Critical and Cultural Studies Commons^™

L’Aventure Du Discours Critique, Justin K. Bisanswa

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The text traces the course of African Literature’s critical adventure. For a long time, studies have been focused on African identity. The critic is often ethnologic, anthropological, cultural and attracted by exoticism. The critic is also attentive to everything that indicates the difference with occidental culture and without which the African text would only be an outline. There is also the frequent intrusion of empty concepts in African Literature criticism (for example : tradition, relatives, ethnic group, oral character, traditional religion, African rhythm, solidarity, communion between the living and the dead). From the criticism of humor and sources, to criticism …

Selected Bibliography Of Work About And Of Edward Said's Texts, Clare Callaghan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

From Plato To Derrida And Theories Of Play, Simona Livescu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "From Plato to Derrida and Theories of Play," Simona Livescu proposes a reevaluation of the concept of play. By examining various critical interpretations of this term from Greek antiquity to modern structuralists and poststructuralist theories, Livescu analyzes the common denominator in philosophical, cultural, and religious facets of the play. In her discussion, Livescu emphasizes the ultimate importance of the ludic presence in every fundamental human action. Among the conclusions of the paper, Livescu suggests that play exists as an essence of consciousness and that it is, actually, a way of being, not only a way of knowing. …

On Edward Said, Scholar And Public Intellectual, F. Elizabeth Dahab

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "On Edward Said, Scholar and Public Intellectual," F. Elizabeth Dahab pays tribute to Edward Said, 1935-2003. Dahab discusses selected aspects of Said's trajectories as a scholar and Palestinian-American activist including aspects of Said's numerous activities and work as a musician, an ardent political polemicist, a music critic, a Columbia University professor of comparative literature, a humanist, President of the Modern Language Association of America, and an exiled Palestinian as evident in the vast corpus of this eminent scholar's publications over the course of almost four decades (twenty-four books and hundreds of articles and interviews). Said's work elicited …

Cultures Of Populism And The Political Right In Central Europe, Patricia Chiantera-Stutte, Andrea Petö

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their paper, "Cultures of Populism and the Political Right in Central Europe," Patricia Chiantera-Stutte and Andrea Petö analyze the common points and differences in which imagined and mythologized histories are serving as a mobilizing force for extreme-right movements in three Central European countries, in Austria, Hungary, and Italy. The authors discuss how populist and right-wing political parties in these countries construct their conceptions of an alternative identity for the European Union. Further, the authors analyze the politico-territorial myths constructed by the three populist right-wing parties, the Freedom Party in Austria, the Northern League in Italy, and the Party of …

Dorian Gray, Tom Ripley, And The Queer Closet, Jonathan Alexander, Deborah Meem

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their paper, "Dorian Gray, Tom Ripley, and the Queer Closet," Jonathan Alexander and Deborah Meem present and portray an imaginary conversation among an impossible but intriguing group of writers, critics, and fictional characters. These individuals speak in their own (published) voices, which are moderated by the author-facilitators and shaped into an extended rumination on art, the Doppelgänger, queerness, and literary influence. Through their dialogue, the actors reveal a tradition of the queer novel, running in this case from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray to Patricia Highsmith's five Tom Ripley books, whereby the closet functions simultaneously as refuge …

Postcolonial African Consciousness And The Poetry Of Agostinho Neto, Irene Marques

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Postcolonial African Consciousness and the Poetry of Agostinho Neto," Irene Marques introduces the magic words of a great poet with the question: can poetry carry enough sorrow, enough strength, enough fire, enough love, enough wisdom, enough care, and enough horror to penetrate the hearts and the souls of the oppressed and the oppressors so that both will desperately want to escape their sinister labels? For Marques, this question represents an old quandary and one that many of us wish could be answered with a simple yes. Marques analyses Neto's poetry in the context of littérature engagé: if …

Comparative Literature Versus Comparative Cultural Studies, Tomo Virk

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Comparative Literature versus Comparative Cultural Studies," Tomo Virk discusses debates of the role, essence, and the future of comparative literature as it has developed since the 1995 publication of the Bernheimer Report. Virk explores the situation of the discipline in its North American context: "contextualists" argue for the abandoning of comparative literature understood as the study of literature with theoretical investigations of literariness while the "non-contextualists" underscore the study of the linguistic structure(s) of the text. Virk supports comparative literature understood as the traditional concentration of the discipline with focus on the specificities of literary questions while …

