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On The Matter Of Prepositions: Peter De Bona's The Discourse Of The Sublime, Fran Bartkowski

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review Essay. On the Matter of Prepositions: Peter de Bona's The Discourse of the Sublime

Intertextuality And Subversion: Poems By Ana Rossetti And Amparo Amorós, Andrew P. Debicki

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the last two decades, a number of Spanish women poets have written very significant works which use intertextuality to lead their readers into new perspectives and attitudes toward literary and social conventions. By examining two texts by Rossetti and Amorós that use intertexts to undermine, respectively, traditional "carpe diem" poetry and sexually allusive verse of different kinds, the article suggests that they reflect new, post-modern literary currents.

The Dangers Of Gullible Reading: Narrative As Seduction In García Márquez' Love In The Time Of Cholera, M. Keith Booker

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera has frequently been read largely as a beautiful love story involving the lifelong fascination of Florentino Ariza with Fermina Daza and the eventual consummation of that fascination. Meanwhile, the text gains much of its energy from an opposition between the poetic romanticism of Ariza and the practical (though somewhat sinister) scientific thinking of Dr. Juvenal Urbino, Fermina's longtime husband. However, this opposition is not nearly as simple as it might appear, Ariza and Urbino being just as susceptible to the narrative of scientific progress as Ariza is to bad poetry, and …

The Difficulty Of Saying "I": Translation And Censorship Of Christa Wolf's Der Geteilte Himmel, Katharina Von Ankum

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The end of the GDR in 1990 triggered a vivid literary debate in Germany which focused on the interrelationship of politics, literature, and criticism. In this context, the work of Christa Wolf was attacked as primary example of self-censorship and collaboration. In my article, I argue that Wolf became the target of literary criticism largely because of her attempt to express female subjectivity in her texts. In my contrastive analysis of Der geteilte Himmel (1963) and its English translation (1965), I read Wolf's text as an initial attempt at a "socialist modernism." The continued value of this and subsequent works …

Rehearsals In Bas Relief: Le Marin De Gibraltar Of Marguerite Duras, Mechthild Cranston

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

With the publication of her first L'Amant in 1984, Marguerite Duras became an instant international best-seller. Seven years later, L'Amant de la chine du Nord received widespread media attention on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet Duras' early work remains virtually unknown to the educated reader here and abroad. Passed off in the Twayne volume on Duras as an imitation of Hemingway, Le Marin de Gibraltar, 1952, has never recovered from that first summary dismissal. The present essay reads Le Marin in light of Kristevan analysis, and attempts to show how the early novel foreshadows Duras' mature oeuvre.

Sounding Out The Silence Of Gregor Samsa: Kafka's Rhetoric Of Dys-Communication, Robert Weninger

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Through his transformation, Gregor Samsa, rather than simply silencing himself, allows his repressed voice to be heard palimpsestically in the language of his family and the boarders. His story is one of inverted—rather than aborted—communication. An analogous inversion governs the relationship between Kafka and his father and Kafka and his interpreters. As a child, Kafka could make little sense of his father's rules and his contradictory actions; later, he reduplicates in his writings this grammar of "dys-communication." Our puzzled and often frustrated reactions to Kafka's texts can therefore be seen to mirror his equally puzzled and frustrated reactions to his …

Simulacra, Symbolic Exchange And Technology In Michel Tournier's La Goutte D'Or, David W. Price

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In La Goutte d'Or, Michel Tournier offers a critique of Western culture by constructing a novel that reflects both Jean Baudrillard's theories of simulacra and the political economy of the sign and Martin Heidegger's meditations on technology. Tournier's novel explores the relationship between Heidegger's explanation of technology as an act of Enframing (Ge-stell) and Baudrillard's description of an economy based upon exchange-sign value. Thus, through La Goutte d 'Or, Michel Tournier depicts the violent confrontation between a symbolic exchange economy based on poietic acts and late capitalist economies of autonomized signs.

