Digital Commons Network^™

Subject To Instability , Karen Bouwer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

For Plantier, language constitutes reality and is male dominated. Readers of texts, she says, are at a disadvantage because the author imposes a logic that we must accept in order to understand the text. The discourses shaping our social reality have the same effect. Plantier has struggled against individual voices, discourses, and the very fabric of language informed by these discourses. "Subject to Instability" examines the impact on her generic evolution of a changing sense of self, of who her interlocutors are, and of those for whom she is speaking. I argue that her increasing attempt to juggle many different …

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Mieke Bal. The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually by Beryl Schlossman

Anny Brooksbank Jones and Catherine Davies, eds. Latin American Women's Writing: Feminist Readings in Theory and Crisis by Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal

Tomasa Cuevas. Prison of Women: Testimonies of War and Resistance in Spain, 1939-1975 by Yolanda Molina Gavilán

David William Foster. Buenos Aires: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production by Gustavo Geirola

Belinda Jack. Francophone Literatures: An Introductory Survey by Claire L. Dehon

Marx-Scouras, Danielle. The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel: Literature and the Left in the Wake of Engagement by Diane Fourny

Jeffrey Mehlman. Genealogies of the …

Victoria Ocampo And Alfonso Reyes: Ulysses's Malady , Doris Meyer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Ocampo (Argentina, 1890-1979) and Reyes (Mexico, 1889-1959) were arguably Latin America's most influential writers and cultural catalysts in the first half of the twentieth century. They met in Argentina in 1927 and their friendship and correspondence lasted until Reyes's death. Over three decades of private and public discourse, they articulated a similar vision of Latin American identity and its future potential. Because they were both internationally known—Ocampo as founder and director of the literary review SUR, and Reyes as a diplomat and intellectual leader—their ideas found resonance in the Americas and Europe. Two dramatic works they wrote before meeting, Ifigenia …

Melodramatic Masculinity, National Identity, And The Stalinist Past In Postsoviet Cinema , Susan Larsen

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The genre of melodrama, sweepingly scorned by Soviet film critics, proved a convenient screen vehicle for a distinctively Postsoviet imagination responding to the historical and social conundrums of the 1990s. Retrospection dominated the decade's most distinctive films, which enlisted melodramatic conventions to identify heroic Russian masculinity as the principal victim of Stalinist evil. In an intersection of national, historical, and sexual identities, directors of different backgrounds and generations collapsed feminine and Stalinist "nature" into one. Illustrative of this trend were three of the period's best known and most provocative films: Petr Todorovskii's Encore, Again, Encore (1992), Ivan Dykhovichnyi's Moscow Parade …

Style And S(T)Imulation: Popular Magazines, Or The Aestheticization Of Postsoviet Russia , Helena Goscilo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The new Postsoviet genre of the glossy magazine that inundated bookstalls and kiosks in Russia's urban centers served as both an advertisement for a life of luxury and an advice column on chic style. Conventionalized signs of affluence, models of beauty, "educational" articles on topics ranging from the history and significance of ties to correct behavior at a first-class restaurant filled the pages of magazines intended to provide an accelerated course in etiquette, appearance, and appurtenances for Russia's newly wealthy. The lessons in spending, demeanor, and taste emphasized moneyed visibility. Despite their differing emphases, popular magazines all shared the new-found …

Introduction: Centrifuge And Fragmentation, Helena Goscilo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The seismic changes inaugurated by desovietization not only recast the entire framework of Russia's cultural priorities, production, and reception, but ultimately revised fundamental concepts of what constitutes culture…

About That: Deploying And Deploring Sex In Postsoviet Russia , Eliot Borenstein

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Desovietization brought sex as a visible cultural phenomenon into Russia, one rife with contradictions and conflicts. Newspapers, popular magazines, advertisements, pornography, the first Russian sex talk show (About That), and pronouncements by a broad range of quotable public figures indicate that the problematics of sex during the 1990s consisted of the following: a sexualized relationship between Russia and the West; a sexualization of politics (rather than the politicization of sex); an inflexible yet implicit code governing the deployment of sex in "high" and "low" culture; and, above all, the development of a sexual discourse that defied circumlocution and …