Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 14 of 14
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
The Integration Of A Fragmented Self In The Works Of Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, Malva E. Filer
The Integration Of A Fragmented Self In The Works Of Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, Malva E. Filer
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Literary creation is always a transposition of individual and collective experiences…
Surreal And Canny Selves: Photographic Figures In Claude Cahun , Gayle Zachmann
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 …
Aesthetic Deviation: Victor Segalen In China , Kimberley Healey
Aesthetic Deviation: Victor Segalen In China , Kimberley Healey
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Victor Segalen's early twentieth-century writings on China provide an alternative to nineteeth-century French literary exoticism. In his examination of the self and the other, much admired by postcolonial critics, he attempts to embrace a new aesthetics of diversity. Segalen's writing on the other opens the door to a jarring and heterogeneous aesthetic of exotic encounter by reevaluating the position of the European abroad as well as the literary forms used to depict the foreign. However, Segalen's encounters with difference as illustrated in his two main narratives on China, Equipée and René Leys, deviate from the desire for absolute difference …
The Construction Of History In The Folds Of Family History In The Novel Song Lost In West Buenos Aires By María Rosa Lojo, Zulema Moret
The Construction Of History In The Folds Of Family History In The Novel Song Lost In West Buenos Aires By María Rosa Lojo, Zulema Moret
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The novels written by María Rosa Lojo strongly reflect a specific preoccupation with the rewriting of history from new perspectives that are related to so-called postmodernism. This is the case with Canción perdida en Buenos Aires al Oeste (1987). This work attempts to articulate a reading of the "private" at a crossroads with the history of the country and of other countries (Argentina/Spain). It is a novel of exiles, from the exile of the Neira family from the Franco dictatorship in the forties to the particular exiles of each family member during the seventies and eighties in Argentina. From the …
Almost The Same, But Not Quite: Re-Orienting The Story Of The Subject In Christina Fernández Cubas's El Año De Gracia , Jessica A. Folkart
Almost The Same, But Not Quite: Re-Orienting The Story Of The Subject In Christina Fernández Cubas's El Año De Gracia , Jessica A. Folkart
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Cristina Fernández Cubas's novel El año de Gracia (1985), about a young Spaniard who is shipwrecked on a deserted island with only a mangy shepherd for company, evokes the political dialectics of self/other found in the European's discovery and conquest of an unknown island in Robinson Crusoe. In Fernández Cubas's literary depiction of the European subject, however, she situates him on the margins of power in order to view the dynamic from a different perspective. The postcolonial theorizations of Edward Said and Homi Bhabha inform this analysis of how Fernández Cubas's castaway is at first overpowered by the other …
Subject To Instability , Karen Bouwer
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 …
The Dialogic Self: Language And Identity In Annie Ernaux , Warren Johnson
The Dialogic Self: Language And Identity In Annie Ernaux , Warren Johnson
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The nine largely autobiographical texts that Annie Ernaux (1940- ) has published to date, which range stylistically from early strident outpourings to the willed transparency of an "écriture plate," all reveal the narrator as a patchwork subjectivity comprised of the discourses surrounding the child, adolescent, and adult against which she reacts, frequently without comprehending her own motivations. I try to unravel the strands that make up Ernaux's language and explore how the self that emerges is an aggregate of the discursive spaces she has inhabited. I trace as well how her gender identity impacts her capacity and willingness to struggle …
Orientalism Reconsidered: Turkey In Barbara Frischmuth's Das Verschwinden Des Schattens In Der Sonne And Hanne Mede-Flock's Im Schatten Der Mondsichel, Petra Fachinger
Orientalism Reconsidered: Turkey In Barbara Frischmuth's Das Verschwinden Des Schattens In Der Sonne And Hanne Mede-Flock's Im Schatten Der Mondsichel, Petra Fachinger
