Act Of Comparison Research Articles

Comparison as a Provisional Activity

The careers of many scholars in various disciplines have been focused on the study of hagiography, including that of the author. Yet, as those scholars have uncovered new knowledge and employed new interpretations of the materials at hand, the very notions of “hagiography” and “hagiology” have become deeply problematized. The issues become more complex as multiple religious traditions are examined. The scholarly work that forms the basis of the essays in this volume has explored the effects of taking a comparative and collaborative approach to “hagiography”. This piece responds to the core essays by showing first how personal the study of such sources and act of comparison can be, and then exploring how knowledge changes through the processes of comparison and collaboration. In the end, this response argues that comparison is by its very nature a provisional activity in that the knowledge it creates constantly changes as comparative methods and theories are re-applied again and again over time. This process is only aided by collaborative efforts which make the act of comparison even more effective and productive.

Diversity in and among Rhetorical Traditions

Diversity in and among Rhetorical Traditions

Between the categories of assessment and qualitativeness

The article deals with the qualitative category and its relationship with the category of evaluation. It is proved that qualification in speech serves the manifesters of subjective evaluation, because evaluation helps to identify the value of an object, action, attribute and is associated with an act of comparison by which the similarity and difference in characteristics are revealed, an act of determining attitudes toward them is performed, and the process of evaluation through comparison is manifested.

Navigating Movie (M)apps: Film Locations, Tourism and Digital Mapping Tools

Navigating Movie (M)apps: Film Locations, Tourism and Digital Mapping Tools

Reimagining Enoch in Sasanian Babylonia in Light of Zoroastrian and Manichaean Traditions

The article examines the reception and transmission of traditions about the figure of Enoch/Metatron in Sasanian Babylonia, and particularly the emergence of Metatron speculation in the Babylonian Talmud and 3 Enoch, by reading these traditions in light of Zoroastrian and Manichaean reports of the Iranian hero, Yima. The figure of Enoch/Metatron was reimagined and reconfigured by the Babylonian authors so as to resemble local Yima traditions, though the process of translating and repackaging the figure of Enoch in the image of his Iranian counterpart was not merely a conscious act of comparison, in which an analogy is drawn in an attempt to highlight particular aspects common to both figures; it was an expression of a more comprehensive discourse of identification.Beyond close parallels in the depictions of these figures, the connections between Metatron speculation and the Zoroastrian and Manichaean Yima traditions are supported by an identification of Yima with the son of man implied in two Sogdian fragments of the Manichaean Book of Giants. The syncretic atmosphere that pervaded Sasanian culture in general and the Manichaean identification of Yima with the son of man in particular facilitated, and perhaps reinforced, the refiguring of Enoch/Metatron in the Babylonian Talmud and 3 Enoch in the image of local Yima traditions.

Temporality in the Construction of Comparative Interpretation

Although comparative studies have been steadily on the rise in recent years across a wide range of disciplines, the questions of how a comparison is constructed and how the term ‘comparative’ differs in meaning in ‘comparative literature’, ‘comparative philosophy’, ‘comparative linguistics’ or ‘comparative history’ are still in much confusion and debate. This article proposes some ways to approach this problem from the perspective of temporality. By temporality, I mean the time scopes of each of the compared elements (comparanda). Due to the huge field of comparative studies, this enquiry about temporality in interpretive contexts will focus on comparative literature and the comparative study of ideas. I will, however, relate my discussion to comparative linguistics to demonstrate how temporality and comparison are treated differently when the object of study changes. Paradigmatically, comparison in studies of comparative literature and thought is cross-cultural, and typically juxtaposes the comparanda – usually texts and systems of thought – from two cultures. This means that comparison is a spatial re-organization and necessarily breaks up the homogeneity of cultural space and context. The question that then arises is whether the comparatist should attempt to preserve a commonly shared temporality between the comparanda, or whether temporality can, just like space and context, be broken and reconstituted through the act of comparison. In other words, when constructing the interpretive context of comparison, the comparatist needs to ask herself to what extent temporality may or may not influence her choice of comparanda. Two texts that are compared can be contemporaneous by date, such as Mallarme’s poetry with Verlaine’s. Or, the time scopes of the compared texts may not be contemporaneous but are considered to be similar in terms of the development of certain aspects of civilization,

Insect Control in Socialist China and the Corporate United States: The Act of Comparison, the Tendency to Forget, and the Construction of Difference in 1970s U.S.–Chinese Scientific Exchange

In 1975, a delegation of U.S. entomologists traveled to socialist China to observe Chinese insect control science. Their overwhelmingly positive reports highlighted in relief the pernicious effects of pesticide corporations on U.S. agriculture; some entomologists hoped this would goad the United States to catch up to China in environmentally sensible insect control practices. Of course, insect control in socialist China carried its own political baggage, some of which-for example, mass mobilization and self-reliance--the state made highly visible to visitors, and some of which--for example, harsh treatment of scientists--it sought to obscure. For both the U.S. and the Chinese participants, the act of comparison itself was of primary significance in the exchange, allowing them to construct socialist Chinese science as refreshingly different from U.S. science. At the same time, however, this construction of difference meant forgetting the much longer transnational history in which U.S. and Chinese entomology had been intertwined.

