Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Elizabeth Grosz. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections On Life, Politics, And Art. Durham: Duke Up, 2011. Viii + 264 Pp., Vera Coleman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Elizabeth Grosz. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. viii + 264 pp.

The Modernist Mirror And The Hold Of Being: Rilke And Zamiatin, Petre Petrov

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The article approaches the image of the mirror as a metaphorical vehicle for the experience of modernity in the work of Rainer Maria Rilke and Evgenii Zamiatin. The argument builds upon a duality that informs the folkloric and artistic representations of mirrors from ancient to modern times: that between flat and deep reflection. Flat reflection refers to the idea of images projected outwardly from the specular surface, while deep reflection implies an imaginary space behind this surface, where objects are caught and held. By examining two of Rilke’s elegies and Zamiatin’s novel We, the article shows the way in …

From The Atlantic To The Pacific: Maruja Mallo In Exile , Shirley Mangini

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Maruja Mallo's life (1902-1995) and art represent one woman's odyssey from the European vanguards to political commitment during the Spanish Republic (1931-1939) and finally to a unique transcendent art form after her wrenching exile from Spain and her residence in Latin America from 1937 to 1965. In her early career she was a leader among the avant-garde painters when few Spanish women were recognized as creative artists. In Latin America, her work diverged radically from European avant-garde trends and from her ideologically oriented subject matter of the 1930s; Mallo not only reflects the impact of her discovery of the Pacific …

Proustian Metaphor And The Automobile , Shawn Gorman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In Marcel Proust's Sodome et Gomorrhe, the automobile produces a transformation in the relationship between space and time and, by analogy, a parallel transformation in art. In Proust's famous notion of involuntary memory, the similarity of a past sense impression to a present one leads to transcendence of time and space, and ultimately to metaphor. The metonymical speed of the automobile endlessly chases the sort of metaphorical "simultaneity" at work in involuntary memory. Structurally, the automobile offers the possibility of bringing together two terms by eliminating the middle term (time, space) that separated them; yet the automobile is never …

The Value Of Kitsch. Hermann Broch And Robert Musil On Art And Morality, Patrizia C. Mcbride

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article examines the discourse on kitsch articulated by Austrian novelists Hermann Broch (1886-1951) and Robert Musil (1880-1942) between 1930 and 1950. In particular, I focus on the ways in which the two novelists draw the distinction of value between real and pseudo art (or kitsch). As I argue, their disagreement on this matter is emblematic of dilemmas that continue to confront aesthetic evaluation today. While Broch anchors value in a metaphysical realm on the outside of aesthetic discourse, assuming a late-idealistic notion of art, Musil frames the distinction between 'good' and 'bad' art within an empirical, relativistic, and immanent …

"Playing A Game Of Worlds": Postmodern Time And The Search For Individual Autonomy In Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire , Jill Leroy-Frazier

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article enters the ongoing critical debate surrounding Pale Fire, as to whether the apparent structure of the novel can be taken at face value. Do the central characters, John Shade and Charles Kinbote, constitute separate voices within the novel, as poet and commentator respectively, or is one in fact the fictional creation of the other? Arguing that the dispute arises out of a set of critical assumptions that negate at least some of the possible implications of Nabokov's own views of art's purpose and function, the essay asserts that Nabokov's disbelief in objective reality renders the entire Shade/Kinbote …

Boris Vian's American Movie: The Lost Authorship Of I Will Spit On Your Graves , M. Martin Guiney

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Boris Vian (1920-1959) is today considered one of France's foremost avant-garde novelists of the twentieth century, but in his lifetime he was known to a wide audience as the author of one work: J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (I Will Spit on Your Graves), a pastiche of American hard-boiled fiction which he published in 1946 under the name of a fictitious Black American author, Vernon Sullivan. Vian died twelve years later of heart failure while viewing the film adaptation, which he had no part in producing. Vian-as-author "died" long before that fateful moment, however: first when he perpetrated a …

Modern Literature And Christianity: The Religious Issue In Lucien Rebatet's Les Deux Étendards , Pascal A. Ifri

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Although Lucien Rebatet's Les Deux étendards (The Two Standards) has been hailed by a number of critics as one of the best novels written in France since World War II, it is surrounded by a wall of silence because its author actively supported the Nazi movement before and during the war. Yet the novel does not deal with politics but with love, art, and religion. Based on real events, it is the story of a love triangle involving Michel, who has lost his Catholic faith, Régis, who studies to become a Jesuit priest, and Anne-Marie, a young student who shares …

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 …

"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 …

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 …

From Iron To Glass: Transparency And Pluralism, Maryse Fauvel

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The author reads a number of recent architectural constructions in Paris (mainly the Louvre pyramid, but also the Musée d'Orsay and the Institut du monde arabe) and argues that they affirm the plurality of contemporary France while at once inscribing and subverting the conventions of its (once) dominant culture: the Arab world in the heart of Paris, the museum cum railway station as the focal point of conflicting tastes, the pyramid as both accomplice and critic of history. Their pluralism qualifies them as postmodern. These monuments also propose a new role for today's museum. The building itself becomes an art …

Mimetic Faces: On Luiz Costa Lima's The Control Of Imaginary, Alberto Moreiras

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Mimetic Faces: On Luiz Costa Lima's The Control of Imaginary

Fear And Fascination In The Big City: Rilke's Use Of George Simmel In The Notebooks Of Malte Laurids Brigge, Neil H. Donahue

