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Style And Otherness In L.-F. Céline's Rigodon, Ann L. Murphy

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

L.-F. Céline's preoccupation with the question of style appears not only in his correspondence, interviews and "socio-political" (i.e. anti-Semitic) tracts, but also in his novels. An examination of Céline's thoughts on the writing of, and in, novels reveals an opposition between features which should inform style, and those which should be eliminated, in other words, between those values upon which his own style rests, and those associated with non-style, with his "others of style." Two passages in his final novel Rigodon may be read as figuring certain aspects of these thoughts as well as some of the paradoxes which accompany …

Phylacteries As Metaphor In Elie Wiesel's Le Testament D'Un Poète Juif Assassiné, Simon P. Sibelman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The novels of the Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, were initially read as eloquent expressions of remembrance and witnessing to the massacred millions who perished in Hitler's Inferno. His fiction is likewise a profound expression of Jewishness and of the author's fundamental belief that post-Auschwitz Jewry must draw nearer to its authentic roots. To that end, Wiesel' s novel, Le Testament d'un poète juif assassiné, represents the author's most compelling expression concerning Jewish identity. The novel is replete with the language, symbols and meta-structural techniques which elicit an exhortation to remain faithful to one's Jewishness. Moreover, Wiesel provides the reader …

The Past And The Present In The Early Novels Of Hanns-Josef Ortheil, Ernestine Schlant

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Hanns-Josef Ortheil's early novels Fermer, 1979 and Hecke, 1983 have male protagonists who search for self-identity in the West Germany of the 1980s. In the process, they discover that they are profoundly influenced by the lives and experiences of their parents, particularly as these lives were shaped during and by the Hitler regime. In Fermer, the 19-year old protagonist rebels against this society by going AWOL. Yet in his geographical flight and intellectual analyses he realizes his deep emotional bonds with the expectations and behavior of the parent generation. Recognition of these bonds is only the first …

Questioning The Postmodern: Deguy, Jabès And Pleynet, Joan Brandt

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Theorists of the postmodern tend to see the postmodernist literary text as that which disrupts modernism's inclusive and coherent structures. As opposed to the modernist text, which is characterized as centered, ordered, self-reflexive and autonomous, the postmodernist text is seen as decentered and indeterminate; it blurs the boundaries separating the text from other cultural spheres and questions radically the metaphysics of presence, of the subject, of identity and coherence. This study questions the tendency to see postmodernism in terms of its opposition to modernism. Through an analysis of three contemporary French poets, Michel Deguy, Edmond Jabès and Marcelin Pleynet, it …

Rhythm And Meter In The Early Juan Ramón Jiménez: The Case Of "¡Silencio!" Of Estío, Vialla Hartfield-Méndez

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The literary trajectory of Juan Ramón Jiménez is commonly divided into two periods, though this division is also generally recognized as an oversimplification of a very complex process in which the poet moves from the use of more traditional poetic forms, and a more concrete reference to reality, to the practice of free verse and more metaphysical expressions of man's relationship to his surroundings. "¡Silencio!," the last poem of Estío (1915), was written just prior to Diario de un poeta reciéncasado, the book with which it is considered that Juan Ramón began the second stage of his literary trajectory. …

The Personal And The Political In The Work Of Mariama Bâ, Adele King

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In her two novels, Une si longue lettre and Un Chant écarlate, Mariama Bâ describes how political as well as domestic problems develop from the tensions between tradition and the modern world. Desire for power and money leads to a post-independence society, in which greed motivates politicians and in which a woman is treated as merchandise to be purchased by the richest man. Adherence to a supposed ideal pre-colonial community, however, can lead to both the subjugation of women and political isolation. Bâ wants a morality based on respect for others, and a willingness to discard those traditions that …

Street-Signs: The City As Context And As Code In The Novels Of Claire Etcherelli, Sara Poole

