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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Introduction, Lynn A. Higgins
Introduction, Lynn A. Higgins
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
From an issue of the Magazine Litteraire featuring the work of Fernand Braudel to an article by Hayden White on the "Absurdist moment" in criticism, it is clear that the disciplines of history and literary studies are converging. Historians like White and Dominick La Capra in the United States, and Michel de Certeau and the members of the Annales School in France are investigating the rhetorical modes of their craft and exploring implications of the fact that it is historians themselves who "make history." At the same time, literary scholars, emerging from Structuralism and the New Criticism, are seeking with …
Forgetting To Remember: Anamnesis And History In J. M. G. Le Clézio's Desert, Kathleen White Smith
Forgetting To Remember: Anamnesis And History In J. M. G. Le Clézio's Desert, Kathleen White Smith
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Unlike most of Le Clezio's previous works. Desert has a specific historical framework. The story of the young boy Nour records the struggle of the Saharaoui people of the western Sahara to claim their land from the French invaders of the early twentieth century. A second narrative, set in the present, continues that story through the experiences of Lalla: unlike the story of her predecessor, the narrative in which she figures has no clear reference to the current, militant political situation established in the western Sahara by the independence movement known as Polisario. Containing both story and document, text and …
Marguerite Yourcenar's Prefaces: Genesis As Self-Effacement, Colette Gaudin
Marguerite Yourcenar's Prefaces: Genesis As Self-Effacement, Colette Gaudin
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Most critics of Marguerite Yourcenar largely ignore the existence of the complex network of prefaces and postfaces which accompanies her fiction. On the basis of the success of her historical reconstitutions and of the classical perfection of her style they characterize her work either as the best illustration of a sexless literature or as a case of denial of femininity. But her prefaces cannot be read simply as an exposition of her thinking about history or as a linear history of her writing. While an authoritative voice exposes her method and asserts a will to aesthetic perfection, the writer as …