Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Craft Of Emotion In Isabel Allende's Paula , Susan Carvalho

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Isabel Allende's narrative, from her first novel The House of the Spirits (1982) through the most recent works, has often been branded as "sentimental..."

The Integration Of A Fragmented Self In The Works Of Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, Malva E. Filer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Literary creation is always a transposition of individual and collective experiences…

Violent Fathers And Runaway Sons: Colonial Relationships In Une Vie De Boy And Mission Terminée , Laurie Corbin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This study examines familial relationships in two novels published by Ferdinand Oyono and Mongo Beti shortly before Cameroon's independence in 1960, making use of three levels of analysis. The first shows the impact of colonization on familial and social structures, in particular the ways in which the weakening of the traditional hierarchy leads to the flight of young men from their families and villages. The second looks at the two novels as showing the relationship of France (who was often represented as a kindly parent to its colonies), the colonized countries, and their citizens: the unpredictable and brutal father can …

The Literal And The Literary: A Note On The Historical References In Isabel Allende's La Casa De Los Espíritus , Scott Macdonald Frame

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Stripped of much of its individuality as a piece of literature and relegated to the niche set aside for women's writing, Isabel Allende's La casa de los espíritus has sometimes wrongfully been critically condemned as a mere facsimile of García Màrquez's seminal Latin American novel. However, if critics were to reexamine La casa de los espíritus as a work of fiction in which its writer attempts to give voice to, and achieve personal closure of, historical events so tragically real for her, its comparisons with that "other" Latin American novel might be less frequent. This article contends that Allende uses …

The Construction Of The Other And The Self In André Gide's Travels In The Congo And Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks , Raphaël Lambert

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Reportedly, André Gide's Travels in the Congo (1929) had fostered reforms of the colonial policy in French Africa. In Travels, Gide reports cases of economic exploitation, abuses of power, use of terror, torture, and even homicidal raids against recalcitrant villagers and, at least in one case, Gide takes it upon himself to have a man prosecuted. Yet his account, through the lense of post-colonial thinking, betrays reactionary and biased views of Africans. Gide does not object to the colonial system per se, but rather blames its malfunction on both a lack of infrastructures and administrative involvement. In Black …

"Playing A Game Of Worlds": Postmodern Time And The Search For Individual Autonomy In Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire , Jill Leroy-Frazier

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article enters the ongoing critical debate surrounding Pale Fire, as to whether the apparent structure of the novel can be taken at face value. Do the central characters, John Shade and Charles Kinbote, constitute separate voices within the novel, as poet and commentator respectively, or is one in fact the fictional creation of the other? Arguing that the dispute arises out of a set of critical assumptions that negate at least some of the possible implications of Nabokov's own views of art's purpose and function, the essay asserts that Nabokov's disbelief in objective reality renders the entire Shade/Kinbote …

Malone Dies And The Beckettian Mimesis Of Inexistence , Eric P. Levy

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the novel, it is not so much that Malone dies as that a mimetic convention concerning the representation of life is terminated or, more precisely, terminally minimalized. Through this reduction of life, Beckettian mimesis is enabled to represent a mode of existence unencumbered by antecedent associations or presuppositions. As the "axioms" (MD 187) and conventions regarding the significance of life are debunked or decomposed, the mimesis of inexistence emerges. But as this state of inexis tence is riddled with paradoxes, an intellectual device is required to facilitate analysis of it. The device in question concerns what metaphysics terms "transcendentals," …

Restaging Hysteria: Mary Wigman As Writer And Dancer , Laura A. Mclary

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Mary Wigman was not only a leading proponent of the early twentieth-century Expressionist dance movement, but also a writer of poetry and short poetic prose. Despite her assertion that dance was beyond language, she wrote often about dance in an attempt to articulate the kinesthetic experience of dance through languages. This interdisciplinary study explores the intersection of dance and writing for Wigman, focusing on gender coding in writing and dance within the context of early twentieth-century dialogues. Despite the pervasive equation of (feminine) hysteria with dance and (masculine) subjectivity with authorship, Wigman engaged in both activities. I argue that Wigman …

