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Moving On? Memory And History In Griselda Gambaro's Recent Theater, Gail Bulman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

For more than forty years, Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro has dramatized the social and political climate of her homeland. This article examines three of her plays from the late eighties and early nineties, using both Freudian and performance theories, in order to show how these works document the range of emotions in post Dirty War Argentina and, at the same time, postulate ways of coping with the memories of those years. Beyond traditional memory-theater, these plays demonstrate the trauma of remembering by highlighting different phases in the memory process and by conceptualizing stages in the grief of a traumatized nation. …

A Literary Form For Love: Yves Navarre's My Friends Are Gone With The Wind, Richard M. Berrong

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In My Friends Are Gone with the Wind (Ce sont amis que vent emporte, 1991), one of his last and most innovative texts, Yves Navarre (1940-1994), one of the most important contemporary French novelists to deal significantly and regularly with gay themes, returns to his preoccupation with the dangers that the forms inherent in traditional literary narrative pose for the expression of authentic human experience. The narrator, Roch, wants to capture the reality of his love for David, in part to prove to what he sees as a largely hostile heterosexual world that gays are as capable of loving …

Patrick Chamoiseau Et Le Gwo-Ka Du Chanté-Parlé , Pim Higginson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Numerous critics have explored the use of orality in Patrick Chamoiseau's work. Solibo Magnificent adds to the opposition between the oral and the written the third term of the musical. Western artistic expression maintains a neat border between the media (e.g. literature, music, the plastic arts) because it helps legitimate the essentialization of (racial, ethnic, sexual) alterity: white maleness writes; the musical is instead associated with otherness (and orality). This hinged or articulated connection between alterity and the musical (and sameness and the literary) assures and assumes that the musical does not signify. This essay contends that Chamoiseau's novel responds …

Reconfiguring Boundaries In Maryse Condé'S Crossing The Mangrove , Deborah B. Gaensbauer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Maryse Condé's 1989 novel, Crossing the Mangrove, presents a compelling performance of the complicated patterns of place and space inherent in the social masquerade of a small, isolated, Guadeloupean village. Because the novel corresponds to Condé's return to a Caribbean "stage" to continue a long process of questioning mapped configurations of identity, critical attention has focused on the character of Francis Sancher, the returning "stranger," whose wake serves as both frame and catalyst for the action. Insufficient attention has been paid to the role of Mira Lameaulnes, Sancher's rejected mistress and the mother of his child, whose story the …

For-Giving Death: Cixous's Osnabrück And Le Jour Où Je N'Étais Pas Là , Eilene Hoft-March

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In her early writings, Hélène Cixous earned recognition as the feminist proponent of a theory of gift economy that challenges the patriarchal practice of giving. Patriarchal giving, she contended, enacts the master-slave dialectic, maintaining power differentials by indemnifying and reducing the other to the one who gives. Cixous imagined an alternate practice whereby the gift incurs no debts and no death for the other, a giving without expectation of return, a generosity that enriches all who participate. More than two decades after those theoretical essays, Cixous continues to explore in her fiction the relationship to the other as mediated by …

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Bohn, Willard. The Rise of Surrealism: Cubism, Dada, and the Pursuit of the Marvelous Reviewed by Elena Cueto As

Folkart, Jessica A. Angles on Otherness in Post-Franco Spain: The Fiction of Cristina Fernández Cubas Reviewed by Jorge Marí

Marí, Jorge. Lecturas espectaculares: El cine en la novela española desde 1970 Reviewed by Salvador A. Oropesa

Meredith, James H. Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents Reviewed by Cornelius Partsch

Moran, Michael G. and Michelle Ballif, eds. Twentieth-Century Rhetorics and Rhetoricians: Critical Studies and Sources Reviewed by David Malcolm

Recollecting Wondrous Moments: Father Pushkin, Mother Russia, And Intertextual Memory In Tatyana Tolstaya's "Night" And "Limpopo", Karen R. Smith

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

With their references to Alexander Pushkin, Tolstaya's "Night" and "Limpopo" respond to the cultural crisis of 1980s Russia, where literary language, bent for so long into the service of totalitarianism, suffers the scars of amnesia. Recycling Pushkin's tropes, particularly his images of feminine inspiration derived from the cultural archetype of Mother Russia, Tolstaya's stories appear nostalgically to rescue Russia's literary memory, but they also accentuate the crisis of the present, the gap between the apparel of literary language and that which it purports to clothe. "Night," an ironic reworking of Pushkin's "Queen of Spades," dismantles the nostalgic imagery of his …

