Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Jacqueline Vansant. Austria Made In Hollywood. Camden House, 2019., Jason Doerre

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Jacqueline Vansant. Austria Made in Hollywood. Camden House, 2019. 196 pp.

Ari J. Blatt And Edward Welch, Editors. France In Flux: Space, Territory, And Contemporary Culture. Liverpool Up, 2019., Suzanne Black

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Ari J. Blatt and Edward Welch, editors. France in Flux: Space, Territory, and Contemporary Culture. Liverpool UP, 2019. xiii + 221 pp.

Erin Mcglothlin, Brad Preger, And Markus Zisselsberger, Editors. The Construction Of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’S Shoah And Its Outtakes. Wayne State Up, 2020., Michael Williamson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Erin McGlothlin, Brad Preger, and Markus Zisselsberger, editors. The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Its Outtakes. Wayne State UP, 2020. 495 pp.

Olga Beloborodova, Editor. The Making Of Samuel Beckett’S Play/Comédie And Film. Bloomsbury, 2019., S. E. Gontarski

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Olga Beloborodova, editor. The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Play/Comédie and Film. Bloomsbury, 2019. 352 pp.

Priscilla Layne. White Rebels In Black: German Appropriation Of Black Popular Culture. U Of Michigan P, 2018., Mona Eikel-Pohen

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Priscilla Layne. White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture. U of Michigan P, 2018. ix + 259 pp.

Wombs, Wizards, And Wisdom: Bilbo's Journey From Childhood In The Hobbit, Rory W. Collins

Crossing Borders: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship

In The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien constructs middle-aged Bilbo Baggins as a sheltered and emotionally immature ‘child’ during the opening chapters before tracing his development into an autonomous, self-aware adult as the tale progresses. This article examines Tolkien’s novel qua bildungsroman through both a literary lens—considering setting, dialogue, and symbolism, among other techniques—and via a psychological framework, emphasizing an Eriksonian conception of development. Additionally, Peter Jackson’s three-part film adaptation of The Hobbit is discussed throughout with ways that Jackson succeeds and fails at portraying Bilbo’s childlike attributes noted. I argue that Tolkien presents a sophisticated account of Bilbo’s …

Steven Ungar. Critical Mass: Social Documentary In France From The Silent Era To The New Wave. U Of Minnesota P, 2018., Mary Mccullough

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Steven Ungar. Critical Mass: Social Documentary in France from the Silent Era to the New Wave. U of Minnesota P, 2018. Xxii + 300pp.

Immigrants And National Anxieties In 21st-Century Spanish Film, Julia C. Barnes

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article analyzes the ways that gender and race inform the portrayals of native-born Spaniards and immigrants in Flores de otro mundo (Flowers from Another World) (1999), Un novio para Yasmina 'A Fiancé for Yasmina' (2008), Retorno a Hansala (Return to Hansala) (2008), Biutiful (2010) and 15 años + 1 día (Fifteen Years and One Day) (2013). These films position the white Spanish man at the center of their stories, even when they are not the sole protagonists. Immigrant men of color, in contrast, are most frequently portrayed as parasitical, delinquent, and criminal. White …

Genetic Modification, Factory Farms, And Alf: A Focus Group Study Of The Netflix Original Film Okja, Garrett M. Steede, Kelsi Opat, Leah S. Curren, Erica Irlbeck

Journal of Applied Communications

Okja is a fictional Netflix original film that was released in 2017. Okja features a “super pig” that is owned by the large, agricultural company Mirando Corporation. Okja is raised by a young girl, Mija, and her grandfather in the South Korean mountains. The film climaxes when Mija and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) narrowly save Okja and a smuggled piglet from the slaughter process. The purpose of this study was to understand how college students responded to the film. The viewers of this film included students who were majoring in a field within the agricultural college (COA) at Texas …

Derek C. Maus And James J. Donahue. Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity After Civil Rights. Jackson: Up Of Mississippi, 2014., Jacinta Yanders

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Derek C. Maus and James J. Donahue. Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity After Civil Rights. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2014.

Matt Yockey. Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence And A Comics Universe. Austin: U Of Texas P, 2017., Kevin Degnan

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Matt Yockey. Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe. Austin: U of Texas, 2017.