The Violence Of Merging: Unica Zürn's Writing (On) The Body , Caroline Rupprecht

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article is about the work of German Surrealist Unica Zürn (1916-1970), known for her autobiographical text about madness, Der Mann im Jasmin: Eindrücke einer Geisteskrankheit (1977). The problem with Zürn's text, as this article demonstrates, is that it becomes nearly impossible to be distinguished from the author's life. Unlike conventional autobiographies, this text raises doubt oyer the sanity of the author who was not only diagnosed with schizophrenia but also made madness the subject of her writing. Zürn's companion, the artist Hans Bellmer, accused her of indulging in madness for the sake of being able to write about it; …

Review Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Bishop, Michael, ed. Women's Poetry in France, 1965-1995. by Martine Antle

Black, Stanley. Juan Goytisolo and the Poetics of Contagion: The Evolution of a Radical Aesthetic in the Later Novels by Bernardo Antonio González

Fachinger, Petra. Rewriting Germany from the Margins: "Other" German Literature of the 1980s and 1990s by Cornelius Partsch

Graham-Jones, Jean. Exorcising History: Argentine Theater under Dictatorship by Daniel Altamiranda

Wishnia, Kenneth J. Twentieth-Century Ecuadorian Narrative by Adelaida López de Martínez

Surreal And Canny Selves: Photographic Figures In Claude Cahun , Gayle Zachmann

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In her 1975 essay, Le Rire de la méduse, Hélène Cixous enthusiastically announced that it was high time for women to enter into discourse. A full half-century earlier, Claude Cahun (1894-1954), a powerful writer and a haunting photographer and artist, was already inscribing herself, Woman, and a woman's voice in visual and verbal self-portraits, photomontages, prose texts, poetry, and aesthetic and political treatises. Cahun's uncanny interventions in both verbal and visual discourse cannily interrogate conventions of literary and pictorial representation and the constructions of self, gender and culture that they exhibit. Insistently asking readers and spectators, "What's wrong with …

Academical Dress In The University Of Westminster, Philip Goff

Transactions of the Burgon Society

The following is the account of how the system of academical dress came into being, beginning with what Dr Avery wrote on the subject in his report to the Polytechnic of Central London Court of Governors’ sub-committee on university status, on 16 December 1991. [Excerpt].

The Poetics Of Visual Cubism: Guillaume Apollinaire On Pablo Picasso, Pamela A. Genova

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Guillaume Apollinaire, one of the most original poets of the early twentieth-century French avant garde, played a crucial role in the enunciation of modernist aesthetics. Through innovative poetic forms, Apollinaire set forth a new aesthetics which underscored the inherent ambiguity of an increasingly turbulent modern context. Apollinaire's interest in the pure dynamism of the contemporary material landscape, and his attraction to the image that explodes with immediate presence, also led him to a natural curiosity in the visual arts. Identifying with the Cubist mosaic style of inclusion, the juxtaposition of reality and imagination, and the simultaneity of spatial and …

Cocteau Au Cirque: The Poetics Of Parade And "Le Numéro Barbette" , Jennifer Forrest

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Parade (1917) was a joint effort production with libretto by Jean Cocteau music by Erik Satie, decor, costumes, and curtain by Pablo Picasso, and choreography by Léonide Massine. It was not only Cocteau's first truly original work, but, as Pierre Gobin contends, Parade is central to an understanding of the structures that would inform all of his subsequent work. Equally central, proposes Lydia Crowson, is Cocteau's July 1926 Nouvelle Revue Française article on "Le Numéro Barbette." The essay on the transvestite striptease trapezist Barbette offers a poetics of the theater that will have changed little by the time of his …