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The piece aims to consider the novels of Claire Etcherelli as examples of le roman parisien, and to examine the different roles the city is made to play in them. It looks briefly at Etcherelli's debt to the literature of the nineteenth century; at the significance of using real place names in such realist fiction; at Paris as political fulcrum; at why most of Etcherelli's characters live on the fringes of the city. The second half concentrates on Elise ou la vraie vie and attempts to illustrate how in this novel Paris becomes an extended and elaborate metaphor for …

Robert Musil: Literature As Experience, Burton Pike

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Trained as a scientist and empirical psychologist, Robert Musil offers an illuminating instance of a post-Nietzschean modernist writer whose endeavor was to develop an experimental literary language that would more adequately represent experience as psychology and philosophy were coming to understand it. Musil's enterprise, based on regarding literature as experience rather than as a formal construct of language only, is not best examined by structurally-based language or discourse analysis and criticism. Like Mach and William James coming along at the end of the idealistic tradition in European thought, Musil wanted to fashion a language that would permit objective communication of …

Return To "0": A Lacanian Reading Of Ingeborg Bachmann's "Undine Goes", Veronica P. Scrol

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay approaches Ingeborg Bachmann's "Undine Goes" from a Lacanian perspective. The object of the study is three-fold: first, to demonstrate Bachmann's deconstruction of the ideal ego through the water-sprite Undine's criticism of the human Hans. Second, to transcend the limitations of dualistic interpretations (as noted by some feminist critics), by introducing the triple Lacanian registers—the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real—into this particular reading. Finally, to establish Bachmann's monologic text as a discourse of the real and Undine as the voice of the death instinct.

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Bjornson, Richard. The African Quest for Freedom and Identity: Cameroonian Writing and the National Experience by Thomas A. Hale

Cixous, Hélène. 'Coming to Wrting' and Other Essays by Randi Brox Birn

Derwin, Susan. The Ambivalence of Form: Lukacs, Freud, and the Novel by Eva L. Corredor

Kaminsky, Amy K. Reading the Body Politic: Feminist Criticism and Latin American Women Writers by Naomi Lindstrom

Nägele, Rainer. Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity by Alice A. Kuzniar

Tomlinson, John. Cultural Imperialism by Michael Filcher

Weisberg, Richard. Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature by Sara B. Blair

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Paisley Livingston. Models of Desire: René Girard and the Psychology of Mimesis by Andrew J. McKenna

Andrew J. McKenna. Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction by Servanne Woodward

James F. Murphy. The Proletarian Moment: The Controversy over Leftism in Literature by Jack Marmorstein

Chris Bongie. Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siecle by Annelise Riles

Luce Irigaray. Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. Trans. Gillian C. Gill by Marianne Bosshard

Christie McDonald. The Proustian Fabric: Associations of Memory by Rebecca Karoff

Kathryn Hume. Calvino 's Fictions. Cogito and Cosmos by Gian-Paolo Biasin

Peter Baker. Obdurate Brilliance: Exteriority …

The Legacy Of Althusser, 1918-1990: An Introduction, Philip Goldstein

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Introduction to the special issue.

Althusserian Theory: From Scientific Truth To Institutional History, Philip Goldstein

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Scholars have emphasized the scientific and the rationalist features of Althusser's work, but few have noted its post-structuralist aspects, especially its Foucauldian accounts of discourse and power. In the early Pour Marx, Althusser divides ideological practices from objective science and theoretical norms from empirical facts; however, in several later essays Althusser repudiates his earlier faith in theory's normative force as well as his broad distinction between science and ideology. He argues that every discipline establishes its own relationship between its ideological history and its formal, scientific ideals. This argument, together with Althusser's earlier rejection of totalizing approaches, establishes important …

