Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Sonja Stojanovic. Mind The Ghost. Thinking Memory And The Untimely Through Contemporary Fiction In French. Liverpool Up, 2023., Catherine Nesci

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Sonja Stojanovic. Mind the Ghost. Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French. Liverpool UP, 2023. xi + 307 pp.

Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza. This Ghostly Poetry: History And Memory Of Exiled Spanish Republican Poets. U Of Toronto P, 2020., Paul Cahill

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza, This Ghostly Poetry: History and Memory of Exiled Spanish Republican Poets. U of Toronto P, 2020. xii + 369 pp.

Amy L. Hubbell. Remembering French Algeria: Pieds-Noirs, Identity, And Exile. Lincoln And London: U Of Nebraska P, 2015., Anna Rocca

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Amy L. Hubbell. Remembering French Algeria: Pieds-Noirs, Identity, and Exile. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2015.

French Theater And The Memory Of The Great War, Susan Mccready

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

A systematic examination of the ground on which French-language playwrights chose to stage their confrontation with the war would expose many of the literary and cultural biases on which our collective memory of the Great War is based. Even the brief outline of French-language war plays provided in this essay challenges many of our most cherished assumptions about war experience and the meaning of the Great War.

Taking Stock: Marie Nimier’S Textual Cabinet Of Curiosities, Adrienne Angelo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In many life-writing projects, the seemingly innocuous description of heteroclite objects and how those objects are stored and recalled in fact plays an important role in demonstrating their importance to the process of memory work. At once the lingering traces of one’s past and also an aggregation of stories evoked by an examination of them, these curios focus attention on the relationship between the individual and the storage of memories. This article will focus on certain collectibles, collections and collectors that appear throughout the fictional, autobiographical and autofictional world that Marie Nimier has scripted to date. This textual cabinet of …

Nina Bouraoui’S Nos Baisers Sont Des Adieux: Ekphrasis And The Accumulation Of Memories, Anna Rocca

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article aims to explore the function of the image and the purpose of the works of art in Franco-Algerian author Nina Bouraoui’s Nos baisers sont des adieux (2010). Similar to a scrapbook with short descriptions of people, places, and objects, the book itself does not contain any visual representations. In spite of this lack, the image—the latter intended as mental or physical picture that reproduces reality—is a central theme throughout the work. Because visual art is described and interpreted but not shown, I argue that, by means of ékphrasis, the word-image dialogue further enables the narrator to express …

The Song Of Disappearance: Memory, History, And Testimony In The Poetry Of Antonio Gamoneda, Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay explores Antonio Gamoneda’s poetry as an Adornian form of testimony. With its enigmatic foregrounding of lies, the book-length poem Descripción de la mentira ‘Description of the Lie’ can be read as a “contradictory testimony” in which the act and memory of witnessing go, as it were, underground—only to resurface, rife with loss, years after Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy. Yet the abstruse character of this poetic writing prevents readers from drawing straightforward political truths about Spanish history from the poem. Losses are inscribed in the text catachrestically, as they truly are: losses. Gamoneda’s poetry has been read …

Memorials, Shrines And Umbrellas In The Rain: Poetry And 11-M, Jill Robbins

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This project examines the representations in recent Spanish poetry of violence, solidarity, and memory, as these intersect with ethnic, linguistic and religious otherness, globalization, communication technology, and nationalisms. The lens through which the analysis is refracted is the poetic response to the Islamist terrorist bombings of working-class commuter trains in Madrid on March 11, 2004 (known in Spain as 11-M). This event, which occurred days before national elections, exposed the contradictory cultural forces that underlie notions of the national identity, economic transformation, the role of the media, and the social contract in Spain today. This became apparent in the massive …

Proust And Eliot: An Intertextual Reading, Inge Crosman Wimmers

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Defining intertextuality as “the reader’s perception of relationships between one work and others, which either preceded or followed it” (Riffaterre), this essay sets out to highlight compelling similarities between Proust’s novel, A la recherche du temps perdu, and the fictional works of George Eliot. The emphasis is on affective memory (involuntary memory and emotional templates), ethical considerations (empathy and compassion), and the kind of self-reflexive reading both writers encourage through a complicit narration that implicates the reader. They show readers how emotional memory constitutes the essence of their personal history, thus anticipating modern research in psychology and the neurosciences. …

