Critical and Cultural Studies Commons^™

Death And Love In Poe's And Schwob's Readings Of The Classics, Ana González-Rivas Fernández, Francisco García Jurado

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Death and Love in Poe's and Schwob's Readings of the Classics," Ana González-Rivas Fernández and Francisco García Jurado propose that although Gothic literature usually relegates the theme of love to the background, devoting most of its attention to the supernatural and to darkness, there are also literary texts in which love is mixed with life beyond the grave. This is the case, for example, of Théophile Gautier's La Morte amoureuse (1836), the story of a vampire who comes back to life in her "undead" condition in order to seduce a priest. The theme of love and death …

Fostering Critical Thinking And Intercultural Understanding: Canada’S Contribution To Media Literacy, Brian O'Neill

Other resources

No abstract provided.

Hiv/Aids: An Opportunistic Infection Of Globalization?, David H. Lee

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Cinematic Jujitsu: Resisting White Hegemony Through The American Dream In Spike Lee’S Malcolm X, Kristen Hoerl

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X (1992) presented Malcolm X’s life story using the narrative framework of the American Dream myth central to liberal ideology. Working from Gramsci’s notion of common sense in the process of hegemony, I explain how Lee appealed to this mythic structure underlying American popular culture to give a platform to Malcolm X’s controversial ideas. By adopting a common sense narrative to tell Malcolm X’s life story, this movie functioned as a form of cinematic jujitsu that invited critical consciousness about the contradictions between liberal ideology and the life experiences of racially excluded groups. Other formal devices …

“I Hope You Never See Another Day Like This”: Pedagogy & Allegory In “Post 9/11” Video Games, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Although critics and scholars have considered the extent to which the terror attacks of 11 Sept. 2001 influenced subsequent media productions, video games comprise a largely unexamined form. This oversight also applies to related forms of media production and among those who study video games is in part attributable to the ongoing debate regarding the relationship(s) between narrative and play. Even so, as early as 1997, JC Herz was investigating the role of video games in the military-entertainment complex. That said, the focus of this paper will not be the obvious games which draw settings and plots directly from the …

Geographies Of Nation And Region In Modern European And American Fiction, Thomas O. Beebee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Geographies of Nation and Region in Modern European and American Fiction" Thomas O. Beebee proposes that beyond using character, plot, and style, modern fiction also has entertained its readers with mental maps of heterotopias. A mental map is an imaginative representation of place derived from experience or story. Following Michel Foucault, heterotopia is defined as an "other space" both familiar as and different from the real. The "imagined communities" (Anderson) of nation and region are themselves heterotopias that receive confirmation and/or contestation through the discursive territoriality of literary prose. The mental maps of literature participate in the …

Towards A Cultural Framework Of Audience Response And Television Violence, Lajos Császi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "Towards a Cultural Framework of Audience Response and Television Violence" Lajos Császi argues that media violence is not a reification of social violence; rather, a popular ritual allowing contemporary societies to sublimate, to substitute, and to discuss aggression in the public sphere. Császi reviews the central questions of contemporary debates about television violence including Stuart Hall's thought on this topic and introduces the ideas of Elias, Geertz, Turner, Bettelheim, Benjamin, Girard, and others in order to locate the representation of violence in an interdisciplinary context. Using the genre of the horror film as an example, Császi suggests …

Patriarchy In Post-1989 Poland And Tokarczuk's Dom Dzienny, Dom Nocny (The Day House, The Night House), Justyna Sempruch

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "Patriarchy in Post-1989 Poland and Tokarczuk's Dom Dzienny, Dom Nocny (The Day House, the Night House)" Justyna Sempruch analyzes Tokarczuk's 1998 narrative in the context of the post-communist revival of patriarchy in Poland as well as the parallel Western feminist impact on women's writing in Poland. These two distinct socio-cultural developments, as reflected in Tokarczuk's novel, expand the concept of a subversive household into a transnational dis/order that abolishes borders between domestic (national) and foreign structures: an increasing masculinization of the power structures (political arena and "scientific" practices) impacts the management of the social and the most …

