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Playing Nabokov: Performances By Himself And Others , Susan Elizabeth Sweeney

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In 1918, in the Crimea, the adolescent Vladimir Nabokov devised a new pastime: "parodizing a biographic approach" by narrating his own actions aloud. In this self-conscious "game," he orchestrated changes in grammatical person, gender, and tense in order to transform his present experiences into a third-person past, as remembered by a female friend in an imaginary future. Staging his own biography in this fashion allowed Nabokov to resolve the inherent conflict between his life and his art. Indeed, he went on to play the game of narrating his own biography throughout his memoir, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, and …

Body/Text/History: Violation Of Borders In Assia Djebar's Fantasia, David Waterman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Assia Djebar's novel Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (1985) can be read as a political novel which examines the permeability of borders, especially between Algeria and the female body. As the primary site of signification and meaning, the body becomes a text which attempts to circulate knowledge and encourage resistance outside a position of mastery, and the same body/text suffers as it is inscribed by the dominant power. The distinction between nature and culture is interrogated as the borders of the body/text overlap the borders of war, writing, history, and sexuality. Ultimately, given the position of the female body within the …

Travels Through Heterotopia: The Textual Realms Of Patrick Modiano's Rue Des Boutiques Obscures And Mikhail Kuraev's Kapitan Dikshtein, Vitaly Chernetsky

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Within contemporary prose, one distinct mode or paradigm that can be discerned is constituted by the texts that daringly tackle the dark, suppressed, erased parts of our history and mentality; however, they approach this task not by way of self-righteous denunciatory investigations, but by provocatively problematizing the most established everyday facts, by depriving the reader of the possibility of even conceiving any firm ground of the stable construct of an origin or a self-identification—historically and culturally. Their irreverent and playful deconstruction of the all-pervasive national cultural mythologies has mounted a powerful challenge to ideological constructs big and small. This article …

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Johnson, Roberta. Crossfire: Philosophy and the Novel in Spain 1900-1934 by Nina L. Molinaro

Lucey, Michael. Gide 's Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing by Jocelyn Van Tuyl

Morris, Alan. Patrick Modiano by David Herman

Sartiliot, Claudette. Citation and Modernity: Derrida, Joyce, and Brecht by Siegfried Mews

"A Myth Becomes Reality": Kaspar Hauser As Messianic Wild Child , Ulrich Struve

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The topos of the "Wild Child" occupies an important place in the mythic and literary imagination of the West. The European climax of a long line of wild children, Kaspar Hauser was a nineteenth-century German foundling whose fate has inspired a host of novels, dramas, novellas, poems, songs, and movies, even an opera and a ballet. It has been treated by Paul Verlaine, R. M. Rilke, and Klaus Mann, by the Dada poet Hans Arp, by the dramatist Peter Handke, and by the filmmaker Werner Herzog. This article offers a brief historical sketch of Hauser's life before discussing a key …

Augusto Roa Bastos's Trilogy As Postmodern Practice, Helene C. Weldt-Basson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Augusto Roa Bastos's most recent novel, El fiscal (1993), completes the author's trilogy on the "monotheism of power," which the novel constitutes in conjunction with the prior works Hijo de hombre (1960) and Yo el Supremo (1974). These novels form a larger whole by virtue of the way in which they attempt to define Paraguay's identity through the nation's history. Hijo de hombre focuses on both the Chaco War and a series of Paraguayan civil wars; Yo el Supremo concentrates on the nineteenth-century dictatorship of Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia; and El fiscal presents both Alfredo Stroessner's dictatorship (1954-1989) …

Etc.: No End To Interpretation Of Julien Green's Le Voyageur Sur La Terre , Robert Ziegler

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

A critical reappraisal of Julien Green's Le Voyageur sur la terre may bring a realization that the text itself is the itinerant traveler, a vagabond temporarily sheltered in readings accorded to it while it awaits entry into heaven, where its meaning is revealed. A tale incorporating inhospitable interpretations, Le Voyageur sur la terre charts a journey toward an impossible homecoming, where the confusion of narrative voices, origins, and identities is finally resolved in a celestial illumination of perfect clarity. As this paper argues, evidence of Green's protagonist Daniel O'Donovan's deliverance from the world is the exile of his narrative in …

"Borges And I," A Narrative Sleight Of Hand , Armando F. Zubizarreta

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Because of its autobiographical appearance, critics have paid little attention to the narrative of "Borges and I" which is so masterfully handled that its complex and transparent texture is almost invisible. A close analysis shows, however, that, in the confessional mode, the two individuals—I and Borges—are true characters involved in a narrative action that is taking place to allow the implementation of vengeance. By focusing on his victim's experience, the narrating I offers an attractive bait to his victimizer, Borges. Borges, the writer, driven by a compulsive pattern of stealing, unsuspectingly takes over the victim's grievances against him by virtue …

Illness As Metaphor? The Role Of Linguistic Categories In The History Of Medicine , Ulrike Kistner

