Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Melanie C. Hawthorne. Women, Citizenship, And Sexuality: The Transnational Lives Of Renée Vivien, Romaine Brooks, And Natalie Barney. Liverpool Up, 2021., Jennifer Carr

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Melanie C. Hawthorne. Women, Citizenship, and Sexuality: The Transnational Lives of Renée Vivien, Romaine Brooks, and Natalie Barney. Liverpool UP, 2021. 167 pp.

Aoife Connolly. Performing The Pied-Noir Family: Constructing Narratives Of Settler Memory And Identity In Literature And On-Screen. Lexington Books, 2020., Tessa Nunn

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Aoife Connolly. Performing the Pied-Noir Family: Constructing Narratives of Settler Memory and Identity in Literature and On-Screen. Lexington Books, 2020. ix, 223 pp.

Seeing (As) The Eroticized And Exoticized Other In Spanish Im/Migration Cinema: A Critical Look At The (De)Criminalization Of Migrants And Impunity Of Hegemonic Perpetrators, Maureen Tobin Stanley

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article examines cinematic perspective in six Spanish im/migration films to show that by resituating the identification from an alignment with that of a hegemonic character (who accepts the systematic bias that confers impunity to perpetrators) to identification with a criminalized migrant subject, these films 1) denounce systemic intersectionality that confers impunity to perpetrators and criminalizes the racialized and/or feminized other and 2) aim at fostering empathy in the hegemonically identified viewer. Parameters for the selection of the six films are: immigration to Spain, African (whether geographic or ethnic) origins, eroticization of the migrant, objectification/(ab)use/commodification/victimization of the Other, criminalization of …

Addressing Diversity And Difference In Contemporary Spanish Lesbian Literature: Reading Illy Nes’S El Lago Rosa And Cristina Cuesta’S “Zoe Y Haydee”, Megan Sheldon

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Illy Nes’s novel El lago rosa (The Pink Lake, 2004) and Cristina Cuesta’s short story “Zoe y Haydee” (Zoe and Haydee, 2007) depict travel and cross-cultural queer relationships that call attention to racial and class differences as well as ethnic and cultural divides. Both narratives raise questions concerning the representation of queer women of color in Spanish fiction of the new millennium. This article focuses on the diverse cultural, political and personal struggles that surround the formation and negotiation of sexual identity, emphasizing the fact that LGBTQ identity is not necessarily cross-culturally or universally constructed around identical interests, desires, or …

Hillary L. Chute. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, And Documentary Form. Cambridge: Harvard Up, 2016., Julia Watson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Hillary L. Chute. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016.

David William Foster. El Eternauta, Daytripper, And Beyond: Graphic Narrative In Argentina And Brazil. Austin: U Of Texas P, 2016., Laura M. Fernandez

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of David William Foster. El Eternauta, Daytripper, and Beyond: Graphic Narrative in Argentina and Brazil. Austin: U of Texas P, 2016.

Mel Gibson. Remembered Reading: Memory, Comics And Post-War Constructions Of British Girlhood. Leuven: Leuven Up, 2015., Kristof Van Gansen

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Mel Gibson. Remembered Reading. Memory, Comics and Post-War Constructions of British Girlhood. Leuven: Leuven UP, 2015.

Frederick Luis Aldama And Christopher M. González, Eds. Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, And Future. Austin: U Of Texas P, 2016., Noel R. Zavala

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher M. González, eds. Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future. Austin: U of Texas P, 2016.

Mark Heimermann And Brittany Tullis, Eds. Picturing Childhood: Youth In Transnational Comics. Austin: U Of Texas P, 2017., Cristina R. Rivera

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Mark Heimermann and Brittany Tullis, eds. Picturing Childhood: Youth in Transnational Comics. Austin: U of Texas P, 2017.

