Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Oulipian Messages, Sydney Levy

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The result of Oulipo's manipulations seem devoid of any message. Upon performing, however, what could be called an Oulipo-critique, the folding of an Oulipo product into a body of knowledge quite removed from it, in this case biology and information theory, we find that Oulipo's message is not in the text but in the work one is likely to perform on that text. That work has all the characteristics of a highly redundant and organized interference and consists in establishing contextual and/or intertextual relationships according to preset formal constraints where chance plays almost no role. Oulipo in effect confuses message …

Literature And Propaganda: The Structure Of Conversion In Schenzinger's Hitlerjunge Quex, John Daniel Stahl

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Propaganda literature as a genre can profitably be analyzed by means of a structuralist approach, as Susan R. Suleiman has shown in her study of the French ideological novel. Extending her discussion of the "structure of confrontation" and the "structure of apprenticeship," this study postulates the "structure of conversion" as a fundamental form of propaganda literature. Through loss of self to a greater entity, the central character in fiction exemplifying this form finds a new identity in self-submergence. A once-popular novel by the German pro-fascist author Karl Aloys Schenzinger, Hitlerjunge Quex ( 1932), serves as a model for investigation into …

Nabokov's "Torpid Smoke", Leona Toker

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Nabokov's short stories are polished self-contained works of art. However, like his novels and poems, they can be profitably read in the light of their place in his general canon. This place is determined by the time when each story was written and by the way in which other works enrich and elucidate the significance of its images.

The short fiction of Nabokov's Berlin period has been regarded largely as akin to studies that a painter makes in preparation for a big picture. In some cases, however, the stories seem to serve as safety valves for the urgent material that …

The Maze Of Taste: On Bataille, Derrida, And Kant, Arkady Plotnitsky

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The case of Kant's Critique of Judgment offers a powerful example of the radical disruption of the metaphysical text, enacted by Bataille's major сoncepts. The analysis of the metaphor of economy in Kant, Bataille and Derrida suggests the crucial importance of Bataille's general economy—as the economy of loss—for deconstructing the Kantian conception of genius and the whole scheme of taste—as an economy of consumption—and inscribing a complex interplay forces that the general economy is designed to account for. Once however taste, art and the economy of genius can no longer be inscribed through the restricted economy …

Anamnesis: Paul Celan's Translations Of Poetry, Leonard Olschner

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Paul Celan's significance as a poet has long been undisputed, and increasingly outside German-speaking countries, but his translations of poetry have remained at the periphery of critical attention and are only gradually becoming recognized as an integral and indeed major part of his poetry and poetics. The present essay attempts to elucidate specific aspects of the biographical, linguistic, literary and historical background at work in Celan's translating and offers analytic interpretations of texts by Mandel'stam, Apollinaire and Shakespeare in Celan's translation.

Tournier's Theoretical Pretext Works Like A Charm, Lawrence R. Schehr

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

By playing on the expectations that a reader would have for a Bildungsroman, Tournier puts generic parameters and received ideas into question. In La Goutte d'or, he writes a text in which thematic considerations become so over-determined that they give way to a set of theoretical considerations about how the novel is constructed and perceived.

Tournier does engage the reader in two "orthodox" theoretical perspectives on the nature of the text. The first involves the generation of meaning through the determination of a signified; the second involves the play of the signifier. But the largest portion of the …