Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Emily Johansen. Beyond Safety: Risk, Cosmopolitanism, And Contemporary Neoliberal Life. Bloomsbury, 2021., Irene Gammel, Jason Wang

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Emily Johansen. Beyond Safety: Risk, Cosmopolitanism, and Contemporary Neoliberal Life. Bloomsbury, 2021. xiii + 171 pp.

Jo Labanyi. Spanish Culture From Romanticism To The Present: Structures Of Feeling. Legenda, 2019., Wadda C. Rios-Font

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Jo Labanyi. Spanish Culture from Romanticism to the Present: Structures of Feeling. Legenda, 2019. 349 pp.

Wartime Teachers: Stories From The Front, Rachel K. Turner, Eliel Hinojosa Jr.

Educational Considerations

In the early 1990s, Dr. O.L. Davis of the University of Texas at Austin sought evacuee teacher and student recollections in England during World War II. The overarching purpose for Davis was to gain an understanding of the effect on schooling and education, specifically as it relates to the curriculum for students. This article continues where he left off and places focus on teacher evacuees. Of the several hundred responses from student evacuees, we utilized ten of the thirty teacher evacuees who responded to Dr. Davis. The purpose in this research endeavor seeks to discover the impact evacuations in England …

Cultivating Culture: Youth Food Movement In The Taos Pueblo Native American Community, Jordan C. Thomas

Crossing Borders: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship

A large number of studies have emerged in recent years regarding the social effects of local food systems. They have been shown to bolster local economies, increase general health, and even decrease crime rates. This study analyzes the effect of local food systems in the Taos Pueblo community, and how and why they create positive farming ideologies. A proposed covert effect may correlate to developments of positive ideologies towards native heritage, which would imply that local food systems can help to preserve indigenous language and culture. To study these trends I moved to Taos, New Mexico with my research partner, …

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Kathyrn Everly. History, Violence, and the Hyperreal: Representing Culture in the Contemporary Spanish Novel by Nina L. Molinaro

Jill Robbins. Crossing Through the Chueca: Lesbian Literary Culture in Queer Madrid by Salvador A. Oropesa

Juan Pablo Dabove. Nightmares of the Lettered City: Banditry and Literature in Latin America 1816-1929 by María Zalduondo

Federico Bonaddio. Federico García Lorca. The Poetics of Self-Consciousness by Carlos Jerez-Farrán

Aníbal González. Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel by Mónica Adriana Agrest

Contemporary French Fiction In And Out Of Screens, Eliane Dalmolin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay explores the ways in which the widespread craze for reality TV has now extended its contamination to the comparatively more traditional discipline of literature. Today, there is no use denying that, acknowledging, and internalizing, the American domination in the creation of reality shows, French television has followed suit and, as a result of the cultural flooding of such a model, recent French literature has also been swayed by the empire of television in general, and the power of reality TV in particular. The author delineates the increasingly porous frontier separating and conjoining reality TV and literary representation, questions …

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 …

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 …

"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, …

(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 …

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…

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 …

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 …

Introduction: Centrifuge And Fragmentation, Helena Goscilo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The seismic changes inaugurated by desovietization not only recast the entire framework of Russia's cultural priorities, production, and reception, but ultimately revised fundamental concepts of what constitutes culture…

About That: Deploying And Deploring Sex In Postsoviet Russia , Eliot Borenstein

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Desovietization brought sex as a visible cultural phenomenon into Russia, one rife with contradictions and conflicts. Newspapers, popular magazines, advertisements, pornography, the first Russian sex talk show (About That), and pronouncements by a broad range of quotable public figures indicate that the problematics of sex during the 1990s consisted of the following: a sexualized relationship between Russia and the West; a sexualization of politics (rather than the politicization of sex); an inflexible yet implicit code governing the deployment of sex in "high" and "low" culture; and, above all, the development of a sexual discourse that defied circumlocution and …

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 …

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?"...

A Lustful Passion For Clarification: Bildung, Aufklärung, And The Sight Of Sexual Imagery , Stephanie D'Alessandro

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The equation of education and self-cultivation was an Enlightenment ideal which has become a hallmark of bourgeois culture. Prizing Bildung, the bourgeoisie professed an appreciation for art, music, and literature. Within their libraries, comprehensive scholarly texts intended for academic and well-educated, lay audiences occupied a special place. Marrying illustration with academic investigation, the Sittengeschichte (history of morals) could also be found on the bourgeois library shelf and afforded its readers a glimpse into a world outside the strict parameters of bourgeois propriety. During the Weimar Republic, the demand for illustrated Sittengeschichten increased dramatically among the bourgeoisie, meeting their ideal …

"Atmosphère, Atmosphère": On The Study Of France Between The Wars, Steven Ungar

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Street Noises: Parisian Pleasure, 1900-1940 by Adrian Rifkin and Shanghai on the Métro: Spies, Espionage, and the French Between the Wars by Michael B. Miller are test cases for issues of historiography related to period and duration in the study of France between 1919 and 1940. Of added relevance to these issues is the fact that Rifkin and Miller both question distinctions between elite literary cultures linked to book publishing and new forms of mass reproduction enhanced by technologies of sound reproduction and illustration. A concluding excursus explores recent theories of urban space symbolized by the street as a site …

Between Ideologies And A Hard Place: Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Utopian Pragmatist Poetics, Jonathan Monroe

