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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Sonja Stojanovic. Mind The Ghost. Thinking Memory And The Untimely Through Contemporary Fiction In French. Liverpool Up, 2023., Catherine Nesci
Sonja Stojanovic. Mind The Ghost. Thinking Memory And The Untimely Through Contemporary Fiction In French. Liverpool Up, 2023., Catherine Nesci
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Sonja Stojanovic. Mind the Ghost. Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French. Liverpool UP, 2023. xi + 307 pp.
Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza. This Ghostly Poetry: History And Memory Of Exiled Spanish Republican Poets. U Of Toronto P, 2020., Paul Cahill
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza, This Ghostly Poetry: History and Memory of Exiled Spanish Republican Poets. U of Toronto P, 2020. xii + 369 pp.
French Theater And The Memory Of The Great War, Susan Mccready
French Theater And The Memory Of The Great War, Susan Mccready
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
A systematic examination of the ground on which French-language playwrights chose to stage their confrontation with the war would expose many of the literary and cultural biases on which our collective memory of the Great War is based. Even the brief outline of French-language war plays provided in this essay challenges many of our most cherished assumptions about war experience and the meaning of the Great War.
Taking Stock: Marie Nimier’S Textual Cabinet Of Curiosities, Adrienne Angelo
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 …
Nina Bouraoui’S Nos Baisers Sont Des Adieux: Ekphrasis And The Accumulation Of Memories, Anna Rocca
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 …
The Song Of Disappearance: Memory, History, And Testimony In The Poetry Of Antonio Gamoneda, Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza
The Song Of Disappearance: Memory, History, And Testimony In The Poetry Of Antonio Gamoneda, Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This essay explores Antonio Gamoneda’s poetry as an Adornian form of testimony. With its enigmatic foregrounding of lies, the book-length poem Descripción de la mentira ‘Description of the Lie’ can be read as a “contradictory testimony” in which the act and memory of witnessing go, as it were, underground—only to resurface, rife with loss, years after Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy. Yet the abstruse character of this poetic writing prevents readers from drawing straightforward political truths about Spanish history from the poem. Losses are inscribed in the text catachrestically, as they truly are: losses. Gamoneda’s poetry has been read …
Memorials, Shrines And Umbrellas In The Rain: Poetry And 11-M, Jill Robbins
Memorials, Shrines And Umbrellas In The Rain: Poetry And 11-M, Jill Robbins
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This project examines the representations in recent Spanish poetry of violence, solidarity, and memory, as these intersect with ethnic, linguistic and religious otherness, globalization, communication technology, and nationalisms. The lens through which the analysis is refracted is the poetic response to the Islamist terrorist bombings of working-class commuter trains in Madrid on March 11, 2004 (known in Spain as 11-M). This event, which occurred days before national elections, exposed the contradictory cultural forces that underlie notions of the national identity, economic transformation, the role of the media, and the social contract in Spain today. This became apparent in the massive …
Wartime Writings, Or The Imaginary Lover Of Marguerite Duras, Bethany Ladimer
Wartime Writings, Or The Imaginary Lover Of Marguerite Duras, Bethany Ladimer
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The publication in 2006 of Marguerite Duras’s Cahiers de la guerre, ‘Wartime Writings,’ written between 1943 and 1949, made accessible to the reader the first known versions of the family drama that was to become the material of much of her fiction. As this work now takes its place as chronologically first in the intertext of Duras’s autofictional writings, it sheds considerable light on our understanding of the transformations in these texts that occurred over her lifetime. Whereas L’Amant had been presented and accepted as the disclosure of a real occurrence and the origin of the other works, it …
The Lost Apple Plays: Performing Operation Pedro Pan , Kimberly Del Busto Ramírez
The Lost Apple Plays: Performing Operation Pedro Pan , Kimberly Del Busto Ramírez
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
From 1960 to 1962, more than 14,000 unaccompanied minors took flight from Cuba to the United States, establishing the largest recorded exodus in the Western Hemisphere. The displaced children and the country they left behind are often metaphorized using a popular Latin American nursery rhyme, “The Lost Apple.” Now, more than four decades later, Operation Pedro Pan persists through a revealing body of performance by and about a nation’s exiled children. The Lost Apple Plays investigates how memory, identity formation, nationhood, citizenship, and migration have been dramatized through these performances. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz, director/actor/playwright Mario Ernesto Sánchez, singers …
Displaced Identities And Traveling Texts In Luisa Valenzuela's Black Novel (With Argentines) , Laura R. Loustau
Displaced Identities And Traveling Texts In Luisa Valenzuela's Black Novel (With Argentines) , Laura R. Loustau
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In Luisa Valenzuela's Black Novel (With Argentines) Roberta and Agustín, the main characters, cross geographic, physical, psychological, sexual and textual borders in order to regain their own writing space, one which would allow them to narrate their own past. Themes that include exile, memory, and literary and artistic creations are presented from a theatrical and deterritorialized space. In Black Novel the city of New York is the stage where the characters/actors create and mix together space and time coordinates. The intention is to (re)construct the individual memory of the characters, and in a more ample perspective, the collective memory of …
Modernity, Postmodernity, And Transgression In Sábato's Esthetics: Poetic Dissemination, Defeat Of Utopias, Returning Bodies , María Rosa Lojo
