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Timothy Bewes. Free Indirect: The Novel In A Postfictional Age. Columbia U.P., 2022., Emily Hall

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Timothy Bewes. Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age. Columbia U.P., 2022. 315 pp.

Repeat Offenders: Violence And Textual Economy, Scott Shinabargar

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

L'acte surréalistite le plus simple consiste, revolvers aux poings, à descendre dans la rue et à tirer au hasard, tant qu'on peut, dans la foule. (Breton, Manifestes 155)

It is difficult not to feel uncomfortable reading this well-known passage now, in light of recent events. And yet, isn't this perhaps precisely the reason such a text demands our attention? By studying similar passages in Breton's writing, we find that it is through a very particular use of language that the alienated subject acquires a sense of empowerment; and more importantly, that the force of such a discourse is extremely limited—dependent …

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 …

Bataille's "The Solar Anus" Or The Parody Of Parodies , Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Bataille uses parody in "The Solar Anus" to attack the concepts underpinning Cartesian, Hegelian, Romantic and Surrealist discourses. Each one of these discourses lays claim to an impossible achievement: that of arriving at a "total identification," whereby the subject attempts to embrace a "transcendent whole." Bataille uses his parodic cosmogony in "The Solar Anus" to subvert these discourses, showing them to be incapable of exhausting the subject of their study. On another level as well, Bataille's "Solar Anus" challenges any attempt at parody. Within the context of his global parody, each target of parody is itself parodic of another target, …

Between L'Irréparable And L'Irrepérable: Subject To The Past, Downing Thomas, Steven Ungar

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This issue of STCL grew from papers presented at a conference, "Memory in Context: Occupation and Empire in France and the Francophone World," held at the University of Iowa in April, 1996...

Korsakoff's Syndrome And Modern German Literature: Alfred Döblin's Medical Dissertation , Roland Dollinger

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay deals with the historical and cultural interrelationships between the medical and psychiatric discourses on memory and memory disorders at the end of the nineteenth century and the invention of an abstract and highly dissociated literary style in modern German literature. An historical reading of Alfred Döblin's medical dissertation (1905) on Korsakoff's syndrome, an amnestic disorder, shows the confluence of both his psychiatric and aesthetic interests in human memory and its failures. The essay analyzes Döblin's medical dissertation less as the contribution of a young psychiatrist to his discipline but rather as an historical text that challenges us to …

Usurping Difference In The Feminine Fantastic From The Riverplate, María B. Clark

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This study intended to define the concept of a feminine fantastic as a narrative mode in contemporary short fiction by women writers from Argentina and Uruguay. As a point of departure, the study examined the narrative techniques and conventions of the fantastic and their strategic use for the expression of feminine concerns. The concept of the feminine was used in the sense of referring to an interpretation of femininity as a construct of language rather than an essentially feminine narrative mode based on a biological gender division. An overview of fantastic short stories by women writers from Argentina and Uruguay …

Literary Invention And Critical Fashion: Missing The Boat In The Sea Of Lentils, Elzbieta Sklodowska

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In pursuing the relation of Sea of Lentils (1979) to the Spanish American literary canon, I argue that while Benítez-Rojo's novel did not fall into the category of the already canonized—and therefore was spared a parricidal gesture of the Post-Boom writers—neither did it belong amidst the previously marginalized texts. I suggest that Sea of Lentils concentrates its internal critique of language and representation around the process of remembering in a manner that is radically at odds not only with the "traditional" historical novel, but with the official voice of the ascendant testimonio as well. Moreover, the notion of memory as …

Return To "0": A Lacanian Reading Of Ingeborg Bachmann's "Undine Goes", Veronica P. Scrol

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay approaches Ingeborg Bachmann's "Undine Goes" from a Lacanian perspective. The object of the study is three-fold: first, to demonstrate Bachmann's deconstruction of the ideal ego through the water-sprite Undine's criticism of the human Hans. Second, to transcend the limitations of dualistic interpretations (as noted by some feminist critics), by introducing the triple Lacanian registers—the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real—into this particular reading. Finally, to establish Bachmann's monologic text as a discourse of the real and Undine as the voice of the death instinct.

The Legacy Of Althusser, 1918-1990: An Introduction, Philip Goldstein

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Introduction to the special issue.

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 …

Partial Interpretations And Company: Beckett, Foucault, Et Al. And The Author Question, Jim Hicks

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay examines recent debate on the status of the author in contemporary literature by means of an extended analysis of Samuel Beckett's Company. A number of critical responses to the Beckett text— Wayne Booth's reading in The Rhetoric of Fiction is taken as symptomatic—are criticized for their recuperation of the author-function in a text which moves beyond such well-wom routes of inquiry. Company is read as an inevitably incomplete attempt to read "anachronistically," i.e. to expand (and contract) story, discourse, and discursive positions starting from the necessary fiction of a present-tense (from, to cite Gilles Deleuze, "il y …

