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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Starring Hitler! Adolf Hitler As The Main Character In Twentieth-First Century French Fiction, Marion Duval
Starring Hitler! Adolf Hitler As The Main Character In Twentieth-First Century French Fiction, Marion Duval
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Adolf Hitler has remained a prominent figure in popular culture, often portrayed as either the personification of evil or as an object of comedic ridicule. Although Hitler has never belonged solely to history books, testimonials, or documentaries, he has recently received a great deal of attention in French literary fiction. This article reviews three recent French novels by established authors: La part de l’autre (The Alternate Hypothesis) by Emmanuel Schmitt, Lui (Him) by Patrick Besson and La jeunesse mélancolique et très désabusée d’Adolf Hitler (Adolf Hitler’s Depressed and Very Disillusioned Youth) by Michel Folco; all of which belong to the …
Self And Stuff: Accumulation In Francophone Literature And Art, Natalie Edwards, Amy L. Hubbell
Self And Stuff: Accumulation In Francophone Literature And Art, Natalie Edwards, Amy L. Hubbell
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Introduction.
Pierre Bayard's Wormholes, Warren Motte
Pierre Bayard's Wormholes, Warren Motte
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The recent work of Pierre Bayard is trenchant, original, and deeply engaging. From Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd? (1998) Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? (2001) onward, Bayard's books have piqued the interest of readers well beyond the limited circle of those who habitually consume French criticism and literary theory, and have served thus to expand the horizon of possibility of critical writing in significant ways. Bayard writes in a conditional, hypothetical mode, rather than a declarative one, keenly aware of how very mobile literary objects are. Bayard is not afraid to take risks, and he searches for new forms through a …
Christian Oster's Picnic, Warren Motte
Christian Oster's Picnic, Warren Motte
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
With eight novels published by the Editions de Minuit in the last decade, Christian Oster has established himself as one of the most interesting figures in a cohort of new French writers who are gradually redefining the novel as literary form…
Rachid Boudjedra's Representations Of Terrorism: Le Vainqueur De Coupe And La Vie À L'Endroit , Lynne D. Rogers
Rachid Boudjedra's Representations Of Terrorism: Le Vainqueur De Coupe And La Vie À L'Endroit , Lynne D. Rogers
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Contemporary fiction either idealizes or demonizes the terrorist as a cultural figure of collective values. In his two contemporary novels, Le vainqueur de coupe and La vie à l'endroit, Rachid Boudjedra, an Algerian novelist, renders two very distinct narratives although both center around terrorist activity and a major sporting event. The first novel is a sympathetic portrait of a young Algerian who gives up his studies to become part of L'Organization. Sentenced to life imprisonment, the young man becomes an international hero. Le vainqueur de coupe offers an explanation for understanding terrorism. In the second novel, La Vie à …
"Pesadillas De La Noche, Amanecer De Silencio": Miguel Méndez And Margarita Oropeza, Debra A. Castillo
"Pesadillas De La Noche, Amanecer De Silencio": Miguel Méndez And Margarita Oropeza, Debra A. Castillo
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In many border-related discussions—whether philosophical, anthropological, critical, or fictional—there are typical themes or narrative tics: allusions to the flexible geography that makes the border region both an isolated territory and an analogue for the postmodern condition, the puzzlement over how to understand the role of the "maquiladoras" 'assembly plants' and the area's industrial boom, the awareness of a vast movement of people both north and south, a persistent and nagging phobia about feminization, and about female sexuality. In this paper I will explore these concerns with reference to two novels: Arizonan Miguel Méndez's well-known 1974 novel Peregrinos de Aztlán (Pilgrims …
The Genesis Of La Desesperanza By José Donoso , Mary Lusky Friedman
The Genesis Of La Desesperanza By José Donoso , Mary Lusky Friedman
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This study analyzes the seven hundred pages of working notes made by the Chilean writer José Donoso as he created La desesperanza, his 1986 novel about the return of a Chilean exile to his homeland. These notes, made in two sustained working sessions, one in the year beginning in December 1980 and the other in the first eight months of 1985, reveal a particular modus operandi: intent on inventing characters who were believable and complex, Donoso subordinated every other aspect of the work—plot, technical considerations like point of view and register, and even the ideas the novel would …
Dissonant Voices: Memory And Counter-Memory In Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's Autobiografia Del General Franco, José F. Colmeiro
Dissonant Voices: Memory And Counter-Memory In Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's Autobiografia Del General Franco, José F. Colmeiro
