Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Subverting The Dominant Order: Narrative As Weapon In Simone De Beauvoir's Tous Les Hommes Sont Mortels, Barbara Klaw
Subverting The Dominant Order: Narrative As Weapon In Simone De Beauvoir's Tous Les Hommes Sont Mortels, Barbara Klaw
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This essay argues that through the narrative techniques of point of view and embedding, Beauvoir carefully constructed her narrative and those of her male and female characters in Tous les hommes sont mortels, her third novel, published in 1946, in order to explain why males dominate society and to encourage women to fight against the current patriarchal social order. Many critics view Fosca as the principal character, and his 400-page embedded recapitulation of his past as the predominant text, but shifting the focus from Fosca to Régine, who constitutes the only focalizer of present events in the embedding text, …
Reading In Colette: Domination, Resistance, Autonomy, Laurel Cummins
Reading In Colette: Domination, Resistance, Autonomy, Laurel Cummins
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The act of reading on the part of Colette's characters reveals itself as a dynamic involving domination and resistance. A study of passages from two of her semi-autobiographical works, La Maison de Claudine and Sido, brings to light both a positively connoted model of reading, exemplified by the character 'Colette,' and a negatively connoted model, exemplified by the older sister Juliette. While Juliette approaches texts with no sense of self, and seeks instead to be defined by the texts she reads, 'Colette' remains in relation to texts and to the discourses they contain, and resists them. Gender complicates the …
Fashion, Bodies, And Objects, Jean-François Fourny
Fashion, Bodies, And Objects, Jean-François Fourny
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This essay is based on the assumption that the body has undergone a process of fragmentation that started with "modern" art and commodity fetishism that is being amplified today by an increasingly fetishistic high fashion industry itself relayed by music videos and a gigantic pornography industry. This article begins with a discussion of fetishism and objectification as they appear in high fashion shows where underwear becomes wear (turning the inside into the outside), thus expanding (or dissolving) the traditional notion of pornography because they are both reported in comparable terms by mainstream magazines such as Femmes and less conventional publications …
Gorgeous Pedagogy, Debra Castillo
Gorgeous Pedagogy, Debra Castillo
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Elena Poniatowska's recent Luz y luna, Ias lunitas immediately impresses the reader with its beauty; it is akin to a "coffee table book" in its sheer gorgeousness. I intend to explore the question of how to read the gorgeous object within the context of Poniatowska's oeuvre and within the frame of a pedagogical endeavor. Poniatowska, of course, represents the epitome of the elite but socially conscious Latin American author. As in certain of her other works (but perhaps more obviously here, because of the very nature of this book), the mix of elitism and social consciousness undergoes a multiple displacement. …
Usurping Difference In The Feminine Fantastic From The Riverplate, María B. Clark
Usurping Difference In The Feminine Fantastic From The Riverplate, María B. Clark
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This study intended to define the concept of a feminine fantastic as a narrative mode in contemporary short fiction by women writers from Argentina and Uruguay. As a point of departure, the study examined the narrative techniques and conventions of the fantastic and their strategic use for the expression of feminine concerns. The concept of the feminine was used in the sense of referring to an interpretation of femininity as a construct of language rather than an essentially feminine narrative mode based on a biological gender division. An overview of fantastic short stories by women writers from Argentina and Uruguay …
The Subject, Feminist Theory And Latin American Texts, Sara Castro-Klaren
The Subject, Feminist Theory And Latin American Texts, Sara Castro-Klaren
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
From a feminist perspective, this essay reviews and analyzes the interaction between metropolitan feminist theories and their interphase with the academic criticism of texts written by Latin American women. Discussion focuses on the question of the subject, which the author believes to be paramount in feminist theory, in as much as the construction of gender and the historical subordination of women devolve on the play of difference and identity. This paper examines how the problematic assumption by feminist theorists in the North American academy of Freudian and Lacanian theories of the subject pose unresolved problems and unanticipated complications to subsequent …
Spanish American Women Writers: Simmering Identity Over A Low Fire, Ksenija Bilbija
Spanish American Women Writers: Simmering Identity Over A Low Fire, Ksenija Bilbija
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
After establishing the parallel between the kitchen and the alchemist's laboratory, this article shows that traditionally, the kitchen has come to symbolize the space associated with the marginalization of women. However, the recent explosion of the novels dedicated to the resemantization and reevaluation of the realm of the kitchen is the best evidence that it is also a space from which much creativity emanates. A close reading of two such cookbook/novels, Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel and Like Potatoes for Varenike by Sylvia Plager, points toward a quite parodic and critical gender perspective. Furthermore, it calls for a …
Power, Gender, And Canon Formation In Mexico, Cynthia Steele
Power, Gender, And Canon Formation In Mexico, Cynthia Steele
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
I propose to analyze Castellanos's trajectory from marginalized ethnographer and critic of "latino" society, to presidential insider and ambassador, and the first modern Mexican woman writer to be accepted into the literary canon. I will explore the intersection of politics, gender, and the (self-) creation of a literary persona with regard to the following issues: 1) the tension between self-exposure and self-censorship in Castellanos's literary work; 2) Castellanos's intense and problematic relationship with her illegitimate, mestizo half-brother; 3) the coincidences and contradictions between Castellanos's journalistic account of her relationship with her servant Maria Escandon, and Maria's own oral history twenty …
Filling The Empty Space: Women And Latin American Theatre, Kirsten F. Nigro
Filling The Empty Space: Women And Latin American Theatre, Kirsten F. Nigro
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In recent years, Latin American women have begun to appropriate and fill a space once empty of their presence. This essay looks at the work of four such women, (Diana Raznovich and Cristina Escofet of Argentina, Raquel Araujo of Mexico and the Peruvian Sara Joffre), to see how they give substance and voice to their particular concerns. In the process, this essay focusses on: 1) the notion of gender as performance; 2) the feminist deconstruction of narrative; 3) the female body in theatrical space; and 4) new, postmodern ways of doing feminist political theatre.