Cars, Space, And The Dynamics Of Power In Cuéntame Cómo Pasó ('Tell Me How It Happened'), Linda B. Bartlett

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Cuéntame cómo pasó 'Tell Me How It Happened,' Radio Televisión Española’s long-running television series, recreates Spain’s recent past from the late years of the Franco regime through the transition to democracy and beyond through the daily experiences of the fictional yet typical Alcántara family, thus functioning as a form of historical memory project. This critically-acclaimed program, which debuted in fall 2001, has attracted not only record-size audiences in its 18 seasons (to date), but also scholarly interest as well. While other studies have analyzed the use of the television medium to represent history, or critiqued its historical …

Gender: The Hidden God In Yasmina Reza's Le Dieu Du Carnage, Lauren Tilger

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Most critics have analyzed acclaimed playwright Yasmina Reza’s Le Dieu du Carnage (2007) as a descent into savagery. This close examination of the play points to the role of gender norms and stereotypes in causing the decline in civility. By taking part in a culture that worships gender ideals, the characters in Reza’s play police one another’s actions to ensure that everyone behaves like proper men and women. The act of attempting to successfully perform femininity or masculinity leads to the evening’s disastrous events. In contrast with readings that have erased gender from the power dynamics of the play and …

Marie Darrieussecq’S Clèves: A Wittigian Rewriting Of Adolescence, Annabel L. Kim

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Marie Darrieussecq's Clèves (2011) shocked readers with the vulgarity of its language and spurred controversy over its status as a literary text. In this article, I show how the novel's "bad" language is a foil for Darrieussecq's larger project of rewriting the adolescent female body, removing it from the sexualized and objectified optic through which it is usually viewed in order to stage it instead as a body in process, as a situation. For this body in process, gender and sexuality are not givens, but deeply unfamiliar experiences that resist the social order’s dominant framing narratives, its scripts for normal …

Anna Rocca And Kenneth Reeds, Eds. Women Taking Risks In Contemporary Autobiographical Narratives. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013. 232 Pp., Kate Averis

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Anna Rocca and Kenneth Reeds, eds. Women Taking Risks in Contemporary Autobiographical Narratives. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013. 232 pp.

Névine El Nossery And Anna Rocca, Eds. Frictions Et Devenirs Dans Les Écritures Migrantes Au Féminin: Enracinements Et Renégociations. Sarrebruck: Editions Universitaires Européens, 2011. 258 Pp., Natalie Edwards

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Névine El Nossery and Anna Rocca, eds. Frictions et devenirs dans les écritures migrantes au féminin: enracinements et renégociations. Sarrebruck: Editions Universitaires Européens, 2011. 258 pp.

What Will The New Generation Generate? Gendering Accumulation In Fatou Diome’S Celles Qui Attendent, Christopher Hogarth

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In this paper I focus on the penultimate installment of the oeuvre of the much-celebrated Franco-Senegalese writer Fatou Diome, whose largely autobiographical work has garnered a wide following and a lucrative contract with the Flammarion publishing house. I propose that Diome’s 2010 novel Celles qui attendent strongly contributes to a discourse surrounding the roles of males and females in an African economy increasingly dominated by migration. Diome started as a writer who portrayed the empowered role of the female migrant, who is able to accumulate financial capital in Europe and send it back to Africa in order for males to …

In The Heideggerian Tradition: Acontecimiento By Concha García, Martha Lafollette Miller

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Critics Sharon Keefe Ugalde and Tina Escaja have called the poetry of Concha García “enigmatic,” “unique,” and “avant-garde.” Studies of her work to date tend to attribute the fragmentation and discontinuity of her poetic discourse to her rejection of phallologocentric language. While one of her work’s chief concerns is indeed her speaker’s sense of a radical difference and alienation based on gender, her poetry at the same time directs her reader’s attention to more general ontological considerations. Rather than clearly recounting the events of the life of her poetic protagonist, she rejects the distillations and simplifications that linear narration presupposes …

Intercourse As Discourse In Alexa Hennig Von Lange’S Relax, Corinna Kahnke

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

While gender has long been an abiding concern of Popliteratur, pop writers (in particular female authors) are often criticized for simply reflecting, if not positively endorsing, negative forms of postfeminism—an attitude that negates the accomplishments of emancipation by regressing to traditional ideas of what it means to be a woman. Some critics suggest that pop texts re-inscribe the gender binary by presenting, even glorifying, long-established gender roles. In response to such a reception, this article investigates Alexa Hennig von Lange’s iconic but much criticized novel Relax (1999) in order to illustrate the reflective and critical nature of Popliteratur. …

