Arts and Humanities Commons^™

New Illnesses—Old Problems, Old Illnesses—New Problems, Sander L. Gilman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This present collection of essays concerns the representation of illness in literature…

The Postmodernist As Academic Leftist; Or, How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Being Politically Correct, Eugene W. Holland

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Postmodernist as Academic Leftist; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Being Politically Correct

Reviews

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Michael Issacharoff. Discourse as Performance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. vii + 161 pp. Reviewed by Gerald Prince, University of Pennsylvania

Thomas M. Kavanagh, ed. The Limits of Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. 254 pp. Reviewed by André J.M. Prévos, Pennsylvania State University, Worthington Scranton Campus

Wendy B. Faris. Labyrinths of Language: Symbolic Landscape and Narrative Design in Modern Fiction. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1988. 242 pp. Reviewed by Carol Rigolot, Princeton University

Eve Tavor Bannet. Structuralism and the Logic of Dissent: Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois …

Beckett's Critical Complicity: Carnival, Contestation, And Tradition, Dina Sherzer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Beckett's Critical Complicity: Carnival, Contestation, and Tradition, by Sylvie Debevec Henning

Joshua Lund. The Mestizo State: Reading Race In Modern Mexico. Minneapolis: U Of Minnesota P, 2012. Xx + 217 Pp., Miguel Ángel González-Abellás

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Joshua Lund. The Mestizo State: Reading Race in Modern Mexico. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012. xx + 217 pp.

Editor's Note, Laura Kanost

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Editor's Note

Josephine Donovan. Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions. Fourth Edition. New York: Continuum, 2012. Xvi + 287 Pp., Alexandra K. Wettlaufer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Josephine Donovan. Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions. Fourth edition. New York: Continuum, 2012. xvi + 287 pp.

A Significant Source For The Madeleine And Other Major Episodes In Combray: Proust's Intertextual Use Of Pierre Loti's My Brother Yves, Richard M. Berrong

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The most famous passage in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and one of the most famous passages in Western literature, is the moment when the narrator sips tea while eating a shell-shaped pastry called a madeleine and suddenly recalls very vividly an apparently long-forgotten scene from his childhood. From this episode Proust developed his theories about involuntary memory and its important role in our emotional welfare.

Proust was an avid reader of the French novelist Pierre Loti when he was young. Contemporary accounts show that he was able to recite whole passages from Loti’s work in public …

Complicating Eroticism And The Male Gaze: Feminism And Georges Bataille’S Story Of The Eye, Chris Vanderwees

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article explores the relationship between feminist criticism and Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye. Much of the critical work on Bataille assimilates his psychosocial theories in Erotism with the manifestation of those theories in his fiction without acknowledging potential contradictions between the two bodies of work. The conflation of important distinctions between representations of sex and death in Story of the Eye and the writings of Erotism forecloses the possibility of reading Bataille’s novel as a critique of gender relations. This article unravels some of the distinctions between Erotism and Story of the Eye in order to complicate …

Aspiration, Consumer Culture, And Individualism In Les Belles-Sœurs, Julie Robert

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The premise of Michel Tremblay’s revolutionary 1968 play, Les Belles-Sœurs, is a working bee. A group of working-class women gather to paste a million trading stamps, won in a sweepstakes, into booklets that once full can be redeemed for household goods. As the guests surreptitiously pilfer what they see as their hostess’s underserved windfall, their actions problematize the links between the individualistic aspects of consumer and material culture and the communal values they share as members of Quebec’s working class.

