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Full-Text Articles in Critical and Cultural Studies
The Memoir And Representations Of The Self: New Books By Vlasopolos And Picard, Ralph Freedman
The Memoir And Representations Of The Self: New Books By Vlasopolos And Picard, Ralph Freedman
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Investigative Spaces In The Poetry Of Pierre Reverdy, Jules Supervielle, And Henri Michaux, Hugo Azérad
Investigative Spaces In The Poetry Of Pierre Reverdy, Jules Supervielle, And Henri Michaux, Hugo Azérad
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his paper, "Investigative Spaces in the Poetry of Pierre Reverdy, Jules Supervielle, and Henri Michaux," Hugo Azérad revisits the notion of poetic space and tries to re-examine it in a novel light. In so doing, Azérad re-adapts phenomenology, which tells us that space outreaches itself in the shape of an horizon of perception. But can we posit a space which would progressively do away with perceiver and perceived alike, a space which poetry (art?) can help establish? Azérad attempts to approach poetic space as if it were a utopian place of encounter, different from the physical or psychological dimensions …
The Latin American Innovative Novel Of The 1920s: A Comparative Reassessment, Elizabeth Coonrod Martínez
The Latin American Innovative Novel Of The 1920s: A Comparative Reassessment, Elizabeth Coonrod Martínez
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her paper, "The Latin American Innovative Novel of the 1920s: A Comparative Reassessment," Elizabeth Coonrod Martínez examines four early twentieth-century novels from four different Latin American countries. Coonrod Martínez pays particular attention to their innovation and rebellious breaking with tradition in the attempt to create new narrative. The paper includes comparisons of Arqueles Vela, Roberto Arlt, Martín Adán, and Pablo Palacio, and their novels of the 1920s, with works by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, Upton Sinclair, Ernest Hemingway, and Ezra Pound. In the paper, Coonrod Martínez also compares these early novels to celebrated novels of the …
The Villain At The Center: Infrapolitical Borges, Alberto Moreiras
The Villain At The Center: Infrapolitical Borges, Alberto Moreiras
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In "The Villain at the Center: Infrapolitical Borges," Alberto Moreiras revisits the Argentinian ideology of "emancipation of the fatherland" on the basis of a re-reading of Jorge Luis Borges's short-story "The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero." Moreiras begins by referring to Paul de Man's comment that Borges's essays were like PMLA essays. Moreiras suggests that, concerning essays, the more deceptive the more honest and less devious they are; and, therefore, the less devious the more devious. He then considers this notion as he surveys recent work on "The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero" by Josefina Ludmer, …
Anxieties Of Impotence: Cuban Americas In New York City, Christina Marie Tourino
Anxieties Of Impotence: Cuban Americas In New York City, Christina Marie Tourino
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her paper, "Anxieties of Impotence: Cuban Americas in New York City, " Christina Marie Tourino seeks a basis for comparison between Latin American literatures and Latino literatures of the United States. Such groups have rarely been compared in the past because they are considered part of the same literary "family." However, Tourino argues that owing to the flows of capital driven by global pressures, literatures between and among Latin Americans and Latinos hail from such culturally heterogeneous sites and are made over by so many relocations that they do call for comparative projects. Instead of comparing texts across national …
Latin American And Comparative Literature, Roberto González Echevarría
Latin American And Comparative Literature, Roberto González Echevarría
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his paper, "Latin American and Comparative Literature," Roberto González Echevarría asks whether comparative literature, a literary discipline dedicated to the proposition that linguistic boundaries must be transcended, can overcome the "cultural arrogance" of the "Eurocentrism" that he believes pervades it currently. González Echevarría argues that if it is to endure, comparative literature will have to undergo "a truly pitiless redefinition," one that effectively displaces "the hegemonic powers of nineteenth-century Europe" and that Latin American literature, by the nature of its historical development on the margins of these "hegemonic" texts and traditions, could -- and should -- play a central …
First Peoples Of The Americas And Their Literature, Gordon Brotherston, Lúcia De Sá
First Peoples Of The Americas And Their Literature, Gordon Brotherston, Lúcia De Sá
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In their paper, "First Peoples of the Americas and Their Literature," Gordon Brotherston and Lúcia de Sá turn their attention to the indigenous literature of the Americas. They point out that concerted attempts to edit, translate, and publish the main examples or "classics" of Native American literature began little more than a century ago. Since that time, more than a dozen major cosmogonies have appeared, some of them in editions, which seriously attempt to trace back to pre-Cortesian antecedents. Outlining key classics and the ways that these texts have been disseminated, Brotherston and Sá elaborate on how this rich tradition …
Spanish American And Brazilian Literature In Inter-American Perspective: The Comparative Approach, Earl E. Fitz