Frederick Luis Aldama. Latinx Superheroes In Mainstream Comics. Tucson: U Of Arizona P, 2017., Danielle A. Orozco

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Frederick Luis Aldama. Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. Tucson: Uof Arizona P, 2017.

Jeffrey A. Brown. The Modern Superhero In Film And Television: Popular Genre And American Culture. New York: Routledge, 2016., Danielle A. Orozco

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Jeffrey A. Brown. The Modern Superhero in Film and Television: Popular Genre and American Culture. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Heimat Goes Mobile: Hybrid Forms Of Home In Literature And Film, Kristy R. Boney

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Gabriele Eichmanns and Yvonne Franke, Eds. Heimat Goes Mobile: Hybrid Forms of Home in Literature and Film. Rochester, NY: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. 224 pp.

Touria Khannous. African Pasts, Presents, And Futures. Generational Shifts In African Women’S Literature, Film, And Internet Discourse. Lanham: Lexington, 2013. Xxv + 203 Pp., Marzia Caporale

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Touria Khannous. African Pasts, Presents, and Futures. Generational Shifts in African Women’s Literature, Film, and Internet Discourse. Lanham: Lexington, 2013. xxv + 203 pp.

Cynthia Tompkins. Experimental Latin American Cinema. Austin: U Of Texas P, 2013. X+ 294 Pp., Carolina Rocha

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Cynthia Tompkins. Experimental Latin American Cinema. Austin: U of Texas P, 2013. x+ 294 pp.

No Mere Reflection: Mirrors As Windows On Russian Culture, Julia Chadaga

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay traces the development of mirror use in Russia from the medieval period to the modern day with particular attention to the dynamic interplay between the utilitarian and symbolic functions of this object. I examine how the discourse around mirrors in Russia was shaped by a preoccupation with border-crossing and identity that is distinctive to Russian culture as well as by mirror lore from other world traditions; and I demonstrate that the presence of mirrors shaped the production of imaginative literature in profound ways. The essay focuses on several key functions of the Russian mirror: as a site of …

The Mirror In Art: Vanitas, Veritas, And Vision, Helena Goscilo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Humankind’s venerable obsession with the mirror, traceable to the ancient myths of Medusa and Narcissus, is copiously attested in Western art, which historically relied on the mirror as both practical tool and polysemous trope. While the mirror’s reflective capacities encouraged its identification with the vaunted mimetic function of literature and film, its refractive quality enabled artists to explore and comment on perspective, in the process challenging the concept of art’s faithful representation of phenomena. My radically compressed and selective overview of the mirror’s significance in Western iconography focuses primarily on visibility, gaze, and gender, dwelling on key moments and genres …

From Jugendbewegung To Raf: Youth, Friendship, And Protest In Post-Wall German Cinema, Nicole Thesz

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Recent German-language films frame anti-establishment activities as a rejuvenating force. In Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (2004) and Was tun, wenn’s brennt? (2001), the young filmmakers Hans Weingartner and Gregor Schnitzler take a nostalgic approach to the tradition of protest in Germany. Volker Schlöndorff, in contrast, builds on first-hand memories of the 1970s and the RAF, depicting the escalation of violence in Die Stille nach dem Schuß (2000). This paper explores the ways in which the three films foreground personal motivations, rather than political causes, arguing that friendship is used to gauge the success of protest. While the friends in …

Geographies Of Memory: Ruth Beckermann's Film Aesthetics , Karen Remmler

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

How might we view the films by the Jewish Austrian filmmaker, Ruth Beckermann through the lens of the prose by the late German writer W.G. Sebald? The archival and, at the same time, haunting prose of Sebald's works such as The Emigrants or Austerlitz bears a close resemblance to the work of memory that Beckermann's films begs us to do. By focusing on particular spaces of remembrance in Beckermann's films in comparison to Sebald's similar practice of intermeshing historical and individual memories, this essay explores how the gendered construction of cultural memory takes place through transcultural encounters with those deemed …

Viennese Memories Of History And Horrors , Dagmar C. G. Lorenz

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

World cities, including Vienna, are notorious for their crime history and for the imaginary crimes in fiction and film associated with them. The works of authors such as Musil, Canetti, Doderer, Jelinek, and Rabinovici, and Reed's film The Third Man portray Vienna as a setting of crimes.