Dialogues With Tradition: Feminist-Queer Encounters In German Crime Stories At The Turn Of The Twenty-First Century, Faye Stewart

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Pieke Biermann’s feminist crime collection Mit Zorn, Charme, und Methode (1992) and Lisa Kuppler’s gay and lesbian anthology Queer Crime (2002) engage in a common project, the rewriting of a popular genre to give voice to previously marginalized identities and perspectives. This article investigates the ways in which each volume negotiates the gendered conventions of crime fiction and its subcategories, feminist and queer crime. A comparative analysis of three mysteries from each collection demonstrates the converging and diverging tendencies of feminist and queer representation in turn-of-the-twenty-first century crime narratives. Feminist mysteries by Edith Kneifl, Birgit Rabisch, and Barbara Neuhaus shift …

Eternal Interns: Kathrin Röggla’S Literary Treatment Of Gendered Capitalism, Florence Feiereisen

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In today’s Germany, university graduates and first-time job seekers find themselves in a different position than did those of previous generations—for many, obtaining a secure, full-time job has become a dream of the past. To boost their résumés, many enter a loop of internships and other similarly precarious states of employment. This article examines the way in which author Kathrin Röggla treats these insecure economic times in her 2004 novel Wir schlafen nicht, with a focus on sex and gender in the New Economy. Are jobs gendered, and what are the resulting effects for both men and women? I …

The Mirror In Art: Vanitas, Veritas, And Vision, Helena Goscilo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Humankind’s venerable obsession with the mirror, traceable to the ancient myths of Medusa and Narcissus, is copiously attested in Western art, which historically relied on the mirror as both practical tool and polysemous trope. While the mirror’s reflective capacities encouraged its identification with the vaunted mimetic function of literature and film, its refractive quality enabled artists to explore and comment on perspective, in the process challenging the concept of art’s faithful representation of phenomena. My radically compressed and selective overview of the mirror’s significance in Western iconography focuses primarily on visibility, gaze, and gender, dwelling on key moments and genres …

Spain, Reincarnated: Julio Medem’S Caótica Ana And New Spanish Media(Tion) In The World, Susan Martin-Márquez

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Spanish director Julio Medem’s visually stunning yet controversial 2007 film Chaotic Ana was panned for its ostensibly Manichaean treatment of gender relations and its crudely scatological ending, both of which have distracted attention from the work’s fascinating incursions into global politics. While the film’s complex layering of hawk and dove imagery figures centuries of male violence against women, it is also imbricated with an extended meditation on the divergent roles of the United States and Spain on the contemporary world stage. Through the male protagonist Said, a Saharawi painter, the film artfully shifts postcolonial guilt for the fate of the …

Corpses And Capital: Narratives Of Gendered Violence In Two Costa Rican Novels , Laura Barbas Rhoden

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In a region prone to violence and political corruption, Costa Rica has been touted as an ecological paradise, a stable democracy, and an egalitarian society. However, Costa Rican fiction from the late twentieth century contests this idyllic image and presents instead a world of intrigue, violence, and criminality. El año del laberinto (2000) by Tatiana Lobo and Cruz de olvido (1999) by Carlos Cortés are two novels that serve as an excellent introduction to developments in postwar fiction and scholarship from Central America. In my analysis, I first situate the novels in the context of Central American cultural and political …

Gender, The Cold War, And Ingeborg Bachmann, Sara Lennox

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay uses the methodology of materialist feminism to situate Ingeborg Bachmann's life and writing in their Cold War context. After outlining the ways in which U.S. Cold War policy affected Austrian cultural life in the nineteen-fifties, I show that Bachmann's own activities during the period of U.S. occupation were steeped in that Cold War atmosphere. I also argue that the Cold War reconfiguration of gender relations left their imprint on Bachmann's writing. Comparing the narrative techniques of the unpublished short story "Sterben für Berlin" (1961) and Bachmann's Büchner Prize Speech "Ein Ort für Zufälle" (1964), I maintain that both …