Spanish American And Brazilian Literature In Inter-American Perspective: The Comparative Approach, Earl E. Fitz
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Querying Komparatistik: Recent Books By Corbineau-Hoffmann, Konstantinovic, And O'Sullivan, Wendy C. Nielsen
Querying Komparatistik: Recent Books By Corbineau-Hoffmann, Konstantinovic, And O'Sullivan, Wendy C. Nielsen
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Comparative Literature As A Messenger Of Diversity: New Books By Cassola, Durisin And Gnisci, And Kushner And Pageaux, Nicoletta Pireddu
Comparative Literature As A Messenger Of Diversity: New Books By Cassola, Durisin And Gnisci, And Kushner And Pageaux, Nicoletta Pireddu
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Ezra Pound's Comparative Poetics, Naikan Tao
Ezra Pound's Comparative Poetics, Naikan Tao
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his paper, "Ezra Pound's Comparative Poetics," Naikan Tao concentrates on Pound's theories regarding comparison and examines the significance of his comparative studies to the formulation of his poetics, an aspect that has not been sufficiently investigated. On the basis of Pound's work, Tao observes that the conception of comparison Pound shaped through his comparative studies is the internal principle that governs the presentation of details and particulars, the method Pound advocated as a reader-oriented approach to truth and as an efficient, self-reliant means to avoid others' generalization and discursive presentation. Pound's view of comparison as an epistemological norm -- …
A Psychological Outline Of "Yerma's Dream", Antonio Fusco, Rosella Tomassoni
A Psychological Outline Of "Yerma's Dream", Antonio Fusco, Rosella Tomassoni
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In their article "A Psychological Outline of 'Yerma's Dream'" Fusco and Tomassoni examine the world of Lorca in his play. Fusco and Tomassoni present an examination of the psychological characteristics of this world, and focus their attention upon a dream of one its female protagonists. Yerma is observed to be a heroine of "sterility" -- or rather, the heroine of an impossibility to love. The heroics of this impossibility is interpreted according to the social constraints made upon women within a male dominated society. These constraints are said to surface symptomatically within her own dream world -- as a heroine …
On The Comparison Of Interliterary Configurations, Armin Paul Frank
On The Comparison Of Interliterary Configurations, Armin Paul Frank
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "On the Comparison of Interliterary Configurations," Armin Paul Frank proposes to draw conceptual and methodological conclusions from what comparatists know but do not always act upon, namely that comparison is essential to an understanding of literature because most authors of primary literature write comparatistically. They inscribe in their texts similarities or differences or both to extant international (and national) texts and sources. This is how literary meaning is produced, this is how status is implicitly but effectively ascribed to works, authors, and literatures, and thus resulting in (inter)cultural work including the enriching of a national literature. From …
Vargas Llosa's La Ciudad Y Los Perros And The European Novel Of Adolescence, John Neubauer
Vargas Llosa's La Ciudad Y Los Perros And The European Novel Of Adolescence, John Neubauer
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his paper, "Vargas Llosa's La Ciudad y los perros and the European Novel of Adolescence," John Neubauer investigates Mario Vargas Llosa's 1962 novel about cadets in a military school located just outside of Lima, Peru. The life of a gang (the dogs) in the city and on the premises is described from constantly changing perspectives. Neubauer's article looks at Vargas Llosa's work in terms of features one finds in narratives about adolescents in European literatures around 1900 and where these texts can be read with three main foci found in them. Thematically, the texts focus on the city and …
From Redskin To Redneck: Atrocity And Revenge In American Writing, Terence Martin
From Redskin To Redneck: Atrocity And Revenge In American Writing, Terence Martin
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "From Redskin to Redneck: Atrocity and Revenge in American Writing," Terence Martin argues that one of the basic narrative patterns in American writing is that of revenge for the violation of innocence. Martin explores in his study Robert Montgomery Bird's Nick of the Woods, Brian Garfield's Death Wish, and John Grisham's A Time to Kill, texts in which ambiguities of the pattern are expressed in a dramatic and disquieting fashion. After brutality to innocent victims precipitates the action, each of these novels identifies predators and revenge figures and thus sets in motion an escalating spectacle of retribution. …
El Gran Viejo: Walt Whitman In Latin America, Josef Raab
El Gran Viejo: Walt Whitman In Latin America, Josef Raab
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "El gran viejo: Walt Whitman in Latin America," Josef Raab examines the role and relevance of Walt Whitman within Latin American poetry. It is observed that since the publication of José Martí's essay of 1887, "El Poeta Walt Whitman," Whitman has been a prominent figure in the literary imagination of Latin America. While Martí lauded Whitman as a prophet, his reception in the Americas is far from homogeneous, however. Raab's study addresses ways in which some of the more prominent Latin American poets -- José Martí, Rubén Darío, Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Vinícius de Moraes, Jorge Luis …
