Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Deborah Mawer, Editor. Historical Interplay In French Music And Culture, 1860-1960. Routledge, 2018., Eric Touya De Marenne

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Deborah Mawer, editor. Historical Interplay in French Music and Culture, 1860-1960.

Andrea Bachner. The Mark Of Theory: Inscriptive Figures, Poststructuralist Prehistories. Fordham Up, 2018., Andrew Kettler

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Andrea Bachner. The Mark of Theory: Inscriptive Figures, Poststructuralist Prehistories. Fordham UP, 2018. 274 pp.

Ben Hutchinson. Comparative Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford Up, 2018., Toloo Riazi

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Ben Hutchinson. Comparative Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2018.

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.

Frederick Luis Aldama. Latinx Superheroes In Mainstream Comics. Tucson: U Of Arizona P, 2017., Danielle A. Orozco

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Frederick Luis Aldama. Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. Tucson: Uof Arizona P, 2017.

Matt Yockey. Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence And A Comics Universe. Austin: U Of Texas P, 2017., Kevin Degnan

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Matt Yockey. Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe. Austin: U of Texas, 2017.

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.

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 …

Sara J. Brenneis. Genre Fusion: A New Approach To History, Fiction, And Memory In Contemporary Spain. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue Up, 2014. Viii + 241 Pp., Anna E. Hiller

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Sara J. Brenneis. Genre Fusion: A New Approach to History, Fiction, and Memory in Contemporary Spain. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue UP, 2014. viii + 241 pp.

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Kathyrn Everly. History, Violence, and the Hyperreal: Representing Culture in the Contemporary Spanish Novel by Nina L. Molinaro

Jill Robbins. Crossing Through the Chueca: Lesbian Literary Culture in Queer Madrid by Salvador A. Oropesa

Juan Pablo Dabove. Nightmares of the Lettered City: Banditry and Literature in Latin America 1816-1929 by María Zalduondo

Federico Bonaddio. Federico García Lorca. The Poetics of Self-Consciousness by Carlos Jerez-Farrán

Aníbal González. Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel by Mónica Adriana Agrest

The Song Of Disappearance: Memory, History, And Testimony In The Poetry Of Antonio Gamoneda, Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay explores Antonio Gamoneda’s poetry as an Adornian form of testimony. With its enigmatic foregrounding of lies, the book-length poem Descripción de la mentira ‘Description of the Lie’ can be read as a “contradictory testimony” in which the act and memory of witnessing go, as it were, underground—only to resurface, rife with loss, years after Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy. Yet the abstruse character of this poetic writing prevents readers from drawing straightforward political truths about Spanish history from the poem. Losses are inscribed in the text catachrestically, as they truly are: losses. Gamoneda’s poetry has been read …

Dora Bruder And The Longue Durée , Susan Weiner

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Modiano's methods in Dora Bruder recall the Annales historiographer's rejection of the history of events in favor of the "long duration," but with human history as its object. Modiano's long duration draws out repetitions and variations between his own life and Dora's as he reconstructs and imagines it, between Dora and fictional characters, between Dora's story and the lives of Holocaust victims and survivors known and unknown. Moreover, the author encourages the reader to take part in the uncanny connections the novel makes, through movements of the imagination not unlike Modiano's own. In so doing, we approach Dora and those …

Modiano Historien , Richard J. Golsan

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Beginning with the "Trilogy" (La place de l'étoile, Ronde de nuit, and Les boulevards de ceinture) of his first three novels published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the work of Patrick Modiano has been indissociably linked with the history and memory of the Occupation. Dora Bruder is of course no exception along these lines. What makes Modiano's Occupation novels distinctive is their combination of the "historian's" knowledge of the historical realities of the period and the novelist's or "poet's" talent for powerfully evoking the feel and ambiance of "les années noires." While Modiano's practice as …