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Vázquez Montalbán's unauthorized autobiography of General Franco is built upon the use of dissonance as a strategy of resistance. The novel reveals the author's "professional schizophrenia" resulting from the dramatic authorial split as Franco's fictional ghostwriter and anti-Franco public persona, refracted internally in the split narrator of the text. This monumental construction of language and memories puts forth a metafictional examination of the conflicting relationship between history and fiction. Challenging traditional notions of authorship, referentiality, and self-referentiality, Autobiografia del general Franco obliges us to examine the dissonant discourses of historiography and memory and to ascertain the political function of writing …
The Fictions Of Surrealism, Walter A. Strauss
The Fictions Of Surrealism, Walter A. Strauss
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Surrealism is an attitude toward life, even more than a literary and artistic movement. It aspired to no less than the remaking of man and the world by reintroducing "everyday" magic and a new idealization of the Female. In many respects, its goal was spiritual renewal. This enterprise was most prominently successful in the domain of poetry and painting. The major spokesman for the movement, Andre Breton, disliked the novel. Nevertheless, the members of the movement and their associates made numerous ventures into prose fiction, with notable results. Four types of fiction are delineated: the neo-Gothic romance; the adventure diary …
Hervé Guibert: Writing The Spectral Image, Donna Wilkerson
Hervé Guibert: Writing The Spectral Image, Donna Wilkerson
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This paper explores the relationship existing between AIDS (in particular the body-with-AIDS or the corps sidaïque), writing, and the spectral image in Hervé Guibert. While taking into account postmodern theory on the image, photography, and the notion of the "real," this essay examines the similitude between the image as plague and AIDS in order to reveal some central components of Guibert's postmodern conceptualization—namely the complex interplay of fact and fiction as it pertains to the body-with-AIDS. For example, the body is a privileged site from which the text radiates. It can also be mistaken for the "real" body of …
Seeing Albertine Seeing: Barbey And Proust Through Balzac, Dorothy Kelly
Seeing Albertine Seeing: Barbey And Proust Through Balzac, Dorothy Kelly
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The three texts, Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or, Barbey d'Aurevilly's Le Rideau cramoisi, and Proust's La Prisonnière, share two structuring themes: the problematic eyes of a woman who desires, and the need to see the woman in order to learn her truth. This article first does a close reading of these themes in the texts. Second, the difference between Barbey and Proust is examined in their ultimate conclusions about the truth of woman, and Proust's text is studied in its use of the impossibility of truth as the origin of its fiction.
Nabokov's Amphiphorical Gestures , S. E. Sweeney
Nabokov's Amphiphorical Gestures , S. E. Sweeney
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In addition to using two primary kinds of metaphors (those that clarify descriptions, and those that develop into leitmotifs), Nabokov's fiction demonstrates a third kind that is characterized by extended analogies, baroque, seemingly uncontrolled imagery and rhetoric, and, most importantly, fundamental ambiguity. Although this inherent ambiguity is developed throughout the comparison, it is never resolved. Because of this distinguishing characteristic, I have named such metaphors "amphiphors," after one of Nabokov's own neologisms. Nabokov's comments in Nikolai Gogol and Lectures on Russian Literature, as well as direct allusions to Gogol embedded in a few amphiphors, suggest that this device evolved …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Fiction And The Ontological Landscape, Thomas G. Pavel
Fiction And The Ontological Landscape, Thomas G. Pavel
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The paper examines fictional ontologies in relation to the distinction between sacred and profane ontologies. This distinction suggests that most cultures organize their worldview into various ontological landscapes. Several types of such landscapes are examined and fiction is characterized as a peripheral ontology used for ludic and instructional purposes.
Käfka's Influence On Camara Laye's Le Regard Du Roi , Patricia A. Deduck
Käfka's Influence On Camara Laye's Le Regard Du Roi , Patricia A. Deduck
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In Le regard du roi, Camara Laye attempted to assimilate into his own fictional world the structure, techniques, and themes which he found in the works of Kafka. A close analysis of the novel reveals not only significant influence, but direct imitation of Kafka. Although certain Kafkaesque techniques—for example, the limited perspective, and the dispensation with time and space as measurable quantities—are often used effectively in the novel, they lose much of their intricate complexity in a fictional world allowing, as Laye's does, for positive resolution. Such techniques become integral and meaningful elements only when Laye uses them within …