Aesthetic Deviation: Victor Segalen In China , Kimberley Healey

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Victor Segalen's early twentieth-century writings on China provide an alternative to nineteeth-century French literary exoticism. In his examination of the self and the other, much admired by postcolonial critics, he attempts to embrace a new aesthetics of diversity. Segalen's writing on the other opens the door to a jarring and heterogeneous aesthetic of exotic encounter by reevaluating the position of the European abroad as well as the literary forms used to depict the foreign. However, Segalen's encounters with difference as illustrated in his two main narratives on China, Equipée and René Leys, deviate from the desire for absolute difference …

Epiphanies At The Supermarket: An Interview With Brigitte Kronauer , Jutta Ittner

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Brigitte Kronauer has been called "the greatest German [female] fiction writer of our time" (Marcel Reich-Ranicki). Her stories, novels, and criticism have established her as a uniquely sophisticated literary voice and won her many literary prizes. Kronauer's trademarks are her laser-sharp vision, her luminous prose, and the intricate structures of her uncannily realistic literary universes. Finding the mystical in the mundane and exposing human foibles with subtle irony, Kronauer creates, in the words of one critic, epiphanies at the supermarket. Beneath its everyday surface her fiction deals with the eternal human questions of life, death, and love. At a still …

The Double Writing Of Agota Kristof And The New Europe , Martha Kuhlman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Agota Kristof, a native of Hungary who lives in Switzerland and writes in French, has written a trilogy of novels that explore the borderlines and fractured history of the "New Europe": The Notebook (1986), The Proof (1988), and The Third Lie (1991). Set in an unnamed Central European country, the novels traverse the three successive shocks of Nazism, Socialism, and Capitalism. Through the device of identical twin narrators, brothers Lucas and Claus, Kristof inscribes the story/history (histoire) with a "double writing" that opposes personal and official histories. But this opposition is not a simple one, for the two …

Theorizing The Role Of The Intermediary In Postcolonial (Con)Text: Driss Chraïbi's Une Enquête Au Pays , Anjali Prabhu

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The paper is a study of the role of the "intermediary" as exemplified by Inspector Ali in Driss Chraïbi's novel Une enquête au pays. This reading traces his role as the intermediary through a close reading of the construction of this space — between higher levels of administration, implying the more elite strata in Moroccan society, and the Berber peasants who live isolated in the mountains, struggling to subsist. Ali has claims to both of these locations: to the former through education and his position in the police force and to the latter through ancestry and the culture of …

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Aizenberg, Edna. Parricide on the Pampa? A New Study and Translation of Alberto Gerchunoffs "Los gauchos judíos" by Jan Mennell

Emerson, Caryl, ed. Critical Essays on Mikhail Bakhtin by Michael Barry

Finney, Gail. Christa Wolf by Stephen Brockmann

Hoeg, Jerry. Science, Technology, and Latin American Narrative in the Twentieth Century and Beyond by Paul Fallon

Mendez-Ramirez, Hugo. Neruda's Ekphrastic Experience: Mural Art and Canto general by Agustin Boyer

Perriam, Chris, Michael Thompson, Susan Frenk, and Vanessa Knights. A New History of Spanish Writing: 1939 to the 1990s by William Sherzer

Soto, Francisco. Reinaldo Arenas by Marina Llorente

Published Articles, Vols. 1 - 26

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

A list of articles in volumes 1 - 26.

"Drunken Boat": Samuel Beckett's Translation Of Arthur Rimbaud's "Le Bateau Ivre", Gerald M. Macklin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This paper scrutinizes Samuel Beckett's translation of Arthur Rimbaud's famous poem "Le Bateau ivre." After a short introductory section which outlines how Beckett's translation fortuitously reached the public domain through the endeavors of James Knowlson and Felix Leakey and then raises some of the main issues arising from this encounter between two such celebrated authors, the article proceeds to offer a close analysis of the Beckett text in terms of Rimbaud's original. This involves a stanza-by-stanza consideration of the original and the translation as reproduced by Knowlson and Leakey and a suggested division of the two texts into four sections …