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Complicating Eroticism And The Male Gaze: Feminism And Georges Bataille’S Story Of The Eye, Chris Vanderwees

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article explores the relationship between feminist criticism and Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye. Much of the critical work on Bataille assimilates his psychosocial theories in Erotism with the manifestation of those theories in his fiction without acknowledging potential contradictions between the two bodies of work. The conflation of important distinctions between representations of sex and death in Story of the Eye and the writings of Erotism forecloses the possibility of reading Bataille’s novel as a critique of gender relations. This article unravels some of the distinctions between Erotism and Story of the Eye in order to complicate …

The Incertitude Of Language And Life In The Poetry Of Olvido García Valdés, Sharon Keefe Ugalde

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Two of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s formulations serve as guideposts for the analysis of the poetry of García Valdés: the concept of language-game and the Creation Mystic Experience, or seeing the world as a miracle. The paper first considers the language-game in terms of “unbound” or exempt language. The poet, recognizing the metamorphic nature of language, frees it from predetermined cultural content and, most notably, from grammatical rigidity, toying with ambiguity and fluidity through such techniques as juxtaposition, pronoun vagueness and ellipsis. The second part of the study considers the poet’s exploration of the ineffable, which embraces both the astonishment of being …

"Oneself As Another": Identification And Mourning In Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder, Susan Rubin Suleiman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Taking off from Paul Ricoeur's book Soi-même comme un autre (Oneself as Another), this essay discusses two kinds of identification in Modiano's relation to Dora: identification as appropriation, where the writer "assimilates" Dora's story in order to explore his own relation to his parents, especially his father; and identification as empathy, where the writer underlines the differences between his and Dora's stories and also seeks to come to a historical understanding of what happened to her. In that process, he also evokes the fate of other Jews who, like Dora and her family, were deported from France. I conclude …

Modernity, Postmodernity, And Transgression In Sábato's Esthetics: Poetic Dissemination, Defeat Of Utopias, Returning Bodies , María Rosa Lojo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

After defining the problematic term "Postmodernity" and its possible application to Latin America, the position of Ernesto Sábato as an essayist and narrator is discussed in light of Modernity (questioned by him as the rationalist and enlightened canon, but applauded as romantic and surrealistic rebellion), and Postmodernity with which it connects from diverse axis: the poetic of desire and that of transgression (vanguard movements related to Foucault, Bataille and Derrida), the theory of reality as "fragment" and "simulacrum" and the suppression of oppositions in the paroxysm of "symbolic exchange." Sábato would transcend from the central proposition of his writing, 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 …

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," …

Reassessing Marguerite Duras, Carol J. Murphy

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Since her death on March 3, 1996, Marguerite Duras continues to "live on" through the ongoing critical appreciation of her works…

Body / Antibody, Lawrence R. Schehr

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Unique object in the exchange-system, the gay body occupies a locus where a phantom identity and an imagined reciprocity define the poles of the subject-object relation. Made of the right stuff, it is an object circulating in a system that tends to reproduce the concept of identity in its search for mirror images of itself. Often rejected by the world, it has recently become a cynosure equated with sickness, pestilence, and death in the age of AIDS. The representations of that object change: no longer perceived as a part of libidinal economy, it has become a mass of symptoms, having …

The Lessons Of The Living Dead: Marcel's Journey From Balbec To Douville-Féterne In Proust's Cities Of The Plain: Part Two, Jonathan Warren

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

By analyzing the narrative of Marcel's journey by the "little train" from Balbec to Douville-Féterne the essay engages with the Proust criticism of Georges Poulet, Paul de Man, and Julia Kristeva to support Hayden White's claim that "it is legitimate to read Proust's narrative as an allegory of figuration itself." Like the Madeleine episode, this one serves as a point from which retrospection and prospection radiate. Central to the discussion is the description of Verdurins' dinner party guests as they stand ready to board the train on the platform at Graincourt: their vivacity, compared to a sort of extinction, suggests …

Christoph Hein's Horns Ende. Historical Revisionism: A Process Of Renewal, Heinz Bulmahn

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In light of recent developments, the historical record of the German Democratic Republic will be closely reexamined as the two Germanies merge into one country. Christoph Hein's novel Horns Ende undoubtedly will play a role in the debate about the GDR past, because it is a clear repudiation of official historical mythmaking. The novel examines in detail the political and social fiber of a small town in the GDR during the fifties. Horn returns to the town some thirty years after his death, and entices the townspeople to recount their lives during the early years of the socialist republic. These …

Oligarchy And Orature In The Novels Of Nuruddin Farah, Derek Wright

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In Farah's fiction Somali oral traditions are shown to possess a resilient strength and even a revolutionary vitality. Yet they are not envisaged polemically, as unsullied alternatives and sources of counter-discourse to post-colonial realities: rather, they are shown to be implicated in their evils and corruptions. Faced with a mode of reality built on oral discourse, where the written word is ruthlessly suppressed, written texts either retreat into secret cipher or are themselves infiltrated by the vaporous oral reality of public life and take on selected elements of oral literary conventions: notably, their fluid indeterminacy of meaning and interpretative openness, …

Modernist Aesthetics And Familial Textuality: Gide's Strait Is The Gate, Roddey Reid

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The essay explores different links drawn by Edward Said and Jean Bone between early modernist fiction and what they call bachelor literature or discourse. The latter attempted to break free from the bourgeois ideology of the family as constituted in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Modernist fiction is anti-bourgeois and anti-familial in some of its deepest impulses.

