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Aoife Connolly. Performing The Pied-Noir Family: Constructing Narratives Of Settler Memory And Identity In Literature And On-Screen. Lexington Books, 2020., Tessa Nunn

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Aoife Connolly. Performing the Pied-Noir Family: Constructing Narratives of Settler Memory and Identity in Literature and On-Screen. Lexington Books, 2020. ix, 223 pp.

Moving Forward With The Past: History And Identity In Marie-Célie Agnant’S La Dot De Sara, Kennedy M. Schultz

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Francophone writers and theorists have long worked to establish a cultural identity true to their collective past and free of Western authority and influence. They reflect in their works the need to find their own voice and validate their own perspective in the face of a history fraught with colonial influence and domination. Marie-Célie Agnant, a Francophone writer of Haitian descent living in Montreal, addresses this search for history and identity through the lens of Haitian immigrant characters in her works, namely La Dot de Sara (1995), Le Livre d’Emma (2001), and Un alligator nommé Rosa (2007). Agnant’s works treat …

Wartime Writings, Or The Imaginary Lover Of Marguerite Duras, Bethany Ladimer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The publication in 2006 of Marguerite Duras’s Cahiers de la guerre, ‘Wartime Writings,’ written between 1943 and 1949, made accessible to the reader the first known versions of the family drama that was to become the material of much of her fiction. As this work now takes its place as chronologically first in the intertext of Duras’s autofictional writings, it sheds considerable light on our understanding of the transformations in these texts that occurred over her lifetime. Whereas L’Amant had been presented and accepted as the disclosure of a real occurrence and the origin of the other works, it …

Cœur, Temps And Monde In Le Forçat Innocent Of Supervielle: A Poet’S Existential Metaphors Of Prison And Shelter, Franck Dalmas

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Poet Jules Supervielle has a marginal status in twentieth-century French literature as he was not engaged in any prominent movement of his time (Symbolism, Futurism, or Surrealism). In that regard, his poetry is neither nationally colored nor aesthetically connoted. It might well be the reason for his lacking consideration in the literary canon. But these differences must get our special attention. Supervielle was not born in France and he was to live and write his works in a state of existential angst, divided, as he always felt, between his native Uruguay and his French legacy. As such, the poet developed …

"Oneself As Another": Identification And Mourning In Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder, Susan Rubin Suleiman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Taking off from Paul Ricoeur's book Soi-même comme un autre (Oneself as Another), this essay discusses two kinds of identification in Modiano's relation to Dora: identification as appropriation, where the writer "assimilates" Dora's story in order to explore his own relation to his parents, especially his father; and identification as empathy, where the writer underlines the differences between his and Dora's stories and also seeks to come to a historical understanding of what happened to her. In that process, he also evokes the fate of other Jews who, like Dora and her family, were deported from France. I conclude …

Origins, Loss, And Recovery In Patrick Modiano's Voyage De Noces And Dora Bruder , Ann L. Murphy

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

By alluding to the writing of his 1990 novel Voyage de noces in the course of the narration of 1997 Dora Bruder, author Patrick Modiano invites an examination of the connections between these two works. This paper demonstrates how Voyage de noces and Dora Bruder, when studied together as a sort of diptych, are informed by what commentators have described as Modiano's simultaneous preoccupations with the expression of absence and loss, on the one hand, and with the use of writing to compensate for these, on the other. Specifically, a formal and thematic relationship between these two texts …

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 …

When I Means We: A Reading Of School In French Caribbean Apprenticeship Novels , Pascale De Souza

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

While most critics agree that the quest for identity which underlies much of post-colonial literature is illustrated in the thematic approaches adopted by writers, this study further the argument by suggesting that it also conditions writers' selection of narrative strategies. In its representation of subjectivity in process, the apprenticeship novel seems to offer an enticing model of self-completion. This narrative strategy, however, presents particular complexities when used to portray coming of age in a society divided along ethnic lines. Simon Gikandi argues with regards to the Caribbean that the probability of a quest for identity reaching fruition is nil, but …

Crossing Francophone Boundaries: Beckett's Fictions, Beryl Schlossman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Although Samuel Beckett's œuvre is bilingual in French and English, his writing is generally considered to be the product of a single national identity…

Interview With Ghada Amer, Estelle Taraud

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Interview with Ghada Amer

From War Films To Films On War: Gendered Scenarios Of National Identity—The Case Of The Last Metro, Leah D. Hewitt

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

If France's ongoing struggle for self-definition in the late twentieth century involved new conceptions of citizenship and nationality, in short what it means to be French, this struggle also entailed the search for an accurate portrayal of a past in which France could recognize itself...

Between L'Irréparable And L'Irrepérable: Subject To The Past, Downing Thomas, Steven Ungar

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This issue of STCL grew from papers presented at a conference, "Memory in Context: Occupation and Empire in France and the Francophone World," held at the University of Iowa in April, 1996...

Identifying Jews: The Legacy Of The 1941 Exhibition, "Le Juif Et La France" , Raymond Bach

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

During the Occupation there was a two-pronged effort to separate the Jews from the rest of the French population...

