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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
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.
Addressing Diversity And Difference In Contemporary Spanish Lesbian Literature: Reading Illy Nes’S El Lago Rosa And Cristina Cuesta’S “Zoe Y Haydee”, Megan Sheldon
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Illy Nes’s novel El lago rosa (The Pink Lake, 2004) and Cristina Cuesta’s short story “Zoe y Haydee” (Zoe and Haydee, 2007) depict travel and cross-cultural queer relationships that call attention to racial and class differences as well as ethnic and cultural divides. Both narratives raise questions concerning the representation of queer women of color in Spanish fiction of the new millennium. This article focuses on the diverse cultural, political and personal struggles that surround the formation and negotiation of sexual identity, emphasizing the fact that LGBTQ identity is not necessarily cross-culturally or universally constructed around identical interests, desires, or …
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.
David William Foster. El Eternauta, Daytripper, And Beyond: Graphic Narrative In Argentina And Brazil. Austin: U Of Texas P, 2016., Laura M. Fernandez
David William Foster. El Eternauta, Daytripper, And Beyond: Graphic Narrative In Argentina And Brazil. Austin: U Of Texas P, 2016., Laura M. Fernandez
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of David William Foster. El Eternauta, Daytripper, and Beyond: Graphic Narrative in Argentina and Brazil. Austin: U of Texas P, 2016.
Mel Gibson. Remembered Reading: Memory, Comics And Post-War Constructions Of British Girlhood. Leuven: Leuven Up, 2015., Kristof Van Gansen
Mel Gibson. Remembered Reading: Memory, Comics And Post-War Constructions Of British Girlhood. Leuven: Leuven Up, 2015., Kristof Van Gansen
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Mel Gibson. Remembered Reading. Memory, Comics and Post-War Constructions of British Girlhood. Leuven: Leuven UP, 2015.
Frederick Luis Aldama And Christopher M. González, Eds. Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, And Future. Austin: U Of Texas P, 2016., Noel R. Zavala
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher M. González, eds. Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future. Austin: U of Texas P, 2016.
Mark Heimermann And Brittany Tullis, Eds. Picturing Childhood: Youth In Transnational Comics. Austin: U Of Texas P, 2017., Cristina R. Rivera
Mark Heimermann And Brittany Tullis, Eds. Picturing Childhood: Youth In Transnational Comics. Austin: U Of Texas P, 2017., Cristina R. Rivera
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Mark Heimermann and Brittany Tullis, eds. Picturing Childhood: Youth in Transnational Comics. Austin: U of Texas P, 2017.
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 …
In The Heideggerian Tradition: Acontecimiento By Concha García, Martha Lafollette Miller
In The Heideggerian Tradition: Acontecimiento By Concha García, Martha Lafollette Miller
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Critics Sharon Keefe Ugalde and Tina Escaja have called the poetry of Concha García “enigmatic,” “unique,” and “avant-garde.” Studies of her work to date tend to attribute the fragmentation and discontinuity of her poetic discourse to her rejection of phallologocentric language. While one of her work’s chief concerns is indeed her speaker’s sense of a radical difference and alienation based on gender, her poetry at the same time directs her reader’s attention to more general ontological considerations. Rather than clearly recounting the events of the life of her poetic protagonist, she rejects the distillations and simplifications that linear narration presupposes …
Corpses And Capital: Narratives Of Gendered Violence In Two Costa Rican Novels , Laura Barbas Rhoden
Corpses And Capital: Narratives Of Gendered Violence In Two Costa Rican Novels , Laura Barbas Rhoden
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In a region prone to violence and political corruption, Costa Rica has been touted as an ecological paradise, a stable democracy, and an egalitarian society. However, Costa Rican fiction from the late twentieth century contests this idyllic image and presents instead a world of intrigue, violence, and criminality. El año del laberinto (2000) by Tatiana Lobo and Cruz de olvido (1999) by Carlos Cortés are two novels that serve as an excellent introduction to developments in postwar fiction and scholarship from Central America. In my analysis, I first situate the novels in the context of Central American cultural and political …
Cyberspace And The Cyberdildo: Dislocations In Cenicienta En Chueca , Jill Robbins
Cyberspace And The Cyberdildo: Dislocations In Cenicienta En Chueca , Jill Robbins
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Cenicienta en Chueca (Cinderella in Chueca) is a collection of short stories by Argentine exile María Felicitas Jaime, published by Spanish gay/lesbian press Odisea in 2003, that represent the neocolonial relations between the Americas, Spain, and the European Union in a globalized age. The stories foreground communication technologies—including type, e-mail, chats, and dialects—in order to highlight the discursive nature of sexuality and to reveal the social, ethnic, racial, nationalistic, economic, gendered tensions underlying linguistic exchange. This article focuses on the neocolonial relations between Spain and Latin America in three stories from this collection—"Chateo" (Chat), "Ejecutivas" (Women Executives), and "Cenicienta en …