Audience, Sentimental Postmodernism, And Kiss Of The Spider Woman, Kimberly Chabot Davis

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Audience, Sentimental Postmodernism, and Kiss of the Spider Woman" Kimberly Chabot Davis analyzes the three media forms of Kiss of the Spider Woman -- novel, film, and musical -- and their reception by gay, bisexual, and heterosexual fans: Davis reads Kiss as a key example of a hybrid contemporary genre she designates as "sentimental postmodernism." Chabot Davis positions the text's dialogic negotiation between the popular and the postmodern in relation to the critical discourse of camp, as a form of sentimentality-cum-irony. Manuel Puig's novel offers a powerful rebuttal to the Frankfurt School's dismissal of sentimental mass culture …

Towards A History Of Intertextuality In Literary And Culture Studies, Marko Juvan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "Towards a History of Intertextuality in Literary and Culture Studies" Marko Juvan argues that the theory of intertextuality reshaped fundamentally the understanding of influence in literature. It showed that supposedly primary sources are themselves but intertextual transformations dependent on cultural "encyclopedia." Intertextuality as a framework offers a refined terminology of forms and functions of both domestic and foreign literatures' creative reception while respecting specific linguistic and cultural spaces, traditions, and literary systems. It deconstructed the postulates of influence; for example, the concepts of author, the logic of cause and effect, and boundaries between texts. It revealed the …

Transnational Book Markets And Literary Reception In The Americas, Molly Metherd

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "Transnational Book Markets and Literary Reception in the Americas," Molly Metherd argues that the most diffuse products of transnational cultural production in the Americas come from mass media productions packaged for transnational audiences -- i.e., Hollywood films, television shows, popular magazines, product advertisements -- and that tend to homogenize messages, promote stereotypes, and simplify complex issues. However, another effort to make sense of shifting relationships in the Americas is coming from a group of US-American and Spanish American literary figures. In their fiction, criticism, journalistic work, and public statements, such authors have been responding to the covalence …

A Moral Reading Of Mahfouz's Fountain And Tomb (Hekayat Haretna), Amal Al-Leithy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "A Moral Reading of Mahfouz's Fountain and Tomb (Hekayat Haretna)," Amal Al-Leithy analyses Naguib Mahfouz's Fountain and Tomb. In Al-Leithy's reading, Mahfouz delineates a gloomy picture of modern humanity still living in a struggle against destitution, ignorance, squalor, and the power of superstition. Society is portrayed as seeped in hopelessness as Mahfouz stresses the physical and moral degradation of his protagonists. He draws a dismal picture of life as swinging between two poles: the fountain of life and the tomb of death. In a symbolic alley in 1920s Cairo, Mahfouz describes humanity's predicament swaying between meaningfulness and …

Myth And Power Structures In Sartre's Les Mouches And La Putain Respectueuse, Martha Evans Smith

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "Myth and Power Structures in Sartre's Les Mouches and La Putain respectueuse," Martha Evans Smith analyses Sartre's plays with regard to the relationship of the individual with the collective, the purportedly self-determinate part of an apparently universalizing whole. Seeming to illustrate an enactment of freedom and an absence thereof, the disparate outcomes of the hierarchies in the plays impose a success/failure paradigm on the concomitant reading of the two plays. Evans Smith argues that these issues in the plays read with regard to structures of classical mythology and racism in the US-American South demonstrate the close relationship …

Translating And (Re)Creating (Cultural) Identities: A Review Article Of New Work By López Sáenz And Penas Ibáñez And Vidal Claramonte, Nuria Brufau Alvira

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

About The Literatures Of The Americas: A Review Article Of New Work By Castillo And Mcclennen, Deborah N. Cohn

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Martin Luther: Perceptions Of The Reformer In Popular Culture And Historical Scholarship, Kathryn R. Cross

History Theses & Dissertations

Martin Luther's remarkable life, his impressive body of written work, his dynamic and charismatic personality, and his impact on the world have long been a source of interest in the world of academia and of popular culture. This thesis examines the affect of the scholarly historical research of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries regarding Luther and its affect on perception of the reformer in popular culture as presented by the media.