Globalization And Conferencing Comparative Literature In Egypt And Slovenia, Babis Dermitzakis
Globalization And Conferencing Comparative Literature In Egypt And Slovenia, Babis Dermitzakis
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Globalization and Conferencing Comparative Literature in Egypt and Slovenia," Babis Dermitzakis discusses two recent conferences in the discipline of comparative literature. The former conference was held on the topic of literary criticism in Cairo and the latter on the genre of the romantic epic poem in Ljubljana. The implicit and explicit objective of both conferences was to discuss as well as to demonstrate a stand against globalization with specific reference to culture and literature. The conference participants as much as the organizers intended to show that cultures and countries peripheral to economic, political, and cultural centres -- …
Testimonial Poetry In East European Post-Totalitarian Literature, Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva
Testimonial Poetry In East European Post-Totalitarian Literature, Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, "Testimonial Poetry in East European Post-Totalitarian Literature," Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva reexamines the belief that postmodern literature and deconstructive writing have parted literary and theoretical discourse from reality, thereby obstructing and annihilating our access to history. Lutzkanova-Vassileva exemplifies her prognosis in an inquiry into post-totalitarian and postmodern Bulgarian literature and its texts of poetry. Born in the turmoil of communism's debacle, the analysis is an attempt to illustrate that, contrary to denying reference, postmodernism solely rejects the reduction of reference to a world that is perceptible and cognitively masterable. Rethinking what many have seen as a self-referential literature, with …
Memory And The Quest For Family History In One Hundred Years Of Solitude And Song Of Solomon, Susana Vega-González
Memory And The Quest For Family History In One Hundred Years Of Solitude And Song Of Solomon, Susana Vega-González
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, "Memory and the Quest for Family History in One Hundred Years of Solitude and Song of Solomon," Susana Vega-González explores similarities between the novels of García Márquez and Morrison with a special focus on the use of memory and imagination. Based on theoretical models, Vega-Gonzálezas proposes that fictional representations are a means of rewriting history, a particular aspect of literay discourse. The texts under scrutiny constitute true quest stories of characters who search for their family history along their own identity amidst the dangers of capitalism and its excessive desire for progress and class ascendance. The break …
Comparative Literature In China, Xiaoyi Zhou, Q. S. Tong
Comparative Literature In China, Xiaoyi Zhou, Q. S. Tong
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In their co-authored article, "Comparative Literature in China," Xiaoyi Zhou and Q.S. Tong present a brief intellectual and institutional history of the discipline. According to Zhou and Tong, main features of the history of comparative literature in China include the fact that as an academic discipline and a mode of intellectual inquiry imported to China from the West in the early twentieth century, the discpline has always been a priori strategically political and the proposition that the development of comparative literature in China is closely related to the formation of China’s literary modernity includes the parallel issue of national identity. …
Concepts Of World Literature, Comparative Literature, And A Proposal, Marián Gálik
Concepts Of World Literature, Comparative Literature, And A Proposal, Marián Gálik
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Concepts of World Literature, Comparative Literature, and a Proposal," Marián Gálik surveys the concept of world literature as it occurs within comparative literature based on Goethe's Weltliteratur. Given its recurrent yet problematic occurrence, he proposes a way in which comparatists can acknowledge and address the problems of the concept of a world literature. The concept is surveyed across various texts and studies and is mapped out in accordance with the ways in which it has been defined and discussed. The picture that emerges is the problem of national delimitations within the context of an international setting. Gálik …
Comparative Literature In India, Amiya Dev
Comparative Literature In India, Amiya Dev
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Comparative Literature in India," Amiya Dev bases his discussion on the fact that India has many languages and literatures thus representing an a priori situation and conditions of diversity. He therefore argues that to speak of an Indian literature in the singular is problematic. Nonetheless, Dev also observes that to speak of Indian literature in the plural is equally problematic. Such a characterization, he urges, either overlooks or obscures manifest interrelations and affinities. His article compares the unity and the diversity thesis, and identifies the relationship between Indian commonality and differences as the prime site of comparative …
Comparative Literature In Slovenia, Kristof Jacek Kozak
Comparative Literature In Slovenia, Kristof Jacek Kozak
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Comparative Literature in Slovenia," Kristof Jacek Kozak provides a historical overview of the practice of theory in the discipline of comparative literature in Slovenia. Despite its small size and relative low profile, Slovenia is taken as an exemplar within comparative literature scholarship. Kozak observes that the development of comparative literature in Slovenia may be characterized by an attempt to both arbitrate and mediate between distinct poles. On the one hand, Slovenian scholarship has felt the need to secure or determine itself in accordance with its own interests and concerns. On the other hand, it has recognized the …
