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Benton Jay KOMINS
Introduction to Comparative Cultural Studies and Popular Culture

Joan GROSS
Symbolism, Popular Drama, and Politics and Art in Belgium, 1886-1910
Abstract: 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 texts and situates them within fin-de-siècle Belgium where racism and socialism were reigning ideologies and symbolism became the favored literary style. Following Taussig, Gross suggests that symbolism and the use of the traditional narrative of The Massacre of the Innocents were literary responses to cultures of terror.

Charlotte HEADRICK
New Orleans and Its Influence on the Work of Lillian Hellman
Abstract: 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 poposes 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 to food and the last volume she published was neither a play nor a memoir but a cookbook. Hellman's life continues to fascinate and, since her death, there have been several plays written about her life and a television film based on her love affair with Dashiell Hammett. Headrick explores Hellman's love affair with New Orleans and how this city infused her memories, her plays, and her love of fine food.

Dana HELLER
Holy Fools, Secular Saints, and Illiterate Saviors in American Literature and Popular Culture
Abstract: 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 Divine Idiots in American literature resonate across so many historical, national, cultural, and ethnic boundaries while retaining some loose correspondence with earlier Christian prototypes -- has rendered them difficult to locate. However, this identification -- or unveiling -- is a crucial part of an idiot's social function and performance. In her analysis, Heller discusses writings by Flannery O'Connor, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, and films such as The Green Mile and Forrest Gump, in an effort to define divine idiocy in American culture as a means of addressing historical contradictions in American society.

Deborah LUTZ
Heidegger, the Erotics of Ontology, and the Mass-Market Romance
Abstract: 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 Dasein's being-toward-death. With the meeting of these two registers, Lutz explores what romance has to teach philosophy about transcendence through the "vulgarity" of the everyday, about transcendence as a repetition, and failure as a constituent of presence.

Brian Mitchell PETERS
Qu(e)erying Comic Book Culture and Representations of Sexuality in Wonder Woman
Abstract: 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. Queer is defined as a category that houses an option to traditional heteronormative representations for young people. An analysis of the history of Wonder Woman comics that traces her creation, her transition in the late-1960s, and a revolutionary series of comics in the mid-1990s reveals a consistent duo of queer subtexts. In his paper, Peters examines the subtextual and textual representations of gay masquerade (or drag) and lesbian jouissance in comics. The theoretical background of the paper is semiotics, queer, and psychoanalytic criticism to explore these three stages in Wonder Woman comics to present an argument that reveals the identification of queer themes by the comic's reading public as well as the cultural homophobia that creates a standard storyline and that, in turn, extinguishes habitually the detectable areas of queer text over and over again.

Marta GUIRAO and Benton Jay KOMINS
Selected Bibliography of Work in Cultural Studies and US-American Popular Culture

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal ISSN 1481-4374
CLCWeb Library of Research and Information ... CLCWeb Contents 5.3 (2003)
Thematic Issue Comparative Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. Ed. Benton Jay Komins
<http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb03-3/contents03-3.html> © Purdue University Press