In Strait is the Gate Jerome's narrative is a tale of failed courtship that has as its setting bourgeois family life in a stage of dissolution. Out of the overwrought family drama emerges an aesthetic problematic: Jerome's account of a fragmented …

Nabokov's Amphiphorical Gestures , S. E. Sweeney

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In addition to using two primary kinds of metaphors (those that clarify descriptions, and those that develop into leitmotifs), Nabokov's fiction demonstrates a third kind that is characterized by extended analogies, baroque, seemingly uncontrolled imagery and rhetoric, and, most importantly, fundamental ambiguity. Although this inherent ambiguity is developed throughout the comparison, it is never resolved. Because of this distinguishing characteristic, I have named such metaphors "amphiphors," after one of Nabokov's own neologisms. Nabokov's comments in Nikolai Gogol and Lectures on Russian Literature, as well as direct allusions to Gogol embedded in a few amphiphors, suggest that this device evolved …

Nathalie Sarraute's Between Life And Death: Androgyny And The Creative Process , Bettina L. Knapp

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Nathalie Sarraute's Between Life and Death deals with the creative process, from the uncreated work of art embedded in the prima materia to its completion in the book. The Writer, the focus of Sarraute's attention, takes the reader through the multiple stages of his literary trajectory: the struggle involved in the transmutation of the amorphous word into the concrete glyph on the blank sheet of paper; the pain and anguish accompanying the birth of the created work, alluded to as the "thing" or the "object"; the attitude of the successful Writer, who postures and panders to his public, and the …

Unreading Borges's Labyrinths, Lawrence R. Schehr

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Borges's stories often valorize the figures of text and labyrinth, and, in "The Garden of Forking Paths," an identity is posited between them. This identity is the means to deconstructing the story and, at the same time, for refusing both structuralist and metaphysical readings of the work. The text of the story gradually subsumes the world it seeks to represent under and within an all-encompassing textuality without origin and without any clearly delimited meaning except absence, the destruction of meaning, death. The solution of the labyrinth is its dissolution, that is, the deconstruction of the text. This easily thematizable deconstruction …

History And His-Story In André Malraux's La Corde Et Les Souris, Lawrence D. Kritzman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In La Corde et Ies souris Malraux attempts to overcome human transience and mortality by memorializing the ephemeral through the artifice of writing. The rhetoric of the self-portrait takes the form of a historical narrative in which the relationship of history to memory as textual archive affords the Malrucian subject a "reprieve" by effacing the inherent status of contingency. The text thus becomes a veritable cultural mausoleum that sublates the implicit negation of death and allows the author to become more than a conscience without memory.

An Inquiry Into Juan Ramon's Interest In Walter Pater, John C. Wilcox

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The evidence for Juan Ramon's interest in Pater, which began around 1920 and was still active twenty years later, is discussed in this paper. Pater's view of death and dying and his attitude toward the decadent persona are described in so far as they indicate the spiritual affinity that exists between him and Juan Ramón. Pater's aesthetic idealism, and the presence of similar ideals in Juan Ramon's own work are then examined. The second part of the paper concentrates on the great interest Juan Ramón took in Pater's evocation of the Mona Lisa. The potential impact of the aesthetic idealism …

The Forces Of Life And Death In Roch Carrier's Fiction, David J. Bond

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Carrier's fiction is based on exaggeration and the grotesque, but it also deals with serious questions: the forces of life and death in the lives of his characters. Death is the subject of La Guerre, Yes Sir! and of several short stories, and it is symbolically present in certain other works. In Le Deux-millième étage and II est par là, le soleil, life in the city is equated with death. None of Carrier's characters live happy lives, and their religion is one of death and sin. As French-Canadians, they are threatened with destruction by the English-speaking world and by …

Tchen's Sacred Isolation—Prelude To Malraux's Fraternal Humanism, Roch C. Smith

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

While Malraux's life-long quest was to seek new values in man's perennial and shared struggle against an overwhelming fate, his early protagonist, particularly the assassin, turns to destruction and terrorism in a frenzied search for absolutes. This attempt to identify with the very fatality that has the power to destroy him is especially developed in Tchen, who embodies a despairing fascination with totalistic nihilism that Malraux must overcome in his search for a new notion of man. Tchen's initiation to murder in La Condition humaine marks a transgression of a taboo that thrusts him into what Georges Bataille calls the …

Du Scorpion Au Désert, Albert Memmi Revisited, Isaac Yetiv

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Albert Memmi's literary work of the last three decades is pervaded by a fundamental pessimism on life and the human condition. It is a long, never-ending investigation of the dynamics of conflict, its causes and its disastrous consequences: hatred, violence, death.

In the last decade, with the publication of Le Scorpion (1969), and Le Désert (1977), Memmi seems to have reached his long-proclaimed goal, "the extrapolation of a personal experience to universal dimensions." These two novels do not reveal a radical departure from the young Memmi's outlook on life. Their innovation lies in the originality of their structure, composition and …