Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 21 of 21
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Melanie C. Hawthorne. Women, Citizenship, And Sexuality: The Transnational Lives Of Renée Vivien, Romaine Brooks, And Natalie Barney. Liverpool Up, 2021., Jennifer Carr
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Melanie C. Hawthorne. Women, Citizenship, and Sexuality: The Transnational Lives of Renée Vivien, Romaine Brooks, and Natalie Barney. Liverpool UP, 2021. 167 pp.
Aoife Connolly. Performing The Pied-Noir Family: Constructing Narratives Of Settler Memory And Identity In Literature And On-Screen. Lexington Books, 2020., Tessa Nunn
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Aoife Connolly. Performing the Pied-Noir Family: Constructing Narratives of Settler Memory and Identity in Literature and On-Screen. Lexington Books, 2020. ix, 223 pp.
Hillary L. Chute. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, And Documentary Form. Cambridge: Harvard Up, 2016., Julia Watson
Hillary L. Chute. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, And Documentary Form. Cambridge: Harvard Up, 2016., Julia Watson
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Hillary L. Chute. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016.
Gender: The Hidden God In Yasmina Reza's Le Dieu Du Carnage, Lauren Tilger
Gender: The Hidden God In Yasmina Reza's Le Dieu Du Carnage, Lauren Tilger
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Most critics have analyzed acclaimed playwright Yasmina Reza’s Le Dieu du Carnage (2007) as a descent into savagery. This close examination of the play points to the role of gender norms and stereotypes in causing the decline in civility. By taking part in a culture that worships gender ideals, the characters in Reza’s play police one another’s actions to ensure that everyone behaves like proper men and women. The act of attempting to successfully perform femininity or masculinity leads to the evening’s disastrous events. In contrast with readings that have erased gender from the power dynamics of the play and …
Marie Darrieussecq’S Clèves: A Wittigian Rewriting Of Adolescence, Annabel L. Kim
Marie Darrieussecq’S Clèves: A Wittigian Rewriting Of Adolescence, Annabel L. Kim
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Marie Darrieussecq's Clèves (2011) shocked readers with the vulgarity of its language and spurred controversy over its status as a literary text. In this article, I show how the novel's "bad" language is a foil for Darrieussecq's larger project of rewriting the adolescent female body, removing it from the sexualized and objectified optic through which it is usually viewed in order to stage it instead as a body in process, as a situation. For this body in process, gender and sexuality are not givens, but deeply unfamiliar experiences that resist the social order’s dominant framing narratives, its scripts for normal …
Anna Rocca And Kenneth Reeds, Eds. Women Taking Risks In Contemporary Autobiographical Narratives. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013. 232 Pp., Kate Averis
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Anna Rocca and Kenneth Reeds, eds. Women Taking Risks in Contemporary Autobiographical Narratives. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013. 232 pp.
Névine El Nossery And Anna Rocca, Eds. Frictions Et Devenirs Dans Les Écritures Migrantes Au Féminin: Enracinements Et Renégociations. Sarrebruck: Editions Universitaires Européens, 2011. 258 Pp., Natalie Edwards
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Névine El Nossery and Anna Rocca, eds. Frictions et devenirs dans les écritures migrantes au féminin: enracinements et renégociations. Sarrebruck: Editions Universitaires Européens, 2011. 258 pp.
What Will The New Generation Generate? Gendering Accumulation In Fatou Diome’S Celles Qui Attendent, Christopher Hogarth
What Will The New Generation Generate? Gendering Accumulation In Fatou Diome’S Celles Qui Attendent, Christopher Hogarth
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In this paper I focus on the penultimate installment of the oeuvre of the much-celebrated Franco-Senegalese writer Fatou Diome, whose largely autobiographical work has garnered a wide following and a lucrative contract with the Flammarion publishing house. I propose that Diome’s 2010 novel Celles qui attendent strongly contributes to a discourse surrounding the roles of males and females in an African economy increasingly dominated by migration. Diome started as a writer who portrayed the empowered role of the female migrant, who is able to accumulate financial capital in Europe and send it back to Africa in order for males to …
Real Estate And Stating The Real In Jean Echenoz's L'Occupation Des Sols, Philip G. Hadlock
Real Estate And Stating The Real In Jean Echenoz's L'Occupation Des Sols, Philip G. Hadlock
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Through its extremely minimal account of the aftermath of an apartment fire, Jean Echenoz's L'Occupation des sols raises intriguing questions about the grounding of property—its occupation des sols—in Western consciousness. The narrative situation allegorizes the longstanding convention in which man is associated with property ownership while woman is associated with property itself. Though seeming to uphold this paradigm, Echenoz presents a challenging perspective of the functions that gendered scenarios of property perform in sustaining symbolic relations and anchoring the "real" in Western thought.
