Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"Appreciation" (Translated By Jerry Mirskin And Michel Sirvent), Jean Ricardou

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Appreciation (translated by Jerry Mirskin and Michel Sirvent)

Translator's Forward And Commentary: "Appreciation" By Jean Ricardou, Michel Sirvent

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Translator's Forward and Commentary: "Appreciation" by Jean Ricardou

Hinduism In Animal De Fondo By Juan Ramón Jimenez, Christine Steffen

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Animal de fondo (1949), by Juan Ramón Jimenez, is an enigmatic and joyous recounting of a mystical trance which the poet experienced during a sea voyage from New York to Buenos Aires in 1948. This essay approaches the poems from the perspective of classic Hindu religious traditions. The conciencia frequently used by Juan Ramón to express integration with the natural world is analogous to Brahman, the all-pervading reality which for the Vedic poets includes everything from the life of man to sticks and stones. The apparent polytheism of Animal de fondo echoes Vedic hymns, which deify many important social and …

Gardens Of Delight, Or What's Cookin'? Leonora Carrington In The Kitchen, Sonia Assa

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Most of the short stories written between the years 1937 and 1941 by Leonora Carrington, a Surrealist painter and story-teller, are centered around an eating scene: "une scène" and/or "cène." Few of her stories fail to include an allusion to eating, and more often to devouring, while the food in question is seldom "innocent." The experience of the body or "corps propre" as represented in her narratives, is that of a body eating/being eaten, a place of culinary alchemies which is also manipulated, or manipulates itself, in order to exercise control over the outside world. In this fictional realm dominated …

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 …

Selective Bibiography Of Critical Essays On Ricardou's Works, Michel Sirvent

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Selective Bibiography of Critical Essays on Ricardou's Works, compiled by Michel Sirvent

Jean Ricardou: A Bibliography, Michel Sirvent

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Jean Ricardou: A Bibliography, compiled by Michel Sirvent

Interview: "How To Reduce Fallacious Representative Innocence, Word By Word" (Response To A Questionnaire By Michel Sirvent), Jean Ricardou

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Interview: "How to Reduce Fallacious Representative Innocence, Word by Word" (response to a questionnaire by Michel Sirvent)

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 …

Review Essays, Various Authors

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Awareness and Amnesia: Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction, by Malcolm Bowie. Mary Lydon

The Modernist Novel in Spain. Transparent Simulacra: Spanish Fiction 1902-1906, by Robert Spires. Roberta Johnson

Staging the End of Individualism: Sloterdijk's Postmetaphysical Dramaturgy. Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche's Materialism, by Peter Sloterdijk. Alan D. Schrift

Introduction, Claire L. Dehon

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Introduction to the special issue on Africa: Literature and Politics

Chinua Achebe And The Post-Colonial Esthetic: Writing, Identity, And National Formation, Simon Gikandi

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Chinua Achebe is recognized as one of Africa's most important and influential writers, and his novels have focused on the ways in which the European tradition of the novel and African modes of expression relate to each other in both complementary and contesting ways. Achebe's novels are informed by an important theory of writing which tries to mediate the politics of the novel as a form of commentary on the emergence and transformation of nationalism which constitutes the African writer's epistemological context. Achebe's esthetic has been overdetermined by the changing discourse on representation and national identity in colonial and post-colonial …

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 …

Autobiographical Authority And The Politics Of Narrative, Renée Larrier

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Autobiographical narratives, which include autobiography, autobiographical novel, memoir, and chronicle, constitute a major genre in African francophone literature. Informed by history, they do not celebrate personal accomplishment, but rather accentuate the group experience. These self-stories rely on realistic representation in order to document events for future generations and function to correct stereotypical misconceptions—therein lies their political consciousness.

