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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 …

Cernuda In Current Spanish Poetry, Salvador J. Fajardo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The poet Luis Cernuda (Spain, 1902-Mexico, 1963) has left his mark on much of the poetry written in Spain since the sixties. First rediscovered in the Peninsula in the late fifties and early sixties by, among others, Francisco Brines, José Angel Valente, and Jaime Gil de Biedma, his influence became pervasive both through the work of these poets, and, through the reading of Cernuda’s poetry itself, available since 1975 in Harris and Maristany edition. Referring in particular to Biedma, whose impact on younger poets has been significant, this paper examines the presence of Cernuda in certain approaches to language and …

Texts Of Light And Shadow: Dickens And Lautréamont In Alejandra Pizarnik's Sombra Poems , Beth Zeiss

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In her poetry, the Argentinean Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-72) persistently explores the transformations that the poetic subject undergoes in language. She articulates a cycle wherein the subject's desire to (re)create herself as a presence in language is followed by the desire for death, the absence of the self, when her desire becomes frustrated by language's inadequacies. As yet, the importance of the theme of the fluctuating self in language as developed by Pizarnik in a series of poems protagonized by Sombra, has not been analyzed. The character Sombra appears in six fragment-like poems published posthumously in Textos de Sombra (1982) and …

Ethnos Meets Eros On The River Plate: Marcelo Birmajer, Sylvia Molloy, Anna Kazumi Stahl , Edna Aizenberg

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article deals with three contemporary novelists, Marcelo Birmajer, Anna Kazumi Stahl and Sylvia Molly in the context of a new understanding of ethnicity, sexuality and literature in Argentina. In contrast to previous eras when writing reflected a melting pot philosophy which saw Eros as a means of fusing ethnicities and eliminating particularities, today's fiction often celebrates these differences, uncovering layers of secrecy and demanding a place for various languages, sexualities and geographies.

Restaging Hysteria: Mary Wigman As Writer And Dancer , Laura A. Mclary

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Mary Wigman was not only a leading proponent of the early twentieth-century Expressionist dance movement, but also a writer of poetry and short poetic prose. Despite her assertion that dance was beyond language, she wrote often about dance in an attempt to articulate the kinesthetic experience of dance through languages. This interdisciplinary study explores the intersection of dance and writing for Wigman, focusing on gender coding in writing and dance within the context of early twentieth-century dialogues. Despite the pervasive equation of (feminine) hysteria with dance and (masculine) subjectivity with authorship, Wigman engaged in both activities. I argue that Wigman …

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 …

Subject To Instability , Karen Bouwer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

For Plantier, language constitutes reality and is male dominated. Readers of texts, she says, are at a disadvantage because the author imposes a logic that we must accept in order to understand the text. The discourses shaping our social reality have the same effect. Plantier has struggled against individual voices, discourses, and the very fabric of language informed by these discourses. "Subject to Instability" examines the impact on her generic evolution of a changing sense of self, of who her interlocutors are, and of those for whom she is speaking. I argue that her increasing attempt to juggle many different …

The Dialogic Self: Language And Identity In Annie Ernaux , Warren Johnson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The nine largely autobiographical texts that Annie Ernaux (1940- ) has published to date, which range stylistically from early strident outpourings to the willed transparency of an "écriture plate," all reveal the narrator as a patchwork subjectivity comprised of the discourses surrounding the child, adolescent, and adult against which she reacts, frequently without comprehending her own motivations. I try to unravel the strands that make up Ernaux's language and explore how the self that emerges is an aggregate of the discursive spaces she has inhabited. I trace as well how her gender identity impacts her capacity and willingness to struggle …

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 …

Footprints Revisited Or "Life In The Changed Space That I Don't Know": Elke Erb's Poetry Since 1989, Barbara Mabee

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

After the fall of the Wall, the lyrical correspondence of the East German writer Elke Erb with the Austrian experimental writer Friederike Mayröcker proved to be of great significance for Erb's process of reexamining perspectives and constituting a new poetic self. In a close reading of Erb's post-Wende texts, the article discusses Erb's reshaping of her poetic craft against the backdrop of her life in the former GDR and literarty discourses in unified Germany. The analysis of representative poetry focuses on three areas of Erb's poetry collections after 1989: critical reflections on life in the former GDR through linguistically …

The Fictions Of Surrealism, Walter A. Strauss

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Surrealism is an attitude toward life, even more than a literary and artistic movement. It aspired to no less than the remaking of man and the world by reintroducing "everyday" magic and a new idealization of the Female. In many respects, its goal was spiritual renewal. This enterprise was most prominently successful in the domain of poetry and painting. The major spokesman for the movement, Andre Breton, disliked the novel. Nevertheless, the members of the movement and their associates made numerous ventures into prose fiction, with notable results. Four types of fiction are delineated: the neo-Gothic romance; the adventure diary …

