Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Böll And The Burgundians: Myth And The (Re)Construction Of The German Nation , David N. Coury

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Since its "rediscovery" by the Romantics, the Nibelungenlied has evolved not only into the German national epic, but has come to be synonymous with Germany and "Germanness." After the misappropriation of the saga by the Nazis, the myth, as well as the themes associated with it had become tainted, like all things heralded for their "Germanic" nature, in the immediate post-war era. One of the first writers in the post-war era to again explore the function of myth and recontextualize the saga was Heinrich Böll. Böll set about to reexamine the mythic elements of the story and did so by …

The "Incongruous Stranger" As Structural Element In The Novels Of Elsa Triolet, Lorene M. Birden

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In Language in Literature, Roman Jakobson underlines the presence of a certain device, which he calls he superfluous passerby, in Russian realist literature. This element has traveled into French literature with a Russian-born expatriate novelist. Several works by Eisa Triolet present this type of character, and extend the device structurally. In this device a character can provoke a new development in plot or character relations. Such a character has no direct relationship to the characters or events portrayed. Therefore, as opposed to classic novelistic perspective, this incongruous and unknown character shifts and blurs characterial hierarchy. The superfluous passerby displaces …

Modern Literature And Christianity: The Religious Issue In Lucien Rebatet's Les Deux Étendards , Pascal A. Ifri

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Although Lucien Rebatet's Les Deux étendards (The Two Standards) has been hailed by a number of critics as one of the best novels written in France since World War II, it is surrounded by a wall of silence because its author actively supported the Nazi movement before and during the war. Yet the novel does not deal with politics but with love, art, and religion. Based on real events, it is the story of a love triangle involving Michel, who has lost his Catholic faith, Régis, who studies to become a Jesuit priest, and Anne-Marie, a young student who shares …

Passion Simple And Madame, C'Est À Vous Que J'Écris: "That's My Desire" , Elizabeth Richardson Viti

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

No two texts better exemplify the contemporary "he said, she said" phenomenon than Annie Ernaux's Passion simple and Alain Gérard's Madame, c'est à vous que j'écris. Ernaux's book, published in 1991, recounts the author's heretofore hidden affair with a foreign businessman living temporarily in France, and Gérard's, published four years later, is an explicit response in which the writer, dissatisfied with Ernaux's account, assumes the lover's identity and chronicles events from his perspective. The result is a literary "tac à tac" very much in the public eye in which a man and woman both wish to tell their side …

Postcards From Venice: Life And The City In Paul Morand's Venises , Kimberly Philpot Van Noort

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Paul Morand's 1971 book Venises leads the reader on a labyrinthine path not only through the various manifestations of the city of Venice and of the life of the author that it presents, but also through the slippery experience of referentiality as the text engulfs the reader in proper names. This article traces Morand's simultaneous construction and destruction of the notion of a referential self as he pieces together his life in and around the city of Venice. By exploiting the complementary genres of autobiography and travel writing, Morand creates a dialogue between the city and the self, an exchange …

Rachid Boudjedra's Representations Of Terrorism: Le Vainqueur De Coupe And La Vie À L'Endroit , Lynne D. Rogers

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Contemporary fiction either idealizes or demonizes the terrorist as a cultural figure of collective values. In his two contemporary novels, Le vainqueur de coupe and La vie à l'endroit, Rachid Boudjedra, an Algerian novelist, renders two very distinct narratives although both center around terrorist activity and a major sporting event. The first novel is a sympathetic portrait of a young Algerian who gives up his studies to become part of L'Organization. Sentenced to life imprisonment, the young man becomes an international hero. Le vainqueur de coupe offers an explanation for understanding terrorism. In the second novel, La Vie à …

Bataille's "The Solar Anus" Or The Parody Of Parodies , Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Bataille uses parody in "The Solar Anus" to attack the concepts underpinning Cartesian, Hegelian, Romantic and Surrealist discourses. Each one of these discourses lays claim to an impossible achievement: that of arriving at a "total identification," whereby the subject attempts to embrace a "transcendent whole." Bataille uses his parodic cosmogony in "The Solar Anus" to subvert these discourses, showing them to be incapable of exhausting the subject of their study. On another level as well, Bataille's "Solar Anus" challenges any attempt at parody. Within the context of his global parody, each target of parody is itself parodic of another target, …

(Ef)Facing The Face Of Nationalism: Wrestling Masks In Chicano And Mexican Performance Art , Robert Neustadt

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Masks serve as particularly effective props in contemporary Mexican and Chicano performance art because of a number of deeply rooted traditions in Mexican culture. This essay explores the mask as code of honor in Mexican culture, and foregrounds the manner in which a number of contemporary Mexican and Chicano artists and performers strategically employ wrestling masks to (ef)face the mask-like image of Mexican or U.S. nationalism. I apply the label "performance artist" broadly, to include musicians and political figures that integrate an exaggerated sense of theatricality into their performances. Following the early work of Roland Barthes, I read performances as …

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Alonso, Carlos J. The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish America Reviewed by Melvin S. Arrington, Jr.

