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(De)Humanizing Humor: The Anthill Of Life And Politics In The Theatre Of Sabina Berman, Priscilla Meléndez

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article examines several theatrical works of this Mexican dramatist by means of ironic humor as a powerful resource to examine the nature of human communication, and to expose the serious and devastating social and political aspects of contemporary culture: machismo, political corruption, sexual violence, sexism, exploitation, historical manipulation, and hopelessness. In a tense environment where humor might not seem appropriate, Berman masterfully uses and critically examines it as a means to understand humor’s serious implications and its comic imperfections, as she subtly recurs to but also parodies some of the most recognized theories of humor. Berman’s use of incongruity …

Style And Otherness In L.-F. Céline's Rigodon, Ann L. Murphy

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

L.-F. Céline's preoccupation with the question of style appears not only in his correspondence, interviews and "socio-political" (i.e. anti-Semitic) tracts, but also in his novels. An examination of Céline's thoughts on the writing of, and in, novels reveals an opposition between features which should inform style, and those which should be eliminated, in other words, between those values upon which his own style rests, and those associated with non-style, with his "others of style." Two passages in his final novel Rigodon may be read as figuring certain aspects of these thoughts as well as some of the paradoxes which accompany …

Sounding Out The Silence Of Gregor Samsa: Kafka's Rhetoric Of Dys-Communication, Robert Weninger

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Through his transformation, Gregor Samsa, rather than simply silencing himself, allows his repressed voice to be heard palimpsestically in the language of his family and the boarders. His story is one of inverted—rather than aborted—communication. An analogous inversion governs the relationship between Kafka and his father and Kafka and his interpreters. As a child, Kafka could make little sense of his father's rules and his contradictory actions; later, he reduplicates in his writings this grammar of "dys-communication." Our puzzled and often frustrated reactions to Kafka's texts can therefore be seen to mirror his equally puzzled and frustrated reactions to his …

El Año De Gracia And The Displacement Of The Word, Catherine G. Bellver

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The power of the established, self-sufficient written word is considerable. Written texts not only furnish material, incentive, or direction for new texts, they also inspire, orient, and mold those who read them. El año de Gracia, a novel by Cristina Fernández Cubas (1985), vividly illustrates the imprint novels can leave on a young mind. The protagonist learns, however, that the concept of the world he formed on the basis of literary models is erroneous. In El año de Gracia literature fails to sustain meaning, and meaning itself becomes irrelevant. Both oral and written discourse are in some way restricted, …

Reflections On Linguistic And Literary Colonization And Decolonization In Africa, Eric Sellin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Despite the cultural diversity found in Africa and the complexity ofthe psychology of the colonizer and the colonized, several fundamental facts emerge regarding the function of language and literature in recent African history. The colonizer sought to instill a sense of inferiority in the colonized as part of the dynamics of conquest, placing special emphasis on education and language. These notions, lucidly discussed by such social thinkers as O. Mannoni, Frantz Fanon, and Albert Memmi, have analogues in the defense of language everywhere where lingua-political oppression occurs, be it in colonial Africa or on an Arapaho reservation in the American …

Nabokov's "Torpid Smoke", Leona Toker

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Nabokov's short stories are polished self-contained works of art. However, like his novels and poems, they can be profitably read in the light of their place in his general canon. This place is determined by the time when each story was written and by the way in which other works enrich and elucidate the significance of its images.

The short fiction of Nabokov's Berlin period has been regarded largely as akin to studies that a painter makes in preparation for a big picture. In some cases, however, the stories seem to serve as safety valves for the urgent material that …

The Dialogue Of Absence, Richard Stamelman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Dialogue of Absence

Introduction, Michael Holquist

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Introduction to the special issue on Mikhail Bakhtin

Circumscription: Proust's The Captive And The Problem Of Other Minds, Carol De Dobay Rifelj

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Central to Proust's Remembrance as a whole and to The Captive in particular is Marcel's attempt to discover what other people think and feel. But, as reading the work in the light of modern analytic philosophy shows, his efforts are thwarted by the deceptions of others and by his own irreconcilable views. The other is radically inaccessible, yet the object of our search; the self is a stable entity, yet multiple, changing, and a fiction constituted by language; language is communication, yet the source of error. These are the problems which confront philosophy and literature when they try to come …