A Body Of Her Own: Cultural Constructions Of The Female Body In A.S. Byatt's Strange Stories, Sabine Coelsch-Foisner

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Byatt's short fiction, from her first collection Sugar and Other Stories (1987) to Elementals (1998) is marked by a continuous preoccupation with the body: the body as the product of social signifying practices, the body as the site of desires, fears, and anxieties, the body as the source of experience, the body as creator and created. In brief, the body is treated as the centre of existence, consciousness and identity. Yet, these are constantly called into doubt in Byatt's stories, which depict heroines trapped between asserting their identity and submitting to cultural dictates of beauty and behavior. In …

Ravers At The Bush: Generation Ecstasy Goes To The Theatre, William C. Boles

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Determining that seminal moment when a new theatrical movement comes to life has been one of the points of debate surrounding the challenging new plays and their talented, twenty something authors that have appeared on the British stage since the mid-1990s. Plays and authors like: Mojo (1995) by Jez Butterworth; Blasted (1995) by Sarah Kane; Closer (1997) by Patrick Marber; The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996) by Martin McDonagh; Butterfly Kiss (1994) by Phyllis Nagy; Love and Understanding (1997) by Joe Penhall; Essex Girls (1994) by Rebecca Prichard; Shopping and Fucking (1996) by Mark Ravenhill; and Ashes and …

Teaching In The Middle: An Ordinary Revolution, Davin Heckman, Patrick Vrooman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

We teach in the humanities. We teach encounters with the Other. And yet, what do we want from an encounter with the Other?

On Katherine Frank's G-Strings And Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars And Male Desire, Kristen Schilt

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Katherine Frank's book, G-Strings and Sympathy, provides an anthropological look into the fantasies of male strip club regulars in a Southern City she calls Laurelton. Turning the gaze onto the gazers, a group left unstudied in the majority of literature on sex work, Frank unpacks how trips to the strip club are closely linked with discourses about sexuality, consumption and masculinity. Through six years of participant observation at a variety of clubs in Laurelton and in-depth interviews with thirty self-professed strip club regulars, Frank delves into not only why these men attend strip clubs but how these visits …

New Orleans And Its Influence On The Work Of Lillian Hellman, Charlotte Headrick

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "New Orleans and Its Influence on the Work of Lillian Hellman," Charlotte Headrick explores playwright Lillian Hellman's life and work. Headrick proposes that Hellman was indelibly shaped by her years in the city of New Orleans. In her early childhood, Hellman would spend half a year in New York and half a year in New Orleans, home to her parents. Despite this seemingly schizophrenic upbringing, she considered herself a Southerner to the end of her days and, in fact, defined herself less by her Jewishness than by her "Southernness." Hellman's plays and memoirs are peppered with references …

Selected Bibliography Of Work In Cultural Studies And Us-American Popular Culture, Marta Guirao, Benton Jay Komins

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Holy Fools, Secular Saints, And Illiterate Saviors In American Literature And Popular Culture, Dana Heller

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Holy Fools, Secular Saints, and Illiterate Saviors in American Literature and Popular Culture," Dana Heller identifies and analyzes characteristics of the holy fool figure in American literature and culture. Heller defines the holy fool, or divine idiot, as a figure central to U.S. myths of nation. One encounters such figures in American literature as well as in American folklore, popular culture, and mass media. In American culture, the Divine Idiot is a hybrid form which grows out of the crossings of numerous literary and historical currents, both secular and non-secular. This unwieldy hybridity -- the fact that …

An Introduction To Comparative Cultural Studies And Popular Culture, Benton Jay Komins

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Qu(E)Erying Comic Book Culture And Representations Of Sexuality In Wonder Woman, Brian Mitchell Peters

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Qu(e)erying Comic Book Culture and Representations of Sexuality in Wonder Woman," Brian Mitchell Peters proposes that youth culture is responsible for an arbitrary yet highly structured appropriation of what we can call high-contemporary culture. Hence, notions of pop-culture take from the past and use the present to create a highly fluid now, capable of transcending its present moment in a stereotypical fifteen minutes of fame. Part of twentieth-century pop-culture phenomena is the evolution of the comic book. The comic, in its habitual split of binaries, creates a space where young people have tapped consistently into queer themes. …

