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Going Under: The Metro And The Search For Oneself In Julio Cortázar's "The Pursuer" , Patricia E. Reagan

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Johnny's metaphysical experience on the metro in Julio Cortázar's "The Pursuer" catalyzes his perception. The metro incident and the ensuing commentary propel all the elements of the narrative. The metro facilitates the development of Johnny's character; relates his character to Charlie Parker; aids our comprehension of the relationship between the metro and Johnny's music; and establishes the metaphysical difference between Johnny and Bruno. The subway is also physical space in which Cortázar reveals a view of time perception in which chronological time succumbs to subjective time. Johnny's metacognitive search for the yonder marks a change in Cortázar's narrative preoccupations and …

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Julian W. Connolly, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov. Thomas Seifrid

Simon Franklin and Emma Widdis, eds. National Identity in Russian Culture: An Introduction. Keith Livers

Sander L. Gilman. Franz Kafka. Esther K. Bauer

Jill Robbins, ed. P/herversions: Critical Studies of Ana Rossetti. Roberta Johnson

Jennifer Warburton. John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds. John Fowles. The Journals, Vol. I. Ed. Charles Drazin Gerd Bayer

Real Estate And Stating The Real In Jean Echenoz's L'Occupation Des Sols, Philip G. Hadlock

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Through its extremely minimal account of the aftermath of an apartment fire, Jean Echenoz's L'Occupation des sols raises intriguing questions about the grounding of property—its occupation des sols—in Western consciousness. The narrative situation allegorizes the longstanding convention in which man is associated with property ownership while woman is associated with property itself. Though seeming to uphold this paradigm, Echenoz presents a challenging perspective of the functions that gendered scenarios of property perform in sustaining symbolic relations and anchoring the "real" in Western thought.

Dead Center: Berlin, The Postmodern Gothic, And Norman Ohler's Mitte, Steffen H. Hantke

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Cultural critics often frame present-day Berlin as a space of historical discontinuities, a nexus of modernity and postmodernity that, in its orientation toward the future, represents post-reunification Germany in all its complexity. However, this framing tends to suppress Gothic imagery, of which traces can be found in the critical discourse on the city. Recuperating such Gothic tropes from critical discourse, and then consciously and strategically re-deploying them, can be a valuable strategy for opening up new venues of thinking about the lingering presence of the past, the high cost of modernization, and the uncanny emotional and affective dimensions of urban …

The Rewriting Of History In Amin Maalouf's The Crusades Through Arab Eyes , Carine Bourget

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This paper analyzes the narrative strategies that shape Maalouf's rewriting of the history of the Crusades, examines why considerations of the problems inherent to the historiographical act are relegated to the background, and how Maalouf links his text to politics contemporary to its writing. I argue that while Maalouf brilliantly deconstructs the Western image of the Crusades as a heroic time by documenting the barbarity of the Crusaders without falling into the pitfall of simply inverting the terms of the dichotomy, the agenda driving his rewriting of this historical period leads him to partially repeat what his book is supposed …

Expressionism, Futurism, And The Dream Of Mass Democracy, Douglas Brent Mcbride

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay throws new light on a radical tendency in cultural modernism by analyzing the role of a single metaphor—the figure of politics as a stage—in political debates among German Expressionists and Italian Futurists before World War I. As the essay argues, this trope was used to critique liberalism's limited notion of popular rule and envision how disenfranchised masses might develop the political subjectivity needed to create a truly mass democracy. While the essay demonstrates that Futurists and Expressionists failed to develop a clear vision of what form mass democracy might take, it concludes that they agreed on one point. …

Expressions Of National Crisis: Diamela Eltit's E. Luminata And Pablo Picasso's Guernica , Gisela Norat

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Diamela Eltit emerged as a writer during the 1980s when Chile was ruled by the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973 -1989). The obscurity of her first book, Lumpérica (trans. E. Luminata) reflects that period of national repression. Despite the negligible attention she received for her first novel, Eltit has since published six other novels and managed to carve out a place for herself within Chile's predominantly male literary establishment. Her writing challenges its mainstream cultural apparatus with a female-centered postmodern writing very different from that of compatriots like best selling authors Isabel Allende in the United States …

