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Genet's Fantastic Voyage In Miracle De La Rose: All At Sea About Maternity, Elizabeth Richardson Viti

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Together psychoanalytical and feminist criticism appear to uncover the very composition of Jean Genet's inversion. Indeed, in this regard the Miracle de la Rose dream sequence which focuses on an extraordinary voyage through the body of Harcamone, the very imprimatur of bisexuality defined in Cixous' Le rire de la méduse, holds singular importance. Abandoned by his biological mother, Genet sees himself as a "produit synthétique" who has to belong to someone in order to be. Genet simply does not exist unless he can establish, not the Lacanian Name-of-the-Father, but rather the Name-of-the-Mother. The dream reveals a Freudian …

Seeing Albertine Seeing: Barbey And Proust Through Balzac, Dorothy Kelly

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The three texts, Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or, Barbey d'Aurevilly's Le Rideau cramoisi, and Proust's La Prisonnière, share two structuring themes: the problematic eyes of a woman who desires, and the need to see the woman in order to learn her truth. This article first does a close reading of these themes in the texts. Second, the difference between Barbey and Proust is examined in their ultimate conclusions about the truth of woman, and Proust's text is studied in its use of the impossibility of truth as the origin of its fiction.

Text As Locus, Inscription As Identity: On Barbara Honigmann's Roman Von Einem Kinde , Marilyn Sibley Fries

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Barbara Honigmann's Roman von einem Kinde (1986) constitutes the author's attempt at narrative self-definition. In this and other regards, it is similar to Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster (1976; Patterns of Childhood, 1980), with which it is briefly compared.

Honigmann's slim collection of stories, conceived by her as "sketches for self-portraits and landscapes," depicts the absolute isolation ofthe female Jewish narrator in the GDR and her search for community (Heimat) via language. Simultaneously, it records that narrator's desire to identify "places of transition," "boundaries at which conditions change" without fixing these in a static prison of text. The narrator-mother …

The Writer's Identity As Self-Dismantling Text In Julien Green's Si J'Étais Vous. . ., Robert Ziegler

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Written between 1944 and 1946, Julien Green's novel Si j'étais vous . . . is one of the author's most fantastic and enigmatic texts, having generated interpretations ranging from the Freudian to the theological. Yet certain central features of the text have not yet been addressed and may lead to a different approach, one focusing on the problem of the writer's identity in his works. Despite the fact that his literary efforts are unsuccessful, Fabien is shown as being a writer like Green himself, but more importantly, he is a character in another writer's fiction. As metatext, Green's novel describes …

Exile In Language, Peter Baker

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Saint-John Perse's poem Exil (1941) represents a deep meditation on the nature of "writing" as subsequent critical theory has developed that term. Though the poem seems to present a "signature" at the end, it may be that the poet through giving in to a radically different signifying practice is in some sense not the signatory of the text. The archaic setting and difficult-to-resolve cultural matrix from this perspective become means of examining the co-originary origins of thought and language. Close analysis of textual patterns reveals a composition practice based on anagrammatic patterning. This kind of questioning of language in the …

Ekphrasis, Intertextuality And The Role Of The Reader In Poems By Francisco Brines And Claudio Rodríguez, W. Michael Mudrovic

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Ekphrasis, the verbal representation of visual art, affords a singular perspective on a discrepancy between the general conception of intertextuality and its practical application. Francisco Brines's "Museo de la Academia" ("Museum of the Academy") and Claudio Rodríguez's "Hilando" ("Spinning") both contain the description of a painting. Each poet achieves diverse effects with a different handling of the respective paintings, yet both come to surprisingly similar conclusions with regard to the poetic act. Brines's depiction of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian supplies a limited amount of information that dovetails neatly with the use of metaphor and metonymy. Rodríguez's use of synecdoche …

The Dialogical Traveler: A Reading Of Semprun's Le Grand Voyage, Sally M. Silk

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In light of discourse theory influenced by Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, the notion of voice has changed significantly so that we are invited to read discourse in a way that represents a departure from Bakhtin. The theories of François Flahault, Michel Pêchetut, and John Frow, who inquire into the importance of conditions of production of language, are used to explore the vain search for a subject-centered voice in Jorge Semprun's Le Grand voyage. The narrating subject Gerard experiences "homelessness" in discourse because he fails to find a voice of his own. His relationship to music and literature depends on …

Embodiments Of Shape: Cubes And Lines And Slender Gilded Thongs In Picasso, Duchamp And Robbe-Grillet, Emma Kafalenos

