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Cliffton Jacques
The University of Georgia
Empathy through Realism in Bakker's Ten White Geese
Gerbrand Bakker’s novel Ten White Geese features one woman’s life in the Welch countryside leading up to her eventual suicide. The work is replete with motifs--recurring imagery, philosophical insight, and other tropes--that do not necessarily enhance the plotline at face value, but rather point…
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Colton Valentine
Harvard College
The Inaesthetics of Robert Creeley: Poetic Thought and Presence
Despite their acclaim, Robert Creeley’s poems are often dismissed as works of the sensible rather than the intellectual; his lyrics are considered fodder for enjoyment rather than serious analysis. Alain Badiou’s theoretical inquiry in Handbook of Inaesthetics, in contrast, extols a handful of challenging “…
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Guillermo Severiche
Louisiana State University
The Neoliberal “Virus”:
Capitalism and the Body from Augustine’s Confessions to Colm Tóibín’s The Story of the Night
This essay is an exploration of the 1997 book La cosa y la cruz: cristianismo y capitalismo written by the Argentine philosophe León Rozitchner. He analyzes Augustine’s Confessions in order to envisage the strong…
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Rachel Thompson
Harvard College
Exploding the Sentence:
Jack Kerouac’s Othering and the Cultural Production of Art
Between the late 1940s and 1960s, the art world underwent significant changes, particularly in the United States. American writers, painters, and musicians were reworking the meaning of art by pushing parameters, and of the main actors in this ideological shift was Jack Kerouac. Through the lens of…
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Marcus Hurney
The University of Georgia
The Man Without Qualities and Against Method: Mythologizing Science
This essay questions human rationality and the concept of truth in the age of science by examining Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method. As Vienna, Austria, charges blindly into the future on the wings of modernization, Musil’s…
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Ashanti Henderson
The University of Georgia
The Legacy of the Holocaust: Silencing the Survivor in "Twilight" and "Hayuta's Engagement Party"
This paper examines two short stories by Israeli women, Shulamit Hareven’s“Twilight” and Savyon Liebrecht’s “Hayuta’s Engagement Party,” as critiques of Zionism and of Israel’s seeming complicity with the anti-Semitic oppression of the European Jew. These…
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Anisha Hegde
The University of Georgia
The Waste Land and “Funes el memorioso”:
Resurrection in Rainstorms and Reflection
Eliot’s The Waste Land and Borges’s “Funes el memorioso” are texts in which futility plays a leading role: the licentiousness of modern society in the former and the wasted genius of a teenager in the latter. This paper suggests an alternative interpretation for both texts,…
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Lara Mengak
The University of Georgia
Life beyond the Green Wall: Limiting the Limitless in Zamyatin's We
Throughout history, philosophers and thinkers have debated the relationship between reason and instinct in human culture. Yevgeny’s Zamyatin’s novel We creates a society in which the government completely isolates rationality from instinct in its citizens and molds them into a homogenous model for an…
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Erin Smith
The University of Georgia
“Written in Pencil in the Sealed Boxcar”: Voices from the Periphery
This essay discusses Dan Pagis’s “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Boxcar” in reference to a model of critique described by Edward Said in “The World, The Text, and The Critic.” I assert that if we put Pagis in the position of the critic within Said’s model, then we can see how Pagis’s poem functions to…
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Note from the Editor:
Sorcery, Silence, and Becoming-Comparative Literature
Animal, Artist, Hybrid
Much popular speculation has arisen in the past year in response to the Coen brothers’ latest film, Inside Llewyn Davis, in an effort to “make sense” of the enigmatic cat(s) woven through the plot. My personal favorite among these theories confers upon this “shifty, totemic cat” the role of a symbolic “…