European Languages and Societies Commons^™

The Unfinished Hope Of Gower's Transgender Children, Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski

Accessus

This article examines two of Gower's tales from the Confessio Amantis that deal with trans youths: Iphis and Narcissus. Considering these two tales together, I ask the question: why does one story end with hopeful futurity for the trans masculine youth and the other end with death and the absence of futurity for the trans feminine youth. Connecting these medieval texts to premodern contexts and then with modern contexts, I map the trajectory of centuries long problems facing trans youths. In the end, I conclude that trans youth possess a healthier and more stable future when they receive trans affirming …

Introduction To Suffering, Endurance, Understanding: New Discourses Within Philosophy And Literature, Douglas S. Berman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Literature is generally seen as depicting the lives of human subjects through their unique narratives. And that, while its endpoint may be universal, it is typically grounded in the specificity of a human being (or, occasionally, an animal). Philosophy is tasked with providing the foundational cognitive tools to grasp the meaning of experience for the whole. In Hegelian terms, it unfolds the history of the concept. Yet, as George Steiner, Jacques Derrida, and other recent authors have shown, both philosophy – along with its agonistic cousin, religion -- evoke literary themes, rhetorics, and struggles. Over the past fifty years, Continental …

Mille-Feuille Magazine Littéraire, Spring/Printemps 2019, Pascale-Anne Brault

Mille-Feuille Magazine Littéraire

Nous sommes heureux de pouvoir vous présenter le vingt-quatrième numéro de Mille-Feuille et remercions tous les participants ainsi que le Doyen de Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, le Département de Langues Modernes et ses professeurs, le Study Abroad Office de DePaul University, et l’Ecole Franco-Américaine de Chicago (EFAC), Lincoln Park High School, Bishop Noll Institute, Illinois Mathemathics & Science Academy, et Collegiate School of New York qui nous ont permis, grâce à leurs subventions généreuses et leurs nombreuses contributions, de donner suite à nos premiers numéros. Bonne lecture !

Alternate Facts And Reality Effects In Antoine Bello’S Roman Américain, Jennifer Willging

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Like several of Antoine Bello’s eight other novels to date, Roman américain contains a staggering array of minute details, which includes the names of dozens of fictional characters, businesses, associations, institutions, locations, and publications. These fictional proper nouns are intertwined throughout the novel with dozens of real ones, and this promiscuous intermixing contributes to the careful construction of a fictional world that rivals the real one in all its complexity. In this essay I examine Bello’s masterful production in Roman américain of verisimilitude, which he creates largely but not exclusively though his exploitation of the documentary fiction genre. I then …

The Jutland Heath As A Literary Place Of Inheritance: Hans Christian Andersen, St. St. Blicher, And Jeppe Aakjær, Johs. Nørregaard Frandsen

The Bridge

The Jutland heath was, in a certain sense, created by Danish writers. It was writers such as Steen Steensen Blicher, Meir Goldschmidt, hans Christian Andersen, Jeppe Aakjær, and Johannes V. Jensen who, in their literary depictions, gave the heath a voice, image, and form that made it accessible as a place of experience for their own and future ages. In doing so, they created a place of inheritance—a dynamic, living place of experience that we can possess forever and refer to as part of our cultural inheritance. Today, the heather-clad heath of Jutland exists only in small clumps that have …

Carole Sweeney. Michel Houellebecq And The Literature Of Despair. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Xx + 215 Pp., Benn E. Williams

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Carole Sweeney. Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. xx + 215 pp.

Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided for the introduction.

Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Animals In Irish Literature And Culture Edited By Kathryn Kirkpatrick And Borbála Faragó, Geneviève Pigeon

The Goose

Review of Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Borbála Faragó's Animals in Irish Literature and Culture.