Using your profanisaurus: Comparisons, analogies and cultural capital in two English Literature seminars

‘Using your profanisaurus’ derives from a project, The Production of University English, whose earliest findings were published in Arts and Humanities in Higher Education in 2005. By analysing ‘ordinary’ discussions in ‘ordinary’ English Literature classes in diverse universities, the project seeks to uncover what really happens when English is taught and learned in British Higher Education. This article examines two instances where students compare the text they are studying with another artifact, in order to raise questions about canonicity, culture, and the act of comparison itself. The project also aims to show how analytical methods generated from the discipline of English may be employed to elucidate other texts, including the ‘text of the classroom’. Consequently, the article begins with a discussion of three artifacts whose form presupposes a comparative reading.

Why Compare?

The purpose of this essay is to complicate the rationale that informs "our" will to comparative knowledge. Why do we want to compare when we are not sure who the "we" is? Any act of comparison, despite the best of intentions, is bound to flounder in that perilous and nameless region that lies between Identity and Difference. Unless "between-ness" is acknowledged as a serious epistemological and political issue in its own right, projects of comparison are doomed to profound self mystification. This essay argues that not only are comparative endeavors mired in relationships of uneven and asymmetrical power that they are unconscious of, but are also symptoms of a developmental epistemology that denies coevalness among the many worlds that constitute our one world. The essay suggests not that we abandon comparisons altogether, but rather that we undertake comparisons in the name of a multilateral relationality that opposes any form of hegemonic centrism.

The essay as

As I start to write this paper, my notes lie stretched out in a long poem of language shifts and comparisons: essay-as-wager, essay-as-puzzle, essay-as-notation, essay-as-conversation, essay-as-meditation. It is in this act of comparison, the ‘as’ moment, that we begin, again and again, to think about the essay form. Its ‘as-ness’ suggests that the essay is not a singular discursive mode but a set of modes, at once many things and many opportunities. The essay practises thinking-while-writing, a compositional process that moves knowledge forward to the limits of its language, in language.

Aeschylus, Homer, and the Serpent at the Breast

CLYTEMNESTRA'S.DREAM OF GIVING BIRTH TO A SERPENT and her bare-breasted confrontation with her son have long been at the center of various literary and psycho-analytical interpretations of Aeschylus' Oresteia.' It is generally accepted that Clytemnestra's bare-breasted supplication of Orestes alludes to Hecuba's similar supplication of Hector in the Iliad.2 The abundance of snake imagery applied to Clytemnestra and Orestes in the Choephori has usually been attributed to the influence of Stesichorus, whose Oresteia contains a striking serpent image of its own.3 In this paper, I will re-examine the relationship of Clytemnestra's supplication to the Homeric model, and argue that significant material found in the same context in both works has been passed over by modern scholarship. Building on the allusion to Hecuba's supplication, I will argue that the Aeschylean image of the serpent at the breast has an antecedent in this Homeric passage, creating an important intertextual relationship. Finally, I will show how this intertextual relationship illuminates the inter-personal dynamics of the climactic scenes of the Choephori. Reading has been described as an act of comparison, seeking a text's resemblance to, and difference from, other texts.4 The term intertextuality describes how a text depends on other texts for meaning, and describes the discursive space that a text occupies in relation to other texts. The expansiveness of intertextuality makes it almost impossible to discuss with regard to specific texts without violating the terms of its definition.s It is all-embracing in that a text is read in relation to all other texts. Yet, as soon as a reader compares a text with a single other text, the expansiveness of intertextuality is called into

Theory and the new comparativism, old and new

From infancy human beings are by necessity engaged in the act of compar ison This fact is not only a matter of common sense but of sophisticated theoretical work Psychologists engaged in research on cognitive structure and development are increasingly discovering the very complex cognitive resources which human beings possess from the earliest moments of life For example, not only does the very young child have the cognitive equipment which enables her to know the difference between animate and inanimate