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The Song Of Disappearance: Memory, History, And Testimony In The Poetry Of Antonio Gamoneda, Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay explores Antonio Gamoneda’s poetry as an Adornian form of testimony. With its enigmatic foregrounding of lies, the book-length poem Descripción de la mentira ‘Description of the Lie’ can be read as a “contradictory testimony” in which the act and memory of witnessing go, as it were, underground—only to resurface, rife with loss, years after Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy. Yet the abstruse character of this poetic writing prevents readers from drawing straightforward political truths about Spanish history from the poem. Losses are inscribed in the text catachrestically, as they truly are: losses. Gamoneda’s poetry has been read …

Cernuda In Current Spanish Poetry, Salvador J. Fajardo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The poet Luis Cernuda (Spain, 1902-Mexico, 1963) has left his mark on much of the poetry written in Spain since the sixties. First rediscovered in the Peninsula in the late fifties and early sixties by, among others, Francisco Brines, José Angel Valente, and Jaime Gil de Biedma, his influence became pervasive both through the work of these poets, and, through the reading of Cernuda’s poetry itself, available since 1975 in Harris and Maristany edition. Referring in particular to Biedma, whose impact on younger poets has been significant, this paper examines the presence of Cernuda in certain approaches to language and …

Proust And Eliot: An Intertextual Reading, Inge Crosman Wimmers

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Defining intertextuality as “the reader’s perception of relationships between one work and others, which either preceded or followed it” (Riffaterre), this essay sets out to highlight compelling similarities between Proust’s novel, A la recherche du temps perdu, and the fictional works of George Eliot. The emphasis is on affective memory (involuntary memory and emotional templates), ethical considerations (empathy and compassion), and the kind of self-reflexive reading both writers encourage through a complicit narration that implicates the reader. They show readers how emotional memory constitutes the essence of their personal history, thus anticipating modern research in psychology and the neurosciences. …

Virtual Counseling For Students Enrolled In Online Educational Programs, Nikki S. Currie

Educational Considerations

Virtual schools are increasing in popularity as a method of providing formal education for a growing number of students in the United States.

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 …

Toward A Meta Understanding Of Reality: The Problem Of Reference In Russian Metarealist Poetry , Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Through an in-depth analysis of Russian metarealist poetry, the paper seeks to undermine the increasingly popular belief in the self-referential nature of postmodern literature and deconstructive writing. To challenge the conviction that postmodern texts have cut off literary discourse from reality, the author focuses on the writing of Olga Sedakova and Elena Shvarts. Her analysis of Sedakova's Vrata, Okna, Arki attempts to draw a parallel between the schools of Russian symbolism and metarealism, and demonstrate the increased referential potential of metarealist writing. While symbolism juxtaposes the mundane reality here to the eternal spiritual world beyond, she argues in the …

Modernity, Postmodernity, And Transgression In Sábato's Esthetics: Poetic Dissemination, Defeat Of Utopias, Returning Bodies , María Rosa Lojo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

After defining the problematic term "Postmodernity" and its possible application to Latin America, the position of Ernesto Sábato as an essayist and narrator is discussed in light of Modernity (questioned by him as the rationalist and enlightened canon, but applauded as romantic and surrealistic rebellion), and Postmodernity with which it connects from diverse axis: the poetic of desire and that of transgression (vanguard movements related to Foucault, Bataille and Derrida), the theory of reality as "fragment" and "simulacrum" and the suppression of oppositions in the paroxysm of "symbolic exchange." Sábato would transcend from the central proposition of his writing, the …

"Playing A Game Of Worlds": Postmodern Time And The Search For Individual Autonomy In Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire , Jill Leroy-Frazier

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article enters the ongoing critical debate surrounding Pale Fire, as to whether the apparent structure of the novel can be taken at face value. Do the central characters, John Shade and Charles Kinbote, constitute separate voices within the novel, as poet and commentator respectively, or is one in fact the fictional creation of the other? Arguing that the dispute arises out of a set of critical assumptions that negate at least some of the possible implications of Nabokov's own views of art's purpose and function, the essay asserts that Nabokov's disbelief in objective reality renders the entire Shade/Kinbote …

The Violence Of Merging: Unica Zürn's Writing (On) The Body , Caroline Rupprecht

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article is about the work of German Surrealist Unica Zürn (1916-1970), known for her autobiographical text about madness, Der Mann im Jasmin: Eindrücke einer Geisteskrankheit (1977). The problem with Zürn's text, as this article demonstrates, is that it becomes nearly impossible to be distinguished from the author's life. Unlike conventional autobiographies, this text raises doubt oyer the sanity of the author who was not only diagnosed with schizophrenia but also made madness the subject of her writing. Zürn's companion, the artist Hans Bellmer, accused her of indulging in madness for the sake of being able to write about it; …

The Poetics Of Visual Cubism: Guillaume Apollinaire On Pablo Picasso, Pamela A. Genova

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Guillaume Apollinaire, one of the most original poets of the early twentieth-century French avant garde, played a crucial role in the enunciation of modernist aesthetics. Through innovative poetic forms, Apollinaire set forth a new aesthetics which underscored the inherent ambiguity of an increasingly turbulent modern context. Apollinaire's interest in the pure dynamism of the contemporary material landscape, and his attraction to the image that explodes with immediate presence, also led him to a natural curiosity in the visual arts. Identifying with the Cubist mosaic style of inclusion, the juxtaposition of reality and imagination, and the simultaneity of spatial and …

Epiphanies At The Supermarket: An Interview With Brigitte Kronauer , Jutta Ittner

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Brigitte Kronauer has been called "the greatest German [female] fiction writer of our time" (Marcel Reich-Ranicki). Her stories, novels, and criticism have established her as a uniquely sophisticated literary voice and won her many literary prizes. Kronauer's trademarks are her laser-sharp vision, her luminous prose, and the intricate structures of her uncannily realistic literary universes. Finding the mystical in the mundane and exposing human foibles with subtle irony, Kronauer creates, in the words of one critic, epiphanies at the supermarket. Beneath its everyday surface her fiction deals with the eternal human questions of life, death, and love. At a still …

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 …

Identifying Jews: The Legacy Of The 1941 Exhibition, "Le Juif Et La France" , Raymond Bach

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

During the Occupation there was a two-pronged effort to separate the Jews from the rest of the French population...

