Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Curious Case Of A Women’S Academic Collar, Valentina S. Grub

Transactions of the Burgon Society

In mid-nineteenth century America, women’s seminaries were established as a counterpoint to men’s colleges. However, while their male counterparts immediately adopted various iterations of academic gowns, these seminaries struggled to formalize their own academic attire. One element of it was a ‘collar’ made of fine mesh and, most unusually, sectioned into panels by lengths of boning. The ends would have been drawn around the back of the neck and fastened by a row of tiny, cumbersome hooks and eyes. As an academic accessory, such a collar has hitherto been unknown to the academic dress academe. Moreover, it offers a scholarly …

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.

Keja L. Valens. Desire Between Women In Caribbean Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Vii + 214 Pp., Mary Mccullough

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Book Review of Keja L. Valens. Desire between Women in Caribbean Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. vii + 214 pp.

Claire Legendre’S Portrait Of Hypermodern Society, Michèle A. Schaal

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Theorists from various academic disciplines believe Western society has entered an age of excess and exacerbated modernity: all areas of life are affected by a will to be or do more at an always faster pace. This article focuses on French writer Claire Legendre’s literary translation of hypermodernity, especially in her narratives published over the past decade. First, it examines her portrayal of contemporary individuality, marked by all sorts of excesses and especially by the imperative to make the most of oneself and one’s life. This ideal being in itself excessive, her characters resort to extreme behaviors. However, they never …

The Mother Figure In Contemporary Women’S Theater, Sanda Golopentia

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Five French plays written by women playwrights between the years 1976–88 attest to significant changes in the dramatic presentation of the mother figure. The innovations occur at the general thematic level (with plays centered on the mother–daughter initiating encounter at the moment of giving birth/being born, the reversal of the mother–daughter roles later on in life, trial maternity, willful maternal eclipse, etc.) as well as at the level of the characters’ speech, the setting, and so on. While some of the plays (such as Chantal Chawaf’s Chair chaude, Denise Chalem’s A cinquante ans elle découvrait la mer and Loleh …

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 …

An Account Of Señorita Maquiladora, Rosina Conde

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Performer and scholar Rosina Conde finds that Señorita Maquiladora is the performance piece that has gone through the most transformations, not in its script, but in its text, as it is constantly being rewritten to speak to contemporary social issues. She believes that Señorita Maquiladora has potential because it speaks to global themes that affect workers in the assembly plant industry, not only with respect to the questions of the environment and health, but also in terms of the patriarchial patterns that force these women to compete in an atmosphere of a vertical structure dominated by men, with all the …

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.

The Rewriting Of History In Amin Maalouf's The Crusades Through Arab Eyes , Carine Bourget

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This paper analyzes the narrative strategies that shape Maalouf's rewriting of the history of the Crusades, examines why considerations of the problems inherent to the historiographical act are relegated to the background, and how Maalouf links his text to politics contemporary to its writing. I argue that while Maalouf brilliantly deconstructs the Western image of the Crusades as a heroic time by documenting the barbarity of the Crusaders without falling into the pitfall of simply inverting the terms of the dichotomy, the agenda driving his rewriting of this historical period leads him to partially repeat what his book is supposed …

"The Lady In Pink: Dress And The Enigma Of Gendered Space In Marcel Proust's Fiction" , Eva Maria Stadler

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

A study of the role of clothing as central to issues of characterization, description and historical reference in Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. Focus on Odette de Crécy, one of the central characters in the novel, a courtesan who becomes the wife of Charles Swann but who first captivates the narrator's imagination when, as a child, he briefly sees her as a "Lady in Pink."

Odette's role as a fashionable woman, as one of the best-dressed women in Parisian society, gives unity to her character. The description of her clothing, however, not only provides the occasion for …

Where Am I? Who Am I? The Problem Of Location And Recognition In Helena Parente Cunha's Woman Between Mirrors , Joanne Gass

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Helena Parente Cunha's novel, Woman Between Mirrors explores the many ways in which a dominant and domineering patriarchy can and does impose itself upon its subjects through what Louis Althusser calls interpellation. Parente Cunha's woman, a true twentieth-century heroine, faces her divided self—a self determined by ideology—and begins a quest which will end when she becomes an "I" before her shattered mirrors. But before that can happen, she must author herself, and, in the process of writing herself, she must overcome the demons of location and recognition. In the material sense, the woman must locate herself geographically, historically, socially, and …