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 …

Phylacteries As Metaphor In Elie Wiesel's Le Testament D'Un Poète Juif Assassiné, Simon P. Sibelman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The novels of the Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, were initially read as eloquent expressions of remembrance and witnessing to the massacred millions who perished in Hitler's Inferno. His fiction is likewise a profound expression of Jewishness and of the author's fundamental belief that post-Auschwitz Jewry must draw nearer to its authentic roots. To that end, Wiesel' s novel, Le Testament d'un poète juif assassiné, represents the author's most compelling expression concerning Jewish identity. The novel is replete with the language, symbols and meta-structural techniques which elicit an exhortation to remain faithful to one's Jewishness. Moreover, Wiesel provides the reader …

The Past And The Present In The Early Novels Of Hanns-Josef Ortheil, Ernestine Schlant

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Hanns-Josef Ortheil's early novels Fermer, 1979 and Hecke, 1983 have male protagonists who search for self-identity in the West Germany of the 1980s. In the process, they discover that they are profoundly influenced by the lives and experiences of their parents, particularly as these lives were shaped during and by the Hitler regime. In Fermer, the 19-year old protagonist rebels against this society by going AWOL. Yet in his geographical flight and intellectual analyses he realizes his deep emotional bonds with the expectations and behavior of the parent generation. Recognition of these bonds is only the first …

Sounding Out The Silence Of Gregor Samsa: Kafka's Rhetoric Of Dys-Communication, Robert Weninger

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Through his transformation, Gregor Samsa, rather than simply silencing himself, allows his repressed voice to be heard palimpsestically in the language of his family and the boarders. His story is one of inverted—rather than aborted—communication. An analogous inversion governs the relationship between Kafka and his father and Kafka and his interpreters. As a child, Kafka could make little sense of his father's rules and his contradictory actions; later, he reduplicates in his writings this grammar of "dys-communication." Our puzzled and often frustrated reactions to Kafka's texts can therefore be seen to mirror his equally puzzled and frustrated reactions to his …

Castles In The Air: Vision And Narrativity In Julien Green's Minuit, Robert Ziegler

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

One feature of Julien Green's 1936 novel Minuit is its examination ofthe problematical relationship between narrative discourse and its receiver. In the text, various characters act as narrators who order and assign a temporal structure to real or fictive events and rely on a narratee's receptivity to discover the meaning intended. In view of the attention accorded in the text to the process of story-telling, one may conclude that Green intended his work to interrogate the nature of its own narrativity. In addition, Green's character, the enigmatic Edme, is a mystic by reason of language, evoking through speech in himself …

Translating From Memory: Patrick Modiano In Postmodern Context, Timothy H. Scherman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In this essay I have attemped to renegotiate the relationship between the work of Patrick Modiano and the conditions of literary production designated by "postmodernism." Contemporary French reviewers and critics have greeted with guarded praise Modiano's efforts to write in a language and about events that belong to another writing. Following their lead, this essay first explores the tension (often lost on American readers) created by the possibility that the historical referent of Modiano's texts—not only Modiano's personal past but the horror of the Occupation—might now exist only as a weightless narrative "effect." As such, it is a part of …

Colonialism, Enlightenment, Castration: Writing, Narration And Legibility In L'Etranger, Larry W. Riggs, Paula Willoquet-Maricondi

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This analysis combines the issue of "narratability" with some psychoanalytic insights, focusing first on the key incident in Meursault's story when he involves himself in writing. Meursault inadvertently inscribes himself in a conflictual drama when he writes a letter for Raymond Sintès. The writing of the letter prefigures both Meursault's later taking up of the gun with which he will kill an Arab and his inexorable evolution toward a situation that makes him capable of narrating and being narrated. It seals him into the colonial world of language. To become capable of narrating is both to become a colonist and …

Some Wheat And Some Chaff: Jean Paulhan And The Postwar Literary Purge In France, Michael Syrotinski

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

A somewhat overlooked figure of French literary history, Jean Paulhan has resurfaced in the polemic surrounding the wartime activities of many respected intellectuals, most prominently Blanchot, Heidegger and de Man. Commentators on Paulhan's role in the intellectual history of the period have tended to avoid reading his texts closely. Paulhan—one of the "heroes" of the literary Resistance in France during the Second World War—took the extremely unpopular and controversial stance after the Liberation of criticizing the National Committee of Writers' proposed purge of suspected collaborationist writers. This essay demonstrates the rigorous consistency of Paulhan's position in the context of his …

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 …

Language And Consciousness In The Poetry Of The "Novisimos": Guillermo Carnero's Latest Poetry, Ignacio-Javier López