El Año De Gracia And The Displacement Of The Word, Catherine G. Bellver

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The power of the established, self-sufficient written word is considerable. Written texts not only furnish material, incentive, or direction for new texts, they also inspire, orient, and mold those who read them. El año de Gracia, a novel by Cristina Fernández Cubas (1985), vividly illustrates the imprint novels can leave on a young mind. The protagonist learns, however, that the concept of the world he formed on the basis of literary models is erroneous. In El año de Gracia literature fails to sustain meaning, and meaning itself becomes irrelevant. Both oral and written discourse are in some way restricted, …

Chinua Achebe And The Post-Colonial Esthetic: Writing, Identity, And National Formation, Simon Gikandi

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Chinua Achebe is recognized as one of Africa's most important and influential writers, and his novels have focused on the ways in which the European tradition of the novel and African modes of expression relate to each other in both complementary and contesting ways. Achebe's novels are informed by an important theory of writing which tries to mediate the politics of the novel as a form of commentary on the emergence and transformation of nationalism which constitutes the African writer's epistemological context. Achebe's esthetic has been overdetermined by the changing discourse on representation and national identity in colonial and post-colonial …

Writing Double: Politics And The African Narrative Of French Expression, John D. Erickson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay studies two African narratives of French expression (Le Temps de Tamango of Boubacar Diop and L'Enfant de sable of Tahar ben Jelloun) to see how they create a discourse of difference that challenges and deconstructs the conventions of the discursive system of French, its signifying practices, and its ideological underpinnings. The tactics of these narratives, which mark them as post-colonial in a strict sense (as opposed to neo-colonial), are productive of a radical other-meaning, a new meaning that "speaks" to the concerns of and problems confronting the non-Western writer.

The Dialogical Traveler: A Reading Of Semprun's Le Grand Voyage, Sally M. Silk

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In light of discourse theory influenced by Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, the notion of voice has changed significantly so that we are invited to read discourse in a way that represents a departure from Bakhtin. The theories of François Flahault, Michel Pêchetut, and John Frow, who inquire into the importance of conditions of production of language, are used to explore the vain search for a subject-centered voice in Jorge Semprun's Le Grand voyage. The narrating subject Gerard experiences "homelessness" in discourse because he fails to find a voice of his own. His relationship to music and literature depends on …

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 …

Voices Of Authority And Linguistic Autonomy In Niebla , Mary Lee Bretz

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Miguel de Unamuno's works have often been studied as expressions of his philosophy or life experience. More recent literary theory has eschewed approaches that foreground the author, preferring to focus primarily on the text or the reader. Utilizing Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel, this paper analyzes Niebla, one of Unamuno's most frequently studied works, to illustrate that new literary theories can enrich our reading of the text. Bakhtin argues that the novel is characterized by many voices or styles which the novelist welcomes and exploits. The novel should not be viewed as having a single style but as …

Bakhtin And Buber: Problems Of Dialogic Imagination, Nina Perlina

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Recent publications of biographical materials on Mikhail Bakhtin demonstrate that he was familiar with the writings of Martin Buber. The philosophical and aesthetic verbal expression of Buber's ideas within the time-spatial universe of Bakhtin's own awareness allows us to discuss this obvious biographical evidence in a wider cultural context. The central opposition of Buber's and Bakhtin's systems is the dialogic dichotomous pair: "Ich und Du" (I and Thou), or "myself and another." Bakhtin's dialogic imagination is rooted in the binaries of the subject-object relations which he initially formulated as "responsibility" and "addressivity," that is to say, as individual awareness and …

Narrative Discourse As A Multi-Level System Of Communication: Some Theoretical Proposals Concerning Bakhtin's Dialogic Principle, Paul Thibault

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article attempts to show that the dialogizing of narrative discourse is a way of de-naturalizing the fictional process and its associated textual activities by reconstituting the material interplay of voices (in Bakhtin's pioneering sense). It is this interplay which is suppressed by the convention of a single, univocal narrative position. This corresponds to Bakhtin's notion of monologic discourse, which implies an already given, objectified identity lying behind the text. Dialogic discourse restores to textual practice the material interplay of frequently opposing and contradictory semantic and ideological positions which actively constitute the formation of discourse. These voices which are constantly …

On Meanings And Descriptions, Mieke Bal

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Although descriptive passages would appear to be of marginal importance in narrative texts, they are, in fact, of both logical and semantic necessity. Narratology, therefore, must take these segments into account. In this article, I shall survey the present situation in this field and compare rival points of view. I shall also offer several suggestions for analyzing descriptions. The following topics will be discussed: the nature of description as a specific type of discourse which makes it recognizable as such; the internal structure of description; the place and function of descriptions in the text as a whole. In the latter …

Sensationalism, Jean-Jacques Thomas

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Roland Barthes's fascination with discourse is usually considered a glorification of intellectual exchanges, the parade of a virtuoso eager to display his unalloyed dedication to logocentrism. As a consequence, scholars tend to rely on his writings as if they were principally a catalogue for the functional concepts of modernity.

The purpose of this article is to show through a close reading of Barthes's latter-day texts that his exhilarating verbal brio is first and foremost a sensuous relationship between the speaking subject and the verbal substance. In his case, this particular relationship generates a discourse akin to physical heroism, thanks to …