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Intercourse As Discourse In Alexa Hennig Von Lange’S Relax, Corinna Kahnke

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

While gender has long been an abiding concern of Popliteratur, pop writers (in particular female authors) are often criticized for simply reflecting, if not positively endorsing, negative forms of postfeminism—an attitude that negates the accomplishments of emancipation by regressing to traditional ideas of what it means to be a woman. Some critics suggest that pop texts re-inscribe the gender binary by presenting, even glorifying, long-established gender roles. In response to such a reception, this article investigates Alexa Hennig von Lange’s iconic but much criticized novel Relax (1999) in order to illustrate the reflective and critical nature of Popliteratur. …

Eternal Interns: Kathrin Röggla’S Literary Treatment Of Gendered Capitalism, Florence Feiereisen

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In today’s Germany, university graduates and first-time job seekers find themselves in a different position than did those of previous generations—for many, obtaining a secure, full-time job has become a dream of the past. To boost their résumés, many enter a loop of internships and other similarly precarious states of employment. This article examines the way in which author Kathrin Röggla treats these insecure economic times in her 2004 novel Wir schlafen nicht, with a focus on sex and gender in the New Economy. Are jobs gendered, and what are the resulting effects for both men and women? I …

Marlen Haushofer: Recollections Of Crime And Complicity, Maria-Regina Kecht

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay wants to introduce readers to one of Austria's most astute women writers of the immediate postwar period. Marlen Haushofer, in contrast to her contemporary Ingeborg Bachmann, has not (yet) gained international renown despite her literary craftsmanship. Looking at those works of her that most poignantly thematize the postwar reaction to the years of National Socialism and deal with the issues of guilt and responsibility, I focus on Haushofer's gendered perspective on the roles of victim, perpetrator, and bystander as played out in the seemingly apolitical microcosm of the family.

The essay consists of an introductory discussion of the …

"The Lady In Pink: Dress And The Enigma Of Gendered Space In Marcel Proust's Fiction" , Eva Maria Stadler

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

A study of the role of clothing as central to issues of characterization, description and historical reference in Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. Focus on Odette de Crécy, one of the central characters in the novel, a courtesan who becomes the wife of Charles Swann but who first captivates the narrator's imagination when, as a child, he briefly sees her as a "Lady in Pink."

Odette's role as a fashionable woman, as one of the best-dressed women in Parisian society, gives unity to her character. The description of her clothing, however, not only provides the occasion for …

Surreal And Canny Selves: Photographic Figures In Claude Cahun , Gayle Zachmann

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In her 1975 essay, Le Rire de la méduse, Hélène Cixous enthusiastically announced that it was high time for women to enter into discourse. A full half-century earlier, Claude Cahun (1894-1954), a powerful writer and a haunting photographer and artist, was already inscribing herself, Woman, and a woman's voice in visual and verbal self-portraits, photomontages, prose texts, poetry, and aesthetic and political treatises. Cahun's uncanny interventions in both verbal and visual discourse cannily interrogate conventions of literary and pictorial representation and the constructions of self, gender and culture that they exhibit. Insistently asking readers and spectators, "What's wrong with …

Female Divinities And Story-Telling In The Work Of Tamara Kamenszain, Naomi Lindstrom

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Tamara Kamenszain (b. Argentina, 1947), in her creative writing and her essays, brings together two concerns. One is her examination of concepts of woman and femininity. She specializes in mythical and archetypal representations of woman. Her texts present such figures as the great mother and forest nymphs. On many occasions, she evokes a past in which female divinities were respected, even in the Judaic tradition that is frequently Kamenszain's frame of reference. The other current that stands out in Kamenszain's writing is her interest in Jewish traditions of informal narrative. In her texts, folk narrative displaces learned and canonical narrative. …

Usurping Difference In The Feminine Fantastic From The Riverplate, María B. Clark

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This study intended to define the concept of a feminine fantastic as a narrative mode in contemporary short fiction by women writers from Argentina and Uruguay. As a point of departure, the study examined the narrative techniques and conventions of the fantastic and their strategic use for the expression of feminine concerns. The concept of the feminine was used in the sense of referring to an interpretation of femininity as a construct of language rather than an essentially feminine narrative mode based on a biological gender division. An overview of fantastic short stories by women writers from Argentina and Uruguay …

Marguerite Yourcenar's Prefaces: Genesis As Self-Effacement, Colette Gaudin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Most critics of Marguerite Yourcenar largely ignore the existence of the complex network of prefaces and postfaces which accompanies her fiction. On the basis of the success of her historical reconstitutions and of the classical perfection of her style they characterize her work either as the best illustration of a sexless literature or as a case of denial of femininity. But her prefaces cannot be read simply as an exposition of her thinking about history or as a linear history of her writing. While an authoritative voice exposes her method and asserts a will to aesthetic perfection, the writer as …