Unconfessing Transgender: Dysphoric Youths And The Medicalization Of Madness In John Gower’S “Tale Of Iphis And Ianthe”, M W. Bychowski

Accessus

On the brink of the twenty-first century, Judith Butler argues in “Undiagnosing Gender” that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) defines the psychiatric condition of “Gender Identity Disorder” (or “Gender Dysphoria”) in ways that control biological diversity and construct “transgender” as a marginalized identity. By turning the study of gender away from vulnerable individuals and towards the broader systems of power, Butler works to liberate bodies from the medical mechanisms managing difference and precluding potentially disruptive innovations in forms of life and embodiment by creating categories of gender and disability.

Turning to the brink of the 15 …

Selected Poems By Emil Aarestrup

The Bridge

The name of the Danish physician and poet Emil Aarestrup is associated with sensual, erotic poetry in which a sharp, anatomical eye for the beauty of the human body is joined with a profound narrative about love in a single embrace. In Aarestrup’s works the body comes alive. His erotic gaze is ever-present as a layer of desire in his work, just as his sense of the all-inclusive joy of the embrace conceptualizes pleasure of an explosive and outrageous kind. This was incompatible with the puritanical petit-bourgeois self-restraint and human isolation of the period in which he wrote. This celebration …

How Toni Morrison's Facebook Page Re(Con)Figures Race And Gender, Beatriz Revelles-Benavente

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "How Toni Morrison's Facebook Page Re(con)figures Race and Gender" Beatriz Revelles-Benavente explores Morrison's Facebook page and comments on it. In 2010, Morrison opened a Facebook page where she received a large amount of comments and created debates and Revelles-Benavente analyses how these comments navigate questions of race and gender. Based on theoretical considerations about issues of race and gender in cyberculture and applied to the narratives posted on Morrison's Facebook page, Revelles-Benavente argues that the problematics of race and gender are relational and the question needs to be centered on the object of study as the relation …

Japanese Poetry And Nature In Borson's Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida, Shoshannah Ganz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Japanese Poetry and Nature in Borson's Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida" Shoshannah Ganz shows how the limited focus of research on Roo Borson oversimplifies the poetry and ignores the tradition that Borson is aligning her work with both in form and content: classical Chinese and Japanese poetry and their perspectives on nature. Further, Ganz explores the ways in which Borson's poetry overcomes intuitively the binaries of East/West, human/non-human, and the further binaries within the human/non-human created through representational language. Ganz contextualizes Borson's work within the master/disciple lineage of Chinese and Japanese tradition and explores how Borson …

Literature And Science In Nineteenth-Century Realist Novels: A Book Review Article About Ambrière's And Bender's Work, Anne-Marie Reboul

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Embodied Cognition And The Grotesque In Calvino's La Giornata D'Uno Scrutatore And Sanguineti's Capriccio Italiano, Marco Caracciolo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Embodied Cognition and the Grotesque in Calvino's La giornata d'uno scrutatore and Sanguineti's Capriccio italiano" Marco Caracciolo analyzes the multiple dimensions of embodied experience and how they can be brought to bear on literary texts. Drawing on scholarship in cognitive science, he argues that the embodiment of people's engagement with the world emerges from the interaction between the physical structure of the body and socio-cultural practices. Caracciolo shows how such nexus of biological make-up and culture can give rise to particularly complex meanings in the representation of grotesque bodies. In order to illustrate his postulates, Caracciolo …

The Spirit Of Hans Christian Andersen In The United States, Taru Rauha Spiegel, Kristi Planck Johnson

The Bridge

Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75) was a great traveler and would undoubtedly have liked to visit the United States, in which he took a keen interest. As his fame grew, he received numerous invitations from his admirers across the Atlantic. However, as is well known, he became morbidly afraid of sea voyages after his dear friend, Henriette Wulff, perished in a fire onboard ship in 1858. 1 Prone to seasickness and careful of his health and well being, the aging author found the prospect of the long Atlantic voyage daunting and never undertook it.