The opening section of the thesis presents an examination and evaluation of Lutheran scholarship and how historical trends have affected the reformer's image in the academic world. Documents …

An Assessment Of Local People’S Opinions Of Community Conservation Initiatives In Relation To Livelihood Strategies In Kenya, Jill Mechtenberg

Department of Environmental Studies: Undergraduate Student Theses

Abstract This paper analyzed the changing livelihood strategies in Kenya, and their cultural impacts via a literature review. I then combined this understanding with the data I collected while in Kenya to examine the opinions local people have of community conservation initiatives, based on their changing livelihood strategies. I expected to find that the following factors would have an affect on the opinions local community members have of community conservation initiatives: livelihood strategy, gender, ethnicity, whether or not they believe the distribution of benefits coming from wildlife conservation is equitable, what issues they would like to see improved within community …

A Social Relations Model Of Everyday Talk And Relational Satisfaction In Stepfamilies, Paul Schrodt, Jordan Soliz, Dawn O. Braithwaite

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This study examined the intrapersonal and interpersonal mechanisms underlying reported frequencies of everyday talk and relational satisfaction in stepfamilies. Participants included a parent, stepparent, and child from 114 stepfamilies (N = 342) from the Midwest and Southwest regions of the United States. Social relations model analyses revealed that everyday talk and relational satisfaction vary across stepfamily relationships as a function primarily of actor and relationship effects. Stepparents’ reports of everyday talk with the parent (i.e., their spouse) varied primarily as a function of actor effects, whereas reports of both children’s and parents’ satisfaction with the stepparent varied primarily as a …

Agenda Setting Of Arabic Related Content On German Tv: A Content Analysis On Deutsche Welle Tv Arabia, Nadine Abdel Latif Rashwan

Archived Theses and Dissertations

In today's media, international broadcasting is a tool to communicate with a world wide audience. Most of the networks, especially those that are linked with their country's government, try to use their international channels to deliver national policy or want to convey certain important factors of their home culture to nations all over the world e.g. language.

The question of broadcast content is a very controversial issue. That is why in this thesis the researcher has focused on the content of the German TV network Deutsche Welle TV Arabia in order to analyze what kind topics the channel focuses on …

Narrative Politics In Historical Fictions For Children, John Streamas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "Narrative Politics in Historical Fictions for Children," John Streamas points out that narrative theory and ethnic studies need to ask each other basic questions before a reading of race in children's literature can be useful. Is the literature merely a reflection of the experience of adult writers and parents? That is, must we read the literature as nostalgic, reflecting a developmental bias? Or does it engage children on their own contemporary terms? Are children themselves capable of racism, even if only as extensions of adult racial imaginations? Certainly the growing number of children's books written by writers of color …

Natives, Nostalgia, And Nature In Children's Popular Film Narratives, C. Richard King

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "Natives, Nostalgia, and Nature in Children's Popular Film Narratives," C. Richard King offers a critical reading in an effort to appreciate the entanglements of nature, natives, and nostalgia in children's narratives. In this context, an analysis of Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron Spirit affords an ideal occasion for such a reading because it centers on the relations between Native Americans, Euroamericans, and the natural world as it tells the story of a wild mustang living in western North America in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, as close examination reveals, the film uses race, gender, civilization, and wildness …

Race And Gender Representations In Advertising In Cable Cartoon Programming, Debra L. Merskin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "Race and Gender Representations in Advertising in Cable Cartoon Programming," Debra L. Merskin explores what children see and what they learn about racial, ethnic, and gender identity in television advertisements. Merskin examines race and ethnicity in commercials on cable television, specifically on the Turner Cartoon Network, an environment devoted entirely to cartoons and to children. Her content analysis of 381 advertisements reveals that while White and African American children are overrepresented in relationship to their percentage of the U.S. population, other minority group children are rarely portrayed. In only one instance were children of color shown alone, …

