British accent (Angel I:7). The show's appeal, however, resides in its battle with history, not its denial. History is the repressed but resurrected, whether personal -- Giles' dark age of demon-worship comes back to (almost) kill him (The Dark Age II:8) -- or cultural, such as the Master's bad Old World …

Review Of Crepuscular Dawn, By Paul Virilio, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Review Of Ruthless Democracy, By Timothy B. Powell, Matthew Wolf-Myer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Rogerian Rhetoric As Negotiation: Does Its Dependence On Game Theory Pose Ethical Problems?, Stacy Fussell Thorne

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In the war game Diplomacy, players win by gaining control of Europe. In order to win, however, players must successfully negotiate with other players, make alliances with them, and sometimes gain the support of their ally's military resources, their armies or fleets. In the rules of the game, Diplomacy is described as

a game of negotiations, alliances, promises kept, and promises broken. In order to survive, a player needs help from others. In order to win the game, a player must eventually stand alone. Knowing whom to trust, when to trust them, what to promise, and when …

En Attendant Le Plan Marshall : Consommation Endogène De La Littérature Camerounaise, Pierre Fandio

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Despite the numerous forms of "aid" it has always received, Africa remains the only continent on the fringe of the tremendous development that the rest of the world has been experiencing in the last two centuries. The sectorial analysis of the literary works in this paper illustrates how the implementation of the various "Marshall Plan" is meant to bring about the development of a whole continent and a country like Cameroon. This could be done by involving actors of the cultural domain in the analysis of data and formulation of solution. Such development could give a boost to profitable endogenous …

"See Me, Touch Me, Feel Me": (Im) Proving The Bodily Sense Of Masculinity, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Ultimately, this paper stems from two cultural strands which intersect in one cultural form, self-improvement advertising aimed at men. The first of these is the figure of the "new man," which appeared in the mid-1980s. The novelty lies in the positioning of masculine bodies precisely for the purpose of being seen. The available criticism was not equipped to account for these positionings. The second cultural strand, the proliferation of technologies which alter the body itself, as opposed to its coverings, makes the gap in the criticism more apparent. The two cultural trends intersect most noticeably in the advertisements for the …

"We Got Married" [Untitled Short Story], Rosa Liksom

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Liksom's Short Story "We Got Married" And (Finnish) Identity Construction, Kimmo Jokinen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Liksom's Short Story 'We Got Married' and (Finnish) Identity Construction," Kimmo Jokinen proposes the validity of common belief today that a shift into a late-modern era is taking place. It has often been claimed in contemporary sociological debates that our "post-industrial" life has become more thoroughly imbricated with culture and signs and sociologists, in their analyses of contemporary life, are interested especially in stories people tell, hear, and read. Based on readers' survey data in Finland, Jokinen analyses the ways in which Rosa Liksom's short story "We Got Married" is being employed in identity construction. For Jokinen, …

Reading Liksom's Short Story "We Got Married" In Post-Communist Bulgaria, Kornelia Slavova

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Kornelia Slavova, in her paper "Reading Liksom's Short Story 'We Got Married' in Post-communist Bulgaria," discusses the intricate interrelations of texts and social practices in postcommunist Bulgaria by analysing Rosa Liksom's short story read by sixty readers. Further, Slavova proposes the study of the uses of stereotypes in fiction and their discursive hardening in extratextual practices at times of radical political and cultural change. With this notion, she focuses on two major stereotypical patterns concerning gender and the supranational opposition East/West. Slavova argues that the latter function as palimpsest structures on which earlier bipolar representations from the communist Cold-War era …