Comparative Literature In The United States, Manuela Mourão
Comparative Literature In The United States, Manuela Mourão
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, "Comparative Literature in the United States," Manuela Mourão offers a historical overview of the debates about comparative literature as a discipline, from the early years of its institutionalization in the United States until the present. Mourão summarizes the most pointed -- and anxious -- interventions of prominent scholars in the field and she discusses the permanent sense of crisis that has typically been part of the discipline. Further, Mourão links the permanent anxiety of the discipline with the prescriptive tendencies that have continued to endure until the present. She then looks at the debates that followed the …
Comparative Literature And The Ideology Of Metaphor, East And West, Karl S.Y. Kao
Comparative Literature And The Ideology Of Metaphor, East And West, Karl S.Y. Kao
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Comparative Literature and the Ideology of Metaphor, East and West," Karl S.Y. Kao offers a comparative reading of the ideological function of metaphor within Eastern and Western thinking. Nietzsche is recognized as the earliest serious challenger to the concepts of meaning and truth within the West, whilst Derrida and de Man are discussed with respect to their conception that figurality is inherent within -- and integral to -- Western philosophical and literary discourse. Parallel to this conception of conceptuality is the Eastern view of language and literature. Kao notes that the Western opposition between logic and rhetoric …
The Goethean Concept Of World Literature And Comparative Literature, Hendrik Birus
The Goethean Concept Of World Literature And Comparative Literature, Hendrik Birus
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "The Goethean Concept of World Literature and Comparative Literature," Hendrik Birus presents a new reading and understanding of Goethe's famous dictum: "National literature does not mean much at present, it is time for the era of world literature and everybody must endeavour to accelerate this epoch" (Eckermann 198, 31 January 1827). According to Birus, this dictum is not to be taken at face value today and argues that Goethe's concept of world literature ought to be understood in the sense that today it is not the replacement of national literatures by world literature we encounter; rather, it …
Interliterariness As A Concept In Comparative Literature, Marián Gálik
Interliterariness As A Concept In Comparative Literature, Marián Gálik
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Interliterariness as a Concept in Comparative Literature," Marián Gálik observes that the concept of interliterariness has a relative short history and limited application owing to geo-political reasons. He traces the history of the concept and cites instances of its use within the Central European scholarship of comparative literature. Dionýz Durišin is identified as the most prominent exponent of the concept and Gálik then locates the question of interliterariness within the context of its potential applications. The concept of interliterariness is defended as both a guiding and unifying principle in so far as it is irreducible, relative, and …
Comparative Literature As Textual Anthropology, Antony Tatlow
Comparative Literature As Textual Anthropology, Antony Tatlow
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Comparative Literature as Textual Anthropology," Antony Tatlow proposes textual anthropology as a critic's approach in the comparative study of literature. If anthropology is "behavioural hermeneutics" (Clifford Geertz) with the implication of self-reflexivity, the anthropologist will be disposed to fashion in the object of attention what is neglected and that can therefore be described as the unconscious of his/her own culture. In an application of his framework, Tatlow relates totemic and utopian thought through the use of animal signs. In his article, Tatlow shows how cultural demands both fashion the ethnographer-critic and select the perspectives he/she must transcend. …
Is Comparative Literature Ready For The Twenty-First Century?, Eva Kushner
Is Comparative Literature Ready For The Twenty-First Century?, Eva Kushner
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, "Is Comparative Literature Ready for the Twenty-First Century?" Eva Kushner observes that throughout its history, comparative literature has internalized as part of its own objectives and directives a major challenge: The need to renew its problematics and curriculums in response to the inherent diversity of literature within culture. She emphasizes that the vitality of the discipline depends on an authentic pluralism capable of resisting the dominance of unanalyzed hierarchies and universals. Acknowledging that the entire history of world literature remains the potential material of comparative literature studies, Kushner favours an "open system" approach. The concept of an …
The Advantages Of Critical And Systematic Literary Taxonomies: A Review Article Of New Work By Cerquiglini, Juvan, And Zima, Kristof Jacek Kozak
The Advantages Of Critical And Systematic Literary Taxonomies: A Review Article Of New Work By Cerquiglini, Juvan, And Zima, Kristof Jacek Kozak
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.