The Public Becomes Personal: From Ernaux's Passion Simple To Journal Du Dehors, Michelle Scatton-Tessier
The Public Becomes Personal: From Ernaux's Passion Simple To Journal Du Dehors, Michelle Scatton-Tessier
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Drawing on an interview in April 1997 with contemporary French writer Annie Ernaux, this article analyzes the interplay between female narrators and quotidian spaces in Passion simple (1991) and Journal du dehors (1993). Ernaux's writing career, spanning nearly thirty years, develops continually from depictions of physical spaces and the gestures or attitudes these spaces prescribe. Ernaux's spaces are not neutral; each bears the strong markings of a specific social class and gender. As this study illustrates, a radical shift exists between the author's 1991 and 1993 texts. Here, she distances herself from the traditional domestic space, as depicted in Passion …
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 …
Cocteau Au Cirque: The Poetics Of Parade And "Le Numéro Barbette" , Jennifer Forrest
Cocteau Au Cirque: The Poetics Of Parade And "Le Numéro Barbette" , Jennifer Forrest
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Parade (1917) was a joint effort production with libretto by Jean Cocteau music by Erik Satie, decor, costumes, and curtain by Pablo Picasso, and choreography by Léonide Massine. It was not only Cocteau's first truly original work, but, as Pierre Gobin contends, Parade is central to an understanding of the structures that would inform all of his subsequent work. Equally central, proposes Lydia Crowson, is Cocteau's July 1926 Nouvelle Revue Française article on "Le Numéro Barbette." The essay on the transvestite striptease trapezist Barbette offers a poetics of the theater that will have changed little by the time of his …
When I Means We: A Reading Of School In French Caribbean Apprenticeship Novels , Pascale De Souza
When I Means We: A Reading Of School In French Caribbean Apprenticeship Novels , Pascale De Souza
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
While most critics agree that the quest for identity which underlies much of post-colonial literature is illustrated in the thematic approaches adopted by writers, this study further the argument by suggesting that it also conditions writers' selection of narrative strategies. In its representation of subjectivity in process, the apprenticeship novel seems to offer an enticing model of self-completion. This narrative strategy, however, presents particular complexities when used to portray coming of age in a society divided along ethnic lines. Simon Gikandi argues with regards to the Caribbean that the probability of a quest for identity reaching fruition is nil, but …
Passion Simple And Madame, C'Est À Vous Que J'Écris: "That's My Desire" , Elizabeth Richardson Viti
Passion Simple And Madame, C'Est À Vous Que J'Écris: "That's My Desire" , Elizabeth Richardson Viti
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
No two texts better exemplify the contemporary "he said, she said" phenomenon than Annie Ernaux's Passion simple and Alain Gérard's Madame, c'est à vous que j'écris. Ernaux's book, published in 1991, recounts the author's heretofore hidden affair with a foreign businessman living temporarily in France, and Gérard's, published four years later, is an explicit response in which the writer, dissatisfied with Ernaux's account, assumes the lover's identity and chronicles events from his perspective. The result is a literary "tac à tac" very much in the public eye in which a man and woman both wish to tell their side …
From The Sea Wall To The Lover : Prostitution And Exotic Parody, Pascale Bécel
From The Sea Wall To The Lover : Prostitution And Exotic Parody, Pascale Bécel
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This analysis of the two novels highlights Marguerite Duras' equivocal stance with regard to colonial Indochina where she grew up at the beginning of the century. As The Lover rewrites The Sea Wall in the autobiographical mode, the emphasis shifts from an explicit denunciation of colonialism and an implicit subversion of the Lotilian novel, to a parody of exotic themes and narratives. However, by focusing on the two young protagonists' construction of themselves as femmes fatales and prostitutes, this discussion reveals that the politics of gender and race remain at odds in Duras' fictional autobiographies. The cultural other (qua a …
Subverting The Dominant Order: Narrative As Weapon In Simone De Beauvoir's Tous Les Hommes Sont Mortels, Barbara Klaw
Subverting The Dominant Order: Narrative As Weapon In Simone De Beauvoir's Tous Les Hommes Sont Mortels, Barbara Klaw
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This essay argues that through the narrative techniques of point of view and embedding, Beauvoir carefully constructed her narrative and those of her male and female characters in Tous les hommes sont mortels, her third novel, published in 1946, in order to explain why males dominate society and to encourage women to fight against the current patriarchal social order. Many critics view Fosca as the principal character, and his 400-page embedded recapitulation of his past as the predominant text, but shifting the focus from Fosca to Régine, who constitutes the only focalizer of present events in the embedding text, …
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 …
Fashion, Bodies, And Objects, Jean-François Fourny
Fashion, Bodies, And Objects, Jean-François Fourny
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This essay is based on the assumption that the body has undergone a process of fragmentation that started with "modern" art and commodity fetishism that is being amplified today by an increasingly fetishistic high fashion industry itself relayed by music videos and a gigantic pornography industry. This article begins with a discussion of fetishism and objectification as they appear in high fashion shows where underwear becomes wear (turning the inside into the outside), thus expanding (or dissolving) the traditional notion of pornography because they are both reported in comparable terms by mainstream magazines such as Femmes and less conventional publications …
Introduction, Laurie Edson
Introduction, Laurie Edson
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Introduction to the special issue
Inventing Antillean Narrative: Maryse Condé And Literary Tradition, Leah D. Hewitt
Inventing Antillean Narrative: Maryse Condé And Literary Tradition, Leah D. Hewitt
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
As a Guadeloupean black woman novelist, Maryse Condé highlights the tensions in Caribbean culture between traditional and modern values, among ethnic groups, and between the sexes. She combines a representative view of an Antillean writer's specific concerns with a postmodern view of literature as multicultural, polymorphous intersection. The opening portion of this essay argues that Condé's personal literary trajectory embodies a general process of identity formation in post colonial literature, one that passes from the alienation of the individual, to the affirmation of collective movements and positive models, and finally, to a critical, playful outlook in which identities are continually …
Reflections On Linguistic And Literary Colonization And Decolonization In Africa, Eric Sellin
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 …