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The Notion Of Presence In The Poetics Of Yves Bonnefoy, John T. Naughton

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The notion of presence is the cornerstone of Bonnefoy's entire poetics, the common element linking his earliest pronouncements about poetry to his latest. The insistence on presence emerges as the animating principle of a selfconsciously anti-Mallarmean concept of poetry that seeks to align itself with hopefulness and with an affirmation of this life. The term is never defined once and for all, however, and the great range of evocations and applications of the idea in Bonnefoy's work has triggered a significant critical debate about its significance and validity.

The Unseizable Landscape Of The Real: The Poetry And Poetics Of Philippe Jaccottet, Richard Stamelman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

For Philippe Jaccottet the real is the force of life itself. It is also a rapid, fleeting perception made all the more ephemeral by the mimetic imprecision of language. The essence of the real, since it is always other than what is said about it, can never be fully represented. This alterity of the real and the fundamental lack it announces provoke poetic language. By means of a poetics of passage, of passing through, of a travers, Jaccottet confronts the otherness of the unseizable landscape and of the elusive language in which he dwells. In the meditative, prose poem …

André Frénaud's Plural Voice, Roger Little

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Dramatic self-projection and the use of recurrent or occasional personae are features manifest in André Frénaud's poetry. One also notes a tendency to multiply unique phenomena. Furthermore, the medium of his poetry displays huge variety in form and tone. This study reviews a selection of these interacting characteristics and investigates their relationship to the poet, who represents the unity beneath the diversity, but whose self proves versatile in its exploration of world, word and identity through the revealing ventriloquy of plural voices.

Thought And Perception: Bernard Noël And The Mind's Eye, Laurie Edson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Bernard Noël has investigated the relationship between the conceptual and the visual in many of his prose and poetic texts. From the earlier "body" poetry of Extraits du corps, where the image of the inward-looking eye makes its appearance, to his book on Magritte's "visible thought" and the prose text Le 19 octobre 1977, where he thematizes the functioning of perception, Noël explores the complex interplay between seeing and thought, language and thought, and seeing and writing. This study analyzes these and other major issues driving Noel's poetics.

Introduction, Richard Stamelman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Introduction to the special issue

Living Transcription: The Poetry Of Jean Tortel, Suzanne Nash

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

With the publication of six new books of poetry since 1979, Jean Tortel has joined his contemporaries, Francis Ponge and Guillevic, as one of France's leading materialist poets. His writing, recounting the process of its own unfolding with voluptuous precision, is meant to bear witness through its figurations to the forces of chance and mutability governing the natural order. As such it constitutes a place of passage or verbal garden, both sumptuous and ordinary, where reading and formulation merge.

Shall We Escape Analogy, Rosmarie Waldrop

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Claude Royet-Journoud's and Anne-Marie Albiach's work can be read as manifestos against metaphor (relation by similarity, the vertical selection axis of the speech act) with which poetry has long been identified. Whereas Royet-Joumoud takes as his theme metaphor in the largest sense (including, finally, all representation that is based on analogy), Albiach's "Enigme" dramatizes the loss of the vertical dimension through, ironically, a metaphor: the fall of a body. Formally, both stress as alternative the horizontal axis of combination (especially the spatial articulation on the page) and the implied view that the world is constructed by language, that it does …

Words, Names, Nature, Earth: On The Poetry Of Pierre-Albert Jourdan, Yves Bonnefoy

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

An ambivalence toward language is present throughout the work of Pierre-Albert Jourdan. Words are associated with the closure of a grey world; they are always arriving late, after the fact; they are veils, masks, dreams detached from truth, knowledge, and immediacy. Yet, words and names hold out the possibility of hope; they can designate the presence of beauty in the world; they can mediate the encounter of self and other. The human word signifies itself through the substance of the world and the communion of beings. At the intersection of natural reality—the center of the real for Jourdan—and of language …

Contemporary Women Poets, Michael Bishop

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The essay evokes the essence of the respective démarches of eight major contemporary women poets: Janine Mitaud, Andrée Chedid, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Jeanne Hyvrard, Anne Teyssiéras, Martine Broda, Denise Le Dantec, Heather Dohollau. No attempt is made to generalise the findings of the individual analyses of collections and sample poems, though the following 'tensions' emerge as characteristically significant: the telluric and the cosmic; entropy and reintegration; body, mind and soul; passingness and search; language as problem and resolution; minimality and maximality; violence and love. In each poet high intensity is matched with wisdom and serenity, problematic though they may be. The …

Klaus Mann's Mephisto: A Secret Rivalry, Peter T. Hoffer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Critics of the 1960s and 1970s have focused their attention on Klaus Mann's use of his former brother-in-law, Gustaf Gründgens, as the model for the hero of his controversial novel, Mephisto, while more recent critics have emphasized its significance as a work of anti-Fascist literature.