Heidegger, The Erotics Of Ontology, And The Mass-Market Romance, Deborah Lutz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Heidegger, the Erotics of Ontology, and the Mass-Market Romance," Deborah Lutz explores a particular formula of mass-market romance -- the dangerous lover or "sweet savage" one -- as an allegory for Heidegger's theories of nearness and being-toward-an-end in Being and Time. The postponements, secrets, and failed presence of the final immanence of love in these narratives allegorize the flight and entanglement of Dasein in the everyday. The romance's narrative movement as always in relationship with its end -- the full presence of love -- and its structure of being always ahead of itself, mirrors the narrativity of …

Symbolism, Popular Drama, And Politics And Art In Belgium, 1886-1910, Joan Gross

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Symbolism, Popular Drama, and Politics and Arts in Belgium, 1886-1910," Joan Gross examines what effects the reign of terror in the Congo and the silence that masked it might have had on popular performance traditions and literary practices in Belgium. Gross examines a popular puppet play by Léopold Leloup and an essay by Maurice Maeterlinck, both of which are called The Massacre of the Innocents. The third text she explores is a parliamentary speech given by Émile Vandervelde in 1903 in which he protested brutal practices in the Congo. Gross explores the interconnections between these three disparate …

时尚报刊、广告与当代中国消费意识形态, Qili Lei

Lingnan Theses

本论文针对 1990 年代以来中国社会在经济文化方面的巨大改变，归纳并指出一种新的“消费意识形态”在中国业已历史地形成并取代日渐式微的传统 意识形态，成为宰制当代中国社会的主导力量。论文批判地回顾了1949 年以后中国大陆语境中意识形态涵义的历史嬗变，以四个具有典型意义的时尚报刊和广告案例、广告事件为例，从不同侧面解析了广告形象以及广告产业如何作为 中介与以时尚报刊为代表的文化工业一起，参与当代中国“消费意识形态”建 构的社会过程。

论文通过对“消费意识形态”所遮蔽的当代中国社会问题的揭示，对“消费意识形态”在当代中国社会发生影响的深度和广度的阐释，回应了九十年代以来在中国思想界有较大影响的“后六·四”文化论争中的一些重要问题，展现了文化研究在中国大陆介入现实社会思考和批判的可能空间。

經典製造 : 金庸研究的文化政治, Shuo Chen

Lingnan Theses (MPhil & PhD)

金庸自一九五五年在新晚報開始連載第一篇武俠小說《書劍恩仇錄》，至一 九七○年封筆作《鹿鼎記》，共創作了十五部小說。這十五部小說在華人世界中 歷久不衰，更引起不少討論。一九八四年，台灣遠景出版社出版了一系列「金 學研究叢書」，「金學」一詞正式出現。最初，討論金庸作品都以短小的筆記型 文章為主，集中在閱讀金著的感受、討論書中情節和人物等。一九八○年代末 開始，「金學」己成為學術界的熱門研究課題，有大學更主辦「金庸小說學術研 討會」，與會者多為享負盛名的學者，最近更出現了所謂「金庸學」(Jinyonology) 一詞。「金學研究集」發行人王榮文認為金庸「極有可能在有生之年看到其作品 「經典化」的完成，這真是古今中外作家們少有的幸運」。王德威在《金庸小說 國際學術研討會論文集》的序言中亦提到：「本書的出版，無疑為金庸作品經典 化發展，再下一城。」

這情況在當代華文創作圈中非常罕有，實在是一個值得深思的文化現象。 金庸小說能發展到現在成為「經典」，內在原因當然是其小說本身的確是不可多 得的好作品。然而，這並不是唯一，甚至不是最重要的原因，外在的文化脈絡 因素發揮的作用更大。作為作者，金庸花了很大心力把自己的小說包裝成「經 典文學」呈現在讀者面前；另外，經過中國大陸、香港和台灣的學術界和文化 界不斷討論，金庸小說終於成為「經典」。然而，由於三地的政治文化環境不同， 金庸小說的經典化在中港台所經歷的道路也有很大差異。本論文的研究目的， 首先是分析金庸如何為其小說製造出一個「經典」形象，再進一步對金庸小說 不同的經典化過程作一疏理，從而探討其間三地在金學研究現象中所包涵的文 化政治意義。