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Recent German criticism has demonstrated that the relationships of Austria and Germany with the "Orient" have been more complex than Edward Said's Orientalism makes it appear. Furthermore, Said only touches upon gender issues. Studies like Rana Kabbani's Europe's Myths of Orient: Devise and Rule explore the convergence of race, class, and gender in the conceptualization of the "Orient." Kabbani claims that in Elias Canetti's Die Stimmen von Marrakesch the narrator's identification with the colonizer's position enters into his representation of self as much as does his gender. My essay demonstrates how the Austrian writer Barbara Frischmuth and the German writer …
Body / Antibody, Lawrence R. Schehr
Body / Antibody, Lawrence R. Schehr
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Unique object in the exchange-system, the gay body occupies a locus where a phantom identity and an imagined reciprocity define the poles of the subject-object relation. Made of the right stuff, it is an object circulating in a system that tends to reproduce the concept of identity in its search for mirror images of itself. Often rejected by the world, it has recently become a cynosure equated with sickness, pestilence, and death in the age of AIDS. The representations of that object change: no longer perceived as a part of libidinal economy, it has become a mass of symptoms, having …
Reading In Colette: Domination, Resistance, Autonomy, Laurel Cummins
Reading In Colette: Domination, Resistance, Autonomy, Laurel Cummins
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The act of reading on the part of Colette's characters reveals itself as a dynamic involving domination and resistance. A study of passages from two of her semi-autobiographical works, La Maison de Claudine and Sido, brings to light both a positively connoted model of reading, exemplified by the character 'Colette,' and a negatively connoted model, exemplified by the older sister Juliette. While Juliette approaches texts with no sense of self, and seeks instead to be defined by the texts she reads, 'Colette' remains in relation to texts and to the discourses they contain, and resists them. Gender complicates the …
The Early (Feminist) Essays Of Victoria Ocampo, Doris Meyer
The Early (Feminist) Essays Of Victoria Ocampo, Doris Meyer
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This study examines the essays written by Ocampo between 1920 and 1934, prior to the time when she publicly voiced her adhesion to feminism and the rights of women in Argentine society. In these works from her Testimonios in which Ocampo struggles to find her voice as a female writer, the maleable essay serves her need to engage in discursive dialogues from the margins of the literary culture of her time. Both as a woman and a member of the oligarchy, she questions cultural assumptions and gender-based binary structures common among the male writers of her time, many of whom …
Power, Gender, And Canon Formation In Mexico, Cynthia Steele
Power, Gender, And Canon Formation In Mexico, Cynthia Steele
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
I propose to analyze Castellanos's trajectory from marginalized ethnographer and critic of "latino" society, to presidential insider and ambassador, and the first modern Mexican woman writer to be accepted into the literary canon. I will explore the intersection of politics, gender, and the (self-) creation of a literary persona with regard to the following issues: 1) the tension between self-exposure and self-censorship in Castellanos's literary work; 2) Castellanos's intense and problematic relationship with her illegitimate, mestizo half-brother; 3) the coincidences and contradictions between Castellanos's journalistic account of her relationship with her servant Maria Escandon, and Maria's own oral history twenty …
Between Female Dialogics And Traces Of Essentialism: Gender And Warfare In Christa Wolf's Major Writings, Sabine Wilke
Between Female Dialogics And Traces Of Essentialism: Gender And Warfare In Christa Wolf's Major Writings, Sabine Wilke
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The relationship between memory, writing, and the question of how we define ourselves as gendered subjects is at the center of Christa Wolf's work. Her literary production, starting in the late fifties with a rather naive and un-selfconscious love story, has undergone a dramatic shift. In her more recent texts, Wolf sets out to rewrite classical mythology to make us aware of those intersections in the history of Western civilization at which women were made economically and psychologically into objects. The present essay seeks to locate Christa Wolf's evolving conception of gender and warfare within the contemporary theoretical discussion on …
The Dialogue Of Absence, Richard Stamelman
The Dialogue Of Absence, Richard Stamelman
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The Dialogue of Absence