Texts Of Light And Shadow: Dickens And Lautréamont In Alejandra Pizarnik's Sombra Poems , Beth Zeiss

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In her poetry, the Argentinean Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-72) persistently explores the transformations that the poetic subject undergoes in language. She articulates a cycle wherein the subject's desire to (re)create herself as a presence in language is followed by the desire for death, the absence of the self, when her desire becomes frustrated by language's inadequacies. As yet, the importance of the theme of the fluctuating self in language as developed by Pizarnik in a series of poems protagonized by Sombra, has not been analyzed. The character Sombra appears in six fragment-like poems published posthumously in Textos de Sombra (1982) and …

The Trope Of Nature In Latin American Literature: Some Examples , Becky Boling

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The article examines the trope of nature through selected texts from Latin American literature, from the writings of Christopher Columbus to more contemporary narratives such as those by Luis Sepúlveda and Mayra Montero. It focuses on the transition in the manner in which writers conceive of the "natural" world within their particular ideological contexts. From early manifestations of Utopian writing to texts extolling urbanization and development, the trope of nature undergoes several permutations which say a great deal about the ideological contexts of the writers and their conceptualization of the place of humans in the scheme of things. Late 20th …

Symptoms Of Spanish Fantasies: Africa As The Sign Of The Other In Angel Ganivet's Idearium Español And La Conquista Del Reino De Maya , Yaw Agawu-Kakraba

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Angel Ganivet's La conquista del reino de Maya (1897, The Conquest of the Realm of Maya) elucidates the aggressive impulse embedded within modern self-consciousness, one that precipitates the need for journeys—linguistic and artistic, as well as authentically colonial—to either the "dark continent" or to the "heart of darkness" to find the irrational Other of the rational modern man. This impulse, however, is not only at the service of individual subjective experience, elevating the ego in relation to a declining awareness of objective or synchronous outside reality. That modernity also precipitated the creation of modern nations, often in conjunction with imperial …

Telling Tales Of War To Teens: Ignacio Martínez De Pisón's Una Guerra Africana And Morocco As "Open Wound" In The Spanish National Imaginary , Silvia Bermúdez

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Exactly ten years after its traumatic defeat in the Spanish-American War of 1898, Spain appeared to find some compensation for the loss of its last colonies by undertaking the invasion of Morocco in 1908. The enterprise proved difficult when the forces of Abd-el-Krim defeated the Spanish army in the summer of 1921. This terrible loss was metaphorized as an "open wound" and entered the collective imagination by becoming a theme in novels such as José Díaz Fernández's El blocao (1928), Ramón Sender's Imán (1930), and Arturo Barea's series La forja de un rebelde (1941-1944). Known as the "Disaster of Annual," …

Introduction: Rethinking Spain From Across The Seas, Jill Robbins, Roberta Johnson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

For much of the twentieth century, critical studies of "Peninsular Spanish Literature" largely followed a generational paradigm that stressed the peculiarities of Spanish history and texts written by Spanish men in the Castilian language, thereby circumscribing the literary within the boundaries of a specific form of national identity...

Orphans Of The Motherland: Puerto Rican Images Of Spain In Jacobo Morales's Linda Sara , Wadda C. Ríos-Font

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Puerto Rican identity has been confounded by Puerto Rico's prolonged colonial relationship to Spain (nearly 80 years longer than that of most other Latin American colonies) and its abrupt change in status to that of United States protectorate in 1898 after the Spanish American War. Increasingly, Puerto Rican identity has been theorized in sole reference to the political relationship with the United States. The residual presence of Spain and Spaniards in the construction of the new Puerto Rican collective, and the denial or nostalgia that might still be elicited by the former empire, have gradually receded into the background. Perhaps …

Jorge Oteiza's Modernity And His Latin American Travels , Marina Pérez De Mendiola

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Along with Eduardo Chillida, Jorge Oteiza is one of the best-known Basque sculptors of his generation. Although many scholars have written on Oteiza's significant contribution to the field of sculpture, and have analyzed his theories on the meaning of art, very few take into consideration Oteiza's 13 years in Latin America, much less acknowledge that these years had a decisive impact on his art and particularly on his critical essays and poetry. In this essay, I explore how Oteiza's stay in Latin America contributed to his reevaluation of the avant-garde movements in Europe and Latin America, and how it led …