Kolocotroni, Vassiliki, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou, eds, Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents Reviewed by Gerd Bayer

Motte, Warren. Small Worlds: Minimalism in Contemporary French Literature Reviewed by William Cloonan

Melton, Judith M. The Face of Exile: Autobiographical Journeys Reviewed by Claude P. Desmarais

Redding, Arthur. Raids on Human Consciousness: Writing, Anarchism, and Violence Reviewed by Gail Finney

Chambers, Ross. Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author Reviewed by Melissa A. Fitch

Marx-Scouras, Danielle. …

Crossing Laterally Into Solidarity In Montserrat Fontes's Dreams Of The Centaur , J. Douglas Canfield

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Fontes's novel begins with a corrido announcing typical themes of murder and revenge. But the novel has from the outset been interimplicated in a history of the persecution of the Yoeme (Yaquis) at the turn into the twentieth century. Its three main protagonists become mavericks on the border, as they cross ultimately not only into safety in Arizona but into solidarity with the oppressed. Such crossings are existential, resulting in new identities that eschew racial or ethnic purity but instead embrace mixed ethnicity, or mestizaje (to borrow key concepts from Anzaldúa). Such crossings are lateral, non-hierarchic. But Fontes does not …

Fan Letters To The Cultural Industries: Border Literature About Mass Media, Claire Fox

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The concentration of the Mexican and U.S. cultural industries in cities outside of the border region and the intermittent outsourcing of Hollywood movies to production facilities in Baja, California, have had a marked impact on the literary practice of "fronterizo" 'border' intellectuals. This essay discusses the theme of the cinema in three narratives by authors from the U.S.-Mexico border region: "Hotel Frontera" ("Border Hotel"), by Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, "Canícula," by Norma Elia Cantú, and "The Magic of Blood," by Dagoberto Gilb. These narratives provide ethnographic information about the reception of nationally distributed mass media in the border region; at the …

Introduction , Charles Tatum

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Contemporary cultural critics have theorized the multiple aspects of "location" in many different ways…

"Pesadillas De La Noche, Amanecer De Silencio": Miguel Méndez And Margarita Oropeza, Debra A. Castillo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In many border-related discussions—whether philosophical, anthropological, critical, or fictional—there are typical themes or narrative tics: allusions to the flexible geography that makes the border region both an isolated territory and an analogue for the postmodern condition, the puzzlement over how to understand the role of the "maquiladoras" 'assembly plants' and the area's industrial boom, the awareness of a vast movement of people both north and south, a persistent and nagging phobia about feminization, and about female sexuality. In this paper I will explore these concerns with reference to two novels: Arizonan Miguel Méndez's well-known 1974 novel Peregrinos de Aztlán (Pilgrims …

Crossing The Great Divide: Rewritings Of The U.S.-Mexican Encounter In Walter Abish And Richard Rodríguez , Maarten Van Delden

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In a 1978 essay on the relationship between Mexico and the United States, Octavio Paz suggested that the two countries were separated by a "perhaps insuperable" divide. Yet two recent works—Richard Rodríguez's collection of essays Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (1992) and Walter Abish's novel Eclipse Fever (1993)—offer evidence of a changing outlook on the U.S.-Mexican encounter. Abish and Rodríguez build upon the storehouse of images of the irreconcilable differences between the two nations. However, insofar as they play with and question these images, they draw attention to the unstable, fluctuating nature of the U.S.-Mexican encounter …

Running The United States-Mexican Border: 1909 Through The Present , Gary D. Keller

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

A very large number of films have been and continue to be made about the border by both the United States and Mexican film industries. This is due primarily to the highly unusual nature of the United States-Mexico border itself, and because of various factors ranging from the Mexican Revolution of 1910, to the emergence of Westerns as the primary product of the United States film industry, and other economic, sociocultural, and technological reasons. This study is dedicated to an overview of the border films and strives to explain some of the major cultural, technological, historical, and economic factors that …

Identity At The Border: Narrative Strategies In María Novaro's El Jardín Del Edén And John Sayles's Lone Star , Amy Kaminsky

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In María Novaro's El jardín del Edén and John Sayles's Lone Star, the narrative and visual art of film functions as ritual does: to make sense of the dangerous liminal space of the border. Novaro and Sayles both locate their protagonists' identity quests in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands, but they approach the problem from different directions: Sayles from the north, Novaro from the south; Sayles from the perspective of men in search of themselves through their fathers, Novaro from that of women in search of identity with the help of each other. With her focus on the stories of three …

