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Memory

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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Displaced Identities And Traveling Texts In Luisa Valenzuela's Black Novel (With Argentines) , Laura R. Loustau Jan 2008

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 Jan 2005

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 Jun 2004

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. …


Unearthing The Past: The Archaeology Of Bog Bodies In Glob, Atwood, Hébert And Drabble, Anthony Purdy Jan 2002

Unearthing The Past: The Archaeology Of Bog Bodies In Glob, Atwood, Hébert And Drabble, Anthony Purdy

French Studies Publications

Within the narrative poetics of the archaeological find, accounts of the discovery of beautifully preserved Iron Age bodies in the peat-bogs of Northwestern Europe constitute a particularly complex, well-defined and resonant subgenre. A reading of the genre’s founding text, P.V. Glob’s The Bog People, reveals a repertoire of tropes and topoï that will inform subsequent fictional treatments of bog body finds. Arguing that the poetic specificity of the bog body lies in its extraordinary capacity to abolish temporal distance and mediate between past and present, this essay seeks to define the figure as a special kind of chronotopic motif, or …


Unearthing The Past: The Archaeology Of Bog Bodies In Glob, Atwood, Hébert And Drabble, Anthony Purdy Dec 2001

Unearthing The Past: The Archaeology Of Bog Bodies In Glob, Atwood, Hébert And Drabble, Anthony Purdy

Anthony Purdy

Within the narrative poetics of the archaeological find, accounts of the discovery of beautifully preserved Iron Age bodies in the peat-bogs of Northwestern Europe constitute a particularly complex, well-defined and resonant subgenre. A reading of the genre’s founding text, P.V. Glob’s The Bog People, reveals a repertoire of tropes and topoï that will inform subsequent fictional treatments of bog body finds. Arguing that the poetic specificity of the bog body lies in its extraordinary capacity to abolish temporal distance and mediate between past and present, this essay seeks to define the figure as a special kind of chronotopic motif, or …


Between L'Irréparable And L'Irrepérable: Subject To The Past, Downing Thomas, Steven Ungar Jan 1999

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 Jan 1999

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 Jan 1999

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 Jun 1997

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 Jan 1995

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 Jan 1993

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 Jun 1992

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 Jan 1987

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 Sep 1985

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 …