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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
French Fiction, Empathy, And The Utopian Potential Of 9/11, Tim Gauthier
French Fiction, Empathy, And The Utopian Potential Of 9/11, Tim Gauthier
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In From Solidarity to Schisms, Cara Cilano conceptualizes September 11 as a moment “characterized by unfathomable vulnerability and the possibility of a better future.” She argues the event, while traumatic, might have served as an impetus to reconfigure American self-perceptions and thoughts about its place in the world. Instead, she contends, the United States squandered the utopian potential of this moment. Cilano remains optimistic, however, because she sees European fictional discourse on 9/11 as emblematic of a desire for a melding of divergent perspectives. Their critique aims to keep America’s sense of itself unbalanced, thus providing fuel for self-reflection, …
Ionesco’S Rhinocéros And The Menippean Tradition, Preston Fambrough
Ionesco’S Rhinocéros And The Menippean Tradition, Preston Fambrough
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Mikhail Bakhtin argues that Menippean satire, one of the two serio-comic genres of classical antiquity from which the carnivalesque strain in Western literature derives, continues its development in modern times in the “fantastic story” and the “philosophical fairy tale.” This modern form of the menippea is characterized by the presence of the grotesque, the use of the fantastic for philosophical purposes, the crowning of a (wise) fool or jester as carnival king, and “a sense of the gay relativity of prevailing truths and authorities” (Rabelais 11) which informs all carnivalized literature. A genre of “ultimate questions of worldview,” it …
Modernity, Postmodernity, And Transgression In Sábato's Esthetics: Poetic Dissemination, Defeat Of Utopias, Returning Bodies , María Rosa Lojo
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 …
Dismantling Romantic Utopias: María Beneyto's Poetry Between Tradition And Protest , Candelas S. Gala
Dismantling Romantic Utopias: María Beneyto's Poetry Between Tradition And Protest , Candelas S. Gala
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Despite the fact that Vicente Aleixandre considered her one of the best young authors of the generation of social poets of the 1950s, María Beneyto's writings have been disregarded by critics. While sharing the social concerns of the other poets of her generation, Beneyto's poetry also reveals the dilemma of the woman author facing a cultural tradition that espouses pre-established models for her conduct and identity patterned mostly in accordance with tenets of Romanticism. Beneyto resorts to those models as projections of herself as she seeks to articulate her own identity as woman and author. The objective of this essay …
Brecht, Hegel, Lacan: Brecht's Theory Of Gest And The Problem Of The Subject, Philip E. Bishop
Brecht, Hegel, Lacan: Brecht's Theory Of Gest And The Problem Of The Subject, Philip E. Bishop
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Brecht used the term "gest" to describe the generic components of human social behavior. He schooled actors in "decomposing" real conduct into distinct gestic images, which were criticized, compared, and altered by other actor-spectators. In his pedagogic theater, Brecht's young players engaged in a reciprocal process of acting and observing, which prepared them to act critically outside the theater. This gestic reciprocality echoes the master-slave dialectic in Hegel's Phenomenology and Lacan's description of the mirror phase. In Hegel, a subject achieves mastery (or self-consciousness) through the recognition of another subject. In Lacan, the infant recognizes itself in an (alienated) mirror-image …
Miguel Delibes' Parábola Del Náufrago: Utopia Redreamed, H. L. Boudreau
Miguel Delibes' Parábola Del Náufrago: Utopia Redreamed, H. L. Boudreau
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Delibes' anti-utopian novel is analyzed from a triple perspective: its internal exegesis, the author's literary development, and the three-phase Utopian genre. Artistic versus thematic orientation is examined via parabolic technique, linguistic characterization, and Parábola's internalization as its author's nightmare. The latter facilitates novelistic exposition through the control and order inherent in the associative language and logic of the dream. Delibes frees his Utopian world from the perquisites of reality by creating an estetic dimension and psychological verisimilitude uncommon in the genre.