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Guillermo Carnero's latest book of poetry, Divisibilidad indefinida, has recently appeared in Spain. In it, the reader witnesses, on the one hand, the reaffirmation of the poetic of the "novisimos": a self-conscious use of language, the presence of "culturalism," a distancing of language, a doubling of the poetic persona. On the other hand, the book reveals an effort to encompass a more complete perspective of poetic reality. The combative attitude of the first decade of the "novisimos" having been left behind, Carnero now develops his poetry in Divisibilidad indefinida by bringing it nearer to human life, although without renouncing …

Recent Poetry And The Essential Word, Biruté Ciplijauskaité

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Postmodern poetry resists classification in tight compartments. After the last artificially-named group of the novisimos in the 60s, the evolution of poetry in Spain has followed different and at times divergent paths. The novisimos had reacted against "social" poetry, denouncing its lack of attention to artistry, almost prosaic quality, subservience to theme, and produced elaborate creations with an emphasis on form and the exquisite and more hermetic word and subject. Obeying the law of corsi e ricorsi, there was a certain return in the 80s to simpler expression which, however, does not pretend to be that of the "man …

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 …

Text As Locus, Inscription As Identity: On Barbara Honigmann's Roman Von Einem Kinde , Marilyn Sibley Fries

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Barbara Honigmann's Roman von einem Kinde (1986) constitutes the author's attempt at narrative self-definition. In this and other regards, it is similar to Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster (1976; Patterns of Childhood, 1980), with which it is briefly compared.

Honigmann's slim collection of stories, conceived by her as "sketches for self-portraits and landscapes," depicts the absolute isolation ofthe female Jewish narrator in the GDR and her search for community (Heimat) via language. Simultaneously, it records that narrator's desire to identify "places of transition," "boundaries at which conditions change" without fixing these in a static prison of text. The narrator-mother …

The Writer's Identity As Self-Dismantling Text In Julien Green's Si J'Étais Vous. . ., Robert Ziegler

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Written between 1944 and 1946, Julien Green's novel Si j'étais vous . . . is one of the author's most fantastic and enigmatic texts, having generated interpretations ranging from the Freudian to the theological. Yet certain central features of the text have not yet been addressed and may lead to a different approach, one focusing on the problem of the writer's identity in his works. Despite the fact that his literary efforts are unsuccessful, Fabien is shown as being a writer like Green himself, but more importantly, he is a character in another writer's fiction. As metatext, Green's novel describes …

Exile In Language, Peter Baker

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Saint-John Perse's poem Exil (1941) represents a deep meditation on the nature of "writing" as subsequent critical theory has developed that term. Though the poem seems to present a "signature" at the end, it may be that the poet through giving in to a radically different signifying practice is in some sense not the signatory of the text. The archaic setting and difficult-to-resolve cultural matrix from this perspective become means of examining the co-originary origins of thought and language. Close analysis of textual patterns reveals a composition practice based on anagrammatic patterning. This kind of questioning of language in the …

Ekphrasis, Intertextuality And The Role Of The Reader In Poems By Francisco Brines And Claudio Rodríguez, W. Michael Mudrovic

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Ekphrasis, the verbal representation of visual art, affords a singular perspective on a discrepancy between the general conception of intertextuality and its practical application. Francisco Brines's "Museo de la Academia" ("Museum of the Academy") and Claudio Rodríguez's "Hilando" ("Spinning") both contain the description of a painting. Each poet achieves diverse effects with a different handling of the respective paintings, yet both come to surprisingly similar conclusions with regard to the poetic act. Brines's depiction of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian supplies a limited amount of information that dovetails neatly with the use of metaphor and metonymy. Rodríguez's use of synecdoche …

The Unseizable Landscape Of The Real: The Poetry And Poetics Of Philippe Jaccottet, Richard Stamelman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

For Philippe Jaccottet the real is the force of life itself. It is also a rapid, fleeting perception made all the more ephemeral by the mimetic imprecision of language. The essence of the real, since it is always other than what is said about it, can never be fully represented. This alterity of the real and the fundamental lack it announces provoke poetic language. By means of a poetics of passage, of passing through, of a travers, Jaccottet confronts the otherness of the unseizable landscape and of the elusive language in which he dwells. In the meditative, prose poem …

Shall We Escape Analogy, Rosmarie Waldrop

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Claude Royet-Journoud's and Anne-Marie Albiach's work can be read as manifestos against metaphor (relation by similarity, the vertical selection axis of the speech act) with which poetry has long been identified. Whereas Royet-Joumoud takes as his theme metaphor in the largest sense (including, finally, all representation that is based on analogy), Albiach's "Enigme" dramatizes the loss of the vertical dimension through, ironically, a metaphor: the fall of a body. Formally, both stress as alternative the horizontal axis of combination (especially the spatial articulation on the page) and the implied view that the world is constructed by language, that it does …