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 …
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 …
Gorgeous Pedagogy, Debra Castillo
Gorgeous Pedagogy, Debra Castillo
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Elena Poniatowska's recent Luz y luna, Ias lunitas immediately impresses the reader with its beauty; it is akin to a "coffee table book" in its sheer gorgeousness. I intend to explore the question of how to read the gorgeous object within the context of Poniatowska's oeuvre and within the frame of a pedagogical endeavor. Poniatowska, of course, represents the epitome of the elite but socially conscious Latin American author. As in certain of her other works (but perhaps more obviously here, because of the very nature of this book), the mix of elitism and social consciousness undergoes a multiple displacement. …
Usurping Difference In The Feminine Fantastic From The Riverplate, María B. Clark
Usurping Difference In The Feminine Fantastic From The Riverplate, María B. Clark
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This study intended to define the concept of a feminine fantastic as a narrative mode in contemporary short fiction by women writers from Argentina and Uruguay. As a point of departure, the study examined the narrative techniques and conventions of the fantastic and their strategic use for the expression of feminine concerns. The concept of the feminine was used in the sense of referring to an interpretation of femininity as a construct of language rather than an essentially feminine narrative mode based on a biological gender division. An overview of fantastic short stories by women writers from Argentina and Uruguay …
The Subject, Feminist Theory And Latin American Texts, Sara Castro-Klaren
The Subject, Feminist Theory And Latin American Texts, Sara Castro-Klaren
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
From a feminist perspective, this essay reviews and analyzes the interaction between metropolitan feminist theories and their interphase with the academic criticism of texts written by Latin American women. Discussion focuses on the question of the subject, which the author believes to be paramount in feminist theory, in as much as the construction of gender and the historical subordination of women devolve on the play of difference and identity. This paper examines how the problematic assumption by feminist theorists in the North American academy of Freudian and Lacanian theories of the subject pose unresolved problems and unanticipated complications to subsequent …
Power, Gender, And Canon Formation In Mexico, Cynthia Steele
Power, Gender, And Canon Formation In Mexico, Cynthia Steele
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
I propose to analyze Castellanos's trajectory from marginalized ethnographer and critic of "latino" society, to presidential insider and ambassador, and the first modern Mexican woman writer to be accepted into the literary canon. I will explore the intersection of politics, gender, and the (self-) creation of a literary persona with regard to the following issues: 1) the tension between self-exposure and self-censorship in Castellanos's literary work; 2) Castellanos's intense and problematic relationship with her illegitimate, mestizo half-brother; 3) the coincidences and contradictions between Castellanos's journalistic account of her relationship with her servant Maria Escandon, and Maria's own oral history twenty …
Filling The Empty Space: Women And Latin American Theatre, Kirsten F. Nigro
Filling The Empty Space: Women And Latin American Theatre, Kirsten F. Nigro
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In recent years, Latin American women have begun to appropriate and fill a space once empty of their presence. This essay looks at the work of four such women, (Diana Raznovich and Cristina Escofet of Argentina, Raquel Araujo of Mexico and the Peruvian Sara Joffre), to see how they give substance and voice to their particular concerns. In the process, this essay focusses on: 1) the notion of gender as performance; 2) the feminist deconstruction of narrative; 3) the female body in theatrical space; and 4) new, postmodern ways of doing feminist political theatre.
Spanish American Women Writers: Simmering Identity Over A Low Fire, Ksenija Bilbija
Spanish American Women Writers: Simmering Identity Over A Low Fire, Ksenija Bilbija
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
After establishing the parallel between the kitchen and the alchemist's laboratory, this article shows that traditionally, the kitchen has come to symbolize the space associated with the marginalization of women. However, the recent explosion of the novels dedicated to the resemantization and reevaluation of the realm of the kitchen is the best evidence that it is also a space from which much creativity emanates. A close reading of two such cookbook/novels, Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel and Like Potatoes for Varenike by Sylvia Plager, points toward a quite parodic and critical gender perspective. Furthermore, it calls for a …
Introduction, Laurie Edson
Introduction, Laurie Edson
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Introduction to the special issue