COMPATIVE LITERATURE : FROM COMPARATIVE MEDIACULTURAL STUDIES TO TRANSMEDIAL NARATOLOGY

The article is devoted to the review of the prospects of multidisciplinary media-cultural studies in modern comparative literature studies towards comparative cultural studies and transmedial naratology. Comparative cultural studies syncretically combine the concepts of comparative literary criticism with the study of culture in the aspect of media-cultural studies, not limited to literature, but also various arts, mass media, computer games, etc. Literature is understood only as one of the media among other media. This is a transdisciplinary turn in comparative literature studies. Comparative naratology, and later transmedial naratology, in turn, is seen as a new discipline on the verge of literary comparativism, intermedialism, and naratology. The typology of intermedial forms of naratology in the classifications of Werner Wolf, Marie-Laure Ryan, and Jan-Noël Thon is discussed. Modern studies of various medial forms of narratives, which may also be presented in cinema, painting, graphic arts, ballet, comic books, and other mediums, and the discovery of the intermedial properties of narratives, lead to a rethinking of the fact that all narratives have a purely linguistic nature. Modern naratology as a separate discipline tends to go beyond purely literary narrative and transfer the concept of narration to other types of arts. Intermediate methodologies have already entered into comparative literature studies and have been successfully used in the analysis of literary works. It is about syncretic theoretical and methodological synthesis of three branches of art studies — naratology, intermedialism and literary comparativism, cross-disciplinary narrative studies. The combination of narrative and intermedial approaches to literature is becoming one of the most urgent tendencies of modern both naratology and the theory and practice of intermediality.

Factors Effecting Time Management of Professional Nurses’ at Public Hospital, Lahore

Introduction: Nursing is a very demanding career. In nursing work nurse’s work not only have tons of things to get done. Nurses scores in time management were more than those of men, with statistically significant difference: (p<0.05). There was a positive significant relationship between individual skills and organizational skills in time management (p<0.05). The purpose of this study was to determine the factors affecting time management of professional nurses. Methodology: A descriptive cross sectional analytic study was conducted at government hospital of Lahore. Data was collected from 211 registered nurses using convenient sampling. Data was analyzed using SPSS version 21. Results: There is statistically significant differences, in the significance level 0.05, of effective time management for nurses according to gender. Professional nurses spend much time in gossiping of both gender as (p <0.05), time allocated for socialization were more among female nurses Shortage of staff contributes poor time management towards patient care, working under pressure is significantly associated with poor patient care (p <0.05). Nurses spend much time using mobile phone is statistically significant (p <0.05). Conclusion: Time management is very crucial to the nurses and helps them to plan for their available time and use it to manage their tasks. This research identified and evaluated time management in professional nurses. Based on the results, it was found that shortage of staff contributes poor time management towards patient care, working under pressure affect patient care negatively, proper supervision will improve time management. It is also conclude that time management is necessary for medical workers, especially nurses. Thus, it would be interesting to conduct comparative cultural studies to better evaluate time management.Int. J. Soc. Sc. Manage. Vol. 5, Issue-3: 231-235

Problems of Comparative Research into Lithuanian and Latvian Collective Memory: The Concepts of Memory of the Balts and of Baltic Regional Memory

The present article deals with the concepts of regional collective memory and intercultural identity actualized in Lithuanian and Latvian comparative cultural studies. The phenomena of memory of the Baltic region (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia) and memory of the Balts (Lithuanians, Latvians), their differences and intersections are briefly discussed in the research part. The former is defined as a geopolitical regional construction, and the latter as a result of traditional common ethnocultural and ethnolinguistic development of two Baltic nations. Some examples of the usage of the term Baltic in literature and literary studies highlight the problems of the concept of regional memory and cases of newly interpreted or unsystematically used terminology. Lithuanian translations of the title of the poems Baltijas eleģijas (The Baltic Elegies) by Ivars Ivasks, Am Baltischen Meer (The Baltic Sea) by Durs Grünbein, or the essay Bałtowie (The Balts) by Czesław Miłosz could stand as examples. Developing the concept and the research field of Baltic (Latvians and Lithuanians) memory, several possible perspectives of comparative studies of Lithuanian and Latvian collective memory are suggested. Memories of exile and migration, the areas of the Lithuanian-Latvian border, the capital cities Riga and Vilnius, the periods of independence and between the wars, and the Holocaust could be taken as places of memory revealing historiographical parallels.