Taking consumer culture and material desire as a starting point, this essay considers the relationship between the individual and …

Migration And Metamorphosis In Marie Ndiaye's Trois Femmes Puissantes, Deborah B. Gaensbauer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In her 2009 Goncourt-Prize-winning novel, Trois femmes puissantes (Three Strong Women), Marie Ndiaye experiments with a polyphonic, semi-fantastical rendering of identity-threatening displacements experienced by three women from different socio-geographic backgrounds. In a brief "Counterpoint" at the end of each of the novel's three sections--a narrative take on the musical technique employed by Ndiaye to introduce new focalizations and unexpected turns of events that complicate interpretations of the characters' behavior--each of the women is perceived as metamorphosed into a bird or a birdlike persona. This essay examines the innovative embedding of the shape-shifts in Trois femmes puissantes in both harrowing …

Falling Into Salvation In Cioran, Joseph Acquisto

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

While, at first glance, there seems to be very little room in the thought of E.M. Cioran for the notion of salvation, a closer look reveals that Cioran returns constantly to the vocabulary and the concept of redemption. This article teases out Cioran’s complex use of the topos of salvation throughout his works, with special emphasis on his middle period. I begin by tracing Cioran’s notion of humanity’s fall into time and language, from which he claims there can be no salvation in the traditional Christian sense. Nonetheless, he retains the concept, claiming at various points that there is a …

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.

A Beautiful Grave: Innocent Objects, Museums, And The Modern Self In Driss Chraïbi's La Civilisation, Ma Mère!... And The Ben M'Sik Community Museum, Katarzyna Pieprzak

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Two-thirds through Driss Chraïbi’s 1972 novel La Civilisation, ma Mère!... ‘Mother Comes of Age’ about an un-named Moroccan woman and her path to modernity, the Mother makes a powerful statement that innocent objects from her past deserve a beautiful tomb and preservation from ridicule. In this article, I discuss the idea of innocent objects – innocent in terms of unknowing, and innocent in juridical terms as absolved from guilt in a crime and undeserving of punishment – in relationship to the Mother’s tomb and the 2006 Casablanca Ben M’Sik Community Museum (BMCM). Both the novel and the museum …

Yasco Horsman. Theaters Of Justice: Judging, Staging, And Working Through In Arendt, Brecht, And Delbo. Stanford Up, 2010. 232 Pp., Peter Yang

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Yasco Horsman. Theaters of Justice: Judging, Staging, and Working Through in Arendt, Brecht, and Delbo. Stanford UP, 2010. 232 pp.

Taking Stock: Marie Nimier’S Textual Cabinet Of Curiosities, Adrienne Angelo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In many life-writing projects, the seemingly innocuous description of heteroclite objects and how those objects are stored and recalled in fact plays an important role in demonstrating their importance to the process of memory work. At once the lingering traces of one’s past and also an aggregation of stories evoked by an examination of them, these curios focus attention on the relationship between the individual and the storage of memories. This article will focus on certain collectibles, collections and collectors that appear throughout the fictional, autobiographical and autofictional world that Marie Nimier has scripted to date. This textual cabinet of …

Nasty Nazis And Extreme Americans: Cloning, Eugenics, And The Exchange Of National Signifiers In Contemporary Science Fiction, Elizabeth Bridges

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article addresses German science fiction novels from the last ten to fifteen years, specifically those that thematize cloning and/or eugenics. The main novels under discussion include Die verbesserte Frau by Barbara Kirchner, Duplik Jonas 7 by Birgit Rabisch, and Blueprint/Blaupause by Charlotte Kerner, (which was released as a film adaptation starring Franka Potente in 2004). This discussion shows how these and similar novels do or do not contend with the legacy of Nazi eugenics and reproductive experimentation, and second, how the existent historical awareness in the novels relates to the content of debates on current issues of biotechnology, …

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 …

Nina Bouraoui’S Nos Baisers Sont Des Adieux: Ekphrasis And The Accumulation Of Memories, Anna Rocca

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article aims to explore the function of the image and the purpose of the works of art in Franco-Algerian author Nina Bouraoui’s Nos baisers sont des adieux (2010). Similar to a scrapbook with short descriptions of people, places, and objects, the book itself does not contain any visual representations. In spite of this lack, the image—the latter intended as mental or physical picture that reproduces reality—is a central theme throughout the work. Because visual art is described and interpreted but not shown, I argue that, by means of ékphrasis, the word-image dialogue further enables the narrator to express …

Nil Santiáñez. Topographies Of Fascism. Habitus, Space, And Writing In Twentieth Century Spain. Toronto: U Of Toronto P, 2013. Xiii + 411 Pp., Salvador Oropesa

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Nil Santiáñez. Topographies of Fascism. Habitus, Space, and Writing in Twentieth Century Spain. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2013. xiii + 411 pp.

