Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Castles In The Air: Vision And Narrativity In Julien Green's Minuit, Robert Ziegler

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

One feature of Julien Green's 1936 novel Minuit is its examination ofthe problematical relationship between narrative discourse and its receiver. In the text, various characters act as narrators who order and assign a temporal structure to real or fictive events and rely on a narratee's receptivity to discover the meaning intended. In view of the attention accorded in the text to the process of story-telling, one may conclude that Green intended his work to interrogate the nature of its own narrativity. In addition, Green's character, the enigmatic Edme, is a mystic by reason of language, evoking through speech in himself …

Translating From Memory: Patrick Modiano In Postmodern Context, Timothy H. Scherman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In this essay I have attemped to renegotiate the relationship between the work of Patrick Modiano and the conditions of literary production designated by "postmodernism." Contemporary French reviewers and critics have greeted with guarded praise Modiano's efforts to write in a language and about events that belong to another writing. Following their lead, this essay first explores the tension (often lost on American readers) created by the possibility that the historical referent of Modiano's texts—not only Modiano's personal past but the horror of the Occupation—might now exist only as a weightless narrative "effect." As such, it is a part of …

Reviews Of Recent Publications, Various Authors

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Brown, Frieda S., Compitello, Malcolm Alan, etc., Editors. Rewriting the Good Fight Critical Essays on the Literature ofthe Spanish Civil War by John Crispin

Connor, Steven. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text by Maria Minich Brewer

Jordan, Barry. Writers and Politics in Franco's Spain by Salvador J. Fajardo

Lindenberger, Herbert. The History in Literature: On Value, Genre, Institutions by Raylene O'Callaghan

Colonialism, Enlightenment, Castration: Writing, Narration And Legibility In L'Etranger, Larry W. Riggs, Paula Willoquet-Maricondi

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This analysis combines the issue of "narratability" with some psychoanalytic insights, focusing first on the key incident in Meursault's story when he involves himself in writing. Meursault inadvertently inscribes himself in a conflictual drama when he writes a letter for Raymond Sintès. The writing of the letter prefigures both Meursault's later taking up of the gun with which he will kill an Arab and his inexorable evolution toward a situation that makes him capable of narrating and being narrated. It seals him into the colonial world of language. To become capable of narrating is both to become a colonist and …

Some Wheat And Some Chaff: Jean Paulhan And The Postwar Literary Purge In France, Michael Syrotinski

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

A somewhat overlooked figure of French literary history, Jean Paulhan has resurfaced in the polemic surrounding the wartime activities of many respected intellectuals, most prominently Blanchot, Heidegger and de Man. Commentators on Paulhan's role in the intellectual history of the period have tended to avoid reading his texts closely. Paulhan—one of the "heroes" of the literary Resistance in France during the Second World War—took the extremely unpopular and controversial stance after the Liberation of criticizing the National Committee of Writers' proposed purge of suspected collaborationist writers. This essay demonstrates the rigorous consistency of Paulhan's position in the context of his …