Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Ari J. Blatt And Edward Welch, Editors. France In Flux: Space, Territory, And Contemporary Culture. Liverpool Up, 2019., Suzanne Black

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Ari J. Blatt and Edward Welch, editors. France in Flux: Space, Territory, and Contemporary Culture. Liverpool UP, 2019. xiii + 221 pp.

In And Out Of Place: Geographies Of Revolt In Camus's La Peste, Erin Tremblay Ponnou-Delaffon

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

From Roland Barthes to Shoshana Felman, some of the most insightful readings of Albert Camus’s La Peste (The Plague) have focused on its historical dimension. In contrast, this article attends to less studied spatial representations, bringing recent insights from human geography to bear on depictions of Oran and exile in the novel. From its start, The Plague insistently connects plot, spatial setting, and notions of normativity and transgression. Understandings of place—and in particular, who or what is out of place—catalyze contestation and shape Camus’s universalized ethics of revolt, one that views evil and suffering as always out of …

The Lesbian And The Room: Proust’S Invention Of Difference, Christina L. Stevenson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

More than a conflict between external activity and internal sanctuary, the room in Proust's writing is a figure that weaves a complex fabric of narrative perception. If, in his youth, Proust's narrator believed the room to be a refuge for containing an eroticized feminine Other, the wiser narrative voice reveals the room as offering the disruption rather than the fulfillment of desire. The perspective of childhood is interwoven with the retrospective voice of the adult narrator who dispels the naïve fantasies of the desiring youth. This paper illustrates that confronting the failure of desire becomes imperative for the Proustian narrator …

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.

Mobile Thresholds, Immobile Phones: Staging Migration, Return, And The Empty Home In Recent Ecuadorian Theater , Amalia Gladhart

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the past decade, hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorians have emigrated, principally to Spain and the United States. A growing body of recent Ecuadorian plays has treated the experiences of the migrants and, tellingly, the experiences of those left behind. This essay focuses on three plays that present migration as a kind of threshold, a space of transition that is paradoxically temporary yet solid: Con estos zapatos me quería comer el mundo ‘With These Shoes I Meant to Take on the World,’ (2002) by Jorge Mateus and Pablo Tatés; El pueblo de las mujeres solas ‘The Village of Solitary Women,’ …

Atlantic Nessologies: Image, Territory, Value , Francisco-]. Hernández Adrián

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay addresses the emerging field of Atlantic Studies and questions the status of "the Atlantic" as an object of study. Rather than assuming a self-evident grid where Atlantic cultural phenomena oscillate between such poles as "centers and peripheries," or "the colonizer and the colonized," I consider a different formulation of the Atlantic. Taking as a starting point an analysis of a poem by Tomás Morales, a modernista poet from the Canary Islands, my essay outlines the notion of "Atlantic nessologies." Three parallel departures are offered from this analysis: image (or the realm of the imaginary); territory (or spatial and …

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 …

Reconfiguring Boundaries In Maryse Condé'S Crossing The Mangrove , Deborah B. Gaensbauer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Maryse Condé's 1989 novel, Crossing the Mangrove, presents a compelling performance of the complicated patterns of place and space inherent in the social masquerade of a small, isolated, Guadeloupean village. Because the novel corresponds to Condé's return to a Caribbean "stage" to continue a long process of questioning mapped configurations of identity, critical attention has focused on the character of Francis Sancher, the returning "stranger," whose wake serves as both frame and catalyst for the action. Insufficient attention has been paid to the role of Mira Lameaulnes, Sancher's rejected mistress and the mother of his child, whose story the …

Hybridity And The Space Of The Border In The Writing Of Norma Elia Cantú, Ellen Mccracken

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The creative and scholarly writing of Norma Elia Cantú focuses centrally on the tensions of borders that are eroding yet firmly in place. Cantú's border pivots on the geographic space in which Mexico and the United States physically intersect, yet she probes at the same time several of the other tenuous cultural borders that postmodernity has brought into focus. Transcending distinctions between genres, languages, and cultures, Cantú undertakes innovative genre hybridity, visual-verbal hybridity, and the recombination of distinct cultural codes. Whether writing cultural criticism, autobioethnography, creative fiction, or poetry, Cantú locates herself at the intersection of the geographical and epistemological …

Proust, Bakhtin, And The Dialogic Albertine: Voice And Fragmentation In The Captive , Jesse Kavadlo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article provides a Bakhtinian reading of Proust's The Captive, the fourth novel of In Search of Lost Time, while at the same time it demonstrates how several of Bakhtin's key terms come to life in Proust's modern, self-conscious novel in a striking way. In particular, the character of Albertine is a fully Bakhtinian figure in the novel: she is at once intertextual (tied to photography and film), chronotopic (scattered through time and space as a living embodiment of narrative), and dialogic (many Albertines in a series). Proust's narrator's fragmentation of consciousness, particularly with regard to Albertine, as …

Missing Persons: Cherokee's Parrot And Chatterton's Poet , Leonard R. Koos

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay explores the problematic nature of selfhood in the detective genre as established by Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) and most recently reformulated in two metaphysical detective novels, Jean Echenoz's Cherokee (1983) and Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton (1987). Poe's detective Auguste Dupin is described as having a "Bi-Part Soul," which permits him to vacate himself in order to construct the narrative solution to a crime. This duality, in the postmodern detective novel, is transformed into an irrevocable dislocation of the subject. Cherokee's onomastic devalorization of the story's characters and simulation of the human subject in the …