Anke Biendarra. Germans Going Global: Contemporary Literature And Cultural Globalization. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2012. X + 244 Pp., Gabriele Eichmanns Maier

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Anke Biendarra. Germans Going Global: Contemporary Literature and Cultural Globalization. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2012. x + 244 pp.

Self And Stuff: Accumulation In Francophone Literature And Art, Natalie Edwards, Amy L. Hubbell

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Introduction.

Dirk Van Hulle. Modern Manuscripts: The Extended Mind And Creative Undoing From Darwin To Beckett And Beyond. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Xiii + 271 Pp., Anna E. Hiller

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Dirk van Hulle. Modern Manuscripts: The Extended Mind and Creative Undoing from Darwin to Beckett and Beyond. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. xiii + 271 pp.

Eugene Onegin The Cold War Monument: How Edmund Wilson Quarreled With Vladimir Nabokov, Tim Conley

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The tale of how Edmund Wilson quarreled with Vladimir Nabokov over the latter’s 1964 translation of Eugene Onegin can be instructively read as a politically charged event, specifically a “high culture” allegory of the Cold War. Dissemination of anti-Communist ideals (often in liberal and literary guises) was the mandate of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, whose funding and editorial initiatives included the publication of both pre-Revolution Russian literature and, more notoriously, the journal Encounter (1953-1990), where Nabokov’s fiery “Reply” to Wilson appeared. This essay outlines the propaganda value of the Onegin debate within and to Cold War mythology.

Fiona Barclay. Writing Postcolonial France. Haunting, Literature, And The Maghreb. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2011. Xliv + 152 Pp., Anna Rocca

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Fiona Barclay. Writing Postcolonial France. Haunting, Literature, and the Maghreb. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2011. xliv + 152 pp.

Milo Sweedler. The Dismembered Community: Bataille, Blanchot, Leiris, And The Remains Of Laure. Newark: U Of Delaware P, 2009. 214 Pp., Jeff Fort

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Milo Sweedler. The Dismembered Community: Bataille, Blanchot, Leiris, and the Remains of Laure. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2009. 214 pp.

Jeffrey Johnson. Creative Development In Marcel Proust’S A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. Xv + 230 Pp., Claudine Fisher

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Jeffrey Johnson. Creative Development in Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. xv + 230 pp.

Accumulated Testimony: Layering French Girls’ Diaries On The Algerian Exodus, Amy L. Hubbell

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In 1997, French-Algerian author Leïla Sebbar published an illustrated children’s book, J’étais enfant en Algérie, juin 1962 (‘I was a child in Algeria, June 1962’) in which she creates the fictional account of a young girl from the interior of Algeria leaving her home during the great exodus of the French just prior to Algerian independence. Using the genre of diary writing, Sebbar’s text reads as testimonial of fleeing their country for a homeland they do not know. Although this text is intimate, Sebbar relies on accumulated scraps of collective experience that, when joined to her own, fill in the …

Hernán Díaz. Borges, Between History And Eternity. London/New York: Continuum, 2012. 208 Pp, Daniel Altamiranda

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Hernán Díaz. Borges, between History and Eternity. London/New York: Continuum, 2012. 208 pp.

Joseph Frank. Responses To Modernity: Essays In The Politics Of Culture. New York: Fordham Up, 2012. X + 234 Pp., David W. Foster

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Joseph Frank. Responses to Modernity: Essays in the Politics of Culture. New York: Fordham UP, 2012. x + 234 pp.