Digital Commons Network^™

Andrea Goulet. Legacies Of The Rue Morgue: Science, Space, And Crime Fiction In France. Philadelphia: U Of Pennsylvania P, 2016., Kelsey B. Madsen

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Andrea Goulet. Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2016. 295pp.

The Legacy Of Althusser, 1918-1990: An Introduction, Philip Goldstein

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Introduction to the special issue.

Althusserian Theory: From Scientific Truth To Institutional History, Philip Goldstein

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Scholars have emphasized the scientific and the rationalist features of Althusser's work, but few have noted its post-structuralist aspects, especially its Foucauldian accounts of discourse and power. In the early Pour Marx, Althusser divides ideological practices from objective science and theoretical norms from empirical facts; however, in several later essays Althusser repudiates his earlier faith in theory's normative force as well as his broad distinction between science and ideology. He argues that every discipline establishes its own relationship between its ideological history and its formal, scientific ideals. This argument, together with Althusser's earlier rejection of totalizing approaches, establishes important …

Response To Ideology Takes A Day Off: Althusser And Mass Culture, Janet Staiger

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Chip Rhodes defends Althusser's scientific belief that the subject is a bearer of structures and opposes the humanist claim that the subject functions independently of its contexts. However, recent work in cultural studies examines how identity is constructed and allows us to reconcile the scientific and the humanist view. Ideological interpellation may define our subject positions but we are still able to refuse them. For instance, Rhodes' account of "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" assumes that the subject is a fully interpellated, adolescent, Anglo, middle or upper class, heterosexual male. However, the film also offers various oppositional subject positions, including adolescent …

Althusser's Mirror, Carsten Strathausen

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Jacques Lacan significantly influenced Althusser's accounts of ideology and the subject. Althusser's belief that science is a discourse without a subject parallels Lacan's belief that in the Symbolic Order the Subject and the Other are alienated. Althusser's account of interpellation, which explains how ideology recognizes individuals as subjects, takes for granted Lacan's notion of the mirror stage. Althusser repudiates the plenitude of the subject, whose interpellation conceals its lack; Lacan shows that the subject's failure to express itself in language makes the subject a void. However, Althusser, whose subject is too much like Lacan's ego, fails to distinguish between the …

The Dialectics Of The Archaic And The Post-Modern In Maghrebian Literature Written In French, Hédi Abdel-Jaouad

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Maghrebian literature written in French has been since its inception a literature of and about the abyss. For the Maghrebian the abyss is esentially the space of modernity, that forbidden citadel of art, science and technology from which s/he was excluded and marginalized. Recently, writing of/in French has become the site/scene of a polemos between the archaic (identity) and the post-modern (difference).

Our study of the archaic focuses on cultural, literary and critical knowledge and centers around two main themes: that of a beginning, that is a search for events in the past that explain the abyss (or retardation vis-à-vis …

Modernity And Marginality In Love In The Time Of Cholera, Mabel Moraña

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The two male protagonists of García Márquez's novel, Dr. Urbino and Florentino Ariza (whose lives are linked by their relationship to Fermina Daza), enact to the limit nineteenth century ideologies of scientific progress and romanticism. The anachronistic plot of romantic love taken to the point of parody is deployed by the author as a critique of fin de siècle modernity.