The Double Writing Of Agota Kristof And The New Europe , Martha Kuhlman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Agota Kristof, a native of Hungary who lives in Switzerland and writes in French, has written a trilogy of novels that explore the borderlines and fractured history of the "New Europe": The Notebook (1986), The Proof (1988), and The Third Lie (1991). Set in an unnamed Central European country, the novels traverse the three successive shocks of Nazism, Socialism, and Capitalism. Through the device of identical twin narrators, brothers Lucas and Claus, Kristof inscribes the story/history (histoire) with a "double writing" that opposes personal and official histories. But this opposition is not a simple one, for the two …

The Construction Of History In The Folds Of Family History In The Novel Song Lost In West Buenos Aires By María Rosa Lojo, Zulema Moret

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The novels written by María Rosa Lojo strongly reflect a specific preoccupation with the rewriting of history from new perspectives that are related to so-called postmodernism. This is the case with Canción perdida en Buenos Aires al Oeste (1987). This work attempts to articulate a reading of the "private" at a crossroads with the history of the country and of other countries (Argentina/Spain). It is a novel of exiles, from the exile of the Neira family from the Franco dictatorship in the forties to the particular exiles of each family member during the seventies and eighties in Argentina. From the …

Hermann Hesse's Hegelianism: The Progress Of Consciousness Towards Freedom In The Glass Bead Game , John Krapp

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Hermann Hesse's novels commonly represent characters' struggles through ideological opposition and conflict towards resolution. The majority of his critics attribute Hesse's interest in, and expression of, this struggle to his lifelong study of Eastern philosophy. However, Hesse's interest in things Eastern need not be taken as the exclusive determinant of the theme of individuation represented in his fiction. This essay argues that Hesse's predilection for elaborating the ideological crises and resolutions of his characters may also be interpreted as reflecting the Western, Hegelian concept of an Absolute Spirit that proceeds through exhaustive dialectical permutations before it becomes conscious of its …

Body/Text/History: Violation Of Borders In Assia Djebar's Fantasia, David Waterman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Assia Djebar's novel Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (1985) can be read as a political novel which examines the permeability of borders, especially between Algeria and the female body. As the primary site of signification and meaning, the body becomes a text which attempts to circulate knowledge and encourage resistance outside a position of mastery, and the same body/text suffers as it is inscribed by the dominant power. The distinction between nature and culture is interrogated as the borders of the body/text overlap the borders of war, writing, history, and sexuality. Ultimately, given the position of the female body within the …

Travels Through Heterotopia: The Textual Realms Of Patrick Modiano's Rue Des Boutiques Obscures And Mikhail Kuraev's Kapitan Dikshtein, Vitaly Chernetsky

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Within contemporary prose, one distinct mode or paradigm that can be discerned is constituted by the texts that daringly tackle the dark, suppressed, erased parts of our history and mentality; however, they approach this task not by way of self-righteous denunciatory investigations, but by provocatively problematizing the most established everyday facts, by depriving the reader of the possibility of even conceiving any firm ground of the stable construct of an origin or a self-identification—historically and culturally. Their irreverent and playful deconstruction of the all-pervasive national cultural mythologies has mounted a powerful challenge to ideological constructs big and small. This article …

"A Myth Becomes Reality": Kaspar Hauser As Messianic Wild Child , Ulrich Struve

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The topos of the "Wild Child" occupies an important place in the mythic and literary imagination of the West. The European climax of a long line of wild children, Kaspar Hauser was a nineteenth-century German foundling whose fate has inspired a host of novels, dramas, novellas, poems, songs, and movies, even an opera and a ballet. It has been treated by Paul Verlaine, R. M. Rilke, and Klaus Mann, by the Dada poet Hans Arp, by the dramatist Peter Handke, and by the filmmaker Werner Herzog. This article offers a brief historical sketch of Hauser's life before discussing a key …

Dissonant Voices: Memory And Counter-Memory In Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's Autobiografia Del General Franco, José F. Colmeiro