Nabokov, Dostoevski, Proust: Despair , Timothy L. Parrish

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Although Nabokov criticism has long identified Despair with Dostoevski, critics have for the most part addressed Despair in terms of how it either attacks or validates Dostoevski and thus have understood Nabokov to be speaking primarily about Dostoevski's achievement as a novelist. As I argue, Despair revises Dostoevski as a sly assertion of Nabokov's paradoxical aesthetic independence, and does so through the medium of Marcel Proust. It predicts the more obvious Proustian influence that critics have noticed in Nabokov's later works. In Despair Proust gives Nabokov the fundamental modernist narrative that makes an artist's coming to consciousness coincident with the …

Hesitating Between Irony And The Desire To Be Serious In Moi, Tituba, Sorcière... Noire De Salem: Maryse Condé And Her Readers , Sarah E. Barbour

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In writing her fifth novel, a fictive autobiography of the title character, Maryse Condé has said that she "felt a strong solidarity with Tituba," and at the same time she admits hesitating "between irony and a desire to be serious" in the invention of this "mock-epic character." This article explores the reader's relationship to the novel as a variation on this hesitation. Once Condé sets up Tituba's authority to narrate her story, the reader is left in the precarious position of hesitating between getting the author's irony and desiring to be serious about Tituba's narrative of a painful history. By …

History As Trash: Reading Berlin 2000, Peter Fritzsche

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The expectation that Berlin, at the cusp of the twenty-first century, should produce "big-city" novels that, like Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz in its own time, would catch the encounters, juxtapositions, and historical layerings of the newly reunified capital is perhaps unfair, and certainly a high bar, but it reflects widespread interest in literary representations of this brazenly, even insolently transformed city...

Post-Colonial Berlin? Pieke Biermann's Crime Novels As Globalization Critique , Katrin Sieg

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Set in and around Tempelhof Airport, the crime novel 4,5,6 poses the question whether social, cultural, and economic "globalization" continues and aggravates colonizing practices (as scholars like Miyoshi, Chomsky, and Said have argued), or whether the term describes the social conditions of postcoloniality, beyond superpower domination and the bloc system it created...

The Desire To Achieve "Normalcy" - Peter Schneider's Post-Wall Berlin Novel Eduard's Homecoming , Siegfried Mews

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

As one critic correctly observed on the occasion of Peter Schneider's sixtieth birthday (21 April 2000), the author's life and work have been defined by two momentous events whose import far surpasses that of happenings of merely local significance (see Karasek)...

The Presence And Absence Of The Past: Sites Of Memory And Forgetting In F. C. Delius's Die Flatterzunge , Carol Anne Costabile-Heming

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Perhaps no site better embodies the juxtaposition of the German past with the challenges of the present and prospect for the future than Berlin. For the city of Berlin, the past (Third Reich, Holocaust) is simultaneously present and absent from view…

Gen(D)Eration Next: Prose By Julia Franck And Judith Hermann, Anke Biendarra

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In March 1999, critic Volker Hage adopted a term in Der Spiegel that subsequently dominated public discussions about new German literature by female authors-"Fräuleinwunder"…

Berlin Heinrichplatz: The Novels Of Ulrich Peltzer, Christian Jäger

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

For at least a decade Germans have been waiting—waiting for literature, waiting for the great Berlin novel, waiting for the great novel of reunification…

Masochism, Marginality, And The Metropolis: Kutlug Ataman's Lola And Billy The Kid , Barbara Mennel

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Baltimore: "What you get is what you see"

While sitting at the window of "City Café," a gay café in Baltimore, I let my eyes wander to the other side of the street where a group of young gay black men were camping it up…

Introduction: Reading And Writing Berlin, Stephen Brockmann

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

On June 20, 1991, eight and a half months after the peaceful reunification of Germany, the German Bundestag voted 337 to 320 to move the capital of the Federal Republic from Bonn to Berlin…

A Stranger In Berlin: On Joseph Roth's Berlin Discourse , Sabine Hake

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

As the quintessential urbanite, Joseph Roth continues to be extremely relevant to ongoing public debates on Berlin's identity as the new center of a multicultural society and architecture of postmodern urbanity…

Guides To The City: Berlin Anthologies, Ulrike Zitzlsperger

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Michael Lewitscharoff's Berlin-Paket (Berlin Package) first appeared in 2001; it invites readers to take a stroll through the city and promises "surprising revelations" about Berlin's architecture, culture and history…

Arrivals, Arrivees: Literary Encounters With Berlin In The Weimar And Berlin Republics , Erhard Schütz

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Neurotic City

Attention is the hard currency of media society. Attention is a scarce resource (compare Franck, Crary, and Assmann)...

"Only The Wall Put A Stop To The Inflow Of Monsters": Bodies And Borders In Post-Wall Berlin , Katharina Gerstenberger

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In his seminal study Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett showed that urban space is significantly shaped through the ways in which humans perceive their bodies…