At Home In An Astonishing World: The Square Stories Of Louis Jensen, Lise Kildegaard

The Bridge

Louis Jensen, the Danish author of more than 70 books, has published poetry, memoir, and fiction for adult readers, but he is best known for his children and young adult books. He has won numerous literary prizes and honors, including the Nordic Children's Prize (1996), the Hans Christian Andersen Stipend (1998) and the Gyldendals Store Bernebogspris (Gyldendal's Big Children's Book Prize) (2009). He has been nominated several times for both of the most prestigious international awards in children's literature, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Prize, and the Hans Christian Andersen Award. In 2010, he made the short list (five authors, chosen …

Wilde And The Model Of Homosexuality In Mann's Tod In Venedig, James P. Wilper

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Wilde and the Model of Homosexuality in Mann's Der Tod in Venedig" James P. Wilper examines the influence of Oscar Wilde and the effeminate homosexual identity which cohered as a result of Wilde's trials for act of "gross indecency" in 1895, in Mann's classic homoerotic short novel. Drawing on Alan Sinfield's The Wilde Century (1994) and recent scholarship into the impact of Wilde on German-language writers, as well as German homosexual communities of the early twentieth century, Wilper explores Mann's ambivalent response to Wilde's homosexual legacy. Later in his career, Mann writes of Wilde with Nietzsche …

Boganis In America: The American Adventures Of Karen Blixen's Father, Wilhelm Dinesen

The Bridge

Sick at heart and world-weary at the age of twenty-seven, Captain Wilhelm Dinesen (1845-95) turned his back on Europe and set sail for America. The year was 1872. Danish immigration was on the rise, and many immigrants dreamed of making their fortune in the land of opportunity. Dinesen had other reasons. His fortune was already secure, for he had been born to wealth and privilege. As a young man, however, he had gone to war, but war had led to defeat, and defeat to bloody civil war. How could he forget the horrors he had seen and experienced? What he …

Piet Hein ( 1905-1996): A Renaissance Man, Inger M. Olsen

The Bridge

A man who in the year 2000 had had his collections of poems and Crooks published in 1,700,000 copies, who had invented lamp shades, a sundial, and the super ellipse as well as games, who had received the Dansk Design Center's annual prize in 1989 should be easy to locate among people whose biography have been written. Those were my thoughts when I started researching this paper, and great was my surprise when I found that was not at all the case.

Three Short Stories By Carl Hansen, J. R. Christianson

The Bridge

Translator's Note. The Danish-American author, Carl Hansen, was born in Jonstrup near Holbcek in 1860, emigrated to America in 1885, taught for a number of years at Danebod Folk School in Tyler, Minnesota, and died in Seattle in 1916. Enok Mortensen once described him as follows:

"[He] had attended university classes in Denmark and studied at the state agricultural school. He knew something about pharmacology, a lot about veterinary medicine, and much about literature and philosophy ... He was a popular teacher. Each Saturday he gave a lecture-often on classics of Danish literature, and the students sat spellbound as he …

Enok Mortensen And The Immigrant Experience: A View From The Lower Class, Rudolf Jensen

The Bridge

To begin with, I would like to cite several short quotations from Enok Mortensen's fiction to show his primary themes as well as his writing style.

...for jer Emigranter er der aldrig noget, der er saa godt som det var i Danmark...altid skal I sammenligne...1 [for you immigrants there is never anything as good as it was in Denmark...you always have to compare.]

...herover gik man med en underlig Uro i Sindet altid...bare et hundrede Dollars mere, eller Tusinde...eller Millionen...2 [over here in America you are always restless...only a hundred dollars more, or a thousand, or a million.]