"Conventional" crimes in literature and films include serial murders, crimes of passion, as well as underworld and gangster activities. These crimes pale in comparison with the crimes committed during the Nazi era and covered up thereafter. Aichinger in "Strassen und Plätze" calls to mind atrocities that occurred at different locations in Vienna. Only …

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…

Maghrebi-French Directors Behind The Camera: The Cinema Of The Second G, Dina Sherzer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In an article entitled "De Nanterre à Hollywood" ("From Nanterre to Hollywood"), published in a 1996 issue of L'Express, Dalila Kerkouche writes: "leur père tenait le marteau piqueur, eux manient la caméra…

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 …

Identity At The Border: Narrative Strategies In María Novaro's El Jardín Del Edén And John Sayles's Lone Star , Amy Kaminsky

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In María Novaro's El jardín del Edén and John Sayles's Lone Star, the narrative and visual art of film functions as ritual does: to make sense of the dangerous liminal space of the border. Novaro and Sayles both locate their protagonists' identity quests in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands, but they approach the problem from different directions: Sayles from the north, Novaro from the south; Sayles from the perspective of men in search of themselves through their fathers, Novaro from that of women in search of identity with the help of each other. With her focus on the stories of three …

Proust, Bakhtin, And The Dialogic Albertine: Voice And Fragmentation In The Captive , Jesse Kavadlo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article provides a Bakhtinian reading of Proust's The Captive, the fourth novel of In Search of Lost Time, while at the same time it demonstrates how several of Bakhtin's key terms come to life in Proust's modern, self-conscious novel in a striking way. In particular, the character of Albertine is a fully Bakhtinian figure in the novel: she is at once intertextual (tied to photography and film), chronotopic (scattered through time and space as a living embodiment of narrative), and dialogic (many Albertines in a series). Proust's narrator's fragmentation of consciousness, particularly with regard to Albertine, as …

Mysterious Illnesses Of Human Commodities In Woody Allen And Franz Kafka , Iris Bruce

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The article examines correspondences between Woody Allen's film Zelig and texts by Franz Kafka. Both Leonard Zelig and Gregor Samsa (The Metamorphosis) suffer from mysterious illnesses which are multi-determined. Twentieth-century racial stereotypes are partially responsible for them; other causes lie in the commercialization of life in early twentieth-century society. Zelig's illness parallels the cultural trends and political movements of his time and becomes full-blown in the fascist movement. Zelig is therefore also a commentary on the cultural climate which helped bring about the rise of fascism. Kafka could not benefit from Allen's hindsight, but Kafka's representation of what …

Border Crossings In Maríe Redonnet's Splendid [Seaside] Hôtel, Elizabeth A. Mazza-Anthony

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Maríe Redonnet crosses previously established boundaries in Splendid Hôtel and Seaside. Her writing flows across traditional literary genres as she revisits certain motifs, characters, and situations in her novel and play. In addition to crossing the border between the novel and theater, she echoes the works of other authors—specifically Rimbaud and Duras. Moreover, within a particular text Redonnet erases subject boundaries. That is to say, her characters are not individuals; their uniqueness is washed away by a continual ebb and flow of common characteristics and traits. By creating such fluid personae, Redonnet captures the societal homogeneity that is symptomatic …

Ideology Takes A Day Off: Althusser And Mass Culture, Chip Rhodes

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

As theories of mass culture that focus on empowerment, use value and utopian bribes have become increasingly popular, Althusser's groundbreaking work on structural causality and ideology has been left aside because of its alleged inability to account for social resistance. This is unfortunate because such Althusserian concepts still provide the most productive foundation for a Marxist approach to mass culture that avoids both unwitting apologetics and facile, ethical critiques. Nevertheless, many of Althusser's theoretical claims are in need of revision. As the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off implicitly suggests, Althusser's distinction between ideology and the aesthetic no longer holds in …

Sembène Ousmane's Xala: The Use Of Film And Novel As Revolutionary Weapon, Kenneth Harrow

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Sembène Ousmane's Xala was written as a novel and made into a film in 1974. It is a biting attack upon the newly risen bourgeois class that has ascended to power and wealth in Senegal since independence. The ideological framework of Xala rests upon Marxist assumptions adapted to and modified by the circumstances in Africa. The distinctively Senegalese features which mark Sembène's portrayal include Muslim and traditional religious beliefs which form the basis of the class oppression and the sexism depicted in Xala. They also supply the title to the work since xala means impotency in Wolof, and it …