Modernity, Postmodernity, And Transgression In Sábato's Esthetics: Poetic Dissemination, Defeat Of Utopias, Returning Bodies , María Rosa Lojo
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
After defining the problematic term "Postmodernity" and its possible application to Latin America, the position of Ernesto Sábato as an essayist and narrator is discussed in light of Modernity (questioned by him as the rationalist and enlightened canon, but applauded as romantic and surrealistic rebellion), and Postmodernity with which it connects from diverse axis: the poetic of desire and that of transgression (vanguard movements related to Foucault, Bataille and Derrida), the theory of reality as "fragment" and "simulacrum" and the suppression of oppositions in the paroxysm of "symbolic exchange." Sábato would transcend from the central proposition of his writing, the …
Moving On? Memory And History In Griselda Gambaro's Recent Theater, Gail Bulman
Moving On? Memory And History In Griselda Gambaro's Recent Theater, Gail Bulman
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
For more than forty years, Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro has dramatized the social and political climate of her homeland. This article examines three of her plays from the late eighties and early nineties, using both Freudian and performance theories, in order to show how these works document the range of emotions in post Dirty War Argentina and, at the same time, postulate ways of coping with the memories of those years. Beyond traditional memory-theater, these plays demonstrate the trauma of remembering by highlighting different phases in the memory process and by conceptualizing stages in the grief of a traumatized nation. …
Between L'Irréparable And L'Irrepérable: Subject To The Past, Downing Thomas, Steven Ungar
Between L'Irréparable And L'Irrepérable: Subject To The Past, Downing Thomas, Steven Ungar
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This issue of STCL grew from papers presented at a conference, "Memory in Context: Occupation and Empire in France and the Francophone World," held at the University of Iowa in April, 1996...
Between Amnesia And Anamnesis: Re-Membering The Fractures Of Colonial History, Anne Donadey
Between Amnesia And Anamnesis: Re-Membering The Fractures Of Colonial History, Anne Donadey
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The Greek word "anamnesis," a term used by several contributors to this section, means "remembrance," or going back (in time) through memory…
Memory And Authenticity, Randolph Starn
Memory And Authenticity, Randolph Starn
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Ten years ago Natalie Davis and I decided to put together a special issue of Representations we would call "Memory and Counter-Memory…
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 …
Literary Invention And Critical Fashion: Missing The Boat In The Sea Of Lentils, Elzbieta Sklodowska
Literary Invention And Critical Fashion: Missing The Boat In The Sea Of Lentils, Elzbieta Sklodowska
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In pursuing the relation of Sea of Lentils (1979) to the Spanish American literary canon, I argue that while Benítez-Rojo's novel did not fall into the category of the already canonized—and therefore was spared a parricidal gesture of the Post-Boom writers—neither did it belong amidst the previously marginalized texts. I suggest that Sea of Lentils concentrates its internal critique of language and representation around the process of remembering in a manner that is radically at odds not only with the "traditional" historical novel, but with the official voice of the ascendant testimonio as well. Moreover, the notion of memory as …
What's In A Name: Elective Genealogy In Schwarz-Bart's Early Novels, Clarisse Zimra
What's In A Name: Elective Genealogy In Schwarz-Bart's Early Novels, Clarisse Zimra
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This essay considers the question of the textual inscription of history in Solitude, Plat de porc and Télumée, by focusing on a narrative feature present in all three: the naming scene, wherein characters claim elective descent from a real historical figure, the pregnant mulatto woman, Solitude, captured and executed after the battle of Matouba in 1802 on Guadeloupe. Every Schwarz-Bart novel to date contains at least one scene, often several, staging this retelling of specifically Guadeloupean origins: the resistance to the reinstatement of slavery, and the ensuing tragedy on Matouba. In Un Plat de porc aux bananes vertes (1967), …
Translating From Memory: Patrick Modiano In Postmodern Context, Timothy H. Scherman
Translating From Memory: Patrick Modiano In Postmodern Context, Timothy H. Scherman
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In this essay I have attemped to renegotiate the relationship between the work of Patrick Modiano and the conditions of literary production designated by "postmodernism." Contemporary French reviewers and critics have greeted with guarded praise Modiano's efforts to write in a language and about events that belong to another writing. Following their lead, this essay first explores the tension (often lost on American readers) created by the possibility that the historical referent of Modiano's texts—not only Modiano's personal past but the horror of the Occupation—might now exist only as a weightless narrative "effect." As such, it is a part of …
Practicing Nostalgia: Time And Memory In Nabokov's Early Russian Fiction , Philip Sicker
Practicing Nostalgia: Time And Memory In Nabokov's Early Russian Fiction , Philip Sicker
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Nabokov's earliest Russian fiction reveals his lifelong preoccupation with time and his complex strategies for preserving heightened moments of experience. Dissatisfied with the brevity of involuntary (Proustian) recall, his émigré protagonists strive to inhabit their Russian past more fully through a painstaking process of aesthetic re-creation. Beginning with a handful of vivid recollections, the hero of Mary gradually fabricates a past that is more intensely real than the original. Nabokov's most mature characters, however, recognize the solipsistic danger and utility of living in a vanished mental paradise. Turning to the present, they find unexpected beauty in the arrangement of ordinary …
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 …