Women, Subalternity, And The Historical Novel Of María Rosa Lojo , Kathryn Lehman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

María Rosa Lojo (1954) has received critical recognition as a poet, short-story writer, and novelist. Her poetic work Visiones (1984) and Forma oculta del mundo (1991), first book of short-stories Marginales (1986), and two novels Canción perdida en Buenos Aires al Oeste (1987) and La pasión de los nómades (1994), have received prestigious awards. Lojo's most recent work, informed and inspired by archival sources, has been acclaimed by both critics and the general public for having radically altered the established representation of canonical historical figures. The novels La princesa federal (1998), and Una mujer de fin de siglo (1999), and …

The Politics Of Race And Patriarchy In Claire-Solange, Âme Africaine By Suzanne Lacascade , Valérie Orlando

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Racial discrimination, colonialism, marginalization, and imperial politics are the components of Martinican author Suzanne Lacascade's 1924 novel, Claire-Solange, âme africaine. This little-known work is shrouded in mystery. Less information is available about the author or under what circumstances she conceptualized and completed her novel. Lacascade probably contributed to various reviews and journals of the first days of the Négritude movement. The novel offers one of the first discourses on race, racial mixing, hierarchy, and colonialism as construed by blacks and whites. The author defies the power of men over women in French society of the early twentieth century. Racialized …

Surreal And Canny Selves: Photographic Figures In Claude Cahun , Gayle Zachmann

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In her 1975 essay, Le Rire de la méduse, Hélène Cixous enthusiastically announced that it was high time for women to enter into discourse. A full half-century earlier, Claude Cahun (1894-1954), a powerful writer and a haunting photographer and artist, was already inscribing herself, Woman, and a woman's voice in visual and verbal self-portraits, photomontages, prose texts, poetry, and aesthetic and political treatises. Cahun's uncanny interventions in both verbal and visual discourse cannily interrogate conventions of literary and pictorial representation and the constructions of self, gender and culture that they exhibit. Insistently asking readers and spectators, "What's wrong with …

Subject To Instability , Karen Bouwer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

For Plantier, language constitutes reality and is male dominated. Readers of texts, she says, are at a disadvantage because the author imposes a logic that we must accept in order to understand the text. The discourses shaping our social reality have the same effect. Plantier has struggled against individual voices, discourses, and the very fabric of language informed by these discourses. "Subject to Instability" examines the impact on her generic evolution of a changing sense of self, of who her interlocutors are, and of those for whom she is speaking. I argue that her increasing attempt to juggle many different …

Men In (Shell-)Shock: Masculinity, Trauma, And Psychoanalysis In Rebecca West's The Return Of The Soldier , Misha Kavka

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This paper undertakes to read Rebecca West's first novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), as a critical exploration of masculine trauma on the one hand and an ambivalent engagement with Freudian psychoanalysis on the other. The novel proves interesting as a site in which two shifting cultural contexts intersect: the wartime culture of England facing the "shell shock" of its men, and the contemporaneous infusion of English intellectual culture with psychoanalytic ideas. Though the effects of new war technology and "a newer kind of doctor," West challenge existing notions of stable masculinity, West maintains that masculinity has all along …

Ideology, Family Policy, Production, And (Re)Education: Literary Treatment Of Abortion In The Gdr Of The Early 1980s, Heinz Bulmahn

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The decision by the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe of placing restrictions on the right to an abortion will profoundly affect German women's right to choose. This decision is a culmination of efforts to errode the right to choose for West as well as East German women. In the former GDR, even though liberal abortion laws allowed women access to free abortions, for ideological reasons, the government devised policies that discouraged abortions as a means of birth control. This policy becomes particularly apparent in the early 1980s when the East German government, confronted with a declining birth rate, faced the dilemma …

Madness And The Middle Passage: Warner-Vierya's Juletane As A Paradigm For Writing Caribbean Women's Identities, Ann Elizabeth Willey

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article links Glissant's theory of an inherent Caribbean madness due to the originary rupture and alienation from Africa with Foucault's theory of the ritual significance and essential liminality of the madman as exemplified in the medieval figure of the "Ship of Fools." In calling the madman the "passenger par excellence," Foucault implies a connection between sanity and linear narratives, such as that of a voyage. Myriam Warner-Vierya's novel, Juletane, suggests that European paradigms of narrative and voyage are inadequate to provide a sense of self for Caribbean women. The novel takes the form of a diary that chronicles …

