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Front Matter, Vol. 33, Issue 2

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Editorial board and Advisory Council, masthead, and contents

Spanish Identity: Nation, Myth, And History, Jesús Torrecilla

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the last two centuries, conservatives and liberals have offered two mutually exclusive visions of Spanish history, each with distinct myths, symbols, and heroes. The conservative image, formed in the Middle Ages, was based on the myth of the Reconquest and the need to restore (or keep) the homogeneity of a country characterized by its Christian religion and Latin culture. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, faced with Napoleon’s invasion, Spanish liberals understood the danger of associating their modern ideas with France and invented a progressive and democratic Spanish tradition. According to their interpretation, the most authentic Spain was …

Habitus, Heterotopia And Endocolonialism In Early Spanish Literary Fascism, Nil Santiáñez

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article explores strategies of symbolic production of national space (e.g. technologies of tropological striation) in early fascist works of Tomás Borrás, Luys Santa Marina, and Rafael Sánchez Mazas written à propos the Rif War (1919-27). Considered as perlocutionary speech-acts, these texts conceive Morocco as a heterotopia and embody a fascist habitus produced by a heterogeneous group of writers, intellectuals, politicians and military personnel—in particular the notorious Foreign Legion—posted in Morocco; they all shared the defense of an authoritarian concept of nation as a model for the political organization of Spain as well as an endocolonialist gaze and stance towards …

The Basque Country: The Heart Of Spain, A Part Of Spain, Or Somewhere Else Altogether, Paddy Woodworth

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Basque Country exhibits contradictory symptoms of good health and chronic internal rupture. A flexible and robust economy and a vibrant cultural life are undermined by opposed senses of identity, which make almost any statement about the region deeply contentious. The verifiability—or otherwise—of Basque nationalist and Spanish nationalist readings of Basque history and culture matter less today than the fact that they are held with genuine conviction by big sectors of Basque society. Both traditions have their own legitimacy, but neither has been capable of fully acknowledging or including the other. Paradoxically, Francoism reinforced Basque nationalist identity, and anxieties about …

Spain, Reincarnated: Julio Medem’S Caótica Ana And New Spanish Media(Tion) In The World, Susan Martin-Márquez

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Spanish director Julio Medem’s visually stunning yet controversial 2007 film Chaotic Ana was panned for its ostensibly Manichaean treatment of gender relations and its crudely scatological ending, both of which have distracted attention from the work’s fascinating incursions into global politics. While the film’s complex layering of hawk and dove imagery figures centuries of male violence against women, it is also imbricated with an extended meditation on the divergent roles of the United States and Spain on the contemporary world stage. Through the male protagonist Said, a Saharawi painter, the film artfully shifts postcolonial guilt for the fate of the …

The Spanish Case For Europe. The Power Of Cultural Identity, Gonzalo Navajas

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Europe has not been for Spain an easily assumed identity, a home within which Spaniards could find accommodation. Yet, for the first time in modern history, Spain has become fully integrated in the political and economic system of Europe and it functions within it as a strong and dedicated partner. Paradoxically, this new order has developed simultaneously with the increasing assertion of the local nationalities. I propose that the current political and cultural situation in both Europe and Spain has created the appropriate conditions for an extensive reexamination of the conventional European/Spanish paradigm. That is so because the circumstances on …

Spaniwood? English Language Spanish Films Since The 1990s, Cristina Sánchez-Conejero

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Is there such a thing as “Spanish identity”? If so, what are the characteristics that best define it? Since the early 1990s we have observed a movement toward young Spanish directors interested in making a different kind of cinema that departs markedly from the lighthearted landismo of the 70s and, later, the indulgent almodovarismo of the 80s. These new directors—as well as producers and actors—are interested in reaching out to wider audiences, in and outside of Spain. The internationalization they pursue comes, in many cases, with an adoption of the English language in their works. This multicultural cinema presents a …

A Vindication Of The Spanish Mother. Maternal Images In The Filmic Make-Over Of The Nation, Andrés Zamora

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The maternal figure as an explicit or oblique image of the Spanish nation has undergone a good share of indignities throughout the modern cultural history of the country, from the nineteenth-century Mater Dolorosa to the stepmother of those forced into exile after the civil war, from the terrible matriarchs of Benito Peréz Galdós, Federico Garcia Lorca and Camilo José Cela to the patriarchal mothers of Spanish oppositional cinema in the final phase of the dictatorship and first years of the democratic transition. This latter avatar of the Spanish mother, so well reconstructed by Marsha Kinder, had the bewildering destiny of …

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Sara Lennox. Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters: Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bachmann by Kristin T. Vander Lugt

Birgit Tautz. Reading and Seeing Ethnic Differences in the Enlightenment: From China to Africa by Susanne Kelley

Patrick Greaney. Untimely Beggar. Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin by Christine Rinne

Philip Payne, Graham Bartram, and Galin Tihanov, eds. A Companion to the Works of Robert Musil by Geoffrey C. Howes

Jennifer Willging. Telling Anxiety: Anxious Narration in the Work of Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Nathalie Sarraute and Anne Hébert by Natalie Edwards

Michael Lucey. Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person …

Uses Of A Myth: Al-Andalus, Serafín Fanjul

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the last two decades, the Spanish press treatment of the Muslim world reflects a change of tone from unsympathetic to enthusiastic, although the information is still marred by confusion and ignorance. This change of attitude has occurred in other Western countries as well, and it is due in part to immigration trends, control over oil resources, and the relativism of official discourses towards the Third World. In the case of Spain, however, there is an additional internal element at play: the mass-media reinvention of a mythical al-Andalus as a tolerant and pluralistic society. This idealized interpretation of seven centuries …