From The Atlantic To The Pacific: Maruja Mallo In Exile , Shirley Mangini

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Maruja Mallo's life (1902-1995) and art represent one woman's odyssey from the European vanguards to political commitment during the Spanish Republic (1931-1939) and finally to a unique transcendent art form after her wrenching exile from Spain and her residence in Latin America from 1937 to 1965. In her early career she was a leader among the avant-garde painters when few Spanish women were recognized as creative artists. In Latin America, her work diverged radically from European avant-garde trends and from her ideologically oriented subject matter of the 1930s; Mallo not only reflects the impact of her discovery of the Pacific …

Carmen Nestares's Venus En Buenos Aires: Neocolonialist Cyber-Romance, Virtual Lies, And The Transatlantic Queer , Maite Zubiaurre

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Carmen Nestares's novel Venus en Buenos Aires (2001) chronicles a transatlantic lesbian love affair between a Spaniard and an Argentinean that begins in cyber-space and culminates in reality. At first, the novel reads "innocently" as an uncomplicated cyber-romance fiction, but once the romance becomes physical after the lovers meet on Latin American soil, certain unsettling elements arise. Online, the Spanish and Argentinean cultures, supposedly "united" by the same language, seem to intermingle easily and graciously, but offline, they are more conflicted, as the Spanish lover adopts a neocolonialist stance. From a distance she considers Argentina a land of capitalist promise …

"Soy Tú. Soy Él": African Immigration And Otherness In The Spanish Collective Conscience, Michael Ugarte

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The commonly heard statement "Spain is different" contains a series of contradictions, paradoxes, and questions concerning Iberia's place within the global community, a community that is itself deeply contradictory—more and more the same and yet more and more fragmented. Immigration highlights the sameness/otherness dichotomy in Spanish culture, and the situation of African immigrants has especially caused the Spanish national consciousness an ethical quandary. Here I examine four recent cultural representations of African immigration in Spain—two journalistic works: Mikel Azurmendi's Estampas del Ejido and Antonio Elorza's articles in El País; and two documentary films: Básel Ramsis's El otro lado: un …

Antonio Banderas: Hispanic Gay Masculinities And The Global Mirror Stage (1991-2001) , Joseba Gabilondo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Here I map out the Atlantic intertwining between neo-liberal/neo-imperial Spain and cinema by analyzing Antonio Banderas's body politics as the postmodern (post- or neoimperialist) Don Juan. Banderas's career trajectory from 1991 to 2001 coincides with larger political and historical developments. He arrived in Hollywood in the early 1990s, a moment when different but interconnected historical events came together— the end of the Cold War and the neo-liberal globalization of the United States with treaties such as NAFTA and GATT; the growing public profile of the fundamentalist religious right and gays; and the mainstream population's (unwilling) acceptance of Latinos as a …

Atlantic Nessologies: Image, Territory, Value , Francisco-]. Hernández Adrián

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay addresses the emerging field of Atlantic Studies and questions the status of "the Atlantic" as an object of study. Rather than assuming a self-evident grid where Atlantic cultural phenomena oscillate between such poles as "centers and peripheries," or "the colonizer and the colonized," I consider a different formulation of the Atlantic. Taking as a starting point an analysis of a poem by Tomás Morales, a modernista poet from the Canary Islands, my essay outlines the notion of "Atlantic nessologies." Three parallel departures are offered from this analysis: image (or the realm of the imaginary); territory (or spatial and …

Cyberspace And The Cyberdildo: Dislocations In Cenicienta En Chueca , Jill Robbins

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Cenicienta en Chueca (Cinderella in Chueca) is a collection of short stories by Argentine exile María Felicitas Jaime, published by Spanish gay/lesbian press Odisea in 2003, that represent the neocolonial relations between the Americas, Spain, and the European Union in a globalized age. The stories foreground communication technologies—including type, e-mail, chats, and dialects—in order to highlight the discursive nature of sexuality and to reveal the social, ethnic, racial, nationalistic, economic, gendered tensions underlying linguistic exchange. This article focuses on the neocolonial relations between Spain and Latin America in three stories from this collection—"Chateo" (Chat), "Ejecutivas" (Women Executives), and "Cenicienta en …