Polly Bemis, Pedagogy, And Multiculturalism In The Classroom, Katy Fry

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

As Katy Fry suggests in her paper "Polly Bemis, Pedagogy, and Multiculturalism in the Classroom," the history of the US-American West is too often taught in mythological terms. This is especially true in grade school classrooms, where children are told that the West was settled by courageous men and women who dared to come to and conquer a wild, untamed place. The notion of what it meant to be a pioneer remains simple and uncomplicated. As Fry points out, however, there were pioneers of a different sort, such as the Chinese immigrant Polly Bemis. Fry's article examines the various pedagogic …

Introduction To Racialized Narratives For Children, C. Richard King

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The Politics Of Childhood In Ellis's Three Wishes, Wafaa Hasan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "The Politics of Childhood in Ellis's Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak," Wafaa Hasan outlines the recent controversy in Canada over the restrictions that shape children's literature. Using Neil Postman's and John Locke's conceptions of childhood, Hasan unpacks the ways in which Ellis's Three Wishes has threatened popular conceptions of childhood. Specifically, as her analysis shows, Ellis's work redefines the boundaries of children's fiction by heterogenizing childhood experience and by affording its readers -- limited but consequential -- authorial agency. Further, Hasan asserts that Three Wishes liberates the idea of childhood as a developmental stage of ignorance by …

Children's Film As Social Practice, J. Zornado

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "Children's Film as Social Practice," J. Zornado argues that the animated feature is a genre distinct in its own right, and, although overlooked by film criticism up to now, deserves rigorous, scholarly attention. Zornado employs the term "iconology" to develop a foundation for a critical methodology indebted to Althusser, Foucault, and Lacan as well as contemporary film criticism. Iconology of the animated feature film is the study of the meaning systems of the dominant culture and the ways in which such systems are inscribed into all kinds of social practice geared, specifically, to seduce and inform the …

Children's Video Games As Interactive Racialization, Cathlena Martin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Cathlena Martin explores in her paper "Children's Video Games as Interactive Racialization" selected children's video games. Martin argues that children's video games often act as reinforcement for the games' television and film counterparts and their racializing characteristics and features. In Martin's analysis the video games discussed represent media through which to analyze racial identities and ideologies. In making the case for positive female minority leads in children's video games, Martin examines the games and franchises of Rugrats and Dora the Explorer. She argues that the influx of games with a greater diversity of minority female characters has only been a …

The Ambiguous Nature Of Multiculturalism In Two Picture Books About 9/11, Jo Lampert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "The Ambiguous Nature of Multiculturalism in Two Picture Books about 9/11," Jo Lampert looks at how some of the Western discourses of multiculturalism and cultural diversity have shifted since 11 September 2001 by discussing two exemplar picture books about 9/11. Lampert begins with a general discussion of children's books as significant cultural producers of knowledge and provides brief summaries of Patel's On That Day: A Book of Hope for Children and Carlson's There's a Big, Beautiful World Out There! Lampert discusses how the imagined readers of these books are positioned problematically in order to embrace racial tolerance, …

A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Representation Of Asian Indian Folk Tales In Us-American Children's Literature, Sudeshna Roy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "A Critical Discourse Analysis of Representation of Asian Indian Folk Tales in US-American Children's Literature," Sudeshna Roy explores the representation of India in U.S. children's picture books by interpreting prevailing images of the subcontinent and its peoples and their impact on children's understandings. Roy analyzes three key elements -- titles, illustrations, and text -- identifying a set of predominant themes: nature and wild animals, poverty and hardship, spiritual hermits, and wit and common sense wisdom. From these findings, Roy suggests that Eurocentric imperial ideologies continue to inform the formulation of race, gender, and nation in U.S. children's …

A Bibliography Of Work On Racial Narratives For Children, Marie Drews

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.