Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Gabriel García Márquez's «Eréndira» And The Brothers Grimm, Joel Hancock

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

García Márquez's long story «La increíble y triste historia de la Cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada» is studied in the light of the structures and themes of the fairy tale, particularly of the type collected by the Grimm brothers. Dimensions of special interest are the organizational framework of the narrative, the portrayal of characters, and certain motifs, all of which are strongly reminiscent of Grimm's Fairy Tales. These elements are examined as representative of those morphologies which Vladimir Propp delineates for the genre of the fairy tale in his Morphology of the Folktale.

Gabriela Mistral's «Sonnets To Ruth»: The Consolation Of Passion, Howard M. Fraser

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

As for many poets, the sonnet form presented the opportunity to Gabriela Mistral to perfect her poetic technique. This study examines in detail the Nobel Laureate's trio of sonnets commemorating the biblical matriarch Ruth. Mistral's treatment of the themes of alienation, self- sacrifice, and the search for human dignity features the contrasts of suffering and consolation which are present in the biblical narrative. But, alongside the thematic purposes which the pleasure/pain duality serves, Mistral exploits this opposition for technical and structural reasons. She uses the feelings of love and pain as an organizational device in her treatment of time, characters …

Affective Consciousness In La Nausée, Benjamin Suhl

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

La Nausée, a key to Sartre's work, centers on an affective comprehension of the world, which becomes cognitive in the author's philosophy. Nausea is the affective equivalent of Descartes's systematic doubt and of Husserl's reduction. The recent publication of Sartre's earliest writings permits us to isolate his fundamental concerns, later to be developed in the novel: contingency and its evasion in bad faith. A certain Antoine Roquentin is shaken by the fear of becoming submerged in Bouville, physically and socially. He passes through an acute crisis, recorded blow by blow in his diary. It leads to a radical change …

The Individual And The «Spiritual» World In Kafka's Novels, Ulrich Fülleborn

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Following an earlier essay by the same author on 'Perspektivismus und Parabolik' in Kafka's shorter prose pieces, this article gives a description of the structure of Kafka's novels in terms of the concepts 'the individual' (cf. Kierkegaard's 'individuals') and 'the spiritual world' (Kafka: «There is no world but the spiritual one»). Joseph K. and the land-surveyor K. become individuals by leaving the world of everyday life and passing over into the incomprehensible spiritual world of trials and a village-castle community, in the same way that Karl Rossmann had passed over into the 'Nature-theatre of Oklahoma' before them. And they remain …

The Image Of The Tiger In Thomas Mann's Tod In Venedig, Ford P. Parkes

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Mann integrates the image of the tiger (according to Nietzsche a concomitant of the Dionysian) that is associated with Aschenbach into Tod in Venedig, commencing with the poet's anticipatory vision. Throughout the course of the novella, the city becomes Aschenbach's envisioned jungle. Of particular significance is the triangular relationship between the viewer, the birds, and the tiger in the vision,which is found again at the end of the novella. Here, there are many repetitions of expressions suggestive of the triangular relationship found in Aschenbach's vision. The tiger in the vision, repeatedly mentioned or alluded to in Tod in Venedig …

Crime And Detection In A Defective World: The Detective Fictions Of Borges And Dürrenmatt, Tamara Holzapfel

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The debt of contemporary writers to detective fiction, both in theme and technique, has been noted in recent criticism. However, studies of a comparative nature are virtually nonexistent. This article attempts to show some remarkable parallels in the approach taken by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Jorge Luis Borges to a genre which, as yet, has not acquired recognition as literary art form. The similarities of the two authors are striking both with respect to their world view and to their transformation of the genre through poetic treatment. Detective fiction, which lends itself readily to innovation and parody, is used by these …

Volk, Jew And Devil: Ironic Inversion In Günter Grass's Dog Years, Lyle H. Smith Jr.

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

As Edward Diller pointed out in A Mythic Journey: Günter Grass's Tin Drum, the author of the Baltic Trilogy employs elements of myth and of the marvellous not only to give his stories local color, but also to establish patterns of symbolism. The present study maintains that Grass employs Baltic mythology and the language of mythopoesis throughout the whole of Dog Years as a means of parodying anti-Semitic myths embodied in Volkist race-ideology, thereby undercutting not only Nazism but also its cultural foundation. By identifying the novel's half-Jewish character, Eddi Amsel, with the gods of ancient Prussia, while simultaneously …

Thomas Mann's "Tobias Mindernickel" In Light Of Sartre's "Being-For-Others", Beth Bjorklund

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Sartre's analysis of "Being-for-Others" in Being and Nothingness describes the Self-Other relationship as essentially one of conflict, with the Self attempting either to dominate or to be dominated by the Other. Subject-Object relations are a common theme also in the early works of Thomas Mann, who gives artistic expression to many of the same problems which Sartre later formalized in a philosophical theory.

The sado-masochistic character, which is portrayed in several of Thomas Mann's narratives, receives its strongest expression in the story "Tobias Mindernickel," which is here singled out for analysis. Humiliation gives rise to aggression, as the protagonist feels …

Cyclones And Vortices: Alejo Carpentier's Reasons Of State As Cartesian Discourse, Joseph F. O'Neill

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Alejo Carpentier's Reasons of State is a reconstruction of Cartesian discourse that is paradoxically both fantastic and baroque in its implications. Building upon the assumption that Cartesianism is typically baroque and therefore a dynamism, rather than a dichotomy of subject and object, the novel proceeds in the form of a retrospective deathbed narrative to suggest the radically anti-Cartesian polarization of subject and object in fin de siècle Latin America by portraying its dictator/narrator as a man whose world-view, like his culture's, is schizophrenically divided between magical realism and positivist progressivism. This ambiguous narrative perception is comparable to that of the …

Race And Incest In Mann's "Blood Of The Walsungs", Gloria Chasson Erlich

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

No German or English edition of "The Bloood of the Walsungs" concludes with the sentence that Mann wrote for the original version in 1905, a sentence that begins and ends with two Yiddish words that conclusively identify the Aarenhold family as Jewish. The story, suppressed until 1921, draws heavily on the family of his new wife, Katya Pringsheim, a twin of Jewish extraction. Mann juxtaposes the incest of a pair of German-Jewish twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde Aarenhold, with the myth of the Walsungs, subtly manipulating the Wagner libretto to make it express his sense of the condition of the assimilated …

Camus' "Guest": The Inadmissible Complicity, James W. Greenlee

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Early analyses of Camus' tale, "The Guest," generally reflect the political tensions that rent Algeria in the 1950's. Since these tensions have disappeared, we are able to read the tale as a personal drama recounting the moral dilemma of its, narrator-protagonist. Scrutiny of his censored account reveals his retreat from an action which would compromise his innocence. The story registers the author's awareness of the ambiguities of moral decision and testifies to the refinement of his thought since the composition of The Plague.

Novel Quarters For An Odd Couple: Apollo And Dionysis In Beckett's Watt And Pinget's The Inquisitory., Robert M. Henkels Jr.

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

By making the act of writing itself the subject of their works, the French "New Novelists" must face the questions of the source of the creative drive and the possibility of engaging the reader directly in it. The response to these conundrums advanced through example by two of the group's outstanding figures, Samuel Beckett and Robert Pinget, gives a piquant twist to the traditional polarization of artistic impulses into the Apollonian (Reason) and the Dionysian (Unreason). In Watt (1953) and The Inquisitory (1962) writing, the act mitigating life's suffering, springs from the union of these two apparently antithetical drives with …