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Vázquez Montalbán's unauthorized autobiography of General Franco is built upon the use of dissonance as a strategy of resistance. The novel reveals the author's "professional schizophrenia" resulting from the dramatic authorial split as Franco's fictional ghostwriter and anti-Franco public persona, refracted internally in the split narrator of the text. This monumental construction of language and memories puts forth a metafictional examination of the conflicting relationship between history and fiction. Challenging traditional notions of authorship, referentiality, and self-referentiality, Autobiografia del general Franco obliges us to examine the dissonant discourses of historiography and memory and to ascertain the political function of writing …

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 …

The Stone And Its Images: The Poetry Of Nancy Morejón, Alan West

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The essay explores the roots of Nancy Morejón's poetry within the context of a transculturated afro-Cuban identity. Beginning by an examination of the poems that directly deal with the orishas of santería, the essay moves on to some of her more lyric poetry. Morejón's relationship to Dulce María Loynaz provides particular interest in how both writers treat the metaphor of the house in two important poems. This is followed by a discussion of some of Morejón's overtly feminist poetry, placed both within a Cuban context of the history of its revolution, and the displacement of exile (in dialogue with Cuban …

Alvaro Mutis And The Ends Of History, Gerald Martin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Part of the confusion of the current literary and critical moment, in Latin America and elsewhere, involves a debate as to whether the most characteristic forms of contemporary writing are the more apparently transparent (in contrast to current critical practice) or the more impenetrable and indecipherable of literary texts. This debate is of particular relevance to Latin American discussions about the so-called "Post-Boom," and the work of the Colombian Alvaro Mutis, a writer who came late to narrative fiction and to critical attention, offers several insights into the links between writing, criticism and idology at this moment close to the …

Althusser And History: A Review Essay, Eric Collum

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Althusser and History: A Review Essay

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 …

The Mother Tongue Of Leila Sebbar, Danielle Marx-Scouras

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Leila Sebbar grew up in French colonial Algeria where her parents taught French to the indigenous children. The daughter of a metropolitan French woman and an Algerian, Sebbar is a croisée. At the height of the Algerian War, Sebbar left her homeland to pursue her university studies in France. She became a French teacher and made France her home. Sebbar writes in her mother tongue, but she treats it like a foreign language. Although she never learned Arabic and left Algeria, her paternal identity haunts all of her writings. Anchored by the notion of exile, Sebbar drifts between two …

Christoph Hein's Horns Ende. Historical Revisionism: A Process Of Renewal, Heinz Bulmahn

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In light of recent developments, the historical record of the German Democratic Republic will be closely reexamined as the two Germanies merge into one country. Christoph Hein's novel Horns Ende undoubtedly will play a role in the debate about the GDR past, because it is a clear repudiation of official historical mythmaking. The novel examines in detail the political and social fiber of a small town in the GDR during the fifties. Horn returns to the town some thirty years after his death, and entices the townspeople to recount their lives during the early years of the socialist republic. These …

History, Violence And Poetics: Saint-John Perse And René Char, Nathan Bracher

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay explores the parallel yet opposite stances taken both personally and textually by Perse and Char with respect to drama of World War II. While Perse remained disdainfully aloof from public affairs after the defeat and proclaimed in his poetry his solidarity with all humanity, Char explicitly linked his writing to events, yet sought to create a human space removed from history's upheavals. Striving to transcend the vicissitudes of individual existence, Perse celebrates an epic vision of history that overlooks and even condones its violence. Focusing on the inconsistent, fragmentary nature of existence, Char prevents us from having any …

Reflections On Linguistic And Literary Colonization And Decolonization In Africa, Eric Sellin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Despite the cultural diversity found in Africa and the complexity ofthe psychology of the colonizer and the colonized, several fundamental facts emerge regarding the function of language and literature in recent African history. The colonizer sought to instill a sense of inferiority in the colonized as part of the dynamics of conquest, placing special emphasis on education and language. These notions, lucidly discussed by such social thinkers as O. Mannoni, Frantz Fanon, and Albert Memmi, have analogues in the defense of language everywhere where lingua-political oppression occurs, be it in colonial Africa or on an Arapaho reservation in the American …