The Paradoxical Effect Of The Documentary In Walter Salles’S Central Do Brasil, Cynthia M. Tompkins

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article explores the fusion between the conventions of the documentary and fiction films in Walter Salles’s Central do Brasil (1998), tracing this synergy back to the impact of the documentary and Neorealism on the New Latin American Cinema and Cinema Novo, its Brazilian counterpart. After acknowledging Alberto Cavalcanti’s role in the development of British documentary and cinema in Brazil, this text examines Salles’s film in terms of Juliane Burton’s typology of the observational mode. Particular attention is given to Bill Nichols’s work on the textual conventions shared by the observational documentary and fiction films. The affective impact, which …

Cœur, Temps And Monde In Le Forçat Innocent Of Supervielle: A Poet’S Existential Metaphors Of Prison And Shelter, Franck Dalmas

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Poet Jules Supervielle has a marginal status in twentieth-century French literature as he was not engaged in any prominent movement of his time (Symbolism, Futurism, or Surrealism). In that regard, his poetry is neither nationally colored nor aesthetically connoted. It might well be the reason for his lacking consideration in the literary canon. But these differences must get our special attention. Supervielle was not born in France and he was to live and write his works in a state of existential angst, divided, as he always felt, between his native Uruguay and his French legacy. As such, the poet developed …

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Bigsby, Christopher. Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory by Roxane Riegler

Bruce, Iris. Kafka and Cultural Zionism. Dates in Palestine by Bettina Matthias

Haase, Christine. When Heimat Meets Hollywood: German Filmmakers and America, 1985-2005 by Maria Stehle

Herzog, Dagmar. Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany by Sabine Hake

Iossel, Mikhail and Jeff Parker. Amerika. Russian Writers View the United States by Yuliya Minkova

Macksey, Richard and Eugenio Donato, eds. The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man by Safoi Babana-Hampton

Magnarelli, Sharon. Home is Where the (He)art Is: The Family …

Nostalgia And The New Cosmopolitan: Literary And Artistic Interventions In The City Of Casablanca, Katarzyna Pieprzak

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the past ten years, groups of local artists, architects, writers and activists have become concerned not only with the changing material conditions of Casablanca, but also with the city’s memory. This essay is concerned with two projects that reveal how nostalgic modes of recollection expose and limit geographies of cosmopolitan identity in the city. The first project, a collection of twelve booklets written by prominent novelists and poets with well-known photographers, is entitled Casablanca, fragments d’imaginaire. This collection argues that nostalgia and phantasm are key organizing concepts through which the city should be recollected, claiming that these modes …

Crypts Of Hélène Cixous’S Past, Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Through a reading of Cixous’s Inside (1986), Or: Les lettres de mon père (1997), Reveries of the Wild Woman (2006) and Si Près (2007), this article explores the diverse allegories of “enclosure” in the figure of the crypt containing Cixous’s father. Part of the allegory entails a process of mourning not only for the defunct father but for Algeria as well where he is encrypted. The crypt (father’s cave or tomb) as the place and the process of writing imposes the de-cryption of the secret cavities of Cixous’s texts where she is enclosed, inside the father’s cave, in the cavity …

The Significance Of Birds In The Works Of Augusto Roa Bastos, Helene C. Weldt-Basson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Birds have occupied a central role in the works of the Paraguayan writer, Augusto Roa Bastos (1917-2005), from the beginning of his literary career. In texts ranging from his early poetry to his complete short stories, compiled in 2003, the bird motif repeatedly resurfaces, raising the question of the relevance of birds in Roa Bastos’s oeuvre. This article argues that birds are used symbolically throughout Roa Bastos’s poetry and prose works, by drawing upon their significance within Guarani myths and literature. The article focuses on several symbolic associations for birds in Guarani culture, including their relationship to oral language, …

Front Matter, Vol. 33, Issue 1

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Editorial board and Advisory Council, masthead, and contents

Philology And Music In The Work Of Pascal Quignard, John Hamilton

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The persistent association of philology and music in the work of Pascal Quignard is mediated through various modalities of silence. Throughout Quignard’s novels, essays and treatises, musical sensibility and philological obsession work to silence the all-too-loud, abstracting processes of communication, representation, narration, or discourse. Upon sketching out the general terms and definitions that Quignard employs across his writing career, the essay turns to two especially illustrative examples: Quignard’s reading of Lucretius and his reflections on Plato’s discussion of misology. Misology, denoting a deep mistrust of words, ends up serving as a synonym for philology itself; it is a hatred of …

Paranoia And Christianity In Maurice Dantec’S Crime Fiction, Jean-Louis Hippolyte

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Maurice Dantec is “a prophet, a mystic, a Christian soldier, Zionist and pro-American, anti-secular and militantly counter-revolutionary. In short, the last scandal of French literature,” according to his editor David Kersan. Dantec’s brand of punk neo-Christian literary activism may feel somehow out of place in a literary milieu still beholden to the existentialism of Sartre and the revolutionary ethos of the 1960s. But Dantec’s “disgust” (of Old Europe, the creeping menace of Islam and the rampant march of secularization) bears witness to a larger malaise. Along with Michel Houellebecq and Peter Sloterdijk, he testifies to the opening of a new …

Wartime Writings, Or The Imaginary Lover Of Marguerite Duras, Bethany Ladimer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The publication in 2006 of Marguerite Duras’s Cahiers de la guerre, ‘Wartime Writings,’ written between 1943 and 1949, made accessible to the reader the first known versions of the family drama that was to become the material of much of her fiction. As this work now takes its place as chronologically first in the intertext of Duras’s autofictional writings, it sheds considerable light on our understanding of the transformations in these texts that occurred over her lifetime. Whereas L’Amant had been presented and accepted as the disclosure of a real occurrence and the origin of the other works, it …