Gender, Cultural Memory, And The Representation Of Queerness In Ingeborg Bachmann's Narrative "A Step Towards Gomorrah." , Imke Meyer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This paper explores the questioning of a culturally produced fixed binary gender opposition, as well as of genre conventions, in Bachmann's "Gomorrah." This questioning, I argue, is achieved despite and in part even due to the fact that a lesbian relationship between the text's protagonists remains unrealized. The text's refusal to depict a lesbian relationship is not so much a capitulation to taboos of the 1950's. Rather, it points up the lack of a language and the lack of generic forms that would allow for the representation of true alternatives to traditional gendered power dynamics. If the narrative wants to …

Geographies Of Memory: Ruth Beckermann's Film Aesthetics , Karen Remmler

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

How might we view the films by the Jewish Austrian filmmaker, Ruth Beckermann through the lens of the prose by the late German writer W.G. Sebald? The archival and, at the same time, haunting prose of Sebald's works such as The Emigrants or Austerlitz bears a close resemblance to the work of memory that Beckermann's films begs us to do. By focusing on particular spaces of remembrance in Beckermann's films in comparison to Sebald's similar practice of intermeshing historical and individual memories, this essay explores how the gendered construction of cultural memory takes place through transcultural encounters with those deemed …

Real Estate And Stating The Real In Jean Echenoz's L'Occupation Des Sols, Philip G. Hadlock

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Through its extremely minimal account of the aftermath of an apartment fire, Jean Echenoz's L'Occupation des sols raises intriguing questions about the grounding of property—its occupation des sols—in Western consciousness. The narrative situation allegorizes the longstanding convention in which man is associated with property ownership while woman is associated with property itself. Though seeming to uphold this paradigm, Echenoz presents a challenging perspective of the functions that gendered scenarios of property perform in sustaining symbolic relations and anchoring the "real" in Western thought.

Cyberspace And The Cyberdildo: Dislocations In Cenicienta En Chueca , Jill Robbins

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Cenicienta en Chueca (Cinderella in Chueca) is a collection of short stories by Argentine exile María Felicitas Jaime, published by Spanish gay/lesbian press Odisea in 2003, that represent the neocolonial relations between the Americas, Spain, and the European Union in a globalized age. The stories foreground communication technologies—including type, e-mail, chats, and dialects—in order to highlight the discursive nature of sexuality and to reveal the social, ethnic, racial, nationalistic, economic, gendered tensions underlying linguistic exchange. This article focuses on the neocolonial relations between Spain and Latin America in three stories from this collection—"Chateo" (Chat), "Ejecutivas" (Women Executives), and "Cenicienta en …

The Public Becomes Personal: From Ernaux's Passion Simple To Journal Du Dehors, Michelle Scatton-Tessier

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Drawing on an interview in April 1997 with contemporary French writer Annie Ernaux, this article analyzes the interplay between female narrators and quotidian spaces in Passion simple (1991) and Journal du dehors (1993). Ernaux's writing career, spanning nearly thirty years, develops continually from depictions of physical spaces and the gestures or attitudes these spaces prescribe. Ernaux's spaces are not neutral; each bears the strong markings of a specific social class and gender. As this study illustrates, a radical shift exists between the author's 1991 and 1993 texts. Here, she distances herself from the traditional domestic space, as depicted in Passion …

Gen(D)Eration Next: Prose By Julia Franck And Judith Hermann, Anke Biendarra

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In March 1999, critic Volker Hage adopted a term in Der Spiegel that subsequently dominated public discussions about new German literature by female authors-"Fräuleinwunder"…

Masochism, Marginality, And The Metropolis: Kutlug Ataman's Lola And Billy The Kid , Barbara Mennel

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Baltimore: "What you get is what you see"

While sitting at the window of "City Café," a gay café in Baltimore, I let my eyes wander to the other side of the street where a group of young gay black men were camping it up…