Writing Double: Politics And The African Narrative Of French Expression, John D. Erickson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay studies two African narratives of French expression (Le Temps de Tamango of Boubacar Diop and L'Enfant de sable of Tahar ben Jelloun) to see how they create a discourse of difference that challenges and deconstructs the conventions of the discursive system of French, its signifying practices, and its ideological underpinnings. The tactics of these narratives, which mark them as post-colonial in a strict sense (as opposed to neo-colonial), are productive of a radical other-meaning, a new meaning that "speaks" to the concerns of and problems confronting the non-Western writer.

Oligarchy And Orature In The Novels Of Nuruddin Farah, Derek Wright

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In Farah's fiction Somali oral traditions are shown to possess a resilient strength and even a revolutionary vitality. Yet they are not envisaged polemically, as unsullied alternatives and sources of counter-discourse to post-colonial realities: rather, they are shown to be implicated in their evils and corruptions. Faced with a mode of reality built on oral discourse, where the written word is ruthlessly suppressed, written texts either retreat into secret cipher or are themselves infiltrated by the vaporous oral reality of public life and take on selected elements of oral literary conventions: notably, their fluid indeterminacy of meaning and interpretative openness, …

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 …

The Political Alienation Of The Intellectual In Recent Zairian Fiction, Janice Spleth

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

A high proportion of recent Zairian fiction features intellectuals—educators, priests, students, and professionals—as major characters who are in some way alienated from society. This study documents the extent of this occurrence in novels by Mbwil a Mpang Ngal, V. Y. Mudimbe, Bolya Baenga, and Pius Ngandu Nkashama and, at the same time, relates the situation of the intellectual as seen in these works to some of the social and political factors peculiar to Zaire's colonial history and post-independence evolution. Analyses of individual novels provide the basis for a discussion of Belgian colonial policies regarding the évolué, the ambiguous role …

The Politics Of Exile: Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy, Gay Wilentz

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint is a relentless attack on the notions of exile as relief from the societal constraints of national development and freedom to live in a cultural environment conducive to creativity. In this personalized prose/poem, Aidoo questions certain prescribed theories of exile (including the reasons for exile)—particularly among African men. The novel exposes a rarely heard viewpoint in literature in English—that of the African woman exile. Aidoo's protagonist Sissie, as the "eye" of her people, is a sojourner in the "civilized" world of the colonizers. In this article, I examine …

Agostinho Neto: Pure Poetic Discourse And Mobilization Rhetoric, Janis L. Pallister

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Neto's importance in relationship to the modern genre we will call militant or guerilla poetry and his considerable poetic gifts as well call for a mainstreaming of his literary contributions. "Protest poetry" might more aptly describe his oeuvre; the term is certainly a somewhat better representation of his content than "guerilla poetry" or "poetry of combat." But whatever word is used to sum up that content, in the article on Neto one sees contextually how this talented poet fuses his ideologies with his structures, and intertextually how he avoids the diatribes, the invective and the stereotypically strident rhetoric of most …

Nadine Gordimer: The White Artist As A Sport Of Nature, Barbara Temple-Thurston

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article applies principles of new historicism to show that A Sport of Nature can be read as Gordimer's attempt to persuade South African artists to reject mere protest art and to shift art beyond the trap of oppositional forces in South Africa's history today. The text calls instead—via fiction and the imagination—for a new post-apartheid art that will generate creative possibilities for a future South Africa. Gordimer's protagonist, Hillela Capran, is read as a metaphor for the white South African artist who, like Hillela, struggles for an authentic identity and meaningful role in the evolving history of South Africa. …

Reviews Of Recent Publications, Various Authors

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, by John Barberet

Asunción Horno-Delgado, Eliana Ortega, Nina M. Scott, and Nancy Saporta Sternbach, eds., Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings, by Amy Kaminsky

Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions, by Rosemarie Scullion

Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology, by Jane Riles Thomas

Colin Davis, Michel Tournier: Philosophy and Fiction, by Marja Warehine

Didier Coste, Narrative as Communication, by Armine Kotin Mortimer

Jean-Jacques Thomas, La Langue, la poésie. Essais sur la poésie française contemporaine, …

`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.