...I det …

The Reception Of Danish Science Fiction In The United States, Kristine J. Anderson

The Bridge

Science fiction is a distinctly American genre. Although scholars have traced its origins back as far as the Latin writer Lucian of Samosata,1 it was Hugo Gernsback, a publisher of pulp magazines in the United States, who first gave the genre its name in the June 1929 issue of Wonder Stories. Gernsback had been serializing the scientific romances of such writers as Jules Verne and HG. Wells, emphasizing their treatment of technology and putting them forth as models for other budding writers to imitate. The magazines that Gernsback initiated became very popular, spawning more from other publishers. Groups of aficionados …

Karin Michaelis: Famous Danish Novelist And Humanitarian Rebel With A Cause, Merete Von Eyben

The Bridge

Consider the following question: Which Danish author was not only one of the most famous European authors in the early part of the twentieth century, but also one of the most widely read female ones; had all of her books translated into German and some of them into as many as 30 other languages; wrote the most notorious bestseller of that period; celebrated her 60th birthday at a banquet hosted by Austrian PEN in Vienna where she was awarded both an Austrian and a Czechoslovakian medal and honored by the German language papers as Europe's Conscience; had her books banned …

Quest And Place In Carl Hansen And Hans Christian Andersen, David S. Iversen

The Bridge

Carl Hansen and Hans Christian Andersen demonstrate a number of similar characteristics as authors. Both wrote their stories with their respective readership in mind. Both authors strove to establish character and setting with as few words as possible. Both knew their audiences well and made use of scenes, places, and experiences that their readers recognized. Each man was also driven to become an author, albeit for slightly different reasons. Hans Christian Andersen was, according to Sven H. Rossel, "single-minded in pursuit of art and recognition,"1 while Carl Hansen relates that "some five years before he emigrated to the United States …

The Travels Abroad Of H. C. Andersen, Don Mowatt

The Bridge

A complete appreciation of Hans Christian Andersen has always been limited to Danish-speaking readers because so much of his private life is most clearly revealed in his letters, diaries, and travel books which remain largely untranslated into English. There is a handful of exceptions, the majority of which are mid-nineteenth century translations from England.

Enok Mortensen's Major Fiction, Dorothy Burton Skardal

The Bridge

Enok Mortensen' s literary career was strangely divided. In the 1930s he published a play and three books of fiction in a first burst of activity that began after most other Scandinavian immigrant authors had ceased to publish or had died. After 1936, however, he abruptly ceased to publish fiction except for scattered short stories , and for many years wrote historical works in English instead. In English too was his charming autobiographical account of A Danish Boyhood in 1981. Who would have expected, then, that his last book would return to the novel form after nearly half a century …

Enok Mortensen And The History Of Danish Immigration To America, Eric Helmer Pedersen

The Bridge

Enok Mortensen is probably best known in Denmark through his activity as a guest lecturer at Askov Folk High School in the 1960s and 1970s. Within the confines of a small group of Danes with friends and family in America he also had a name as a writer of fiction. It is true that his first work Mit Folk (1932), a collection of short stories, was published in Askov, Minnesota, but his next, the novel Saledes blev jeg hjeml0s (1934) was published in Holb

Danish-American Literature In Transition, Dorothy Burton Skardal

The Bridge

Danish-American literature was written by Danish immigrants in the United States mainly about and for members of their own group. Their lives were lived in constant psychological and cultural flux undergoing the pressures of assimilation; therefore their literature both grew out of and recorded multifaceted processes of transition. Today the literature Danish immigrants wrote is itself in transition: long unread or forgotten, it is now being rediscovered by Americans of Danish heritage. This brief introduction to the main Danish-American writers is meant to stimulate still more to reclaim their heritage preserved in Danish-language fiction and poetry.

In Debt To Heritage Denmark, Hermansen-Jensen, Nysted, Otto G. Hoiberg, Reviewer, Elise Hermansen Olsen

The Bridge

This is the life story of the late Elise Hermansen Olsen, as portrayed in autobiographical materials edited admirably by her still-active husband, Dr. C. Arild Olsen. It mirrors the various interrelated ways in which Elise "lived her Danish heritage" - by use of the Danish language in speech and song, by a deep appreciation of that country's literature, by perpetuation of its characteristic customs, and by living a life geared to its distinctive values.