Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Boris Vian's American Movie: The Lost Authorship Of I Will Spit On Your Graves , M. Martin Guiney

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Boris Vian (1920-1959) is today considered one of France's foremost avant-garde novelists of the twentieth century, but in his lifetime he was known to a wide audience as the author of one work: J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (I Will Spit on Your Graves), a pastiche of American hard-boiled fiction which he published in 1946 under the name of a fictitious Black American author, Vernon Sullivan. Vian died twelve years later of heart failure while viewing the film adaptation, which he had no part in producing. Vian-as-author "died" long before that fateful moment, however: first when he perpetrated a …

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 …

A Tale Of Two Authors: Valenzuela And Borges , Sharon Magnarelli

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Although Luisa Valenzuela and Borges were friends for many years, it is only recently that we find traces of that friendship in her narrative. "La calesita" and "El otro libro," published in 1998 and 1999 respectively, evoke many of the elements we find in Borges's narrative. The latter story, which is the main focus of this study, employs nearly all the narrative elements we have come to associate with the Argentine master. Nonetheless, a single sign is changed as Borges's male characters are replaced by females in Valenzuela's work. The end result is a tribute to Borges but one that …

"What Exactly Is A Black?": Interrogating The Reality Of Race In Jean Genet's The Blacks , Debby Thompson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

On the dedication page of The Blacks, Genet writes "One evening an actor asked me to write a play for an all-black cast. But what exactly is a black? First of all, what's his color?" Prefiguring major issues and paradoxes of African American cultural studies today, The Blacks insists on the very real ways in which the black/white racial binary, like the very concept of race itself, is lived and socially enforced, and at the same time argues that the binary is ultimately a fiction, made real through performative reification. Genet's "clown show," ambiguously reversing the blackface minstrelsy tradition, …

Interview, Ghada Amer, French,, Fuencisla Zomeño

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This paper analyzes the influence of postmodernism in Paloma Díaz-Mas's feminist approach through two short stories, "The World According to Valdés," and "In Search of a Portrait." The political situation after Franco's death embraced democracy which allowed writers to pay more attention to intellectual concerns. Women writers steered the radical positions of the 1970s toward a more philosophical and intellectual analysis of reality and artistic expression during the eighties. In these two short stories, Díaz-Mas addresses women's issues by questioning the scope of modernist and humanist views. She criticizes the modernist concept of unity (text/identity) pointing out the discrimination that …

The Construction Of History In The Folds Of Family History In The Novel Song Lost In West Buenos Aires By María Rosa Lojo, Zulema Moret

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The novels written by María Rosa Lojo strongly reflect a specific preoccupation with the rewriting of history from new perspectives that are related to so-called postmodernism. This is the case with Canción perdida en Buenos Aires al Oeste (1987). This work attempts to articulate a reading of the "private" at a crossroads with the history of the country and of other countries (Argentina/Spain). It is a novel of exiles, from the exile of the Neira family from the Franco dictatorship in the forties to the particular exiles of each family member during the seventies and eighties in Argentina. From the …

Almost The Same, But Not Quite: Re-Orienting The Story Of The Subject In Christina Fernández Cubas's El Año De Gracia , Jessica A. Folkart

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Cristina Fernández Cubas's novel El año de Gracia (1985), about a young Spaniard who is shipwrecked on a deserted island with only a mangy shepherd for company, evokes the political dialectics of self/other found in the European's discovery and conquest of an unknown island in Robinson Crusoe. In Fernández Cubas's literary depiction of the European subject, however, she situates him on the margins of power in order to view the dynamic from a different perspective. The postcolonial theorizations of Edward Said and Homi Bhabha inform this analysis of how Fernández Cubas's castaway is at first overpowered by the other …

Hermann Hesse's Hegelianism: The Progress Of Consciousness Towards Freedom In The Glass Bead Game , John Krapp

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Hermann Hesse's novels commonly represent characters' struggles through ideological opposition and conflict towards resolution. The majority of his critics attribute Hesse's interest in, and expression of, this struggle to his lifelong study of Eastern philosophy. However, Hesse's interest in things Eastern need not be taken as the exclusive determinant of the theme of individuation represented in his fiction. This essay argues that Hesse's predilection for elaborating the ideological crises and resolutions of his characters may also be interpreted as reflecting the Western, Hegelian concept of an Absolute Spirit that proceeds through exhaustive dialectical permutations before it becomes conscious of its …

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Avelar, Idelber. The Untimely Present: Post-Dictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning by Herbert J. Brant

Bertharion, Jacques-Denis. Poetique de Georges Perec by Warren Motte