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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Corrupting Capitalism: Michael Ende’S Momo And “Cathedral Station”, Heike Polster
Corrupting Capitalism: Michael Ende’S Momo And “Cathedral Station”, Heike Polster
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Michael Ende, the well-known author of The Neverending Story, foresaw dramatic changes in the fabric of society resulting from a turn toward neoliberal policies. One such far-reaching and dangerous change has to do with a diminishing of temporal autonomy, the ability to freely determine the use and meaning of our time. This article explores how neoliberalism is shaping our concept of time and our experience of it. In an effort to demonstrate the process and the line of reasoning behind the monetization of time, and to connect time to more qualitative considerations of the human condition, I shall demonstrate …
Time’S Deadly Arrow: Time And Temporality In Narratives Of Immaterial Labor, Sabine Von Dirke
Time’S Deadly Arrow: Time And Temporality In Narratives Of Immaterial Labor, Sabine Von Dirke
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The article investigates the discourse on time and temporality in non-fictional and fictional accounts of paid, white collar labor, or, in the broader terminology of Maurizio Lazzarato, immaterial labor since the last quarter of the twentieth century. More specifically, it brings the critique of neoliberal capitalism by two influential social philosophers, Richard Sennett and Oskar Negt, in dialogue with fictional narratives of white collar labor: Rainer Merkel’s novel, Das Jahr der Wunder (The Year of Miracles, 2001), W.E. Richartz’s Büroroman (Office Novel, 1976) and Wilhelm Genazino’s Abschaffel-trilogy (1977-1979). Sennett and Negt’s non-fictional accounts contrast living and working conditions under …
Introduction, Necia Chronister, Lutz Koepnick
Introduction, Necia Chronister, Lutz Koepnick
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The task of this special issue is to unearth the often denied logic of neoliberal rationality in Germany over the last few decades by exploring how various literary texts, films, and artistic projects, at the level of both content and formal experimentation, have sought to visualize the ramifications of deregulation and ceaseless self-management. The volume features scholarly work on various literary texts, performances, films, time-based art works, and theoretical interventions that explore the nexus between neoliberalism, new media culture, and the landscapes of temporal experience.
Going Under: The Metro And The Search For Oneself In Julio Cortázar's "The Pursuer" , Patricia E. Reagan
Going Under: The Metro And The Search For Oneself In Julio Cortázar's "The Pursuer" , Patricia E. Reagan
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Johnny's metaphysical experience on the metro in Julio Cortázar's "The Pursuer" catalyzes his perception. The metro incident and the ensuing commentary propel all the elements of the narrative. The metro facilitates the development of Johnny's character; relates his character to Charlie Parker; aids our comprehension of the relationship between the metro and Johnny's music; and establishes the metaphysical difference between Johnny and Bruno. The subway is also physical space in which Cortázar reveals a view of time perception in which chronological time succumbs to subjective time. Johnny's metacognitive search for the yonder marks a change in Cortázar's narrative preoccupations and …
Introduction: Rethinking Spain From Across The Seas, Jill Robbins, Roberta Johnson
Introduction: Rethinking Spain From Across The Seas, Jill Robbins, Roberta Johnson
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
For much of the twentieth century, critical studies of "Peninsular Spanish Literature" largely followed a generational paradigm that stressed the peculiarities of Spanish history and texts written by Spanish men in the Castilian language, thereby circumscribing the literary within the boundaries of a specific form of national identity...
Proust, Bakhtin, And The Dialogic Albertine: Voice And Fragmentation In The Captive , Jesse Kavadlo
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
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 …
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 …
Bakhtin And Buber: Problems Of Dialogic Imagination, Nina Perlina
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 …
Towards A Poetry Of Silence: Stéphane Mallarmé And Juan Ramón Jiménez, Mervyn Coke-Enguídanos
Towards A Poetry Of Silence: Stéphane Mallarmé And Juan Ramón Jiménez, Mervyn Coke-Enguídanos
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In an era of apparent dissolution, "la Obra" of Juan Ramón Jiménez, like "l'Oeuvre" of Stéphane Mallarmé, has for its goal the attainment of timelessness. In both poets, the concept of absolute Time—the timelessness of eternal Time—is yoked with the ideal of silence. But this is no ordinary silence, and certainly not the kind that results from inadequacy of expression. It is the silence of perfection, the expression of the ineffable: pure Poetry. Since the poetic language is the silent language of thought, both Mallarmé and Juan Ramón seek to convey the pure idea. In so doing, both must stringently …
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 …
Points South: Ambrose Bierce, Jorge Luis Borges, And The Fantastic, Howard M. Fraser
Points South: Ambrose Bierce, Jorge Luis Borges, And The Fantastic, Howard M. Fraser
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The debt of Borges's "A Secret Miracle" to Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" both in theme and technique has been noted in recent criticism. However, a careful study of the two works reveals striking differences, particularly with respect to the treatment of time. Based on Todorov's study of the fantastic, this article attempts to show how Bierce's influence on Borges parallels the general development of psychological realism and its transformation into surrealism. While it is true that the allusive qualities of Borges' work recall thematic and technical aspects of Bierce, nonetheless the American Hispanophile is a precursor …