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Moving On? Memory And History In Griselda Gambaro's Recent Theater, Gail Bulman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

For more than forty years, Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro has dramatized the social and political climate of her homeland. This article examines three of her plays from the late eighties and early nineties, using both Freudian and performance theories, in order to show how these works document the range of emotions in post Dirty War Argentina and, at the same time, postulate ways of coping with the memories of those years. Beyond traditional memory-theater, these plays demonstrate the trauma of remembering by highlighting different phases in the memory process and by conceptualizing stages in the grief of a traumatized nation. …

Reconfiguring Boundaries In Maryse Condé'S Crossing The Mangrove , Deborah B. Gaensbauer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Maryse Condé's 1989 novel, Crossing the Mangrove, presents a compelling performance of the complicated patterns of place and space inherent in the social masquerade of a small, isolated, Guadeloupean village. Because the novel corresponds to Condé's return to a Caribbean "stage" to continue a long process of questioning mapped configurations of identity, critical attention has focused on the character of Francis Sancher, the returning "stranger," whose wake serves as both frame and catalyst for the action. Insufficient attention has been paid to the role of Mira Lameaulnes, Sancher's rejected mistress and the mother of his child, whose story the …

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Bohn, Willard. The Rise of Surrealism: Cubism, Dada, and the Pursuit of the Marvelous Reviewed by Elena Cueto As

Folkart, Jessica A. Angles on Otherness in Post-Franco Spain: The Fiction of Cristina Fernández Cubas Reviewed by Jorge Marí

Marí, Jorge. Lecturas espectaculares: El cine en la novela española desde 1970 Reviewed by Salvador A. Oropesa

Meredith, James H. Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents Reviewed by Cornelius Partsch

Moran, Michael G. and Michelle Ballif, eds. Twentieth-Century Rhetorics and Rhetoricians: Critical Studies and Sources Reviewed by David Malcolm

Hesitating Between Irony And The Desire To Be Serious In Moi, Tituba, Sorcière... Noire De Salem: Maryse Condé And Her Readers , Sarah E. Barbour

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In writing her fifth novel, a fictive autobiography of the title character, Maryse Condé has said that she "felt a strong solidarity with Tituba," and at the same time she admits hesitating "between irony and a desire to be serious" in the invention of this "mock-epic character." This article explores the reader's relationship to the novel as a variation on this hesitation. Once Condé sets up Tituba's authority to narrate her story, the reader is left in the precarious position of hesitating between getting the author's irony and desiring to be serious about Tituba's narrative of a painful history. By …

Gen(D)Eration Next: Prose By Julia Franck And Judith Hermann, Anke Biendarra

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In March 1999, critic Volker Hage adopted a term in Der Spiegel that subsequently dominated public discussions about new German literature by female authors-"Fräuleinwunder"…

Masochism, Marginality, And The Metropolis: Kutlug Ataman's Lola And Billy The Kid , Barbara Mennel

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Baltimore: "What you get is what you see"

While sitting at the window of "City Café," a gay café in Baltimore, I let my eyes wander to the other side of the street where a group of young gay black men were camping it up…

A Stranger In Berlin: On Joseph Roth's Berlin Discourse , Sabine Hake

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

As the quintessential urbanite, Joseph Roth continues to be extremely relevant to ongoing public debates on Berlin's identity as the new center of a multicultural society and architecture of postmodern urbanity…

Post-Colonial Berlin? Pieke Biermann's Crime Novels As Globalization Critique , Katrin Sieg

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Set in and around Tempelhof Airport, the crime novel 4,5,6 poses the question whether social, cultural, and economic "globalization" continues and aggravates colonizing practices (as scholars like Miyoshi, Chomsky, and Said have argued), or whether the term describes the social conditions of postcoloniality, beyond superpower domination and the bloc system it created...

"Only The Wall Put A Stop To The Inflow Of Monsters": Bodies And Borders In Post-Wall Berlin , Katharina Gerstenberger

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In his seminal study Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett showed that urban space is significantly shaped through the ways in which humans perceive their bodies…