The Dialogic Self: Language And Identity In Annie Ernaux , Warren Johnson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The nine largely autobiographical texts that Annie Ernaux (1940- ) has published to date, which range stylistically from early strident outpourings to the willed transparency of an "écriture plate," all reveal the narrator as a patchwork subjectivity comprised of the discourses surrounding the child, adolescent, and adult against which she reacts, frequently without comprehending her own motivations. I try to unravel the strands that make up Ernaux's language and explore how the self that emerges is an aggregate of the discursive spaces she has inhabited. I trace as well how her gender identity impacts her capacity and willingness to struggle …

Geography, (M)Other Tongues And The Role Of Translation In Giannina Braschi's El Imperio De Los Sueños, María M. Carrión

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Big Apple seems to be the central axis for the readerly and writerly "I" in El imperio de los sueños (Empire of Dreams), by Giannina Braschi. Readers can easily realize that the text is not just about New York, but that it actually journeys through praise and blame, drinking and dancing, talking and perversing many other cities and landscapes. El imperio is a space of bohemia with streaks from the Latin American Quarter in Paris, the barrio chino barcelonés, the zaguanes of Borges's Buenos Aires, from colonial houses in Old San Juan; it evokes dandy places, …

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

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 …

Street-Signs: The City As Context And As Code In The Novels Of Claire Etcherelli, Sara Poole

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The piece aims to consider the novels of Claire Etcherelli as examples of le roman parisien, and to examine the different roles the city is made to play in them. It looks briefly at Etcherelli's debt to the literature of the nineteenth century; at the significance of using real place names in such realist fiction; at Paris as political fulcrum; at why most of Etcherelli's characters live on the fringes of the city. The second half concentrates on Elise ou la vraie vie and attempts to illustrate how in this novel Paris becomes an extended and elaborate metaphor for …

A Reconsideration Of Two Spanish Women Poets: Angela Figuera And Francisca Aguirre, John C. Wilcox

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the last decade, poetry written by women in Spain experienced a "boom," as one close observer of the scene has noted, with the result that young women poets on the Peninsula have begun to receive the attention they merit. It is therefore an opportune moment to turn our critical attention toward the poetry written by women earlier in the twentieth century.

Angela Figuera (1902-1984) and Francisca Aguirre (b. 1930), two "uncanonized" mid-twentieth century Spanish poets, are presented here as challenging the androcentric culture of their time. Figuera critiques the male-dominated poetic canon as she develops a gynocentric poetics; poems …

Shall We Escape Analogy, Rosmarie Waldrop

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Claude Royet-Journoud's and Anne-Marie Albiach's work can be read as manifestos against metaphor (relation by similarity, the vertical selection axis of the speech act) with which poetry has long been identified. Whereas Royet-Joumoud takes as his theme metaphor in the largest sense (including, finally, all representation that is based on analogy), Albiach's "Enigme" dramatizes the loss of the vertical dimension through, ironically, a metaphor: the fall of a body. Formally, both stress as alternative the horizontal axis of combination (especially the spatial articulation on the page) and the implied view that the world is constructed by language, that it does …

Bakhtin And Buber: Problems Of Dialogic Imagination, Nina Perlina

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Recent publications of biographical materials on Mikhail Bakhtin demonstrate that he was familiar with the writings of Martin Buber. The philosophical and aesthetic verbal expression of Buber's ideas within the time-spatial universe of Bakhtin's own awareness allows us to discuss this obvious biographical evidence in a wider cultural context. The central opposition of Buber's and Bakhtin's systems is the dialogic dichotomous pair: "Ich und Du" (I and Thou), or "myself and another." Bakhtin's dialogic imagination is rooted in the binaries of the subject-object relations which he initially formulated as "responsibility" and "addressivity," that is to say, as individual awareness and …

The Relevance Of The Carnivalesque In The Québec Novel, Maroussia Ahmed

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Bakhtinian concept of space is topological rather than topographic, and encompasses the cosmic, the social and the corporeal; its function in the Québec novel consists in debasing the hierarchical verticality of Lent and of the "official feast." As Carnival is an anti-law,"law" in the Québec novel will be defined as the chronotope of the sacred space (the land or "terre" of Québec) in the genre known as the "novel of the land" ("le roman de Ia terre"). Until the Second World War, this chronotope transforms an Augustinian political view of the civitas dei into literary proselytism, via the ideology …

Space And Salvation In Colette's Chéri And La Fin De Chéri, Ann Leone Philbrick

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Colette's critics often seem to dismiss all but her autobiographical creatures as whimsical and inarticulate. Her characters are frequently less eloquent than the spaces they create and inhabit; this observation offers an approach to Chéri and La Fin de Chéri that invites us to read them as two of Colette's most ambitious and authentic works. Here are stories of compromises with the containers of one's life and identity: streets, salons, boudoirs, and, ultimately, the body. Indeed, the self and its containers function symbiotically. Chéri makes no effort to direct this relationship, and kills himself when the world finally seems inscrutable …

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 …