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Susan Soniag's studies on "Illness and Metaphor" raise a host of questions, based on the twin suppositions running through her project: the ubiquity and pervasiveness of metaphoric constructions of illness on the one hand, and the vision of a liberation from metaphors of illness on the other hand. This paper sets itself the task to explain and resolve this paradox. To this end, concepts of metaphor have to be linguistically defined and differentiated, both structurally and within an archaeology of (medical) knowledge; for it is only on the basis of such a differentiation that we can show how metaphorical language …

Homosexuality As (Anti)Illness: Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray And Gabriele D'Annunzio's Il Piacere , Edward S. Brinkley

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article treats Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray as culturally antagonistic but also as culturally conservative: Dorian's liminal position as a male who knows—who has experienced sexual contact with other males—is linked in the text both to a position of cultural/epistemological superiority (the "Greek" sexual act constructed as index of canonical mastery, back to Greek texts and artwork) and to a position of disease and dis-figurement. The latter association, read by other commentators particularly in the final pages as punishment for narcissism, hedonism, or homosexual activity, is here glossed as an accusation against Victorian injunctions against same …

The Empire Bites Back: Sherlock Holmes As An Imperial Immune System, Laura Otis

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Trained as a physician in the bacteriological age, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created a detective-hero who acts both like a masterful bacteriologist and an imperial immune system. Doyle's experiences as a doctor in South Africa taught him that the colonies' microbes were his Empire's worst enemy. In 1890, Doyle visited Berlin, where Robert Koch was testing a "cure" for tuberculosis, and in Doyle's subsequent character sketch of Koch, the scientist sounds remarkably like Sherlock Holmes. Based on Doyle's medical instructor Joe Bell, Holmes shares Koch's relentless drive to hunt down and unmask tiny invaders. Imperialism, by the 1880s, had opened …

Men In (Shell-)Shock: Masculinity, Trauma, And Psychoanalysis In Rebecca West's The Return Of The Soldier , Misha Kavka

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This paper undertakes to read Rebecca West's first novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), as a critical exploration of masculine trauma on the one hand and an ambivalent engagement with Freudian psychoanalysis on the other. The novel proves interesting as a site in which two shifting cultural contexts intersect: the wartime culture of England facing the "shell shock" of its men, and the contemporaneous infusion of English intellectual culture with psychoanalytic ideas. Though the effects of new war technology and "a newer kind of doctor," West challenge existing notions of stable masculinity, West maintains that masculinity has all along …

Korsakoff's Syndrome And Modern German Literature: Alfred Döblin's Medical Dissertation , Roland Dollinger

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay deals with the historical and cultural interrelationships between the medical and psychiatric discourses on memory and memory disorders at the end of the nineteenth century and the invention of an abstract and highly dissociated literary style in modern German literature. An historical reading of Alfred Döblin's medical dissertation (1905) on Korsakoff's syndrome, an amnestic disorder, shows the confluence of both his psychiatric and aesthetic interests in human memory and its failures. The essay analyzes Döblin's medical dissertation less as the contribution of a young psychiatrist to his discipline but rather as an historical text that challenges us to …

A Lustful Passion For Clarification: Bildung, Aufklärung, And The Sight Of Sexual Imagery , Stephanie D'Alessandro

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The equation of education and self-cultivation was an Enlightenment ideal which has become a hallmark of bourgeois culture. Prizing Bildung, the bourgeoisie professed an appreciation for art, music, and literature. Within their libraries, comprehensive scholarly texts intended for academic and well-educated, lay audiences occupied a special place. Marrying illustration with academic investigation, the Sittengeschichte (history of morals) could also be found on the bourgeois library shelf and afforded its readers a glimpse into a world outside the strict parameters of bourgeois propriety. During the Weimar Republic, the demand for illustrated Sittengeschichten increased dramatically among the bourgeoisie, meeting their ideal …

Mysterious Illnesses Of Human Commodities In Woody Allen And Franz Kafka , Iris Bruce

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The article examines correspondences between Woody Allen's film Zelig and texts by Franz Kafka. Both Leonard Zelig and Gregor Samsa (The Metamorphosis) suffer from mysterious illnesses which are multi-determined. Twentieth-century racial stereotypes are partially responsible for them; other causes lie in the commercialization of life in early twentieth-century society. Zelig's illness parallels the cultural trends and political movements of his time and becomes full-blown in the fascist movement. Zelig is therefore also a commentary on the cultural climate which helped bring about the rise of fascism. Kafka could not benefit from Allen's hindsight, but Kafka's representation of what …

A Literature Of "Truth": Writing By Gay Men In East Germany , Denis M. Sweet

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the last few years of its existence, the East German socialist state had initiated a campaign of tolerance and integration of its homosexuals into socialist society that seemed to cast the GDR in a more progressive light than West Germany. Breaking with the taboos of the previous era, gay literary works were allowed to be published for the first time. These works were in genres (a diary, representative interviews, a confession) that suggested unmitigated truth. Yet a closer analysis reveals them to be works not so much of 'truth' as of compromise and cooptation by a state policy of …

Should Feminists Forget Foucault?, Dominique D. Fisher

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Up Against Foucault (1993), a collection of essays edited by Caroline Ramazanoglu, reevaluates Michel Foucault's theories on power and sexuality in regard to feminism from a sociological perspective…