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An Anatomy Of Marginality: Figures Of The Eternal Return And The Apocalypse In Chilean Post-Dictatorial Fiction, Idelber Avelar

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The article analyzes two novels by Chilean writer Diamela Eltit from the standpoint of the post-dictatorial imperative to mourn the dead and reactivate collective memory. After framing Eltit's fiction in the context of the avant-garde resurgence of plastic and performance arts in the second half of Pinochet's regime, I move on to discuss Lumpérica (1983) and Los vigilantes (1994) as two different manifestations of the temporality of mourning. The article addresses how Lumpérica's portrayal of an oneiric, orgiastic communion in marginality (shared by the protagonist and a mass of beggars at a Santiago square) composed an allegory in the strict …

The Genesis Of La Desesperanza By José Donoso , Mary Lusky Friedman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This study analyzes the seven hundred pages of working notes made by the Chilean writer José Donoso as he created La desesperanza, his 1986 novel about the return of a Chilean exile to his homeland. These notes, made in two sustained working sessions, one in the year beginning in December 1980 and the other in the first eight months of 1985, reveal a particular modus operandi: intent on inventing characters who were believable and complex, Donoso subordinated every other aspect of the work—plot, technical considerations like point of view and register, and even the ideas the novel would …

Missing Persons: Cherokee's Parrot And Chatterton's Poet , Leonard R. Koos

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay explores the problematic nature of selfhood in the detective genre as established by Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) and most recently reformulated in two metaphysical detective novels, Jean Echenoz's Cherokee (1983) and Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton (1987). Poe's detective Auguste Dupin is described as having a "Bi-Part Soul," which permits him to vacate himself in order to construct the narrative solution to a crime. This duality, in the postmodern detective novel, is transformed into an irrevocable dislocation of the subject. Cherokee's onomastic devalorization of the story's characters and simulation of the human subject in the …

Dismantling Romantic Utopias: María Beneyto's Poetry Between Tradition And Protest , Candelas S. Gala

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Despite the fact that Vicente Aleixandre considered her one of the best young authors of the generation of social poets of the 1950s, María Beneyto's writings have been disregarded by critics. While sharing the social concerns of the other poets of her generation, Beneyto's poetry also reveals the dilemma of the woman author facing a cultural tradition that espouses pre-established models for her conduct and identity patterned mostly in accordance with tenets of Romanticism. Beneyto resorts to those models as projections of herself as she seeks to articulate her own identity as woman and author. The objective of this essay …

The Dialogic Self: Language And Identity In Annie Ernaux , Warren Johnson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The nine largely autobiographical texts that Annie Ernaux (1940- ) has published to date, which range stylistically from early strident outpourings to the willed transparency of an "écriture plate," all reveal the narrator as a patchwork subjectivity comprised of the discourses surrounding the child, adolescent, and adult against which she reacts, frequently without comprehending her own motivations. I try to unravel the strands that make up Ernaux's language and explore how the self that emerges is an aggregate of the discursive spaces she has inhabited. I trace as well how her gender identity impacts her capacity and willingness to struggle …

Of Genius And Epiphany: Schlafes Bruder, Das Parfum, And Babette's Feast, Nicholas Vazsonyi

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

At first sight, all three works under consideration—Schlafes Bruder (1992), Das Parfum (1985), and Babette's Feast (1950)—appear to conform to "postmodern" conventions, such as a rejection of logocentrism or a playful borrowing of pre-existing literary motifs and styles. However, all three works also revive the category of "natural genius," despite the twentieth-century rejection of romantic idealism in matters of aesthetics. Moreover, these "geniuses" create "masterpieces," which invariably trigger epiphanous moments for the untrained and unsuspecting audiences to whom they are presented. This is true even for the otherwise parody- and pastiche-filled Perfume, where the phenomenon of genius and …

Orientalism Reconsidered: Turkey In Barbara Frischmuth's Das Verschwinden Des Schattens In Der Sonne And Hanne Mede-Flock's Im Schatten Der Mondsichel, Petra Fachinger

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Recent German criticism has demonstrated that the relationships of Austria and Germany with the "Orient" have been more complex than Edward Said's Orientalism makes it appear. Furthermore, Said only touches upon gender issues. Studies like Rana Kabbani's Europe's Myths of Orient: Devise and Rule explore the convergence of race, class, and gender in the conceptualization of the "Orient." Kabbani claims that in Elias Canetti's Die Stimmen von Marrakesch the narrator's identification with the colonizer's position enters into his representation of self as much as does his gender. My essay demonstrates how the Austrian writer Barbara Frischmuth and the German writer …

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Lucile C. Charlebois. Understanding Camilo José Cela Reviewed by Jessica A. Folkart

Rainer Nägele. Echoes of Translation: Reading Between Texts Reviewed by Carol Jacobs

Siegfried Mews (ed.). A Bertolt Brecht Reference Companion Reviewed by Horst Lange

Suzanne Nalbantian. Æsthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin Reviewed by Laurence M. Porter

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...

Memory And Justice Abused: The 1949 Trial Of René Bousquet, Richard J. Golsan

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

On the morning of June 8, 1993, one Christian Didier arrived at 34 rue Raphael, a posh apartment building in Paris's sixteenth arrondissement and the residence of René Bousquet, former head of Vichy police…

Paris-Tel Aviv: Forgetting As Memory, Ora Avni

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The definition of collective identity has been at the heart of our fin de siècle's preoccupations...

Between Amnesia And Anamnesis: Re-Membering The Fractures Of Colonial History, Anne Donadey

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Greek word "anamnesis," a term used by several contributors to this section, means "remembrance," or going back (in time) through memory…

The State, The Writer, And The Politics Of Memory , Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In L'Histoire sous surveillance (History Under Surveillance) Marc Ferro refers to what he calls the "silences of official history"…

Mourning, Memorials, And Filmic Traces: Reinscribing The "Corps Strangers" And Unknown Soldiers In Bertrand Tavernier's Films, Panivong Norindr

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The tirailleurs indigènes, as cinematic figures, occupy an ex-centric place in contemporary French cinema...

Nations Of Writers , Réda Bensmaïa

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In a speech given at the first Algerian National Colloquium on Culture, M. Lacheraf, a Maghrebian historian and former Minister of National Education, addressed the question of minimal requirements for the development of a Maghrebian culture, asking the following question: "At what level already or yet to be reached, does a national culture cease to be mere entertainment and become as basic as the bread one eats and the air one breathes?"...

Anamnesis In The Language Of Writing , Assia Djebar

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

To write, to return to the body, or, at the very least, to the hand in motion…

Memory And Authenticity, Randolph Starn

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Ten years ago Natalie Davis and I decided to put together a special issue of Representations we would call "Memory and Counter-Memory…

The Ghosts Of Sigmaringen, Phillip Watts

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

There seem to be two ways to write about Sigmaringen, the German town where an incapacitated Vichy government landed in September 1944…

Unforgettable: History, Memory, And The Vichy Syndrome , Rosemarie Scullion

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In 1987, the French historian Henry Rousso formulated an interpretive model that has decisively influenced the directions and forms of inquiry scholars have pursued in relation to les années noires, the period between 1940 and 1944 during which France endured a catastrophic military defeat and four years of occupation by a neighboring fascist state...

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...