Writings From The Margins: German-Jewish Women Poets From The Bukovina, Amy Colin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Emerging at the crossroads of heterogeneous languages and cultures, German-Jewish women's poetry from the Bukovina displays the characteristics of its fascinating multilingual contextuality, yet it also bears the stigma of a double marginalization, for its representatives became time and again targets of both anti-Semitic attacks as well as gender discrimination. The present essay explores the untiring struggles of German-Jewish women authors from the Bokovina for acceptance within the Jewish and non-Jewish community. It analyzes their attempts to cope with social barriers, prejudices, and their difficult situation as both women and Jews. The essay also sets their poetry against the background …

Introduction To The Special Issue, Adelaida López De Martínez

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

It is quite appropriate that Studies in Twentieth Century Literature should devote its 20th-anniversary special issue to the literature of Latin American women writers…

Female Divinities And Story-Telling In The Work Of Tamara Kamenszain, Naomi Lindstrom

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Tamara Kamenszain (b. Argentina, 1947), in her creative writing and her essays, brings together two concerns. One is her examination of concepts of woman and femininity. She specializes in mythical and archetypal representations of woman. Her texts present such figures as the great mother and forest nymphs. On many occasions, she evokes a past in which female divinities were respected, even in the Judaic tradition that is frequently Kamenszain's frame of reference. The other current that stands out in Kamenszain's writing is her interest in Jewish traditions of informal narrative. In her texts, folk narrative displaces learned and canonical narrative. …

Dynamics Of Change In Latin American Literature: Contemporary Women Writers, Adelaida López De Martínez

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Over the last twenty-five years Latin American societies have undergone profound changes. Where once the legalized abuses of dictatorships gave new meaning to the word "silence" for both men and women, now large segments of the population fight hard to sustain democratic regimes throughout the Continent. Repressive governments are being replaced, and shattered economies have begun to recover. Encouraged by the ever-increasing strength of international feminism, Latin American women (from Chiapas, Mexico, to Plaza de Mayo in Argentina) have risen to play key roles in this socio-political reformation. The writing of female authors has proliferated in this environment, and the …

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 …

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

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.

Between Female Dialogics And Traces Of Essentialism: Gender And Warfare In Christa Wolf's Major Writings, Sabine Wilke

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The relationship between memory, writing, and the question of how we define ourselves as gendered subjects is at the center of Christa Wolf's work. Her literary production, starting in the late fifties with a rather naive and un-selfconscious love story, has undergone a dramatic shift. In her more recent texts, Wolf sets out to rewrite classical mythology to make us aware of those intersections in the history of Western civilization at which women were made economically and psychologically into objects. The present essay seeks to locate Christa Wolf's evolving conception of gender and warfare within the contemporary theoretical discussion on …

Feminism And Islamic Tradition, Winifred Woodhull

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

"Feminism and Islamic Tradition" explores the territory mapped by Fatima Mernissi in Sultanes oublées (1990) and Le Harem politique: Le Prophète et les femmes (1987) in relation to that charted by Assia Djebar in her latest novel Loin de Médine (1991). The aim is to see why Maghrebian feminists as different as Mernissi and Djebar—a liberal democratic sociologist and a postmodern writer—have begun to move into Arab-Islamic cultural-political spaces which, until recently, have been occupied mainly by various Islamic fundamentalist factions and other right-wing groups such as conservative nationalists in the Maghreb. The essay delineates the change between these writers' …

Introduction, Laurie Edson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Introduction to the special issue

Mariama Bâ And The Politics Of The Family, Laurie Edson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Senegalese woman writer, Mariama Bâ, chronicles a changing society in post colonial Senegal, caught between the attraction of modernization and the resistance of traditional beliefs. Her award-winning novel, Une si longue lettre, is examined as an example of the kind of subversive "journalism-vérité" proposed by Paulin Hountondji: an anecdotal reconstruction of facts combined with organization and interpretation that leads readers to an awareness of the real conditions of daily life and exposes the structures that make them possible. Bâ's novel exemplifies this "return to the real" not only because Bâ speaks about and exposes the all-too-common reality of …

Introduction, Jean Franco

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Introduction to the special issue.