Response To Ideology Takes A Day Off: Althusser And Mass Culture, Janet Staiger

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Chip Rhodes defends Althusser's scientific belief that the subject is a bearer of structures and opposes the humanist claim that the subject functions independently of its contexts. However, recent work in cultural studies examines how identity is constructed and allows us to reconcile the scientific and the humanist view. Ideological interpellation may define our subject positions but we are still able to refuse them. For instance, Rhodes' account of "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" assumes that the subject is a fully interpellated, adolescent, Anglo, middle or upper class, heterosexual male. However, the film also offers various oppositional subject positions, including adolescent …

Father Knows Best, Judith Roof

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In his essay, "Althusser's Mirror," Carsten Strathausen reveals the paternal politics inherent to any gesture of appropriation. Molding Lacan to an Althusserian mirror, Strathausen demonstrates parallels between Lacan's mirror stage and Althusser's interpellated subject. The resemblance, created through what Strathausen suggests is Althusser's mis-reading of Lacan, reveals their mutual influence. The question of influence, however, becomes an issue of tradition Althusser links to a politics of legitimacy and right he associates with a figure of paternity. While the process of filiation would seem to extend from Lacan to Althusser in the logic of the mirror employed by Strathausen to renew …

Althusser And History: A Review Essay, Eric Collum

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Althusser and History: A Review Essay

Ideology Takes A Day Off: Althusser And Mass Culture, Chip Rhodes

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

As theories of mass culture that focus on empowerment, use value and utopian bribes have become increasingly popular, Althusser's groundbreaking work on structural causality and ideology has been left aside because of its alleged inability to account for social resistance. This is unfortunate because such Althusserian concepts still provide the most productive foundation for a Marxist approach to mass culture that avoids both unwitting apologetics and facile, ethical critiques. Nevertheless, many of Althusser's theoretical claims are in need of revision. As the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off implicitly suggests, Althusser's distinction between ideology and the aesthetic no longer holds in …

Althusser's Mirror, Carsten Strathausen

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Jacques Lacan significantly influenced Althusser's accounts of ideology and the subject. Althusser's belief that science is a discourse without a subject parallels Lacan's belief that in the Symbolic Order the Subject and the Other are alienated. Althusser's account of interpellation, which explains how ideology recognizes individuals as subjects, takes for granted Lacan's notion of the mirror stage. Althusser repudiates the plenitude of the subject, whose interpellation conceals its lack; Lacan shows that the subject's failure to express itself in language makes the subject a void. However, Althusser, whose subject is too much like Lacan's ego, fails to distinguish between the …

Text And Subject Position After Althusser, Antony Easthope

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Althusser's achievement is that he redefined Marxism. He reconceptualizes history and totality in terms of different times, construes knowledge as the outcome of a process of construction, and interprets subjectivity as an effect of ideology and unconscious processes. Unfortunately, Althusser's functionalist view of ideology claims that the subject recognizes itself as a subject because it duplicates— reflects—an absolute subject. However, Lacan's notion of the mirror stage remedies this fault. Lacan's subject always misrecognizes itself in a process of contradiction that threatens the stability of any given social order. Moreover, unlike Foucault's subject, which is limited in that subjectivity is folded …

Literature In The Abstract: Althusser And English Studies In England, David Margolies

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Althusser's work arrived just when the disintegrating liberal consensus was shaking the ivory towers of the university. Students protested the war in Vietnam as well as the policies of the university. Althusser offered an understanding of this corrupt world and its distorted self-image. These theories provided an exciting new totalization in which life had meaning and intellectuals, a vital role. In literary studies, students and lecturers assumed that works of literature were anti-scientific, preservers of the status quo, without genuine knowledge. Disillusioned, these students and lecturers condemned Literature as an institution and ignored the individual work. To stop teaching the …

Althusser, Foucault, And The Subject Of Civility, Toby Miller

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This paper seeks to paint a picture of how discernible links between Althusser and Foucault can assist us to theorise the life of cultural subjects inside established and emergent liberal-capitalist states. Althusser's querying of a humanistic foundation to political philosophy and the social contract is connected to Foucault's contention that modernity invented the subject as a centre of inquiry and that centre became the site constructing obedient citizens.