Body / Antibody, Lawrence R. Schehr

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Unique object in the exchange-system, the gay body occupies a locus where a phantom identity and an imagined reciprocity define the poles of the subject-object relation. Made of the right stuff, it is an object circulating in a system that tends to reproduce the concept of identity in its search for mirror images of itself. Often rejected by the world, it has recently become a cynosure equated with sickness, pestilence, and death in the age of AIDS. The representations of that object change: no longer perceived as a part of libidinal economy, it has become a mass of symptoms, having …

The Perilous Journey From Melancholy To Love: A Kristevan Reading Of Le Médianoche Amoureux, Karen D. Levy

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Since the publication of Michel Tournier's first novel Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique in 1967, in which his protagonist Robinson makes fruitful the very earth of his desert island and eventually accedes to the cosmic transcendence embodied in his mentor and companion Vendredi, this contemporary French writer has boldly explored alternative forms of sexual expression that challenge traditional biological definitions of identity as well as norms of accepted behavior. The basis of his investigations is the anguish-ridden separation from the maternal, as experienced under diverse manifestations usually by male characters, and the irremediable solitude which then stretches over that …

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 …

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 …

What's In A Name: Elective Genealogy In Schwarz-Bart's Early Novels, Clarisse Zimra

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay considers the question of the textual inscription of history in Solitude, Plat de porc and Télumée, by focusing on a narrative feature present in all three: the naming scene, wherein characters claim elective descent from a real historical figure, the pregnant mulatto woman, Solitude, captured and executed after the battle of Matouba in 1802 on Guadeloupe. Every Schwarz-Bart novel to date contains at least one scene, often several, staging this retelling of specifically Guadeloupean origins: the resistance to the reinstatement of slavery, and the ensuing tragedy on Matouba. In Un Plat de porc aux bananes vertes (1967), …

Inventing Antillean Narrative: Maryse Condé And Literary Tradition, Leah D. Hewitt

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

As a Guadeloupean black woman novelist, Maryse Condé highlights the tensions in Caribbean culture between traditional and modern values, among ethnic groups, and between the sexes. She combines a representative view of an Antillean writer's specific concerns with a postmodern view of literature as multicultural, polymorphous intersection. The opening portion of this essay argues that Condé's personal literary trajectory embodies a general process of identity formation in post colonial literature, one that passes from the alienation of the individual, to the affirmation of collective movements and positive models, and finally, to a critical, playful outlook in which identities are continually …

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 …

The Dialectics Of The Archaic And The Post-Modern In Maghrebian Literature Written In French, Hédi Abdel-Jaouad

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Maghrebian literature written in French has been since its inception a literature of and about the abyss. For the Maghrebian the abyss is esentially the space of modernity, that forbidden citadel of art, science and technology from which s/he was excluded and marginalized. Recently, writing of/in French has become the site/scene of a polemos between the archaic (identity) and the post-modern (difference).

Our study of the archaic focuses on cultural, literary and critical knowledge and centers around two main themes: that of a beginning, that is a search for events in the past that explain the abyss (or retardation vis-à-vis …

`Boy!': The Hinge Of Colonial Double Talk, Anne M. Menke

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The French colonial enterprise in Africa enforced racial segregation, yet encouraged Africans to assimilate the French language, culture, and religion. The essay questions these contradictory policies through readings of Ferdinand Oyono's novels. It argues that a figure that embodies undecidability—the colonial servant known as the "boy"—is the locus of the denaturalization of the identities that were simultaneously institutionalized and denied by the Manichaean colonial world.

The Writer's Identity As Self-Dismantling Text In Julien Green's Si J'Étais Vous. . ., Robert Ziegler

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Written between 1944 and 1946, Julien Green's novel Si j'étais vous . . . is one of the author's most fantastic and enigmatic texts, having generated interpretations ranging from the Freudian to the theological. Yet certain central features of the text have not yet been addressed and may lead to a different approach, one focusing on the problem of the writer's identity in his works. Despite the fact that his literary efforts are unsuccessful, Fabien is shown as being a writer like Green himself, but more importantly, he is a character in another writer's fiction. As metatext, Green's novel describes …

Exile In Language, Peter Baker

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Saint-John Perse's poem Exil (1941) represents a deep meditation on the nature of "writing" as subsequent critical theory has developed that term. Though the poem seems to present a "signature" at the end, it may be that the poet through giving in to a radically different signifying practice is in some sense not the signatory of the text. The archaic setting and difficult-to-resolve cultural matrix from this perspective become means of examining the co-originary origins of thought and language. Close analysis of textual patterns reveals a composition practice based on anagrammatic patterning. This kind of questioning of language in the …

André Frénaud's Plural Voice, Roger Little

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Dramatic self-projection and the use of recurrent or occasional personae are features manifest in André Frénaud's poetry. One also notes a tendency to multiply unique phenomena. Furthermore, the medium of his poetry displays huge variety in form and tone. This study reviews a selection of these interacting characteristics and investigates their relationship to the poet, who represents the unity beneath the diversity, but whose self proves versatile in its exploration of world, word and identity through the revealing ventriloquy of plural voices.

Black And White, Massimo Cacciari

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Black and White

The Dialogue Of Absence, Richard Stamelman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Dialogue of Absence

Space And Salvation In Colette's Chéri And La Fin De Chéri, Ann Leone Philbrick

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Colette's critics often seem to dismiss all but her autobiographical creatures as whimsical and inarticulate. Her characters are frequently less eloquent than the spaces they create and inhabit; this observation offers an approach to Chéri and La Fin de Chéri that invites us to read them as two of Colette's most ambitious and authentic works. Here are stories of compromises with the containers of one's life and identity: streets, salons, boudoirs, and, ultimately, the body. Indeed, the self and its containers function symbiotically. Chéri makes no effort to direct this relationship, and kills himself when the world finally seems inscrutable …

Narrative Finality, Armine Kotin Mortimer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The cloturai device of narration as salvation represents the lack of finality in three novels. In De Beauvoir's Tous les hommes sont mortels an immortal character turns his story to account, but the novel makes a mockery of the historical sense by which men define themselves. In the closing pages of Butor's La Modification, the hero plans to write a book to save himself. Through the thrice-considered portrayal of the Paris-Rome relationship, the ending shows the reader how to bring about closure, but this collective critique written by readers will always be a future book. Simon's La Bataille de …