The Phenomenology Of Büchner's Woyzeck: Historical And Critical Problems In The Ongoing Adaptation, Jonathan W. Myers

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Georg BUchner is considered by many to be the father of 20th century drama, despite his death in 1837 at the young age of 23. His legacy is visible in any contemporary survey of the history of theater. The origins of the styles and techniques of Naturalism, Expressionism, Theater of the Absurd, Existential Drama, Theater of Alienation, Theater of Cruelty, Socialist theatre, and documentary drama may all be feasibly traced to BUchner's own innovative themes and playwriting techniques. His final manuscript Woyzeck remained incomplete at his death, leaving what would become a dramaturgical puzzle for the theater scholars of each …

Press Controls In Wartime: The Legal, Historical, And Institutional Context, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

News coverage of warfare poses a dilemma for social systems with a free press, such as the United States. In an era of high-tech weaponry and nearly instantaneous global communications, conflict is inevitable between the obligation of the press to inform the general public and the obligation of the military to successfully conduct war. The importance of secrecy to the conduct of warfare heightens the issue in the current counterterrorism operations. The competitive advantage of live coverage raises the stakes in a crowded media market. The military’s control over newsgathering during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War set off a controversy …

Solutions/Fixations: A Transformation, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First two paragraphs]

As I write from the heartland, in a small rural town in Northwest Ohio, the world, with the help of my government, is undergoing a process of reorganization.

This has been going on for some time. Media and its various material incarnations have stumbled around the world and back, layering it with new meanings, creating new sites of production. Rays of feedback, echoes, have coated the world with a many-layered web of meaning.

The Electronic Polis: Media Democracy And The Invasion Of Iraq, Jeff Lewis, Kirsty Best

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The American-led victory in Baghdad was announced to the world with scenes of Iraqi citizens dragging down the statues of the deposed tyrant. Like the spectacle of World Cup Soccer or the Olympic Games, the image was transmitted live through the global media network to the billions of people who had been closely watching the three week invasion. President Bush shared in the celebration, announcing the dawn of a new age for freedom and democracy in the Middle East. This new democracy, the president proclaimed, would bring stability and prosperity to the region through the obliteration of terrorism …

Stuffed Animals And The Predicament Of Culture: Lost In The Bedroom Jungle, Walter Putnam

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

These preachings are from the gospel according to Reverend Billy, spiritual leader of the Church of Stop Shopping (qtd. in Kalb). For several years, Reverend Billy has been waging a guerilla war in Lower Manhattan against the likes of Starbucks and Disney, including agit-prop performances where he brandishes stuffed animals atop tall poles like skulls adorning savage palisades. His inversion and subversion of these multivalent emblems of consumer culture reinforce the anti-consumer message he delivers in our era of late capitalism and globalization. His conspicuous utilization of stuffed animals highlights the manner in which these ubiquitous and inconspicuous …

The Cia World Factbook: Marriage Of Archive And Empire?, Jack Shuler

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

A recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art cites the production of textiles as integral in establishing the power of the Mongol empire. In the accompanying notes to the exhibit, the museum curators write that, In the creation of luxury textiles and objects for the Mongol elite, Chinese artists developed a visual language that was an effective means of establishing their rule and continuous presence throughout the vast empire. These artists used certain motifs such as the dragon and phoenix, to create tangible representations of power. The mythical beasts integrated the ideas of cosmic force, earthly strength, …

Review Of Writing Back: Sylvia Plath And Cold War Politics, By Alan Clinton, Alan Clinton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Review Of Mapping Tourism, By Stephen P. Hanna And Vincent J. Del Casino, Jr., Alexandra Ganser

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Homeland (In)Security : Roots And Displacement, From New York, To Toronto, To Salt Lake City, Marusya Bociurkiw

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

On September 11, 2001, broadcast and print media around the world narrated the destruction of New York City's World Trade Center and the deaths of thousands of its occupants. This paper will examine the ways in which television and its appendages (the telephone, the internet, the newspaper) operated to organize the discursive meanings of this traumatic event. I will propose that between September 11 and February 2002's Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah, ideas about home, roots and rootedness (and their Others: foreignness, homelessness, nomadicism) operated as a discursive mapping of that which could otherwise not be …