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The marginalization of poetry in North American culture makes it difficult to appreciate fully on this side of the Atlantic the importance of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's literary and cultural contributions over the past four decades. Working against familiar cultural encodings that would align poetry uncritically with the "personal" and prose with the "political," his oeuvre makes a strong case for poetry and critical prose as vitally complementary activities. In his 1991 collection of poems, Zukunftsmusik (Future Music) and his 1993 prose collection, Civil Wars: From L.A. to Bosnia, Enzensberger renews his longstanding commitment to "the process / of becoming …

Writings From The Margins: German-Jewish Women Poets From The Bukovina, Amy Colin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Emerging at the crossroads of heterogeneous languages and cultures, German-Jewish women's poetry from the Bukovina displays the characteristics of its fascinating multilingual contextuality, yet it also bears the stigma of a double marginalization, for its representatives became time and again targets of both anti-Semitic attacks as well as gender discrimination. The present essay explores the untiring struggles of German-Jewish women authors from the Bokovina for acceptance within the Jewish and non-Jewish community. It analyzes their attempts to cope with social barriers, prejudices, and their difficult situation as both women and Jews. The essay also sets their poetry against the background …

. . . Und . . . Fried . . . Und . . .: The Poetry Of Erich Fried And The Structure Of Contemporaneity, Nora M. Alter

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay looks at the poetry of Erich Fried in the context of tensions within contemporary cultural studies. Fried's contemporaneity is linked to his status on the margins of various cultures, media, and ideologies—thus making both his life and his works appear as exemplary paradigms for the postmodern condition, with its various theoretical celebrations of "exile," "border crossing," "transgression," "deterritorialization," and so forth. Yet, at the same time, seemingly in contrast with his labile identity is Fried's rigid Marxist political ideological core which surfaces in his political poetry. Focusing, in particular, on Fried's poems directed against the Vietnam War, this …

Althusserian Theory: From Scientific Truth To Institutional History, Philip Goldstein

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Scholars have emphasized the scientific and the rationalist features of Althusser's work, but few have noted its post-structuralist aspects, especially its Foucauldian accounts of discourse and power. In the early Pour Marx, Althusser divides ideological practices from objective science and theoretical norms from empirical facts; however, in several later essays Althusser repudiates his earlier faith in theory's normative force as well as his broad distinction between science and ideology. He argues that every discipline establishes its own relationship between its ideological history and its formal, scientific ideals. This argument, together with Althusser's earlier rejection of totalizing approaches, establishes important …

Introduction, Laurie Edson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Introduction to the special issue

Inventing Antillean Narrative: Maryse Condé And Literary Tradition, Leah D. Hewitt

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

As a Guadeloupean black woman novelist, Maryse Condé highlights the tensions in Caribbean culture between traditional and modern values, among ethnic groups, and between the sexes. She combines a representative view of an Antillean writer's specific concerns with a postmodern view of literature as multicultural, polymorphous intersection. The opening portion of this essay argues that Condé's personal literary trajectory embodies a general process of identity formation in post colonial literature, one that passes from the alienation of the individual, to the affirmation of collective movements and positive models, and finally, to a critical, playful outlook in which identities are continually …

Snares: Pere Gimferrer's Los Espejos/ Els Miralls, Margaret Persin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

With the publication of Els miralls, Pere Gimferrer effected a major shift in philosophical and linguistic perspective. It is the first collection to be published in Catalan, and thus represents for the well-known writer a change in direction for him as a poet and spokesperson of his culture and his generation. But the change is more than one of mere language coding. For in this collection, the Catalan poet confronts all the snares of language which he views as limiting of creativity and originality. He adopts a variety of poetic strategies and voices in an attempt to come to …

A Reconsideration Of Two Spanish Women Poets: Angela Figuera And Francisca Aguirre, John C. Wilcox

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the last decade, poetry written by women in Spain experienced a "boom," as one close observer of the scene has noted, with the result that young women poets on the Peninsula have begun to receive the attention they merit. It is therefore an opportune moment to turn our critical attention toward the poetry written by women earlier in the twentieth century.

Angela Figuera (1902-1984) and Francisca Aguirre (b. 1930), two "uncanonized" mid-twentieth century Spanish poets, are presented here as challenging the androcentric culture of their time. Figuera critiques the male-dominated poetic canon as she develops a gynocentric poetics; poems …

Reflections On Linguistic And Literary Colonization And Decolonization In Africa, Eric Sellin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Despite the cultural diversity found in Africa and the complexity ofthe psychology of the colonizer and the colonized, several fundamental facts emerge regarding the function of language and literature in recent African history. The colonizer sought to instill a sense of inferiority in the colonized as part of the dynamics of conquest, placing special emphasis on education and language. These notions, lucidly discussed by such social thinkers as O. Mannoni, Frantz Fanon, and Albert Memmi, have analogues in the defense of language everywhere where lingua-political oppression occurs, be it in colonial Africa or on an Arapaho reservation in the American …

`Boy!': The Hinge Of Colonial Double Talk, Anne M. Menke

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The French colonial enterprise in Africa enforced racial segregation, yet encouraged Africans to assimilate the French language, culture, and religion. The essay questions these contradictory policies through readings of Ferdinand Oyono's novels. It argues that a figure that embodies undecidability—the colonial servant known as the "boy"—is the locus of the denaturalization of the identities that were simultaneously institutionalized and denied by the Manichaean colonial world.