The Disappearance Of Objects In "Surmodernity": From Object-Images To Meta-Objects, Dominique D. Fisher

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article examines various modes of disappearance of objects from modernity to the latest stage of postmodernity. From the loss of the aura to the proliferation of fractal images, whether it be in literature, contemporary art, or daily life, objects undergo a series of mutations (object-signs, image-objects, object-images, meta-objects) that lead to a new kind of obscenity in which "jouissance" 'pleasure' is released into the madness of a vision obdurated by pathos and panopticism.

The Writer's Identity As Self-Dismantling Text In Julien Green's Si J'Étais Vous. . ., Robert Ziegler

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Written between 1944 and 1946, Julien Green's novel Si j'étais vous . . . is one of the author's most fantastic and enigmatic texts, having generated interpretations ranging from the Freudian to the theological. Yet certain central features of the text have not yet been addressed and may lead to a different approach, one focusing on the problem of the writer's identity in his works. Despite the fact that his literary efforts are unsuccessful, Fabien is shown as being a writer like Green himself, but more importantly, he is a character in another writer's fiction. As metatext, Green's novel describes …

Introduction, Richard Stamelman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Introduction to the special issue

Words, Names, Nature, Earth: On The Poetry Of Pierre-Albert Jourdan, Yves Bonnefoy

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

An ambivalence toward language is present throughout the work of Pierre-Albert Jourdan. Words are associated with the closure of a grey world; they are always arriving late, after the fact; they are veils, masks, dreams detached from truth, knowledge, and immediacy. Yet, words and names hold out the possibility of hope; they can designate the presence of beauty in the world; they can mediate the encounter of self and other. The human word signifies itself through the substance of the world and the communion of beings. At the intersection of natural reality—the center of the real for Jourdan—and of language …

The Syntax Of Assertion In The Poetry Of Claudio Rodriguez, Margaret H. Persin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Through his original and unsettling manner of syntactical assertion, Claudio Rodriguez, the contemporary Spanish poet, subverts the conventional usage of language. But, in turn, he captures the transcendental, magical experience of language and all existence in the process of the text. That experience is based on intuition, irrationality and sensorial associations, rather than on logical connections. The reader is thus confronted with texts whose contradictory interpretive paths of signification continually subvert one another. Rodriguez wishes to communicate that it is not the end result but rather the process of the text that is the ultimate meaning. The reader's task is …

Writing The Past: Le Roy Ladurie And The Voice Of The New History, Philippe Carrard

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Just as in fiction, discursive strategies in history can reveal the very nature of a project. The positivist historiography that prevailed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries regarded historical facts as givens. Accordingly, it held as its ideal of writing the objective text, that is. the text from which the historian's mediation would be carefully erased. The New History, on the other hand, considers all research to be grounded in a researcher and seeks to indicate by various means that the text does not generate itself. In Carnival in Romans, for example, Le Roy Ladurie explicitly resorts …

Construction And Deconstruction: The Theme Of Fleetingness In Poems By Juan Ramón Jiménez, And Pedro Salinas, Andrew P. Debicki

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Both Juan Ramón Jiménez and Salinas reveal in their poems a striving to capture the essences of things, continuing in this quest a tradition coming to them from symbolist poetry. By examining several poems written by them, however, we discover a basic difference in their way of embodying this striving. Juan Ramón, concerned with the perfection of form, remains within a logocentric tradition in which the poem attempts to embody its meanings objectively; Salinas, on the other hand, writes poems the meanings of which evolve with successive readings and reflect the theme of reality's fleetingness. A close analysis of the …

Sensationalism, Jean-Jacques Thomas

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Roland Barthes's fascination with discourse is usually considered a glorification of intellectual exchanges, the parade of a virtuoso eager to display his unalloyed dedication to logocentrism. As a consequence, scholars tend to rely on his writings as if they were principally a catalogue for the functional concepts of modernity.

The purpose of this article is to show through a close reading of Barthes's latter-day texts that his exhilarating verbal brio is first and foremost a sensuous relationship between the speaking subject and the verbal substance. In his case, this particular relationship generates a discourse akin to physical heroism, thanks to …

Evembe's Sur La Terre En Passant And The Poetics Of Shame, Richard Bjornson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In Sur ta terre en passant, Evembe fashions a poetics of shame from the ordinary experiences of life in a large African city (Yaounde). He does it in such a way that the hallucinatory qualities and scabrous details of one individual's state of consciousness mirror the malaise which characterizes the larger social reality. The protagonist Iyoni (whose name means «shame» in the dialect of Evembe's native Kribi) experiences both misery and social respectability in an environment where traditional values have been lost, only to be replaced by artificial, dehumanizing hierarchies and an attitude of materialistic acquisitiveness. Despite the mysterious …