Desire, Duplicity And Narratology: Boris Vian's L 'Ecume Des Jours, Charles J. Stivale

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In this examination of Boris Vian's L'Ecume des jours, I call into question the masculinist resistance to criticism of Vian and his works through a critical counter-resistance from a feminist narratological perspective. In order to examine the implications of "narrative desire" for understanding textual and sexual difference, I argue for a narratology that develops the concept of textual "seduction" as a question of narrative duplicity. I undertake this "re-reading" not merely from the perspective of an "ideological unmasking," but also to suggest the possibility of a positive hermeneutic, or more precisely, the limits of such a move given inherent …

Reviews Of Recent Publications, Various Authors

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Granqvist, Raoul, editor. Canonization and Teaching of African Literature. Matatu 7 by Claire L. Dehon

Margolis, Joseph. Texts Without Referents: Reconciling Science and Narrative by David J. Depew

Keitel, Evelyne. Reading Psychosis, Readers, Texts and psychoanalysis by Reinhild Steingrover

Shaviro, Steven. Passion and excess: Blanchot, Bataille, and Literary Theory by Steven Ungar

Kellner, Douglas. Jean Baudrillard From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond by Allan Stoeld

Pecorora, Vincent P. Self & Form in Modern Narrative by Walter A. Strauss

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

Motard-Noar, Martine. Les Fictions d'Hélène Cixous. Une autre lanque de …

The Oldest Trick In The Book: Borges And The "Rhetoric Of Immediacy'', James Winchell

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In his most "philosophical'' texts, Jorge Luis Borges paradoxically posits the act of reading as the scene of affectively "immediate" experience: his reader reads a reader reading (ad infinitum). This sort of hyper-meditated, specular imitation actually comes to mirror the substantive preoccupation of the "philosophical" text itself. Borges thereby breaks down what Theodor Adorno calls "concept fetishism'' by making mimesis his textual concept. Given Italo Calvino's claim for the novelty of "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" in relation to modern genres, I propose a two-fold thesis: first, that this typically Borgesian narrative juxtaposes concept and mimesis (a traditional …

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 …

From Exile To Affirmation: The Poetry Of Joseph Brodsky, David Patterson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article examines the relation between the exile of the poet from his homeland and the "exile of the word." The notion of the exile of the word pertains to the poet's problem of re-introducing meaning to the word—an excess of meaning that conveys more than the word can normally convey—through his poetry. Showing how the poet in exile becomes a poet of exile, the article examines what poetry has to do with a larger difficulty of exile and homelessness in human life. Brodsky's poetry, the article argues, addresses this very difficulty. The article concludes that the human capacity to …

Partial Interpretations And Company: Beckett, Foucault, Et Al. And The Author Question, Jim Hicks

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay examines recent debate on the status of the author in contemporary literature by means of an extended analysis of Samuel Beckett's Company. A number of critical responses to the Beckett text— Wayne Booth's reading in The Rhetoric of Fiction is taken as symptomatic—are criticized for their recuperation of the author-function in a text which moves beyond such well-wom routes of inquiry. Company is read as an inevitably incomplete attempt to read "anachronistically," i.e. to expand (and contract) story, discourse, and discursive positions starting from the necessary fiction of a present-tense (from, to cite Gilles Deleuze, "il y …

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), …

Reading/Writing Women In Myriam Warner-Vieyra's Juletane, Bella Brodzki

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Voicelessness, alienation, confinement, deracination, rupture, exclusion, madness and exile: the thematic preoccupations of Myriam Warner-Vieyra's Juletane are familiar to readers of francophone Caribbean women's writing. The legacy of slavery and 20th century departmentalization have produced a complex politics of identity, whose points of reference and sites of longing—though privileged in a variety of ways in the psyches of Caribbean subjects—are Africa and France. The orphaned protagonist Juletane seeks love in Africa in the heady days before Independence. Warner-Vieyra uses the device of the fictional first-person journal mode to examine Juletane's disillusionment as well as the interplay of colonially-produced cultural differences …

Mimetic Faces: On Luiz Costa Lima's The Control Of Imaginary, Alberto Moreiras

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Mimetic Faces: On Luiz Costa Lima's The Control of Imaginary

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 …

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 …

Private Life And Collective Experience In Quebec: The Autobiographical Project Of France Théoret, Mary Jean Green

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In her study of women's autobiographical writing, Carolyn Heilbrun contends that women's authorship has been most hindered by the lack of narrative structures adequate to the telling of women's experience. She further suggests that female narrative will be found as women talk together, exchange stories, and move toward a collective understanding of self. In recent years, the interplay of women's voices has assumed new importance in women's writing, and specifically in women's life/writing in French. Perhaps beginning with Simone de Beauvoir's feminist classic, The Second Sex, where the words of hundreds of other women are woven into the text …

Reviews Of Recent Publications, Various Authors

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Sagan Gubar. Blindspots of an Old Dream of Equality: Liberal Feminism as Exclusionary Practice in No Man's Land