To Arrive Is To Begin: Benjamin Sáenz's Carry Me Like Water And The Pilgrimage Of Origin In The Borderlands , Alberto López Pulido

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay examines the "pilgrimage of origin" as presented in Benjamin Sáenz's novel Carry Me Like Water. As is the case with other ethnic literature, Carry Me Like Water teaches us that we must first go back before we can move forward and transform our lives. By pilgrimage of origin I make reference to a journey where participants are required to return to the past and the familiar. Unlike the more commonly described linear pilgrimage experience where participants are required to travel beyond the range of their familiar space, the pilgrimage of origin obligates participants to return to their …

Borders Of The Self In Alfredo Véa's The Silver Cloud Café , Roberto Cantú

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

I am proposing an analysis of a novel by Alfredo Véra, Jr., The Silver Cloud Café (1996). As the author of a narrative trilogy that includes La Maravilla (1993), and Gods Go Begging (1999), Véa has produced, in The Silver Cloud Café, a novel that is central to the trilogy's interpretation. In my analysis, I discuss how Véa's novels question borders of the self—understood as ethnic or racial—through notions of a personal education (in La Maravilla, Alberto's; in The Silver Cloud Café, Zeferino's) in which characters count on the pedagogical guidance of Yaqui shamans, manongs from the …

John Rechy: Bodies And Souls And The Homoeroticization Of The Urban Quest, David William Foster

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

It has been difficult for John Rechy to become established in the canon of Chicano literature, in large part because of the homophobia that held sway during the formative period of Chicano literary criticism. However, now recognized as a founding figure of U.S. homoerotic writing, Rechy is also widely recognized as important to the Chicano literary tradition. This study focuses on the importance of Rechy less as a gay writer than to explore the ways in which his great Los Angeles novel, Bodies and Souls (1983), explores the conflicts between sexuality and the emotionally and physically deadening effects of modern …

Reading The Other Side Of The Story: Ominous Voice And The Sociocultural And Political Implications Of Luis Spota's Murieron A Mitad Del Río , Francisco Manzo-Robledo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

It is always contoversial to proclaim a literary work, at face value, as a sociocultural study of a particular society. It is even more controversial when one deals with a hybrid work, combining factors from two completely distinct societies. Yet, there are some literary works that seem to call for exactly this type of analysis, presenting a range of ideas which in retrospect reveal origins of significant sociocultural trends. Such is the case of Luis Spota's Murieron a mitad del río (1948). This novel presents a panorama of ancestral problems in the life of thousands of immigrants and inhabitants of …

Border Crossings: Images Of The Pachuco In Mexican Literature, Javier Durán

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This study suggests that an analysis of the image of the pachuco in Mexican literature can provide useful insights about the role and position of subaltern expressions as they become integrated into a larger mapping of cultural production. The paper argues that the pachuco's representation in Mexican culture undergoes a series of transformations that ultimately materialize in a symbolic entity which functions as a buffer mechanism of inclusion and/or exclusion. The pachuco is then a contra modern element that becomes de-territorialized from both Mexican and U.S. culture due to its aesthetic and linguistic hybridity which becomes a menace for essentialist …

Hybridity And The Space Of The Border In The Writing Of Norma Elia Cantú, Ellen Mccracken

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The creative and scholarly writing of Norma Elia Cantú focuses centrally on the tensions of borders that are eroding yet firmly in place. Cantú's border pivots on the geographic space in which Mexico and the United States physically intersect, yet she probes at the same time several of the other tenuous cultural borders that postmodernity has brought into focus. Transcending distinctions between genres, languages, and cultures, Cantú undertakes innovative genre hybridity, visual-verbal hybridity, and the recombination of distinct cultural codes. Whether writing cultural criticism, autobioethnography, creative fiction, or poetry, Cantú locates herself at the intersection of the geographical and epistemological …

Hegemony And Identity: The Chicano Hybrid In Francisco X. Alarcón's Snake Poems , George Hartley

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Snake Poems renegotiates power relations between the discourse of Spanish imperialism and Aztec poetic practice. Alarcón's extended poem enacts a process of ethnic, cultural, and spiritual identification through a confrontation between texts—Alarcón's original poems, passages of commentary from the Spanish Inquisitor Hernando Ruíz de Alarcón's treatise on Aztec spells and invocations, and the Aztec spells themselves in the original Náhuatl, the Aztec language. Each of these three layers of text represents a unique and competing people, ideology, and culture, and it is the clash and the hybrid fusion of these distinct discourses that Alarcón the poet stages in Snake Poems …