Comparative Literary History in Assamese: Some Possibilities

The essay attempts to explore some possibilities of Comparative Literary History with respect to Assamese literature. Writing a literary history is a complex business, and the tenets underlying its conceptualisation and execution have often been determined by factors other than purely ‘literary’ ones. In the essay, the conceptual dimensions of literary historiography are examined in relation to its recently developed nexus with comparative literature and cultural studies. Within this theoretical framework, the essay briefly touches upon the development of literary historiography within the Indian context in the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial periods, and subsequently moves on to discuss its position vis-a-vis Assamese literature, particularly in the latter’s institutionalisation as a subject for graduate and postgraduate study under Gauhati University, Assam, in the post-Independence period. The essay deals specifically with the efforts of Professor Satyendranath Sarma, prominent academician and literary historian of Assam, towards the academic study of Assamese literary history. It explores the possibilities of comparative literary history in Assamese—one that is not based on a linear narrative of succeeding generations of poets and writers recorded and documented under a progressive model of impact and response, but rather a history of literary reception with many complex and multidimensional narratives often at loggerheads with each other.Key words: Literary Historiography, Comparative Literature, Comparative Cultural Studies, Indian Literature, Assamese Literature, Satyendranath Sarma

The Post-Literary Era, Leonardo’s Paradigm From Comparative Cultural Studies to Post-literary Study. Gilles Deleuze and Central-European Thought. Post-literature.

The idea to write this essay came after I studied, almost in the same period, the works of two major contemporary philosophers: the US-American Michael Heim, known as the best theorist of virtual reality, and the French Gilles Deleuze. At the beginning of the new millennium, I have noticed many challenging transformations in art and literature, influenced by the emerging of the new technologies and the self-transformation that it is currently undergoing. This was the major reason I tried to launch a new concept, post-literarure, in order to describe the complex forms of art in the contemporary culture. The concept of post-literature defines metamorphoses and tensions in the world of contemporary creativity, the co-existence, even merging of fields with autonomous profiles in the past. In my opinion the changes are so radical and quick that we can already talk about a new cultural paradigm in this post-literary epoch, with so many amazing projects imagined by kinetic and temporary organizations, focused on interdisciplinary work and hybridization, on substitution of confrontation between interfering disciplines by dialogue and cohabitation among them, on interchangeability and virtual textualism.

Testurō Watsuji’s Theory of Betweenness: With a Focus on the Two-Person Community

This article discusses the problem of betweenness that Tetsurō Watsuji describes in his book Ethics. There, he takes up the very special theme of the two-person community, which seems to be a kind of solipsism-space constituted by two persons closely related to each other. But this contains the possibility, for Watsuji, to develop an examination of the intensive space known as MA, which is not only a subject matter of comparative cultural studies, but also of philosophy.Cet article traite le problème de l’entre que Tetsurō Watsuji a exploré dans son livre intitulé L’Éthique. Il y approfondit le thème très particulier de la communauté de deux-personnes, qui semble tenir en un espace-solipsisme constitué par deux personnes très intimes. Mais cela ouvre la possibilité, pour Watsuji, d’explorer plus profondément l’espace d’intensité nommé MA, qui intéresse beaucoup de notions non seulement culturelles mais vraiment philosophiques.

Live and Active Cultures: Gender, Ethnicity, and “Greek” Yogurt in America

Using a transnational and comparative cultural studies approach, this essay investigates how yogurt, perceived as a strange and foreign food in the early to mid-twentieth-century United States, became localized through intersectional processes of feminization and de-exoticization. In the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s, the dairy industry adopted a postfeminist ethos, which co-opted the hippie and feminist self-care movements that had made yogurt a staple health food outside the purview of the medical-industrial complex and on the margins of the market economy. Increasingly, yogurt was marketed to the prototypical (white middle class) dieting female, expected to discipline her body by consuming pre-proportioned approximations of dessert. The rising popularity of “Greek yogurt” in the early twenty-first century has modified this cultural neutralization by foregrounding a nonthreatening “white” ethnicity—while furthering the feminization of yogurt consumption and obscuring connections to the food cultures of the Middle East.