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay examines Rainer Maria Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) as one corner in a triangle of reciprocal influence and affinity in early twentieth-century modernity consisting of Rilke, the sociologist Georg Simmel, and the art theorist Wilhelm Worringer. In the notes, this essay documents the biographical relations among the three, but in its text it demonstrates through textual analysis how Rilke's descriptions of Malte in Paris enact Simmel's categories of psychological response for man in the metropolis, as delineated in his essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life"(1903). Rilke's descriptions of Malte's attempts to overcome his fears of …

The Dialectics Of The Archaic And The Post-Modern In Maghrebian Literature Written In French, Hédi Abdel-Jaouad

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Maghrebian literature written in French has been since its inception a literature of and about the abyss. For the Maghrebian the abyss is esentially the space of modernity, that forbidden citadel of art, science and technology from which s/he was excluded and marginalized. Recently, writing of/in French has become the site/scene of a polemos between the archaic (identity) and the post-modern (difference).

Our study of the archaic focuses on cultural, literary and critical knowledge and centers around two main themes: that of a beginning, that is a search for events in the past that explain the abyss (or retardation vis-à-vis …

Nadine Gordimer: The White Artist As A Sport Of Nature, Barbara Temple-Thurston

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article applies principles of new historicism to show that A Sport of Nature can be read as Gordimer's attempt to persuade South African artists to reject mere protest art and to shift art beyond the trap of oppositional forces in South Africa's history today. The text calls instead—via fiction and the imagination—for a new post-apartheid art that will generate creative possibilities for a future South Africa. Gordimer's protagonist, Hillela Capran, is read as a metaphor for the white South African artist who, like Hillela, struggles for an authentic identity and meaningful role in the evolving history of South Africa. …

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 …

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 …

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 …

The Maze Of Taste: On Bataille, Derrida, And Kant, Arkady Plotnitsky

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The case of Kant's Critique of Judgment offers a powerful example of the radical disruption of the metaphysical text, enacted by Bataille's major сoncepts. The analysis of the metaphor of economy in Kant, Bataille and Derrida suggests the crucial importance of Bataille's general economy—as the economy of loss—for deconstructing the Kantian conception of genius and the whole scheme of taste—as an economy of consumption—and inscribing a complex interplay forces that the general economy is designed to account for. Once however taste, art and the economy of genius can no longer be inscribed through the restricted economy …

Nathalie Sarraute's Between Life And Death: Androgyny And The Creative Process , Bettina L. Knapp

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Nathalie Sarraute's Between Life and Death deals with the creative process, from the uncreated work of art embedded in the prima materia to its completion in the book. The Writer, the focus of Sarraute's attention, takes the reader through the multiple stages of his literary trajectory: the struggle involved in the transmutation of the amorphous word into the concrete glyph on the blank sheet of paper; the pain and anguish accompanying the birth of the created work, alluded to as the "thing" or the "object"; the attitude of the successful Writer, who postures and panders to his public, and the …

Proust And Benjamin: The Invisible Image, Beryl Schlossman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Benjamin's essay "Zum Bilde Prousts" questions the status of the image even as it leafs through the possibilities and variations that form it—as photograph, figure, representation, disappearing trace or promise of creation. As the image of Proust's novel, Benjamin's text takes up the elements of A la Recherche du temps perdu (poetic language, autobiography, critical commentary) in the terms of Benjamin's theory of allegory reflected through the Proustian strategy of reading and writing. "Zum Bilde Prousts" examines the traditional markers of "art" and "life," locating Proustian recherche—and Benjamin's image—in the deep waters beyond them. Through an interpretation of Benjamin's …

Saturnine Vision And The Question Of Difference: Reflections On Walter Benjamin's Theory Of Language, Rodolphe Gasché

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Walter Benjamin's writings do not owe their intelligibility to their indebtedness to one or more specific brands of philosophical thought, but to Benjamin's primary concern with the most elementary distinctions of philosophy itself. Chief among these distinctions is that of philosophical thought itself, or the difference it makes with respect to the realms of nature, myth, or the appearances. By focusing on the notions of "communicability" and "translatability," philosophical difference, for Benjamin, shall be shown to rest on structures within the language of man and art that aim at breaking through language's mythical interconnectedness, its weblike quality, its textuality, toward …

Meaning In Structure And The Structure Of Meaning In La Modification And La Route Des Flandres, Katherine Passias

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Stream of consciousness novels employ a variety of narrative techniques to depict the flow of consciousness. This article examines narrative structures underlying the subjective frame created by a sole character/narrator in two French New Novels, Michel Butor's La Modification and Claude Simon's La Route des Flandres. There is a dynamic relationship between form and content. Conventional narrative syntax in Butor's work reflects the evaluative and associative processes of the mind attempting to resolve an emotional conflict. In Simon's work, narrative structures mirror the complex embedding of four main fables as the narrative process attempts to depict the uncontrolled thought …

Avant-Garde: The Convulsions Of A Concept, Michael T. Jones

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The current status of the «avant-garde» provokes many questions, which include both inner-artistic matters and matters of history and society commonly associated with Marxist or reception-oriented thinkers. The convolution of questions cannot be disentangled; efforts to confront the dilemmas of the avant-garde cannot abstract from matters of commodification, recent reception, or the complex dialectic of «classical» and «modern.» The essay deals with the most recent manifestations of avant-garde aesthetic impulses. It emphasizes the historical and social aspects of German theorizing in contrast to purely formalist or ahistorical conceptions commonly found elsewhere. It insists that such «materialist» theory does greater justice …