This essay seeks to resolve some of the apparent contradictions in Klaus Mann's motivation for writing Mephisto by viewing the novel primarily in the context of his life and career. Although Mephisto is the only political satire that Klaus Mann wrote, it is consistent with his life-long tendency to use autobiographical material as the …

Moral Dilemmas In The Work Of Yury Trifonov, Richard Chapple

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The work of soviet novelist and playwright Yury Trifonov displayed throughout a concern with moral dilemmas and ethical choice. What distinguished the writing after 1969 from the earlier production was a shift away from facile platitudes of socialist dogma to a vision that would account more fully for the moral ambiguity with which modern life confronts the individual.

Jewish Writers In Contemporary Germany: The Dead Author Speaks, Sander L. Gilman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The question I wish to address in this essay is really quite simple: Given the fact that there are "Jews" who seem to play a major role in contemporary German "Kultur" (at least that narrower definition of culture, meaning the production of cultural artifacts, such as books—a field which, at least for Englemann, was one of the certain indicators of a Jewish component in prewar German culture)—what happened to these "Jews" (or at least the category of the "Jewish writer") in postwar discussions of culture? Or more simply: who lulled the remaining Jews in contemporary German culture and why? Why …

In Search Of A Synthesis: Reflections On Two Interpretations Of Edvard Radzinskii's Lunin Or The Death Of Jacques, Recorded In The Presence Of The Master, Maia Kipp

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article examines the contemporary Soviet dramatist Edward Radzinskii's Lunin, the second play in the author's "historical-philosophical trilogy" [Conversations with Socrates (1969), Lunin (1979), and Theater at the Time of Nero and Seneca (1981)]. All three dramas address the relationship between the intellectual and authority. As a philosophical play and as part of the trilogy, Lunin raises universal ethical questions: the banality of power, the paranoia of ideological dogmatists, the fate of the individual who refuses to compromise in the face of a system which will not tolerate any denial of its authority. As an historical play, Lunin …

Modernist Aesthetics And Familial Textuality: Gide's Strait Is The Gate, Roddey Reid

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The essay explores different links drawn by Edward Said and Jean Bone between early modernist fiction and what they call bachelor literature or discourse. The latter attempted to break free from the bourgeois ideology of the family as constituted in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Modernist fiction is anti-bourgeois and anti-familial in some of its deepest impulses.

In Strait is the Gate Jerome's narrative is a tale of failed courtship that has as its setting bourgeois family life in a stage of dissolution. Out of the overwrought family drama emerges an aesthetic problematic: Jerome's account of a fragmented …

Art And Androgyny: The Aerialist, Naomi Ritter

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Among the many circus performers who have fascinated writers and artists since Romanticism, the clown and the aerialist predominate. In the nineteenth century, the tightrope artiste inspired comparisons with the (self-styled) equally daring and equally craftsmanlike poet. The vertical metaphor suggested a vision of transcendent art that Romantics and their heirs claimed for themselves. In the twentieth century, vestiges of the same identification and transcendence remain, but a new sexual focus appears also. Two important texts by Cocteau and Thomas Mann, "Le Numero de Barbette" (1926) and Chapter 1 in Book III of Felix Krull ( 1951), show the aerial …

Retracing The Text: Francisco Brines' Poemas Excluidos, Judith Nantell

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In 198S Francisco Brines published Poemas excluidos [Excluded Poems]. In this work he included, ironically and paradoxically (considering the title), various poems that had been excluded from his previously published collections of poetry. This essay investigates the critical activity of reconstructing the text within the included-excluded intertextual context of Brines' poetic production. In particular, as will be shown, Poemas excluidos demonstrates the play of texts and play of meaning that constitute the complex object the literary critic seeks to describe. One aspect of the play of texts evident in this work is that the poem is a symbiont not …