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

An account, from several perspectives, of a structural type exemplified by Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), generally considered the first Cubist painting; Marcel Duchamp's Nu descendant un escalier (1912), and Alain Robbe-Grillet's La Maison de rendez-vous (1965). To compare contemporary texts to paintings that arose in the moment immediately preceding the full achievement of the non-representational suggests that both incorporate trivial—and even popular—elements because they are so eminently cuttable. In each work, the decomposition of objects to their pieces shifts interest from paradigm to syntagm, while retaining sufficient reference to paradigm to embody syntagm, to make structure perceptible. All …

Peter Handke's Kaspar: The Mechanics Of Language—A Fractionating Schizophrenic Theatrical Event, Bettina L. Knapp

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Theatre, for Handke, has neither object nor subject. concepts, values, functional systems of signification, verifiable contents are non existent in Kaspar. Words alone are of import; they alone create reality.

Words, therefore, and not subjective evaluations of them, are acceptable to Handke, Comparisons, associations, metaphors, or references prevent people from dealing directly with the object itself (the signified), inviting them to have recourse to a "system of differences," to use Derrida's expression, thus contrasting or modifying one with the other. Evaluation breeds buffers and hierarchies; it encourages people to rank or compute ideas, notions, or feelings, and therefore …

Introduction, Jean Franco

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Introduction to the special issue.

Pedro Páramo, A Metaphor For The End Of The World, Julio Ortega

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In Rulfo's novel, popular Catholic culture functions as an ideology and as such, it encompasses the totality of the represented universe. Because reality is only captured through ideology, there is no criterion in the novel that is outside ideology and which would therefore offer a critical standpoint, though this criterion does exist by implication in the world of the reader.

César Vallejo And The Stones Of Darwinian Risk, Christiane Von Buelow

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

César Vallejo's short story, "Los caynas" (1923), relates a tale of species mutation, of men who become apes. The story, however, is something more than the reflection of the positivist interpretation of Darwinian theory. It can be read as a critique of Positivism's pseudo-scientific ideals or as a version of the Oedipal drama in which the son encounters and rejects his ape father. The ambivalence raises the question of whether Vallejo's Darwinism is to be read literally or ironically as well, as marking an antinomy present throughout his writing between the human subject's immersion in the species and the possibility …

Postmodernity And Fin De Siècle In Uruguay, Hugo Achugar

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Since the end of the military regime, Uruguay has been culturally and politically divided. During the period of repression, the opposition was united against the dictatorship. Yet economic decline and the military dictatorship have profoundly divided Uruguayan culture. On the positive side, new cultural actors have emerged—women, younger poets and writers and the marginalized—on the negative side, there is a sense of malaise that has neither been adequately discussed nor theoretized.

Modernity And Marginality In Love In The Time Of Cholera, Mabel Moraña

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The two male protagonists of García Márquez's novel, Dr. Urbino and Florentino Ariza (whose lives are linked by their relationship to Fermina Daza), enact to the limit nineteenth century ideologies of scientific progress and romanticism. The anachronistic plot of romantic love taken to the point of parody is deployed by the author as a critique of fin de siècle modernity.

From Vision To Apocalypse: The Poetic Subject In Recent Mexican Poetry, Norma Klahn

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Over the last two decades there have been significant changes in the poetic subject. After the colloquial realism of the fifties and sixties, in which the poetic subject acted as witness to his or her time or spoke as a collective subject, there has emerged, particularly in the poetry of José Emilio Pacheco, a poetry in which the subject assumes an impersonal voice. This poetry questions originality, privileging appropriation, parody and pastiche while becoming increasingly skeptical and apocalyptic.

Rereading De Man's Readings, Herman Rapaport

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

A review article on Reading de Man Reading.

Patriarchy And Apocalypse In Cerca Del Fuego By José Agustín, Cynthia Steele

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

José Agustín's novel is one of several Mexican texts that depict the nation in ruins, but although the novel is parricidal in its parody of its literary antecedents, it is underpinned by a Jungian quest for wholeness. The protagonist's spiritual adventures take him through the subterranean experience of limits (and through the lower depths of Mexico City), only to end with the reconstitution of the "fatherland" and the family.

Pastiche In Contemporary Latin American Literature, Jean Franco

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Pastiche, defined as non-satiric imitation, is a characteristic feature of contemporary Latin American narrative. Although unlike parody it does not stand in antagonist relationship with a prior text, nevertheless pastiche marks a distance and a displacement of other texts. The article illustrates this with reference to Mario Vargas Llosa's pastiche of Machiguenga indigenous legends in his novel El hablador and Silviano Santiago's pastiche of Graciliano Ramos's prison memories in his novel, Em Liberdade.

Claude Simon: Writing The Visible, Lynn A. Higgins

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Claude Simon: Writing the Visible, by Celia Britton