Category: Humanities – Literature/Literary Studies*
A Gothic Bridge Between the Past and the Future
This paper is a postcolonial reading of Nick Joaquin’s The Mass of St. Sylvestre. It explores the elements and functions of postcolonial Gothic in the story. It argues that Joaquin deliberately employs the elements of the Gothic to manifest how the shadow of the colonial past haunts the nation’s future in the Philippines. The struggle …
The King and His Queen: Henry VIII’s Verse and Katherine of Aragon as Center of the Chivalric Court
This essay examines the ways in which Henry used poetics and performances to establish the iconography of his court and the relevance, within this context, of Henry’s specific choice of Katherine as queen to preside over his chivalric court. Though analysis may now often interrogate the possibility of underlying insecurities motivating Henry’s actions, the king’s …
The Web of Signification in Journey to the West
Journey to the West, one of the ancient Chinese classics, is an imaginative narration of the historical event of the buddhist monk Xuanzang embarking on an arduous journey to India for Buddhist scriptures in Tang dynasty (618-907 AD). While advocating mainly Buddhist beliefs, such as the concept of karma, as conventionally understood, the novel also …
Diminished Power: The Fall of Wonder Woman
One of the most recognized characters that has become a part of the pantheon of pop-culture is Wonder Woman. Ever since she debuted in 1941, Wonder Woman has been established as one of the most familiar feminist icons today. However, one of the issues that this paper contends is that this her categorization as a …
The Wonder of the Power of Language in Alice in Wonderland
Power is a game played by everyone. Learning to confront the power game is important if we do not want to fall prey of it. Among all sources of power, language is one uniquely human. The language people use in communication is just like a game according to Ludwig Wittgenstein. People not only connect the …
European Narratives of the Insular Space : Poetics of the Social System after 1945
In European postmodern literature, the topos of the island becomes even more central than previously because of its way of narrating a micro-scale society and the reconstruction of its social system. From a historical perspective, isolation (semantically derived from the term ‘island’) and doubt represent characteristics of a European society radically transformed by the traumatic …
A Journey to the Contemporary Past: Edward Bond’s the Fool, Artist Responsibility in Light of Power of Capitalist Marketing and Neoliberalism
The concern of this study is how the text is interpreted within a theoretical and critical framework such as Cultural Materialism and to investigate the relationship between literature and history. Cultural Materialism is a model which argues that literary texts are part of a history that is still in the process of being written. In …
Optimistic Dogmatism and Pessimistic Empiricism
Edward Bellamy, a 19th-century American utopian socialist, held that a utopian vision can be achieved through both faith and science, the human cultivation of their garden. In his The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, Wilfred McClay quite poignantly observed: A utopia is not only an imaginative projection of a radiant social ideal; it …
The Literary Figuration and the Constellation of Power in the Play “The Life of Edward II of England”
Believing in the necessary and close connection between aesthetics and politics runs like a golden thread through the whole work of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht. The paper would like to focus on the nexus of power and politics to which Brecht pays an attention in his play “The Life of Edward II of England”. …
The Power of Popular Culture in Salman Rushdie’s “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”
This paper discusses elements of popular culture found in Salman Rushdie’s “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” and bases its arguments on Fiske, Kundu and Herwitz’s ideas of globalization. Popular culture is driven by both consumerism and the people that makeup the fan base, who have gained the power to criticize the same society that has …
The Power of Fiction: The Nameless Book and the Birth of Literary Criticism in Japan
Mumyōzōshi (The Nameless Book, ca. 1200) is frequently cited as the first work of prose criticism in the Japanese literary tradition, in part due to the author’s sensitive treatment of several vernacular tales (monogatari) composed between the early tenth and late twelfth centuries. The author is generally assumed to be the poet known as Shunzei’s …
Thought and Image in Goncalo M. Tavares: A Contemporary Writing
The paper takes part of a project on Representation and Image, within the line of current research Literature, Theory and Literary Criticism. My goal is to investigate the image as the smallest unit of literary art, a special form of thinking. My question oscillates between pairs Text/Image, Real/Unreal, Poetry/Prose toward something I call the Body/Meaning …
Shakespearean Intertextuality in “The Rivals”
This paper explores Shakespearean intertextuality in The Rivals (1775), a comedy by the British playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. In this play, we find characters parallel to those in plays such as The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado about Nothing, Measure for Measure, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Nights Dream, etc. Through intertextual …
Interpreting Poems, Interpreting Worlds – on Poetry Translation
Li Bai’s poems are appreciated and enjoyed by people all over the world, which shows the universal aspect of language and mind. However, as the physical being and environment of a poet are often very different from those of his/her translator(s), one can not but wonder if the translation can really be embodied with the …
Malcolm Lowry the Russian Connection
In Under the Volcano (1947) Malcolm Lowry (1909-57) presents us with a Faustian image of a British ex-Consul tormented by inner turmoil between his divided self and the socio-political environment which has alienated him. A would-be visionary, Geoffrey Firmin undergoes a shamanic journey to exorcise the phantoms of his past by striving towards a higher …
George Lathrop’s Short Story “Left Out” and Its Unknown Translations
The journalism boom in the nineteenth century facilitated not only development of a new literary genre, the short story, but also its exchange among various cultures. Magazine editors in different countries were searching for new interesting short stories to translate and publish. In most cases, these translations were carried out in a very short time. …