Wartime Writings, Or The Imaginary Lover Of Marguerite Duras, Bethany Ladimer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The publication in 2006 of Marguerite Duras’s Cahiers de la guerre, ‘Wartime Writings,’ written between 1943 and 1949, made accessible to the reader the first known versions of the family drama that was to become the material of much of her fiction. As this work now takes its place as chronologically first in the intertext of Duras’s autofictional writings, it sheds considerable light on our understanding of the transformations in these texts that occurred over her lifetime. Whereas L’Amant had been presented and accepted as the disclosure of a real occurrence and the origin of the other works, it …

The Lost Apple Plays: Performing Operation Pedro Pan , Kimberly Del Busto Ramírez

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

From 1960 to 1962, more than 14,000 unaccompanied minors took flight from Cuba to the United States, establishing the largest recorded exodus in the Western Hemisphere. The displaced children and the country they left behind are often metaphorized using a popular Latin American nursery rhyme, “The Lost Apple.” Now, more than four decades later, Operation Pedro Pan persists through a revealing body of performance by and about a nation’s exiled children. The Lost Apple Plays investigates how memory, identity formation, nationhood, citizenship, and migration have been dramatized through these performances. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz, director/actor/playwright Mario Ernesto Sánchez, singers …

Displaced Identities And Traveling Texts In Luisa Valenzuela's Black Novel (With Argentines) , Laura R. Loustau

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In Luisa Valenzuela's Black Novel (With Argentines) Roberta and Agustín, the main characters, cross geographic, physical, psychological, sexual and textual borders in order to regain their own writing space, one which would allow them to narrate their own past. Themes that include exile, memory, and literary and artistic creations are presented from a theatrical and deterritorialized space. In Black Novel the city of New York is the stage where the characters/actors create and mix together space and time coordinates. The intention is to (re)construct the individual memory of the characters, and in a more ample perspective, the collective memory of …

Modiano And Sebald: Walking In Another's Footsteps , Steven Ungar

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article studies Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder (1997) and W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2000) in conjunction with a contemporary literature of diaspora grounded in the extended aftermath of World War II. Both texts straddle fiction and testimonial accounts such as memoirs, letters, and video/audio recordings. In addition, both raise questions with which traditional historians seldom contend, even when they group these questions under the category of memory. What understanding of the recent past might these two narratives promote? What do they imply—individually or as a set—concerning the nature and function of the historical subjectivity that literature can convey? Each in its …

Jewish History And Memory In Paul Celan's "Du Liegst" , Irene Fußl

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the poem "DU LIEGST" (1967), Paul Celan demonstrates his mindfulness of historical dates as memorials to past traumas—the execution of the conspirators of the plot to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944, the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in 1919, and the be-heading of Danton in 1794. Celan has also written the specific date of the poem into the text, although hidden, and weaves together Jewish tradition and events of the recent past in a lyric exploration of human suffering. Building on the hitherto predominantly biographical readings of the poem, the presence of traditional Jewish texts (Old …

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 …

The Necessity Of Remembering Injustice And Suffering: History, Memory, And The Representation Of The Romani Holocaust In Austrian Contemporary Literature, Roxane Riegler

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay focuses on the role of memory in Austria. It demonstrates the significance of literary production when addressing and coming to terms with the past. Reflecting on the role of memory in history and literature, I see the boundaries between the two blurring. My inquiry includes several questions: Why should we remember? How can we integrate literature into a theoretical framework of memory and history? Why do authors take the trouble to reconstruct a burdened past or even relive pain and suffering? How do authors address the connections between the past and the present? Is it important to draw …

A Clear-Sighted Witness: Trauma And Memory In Maryse Condé'S Desirada, Dawn Fulton

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Maryse Condé's 1997 novel recounts a young Guadeloupean woman's frustrating search for the identity of her father. Because the information she seeks is initially guarded by her mother and later contradicted by friends and family, this heroine confronts an epistemological impasse, a potentially traumatic event to which she will never have direct access. Informed by Toni Morrison's reflections on memory and invention and by recent studies in trauma theory, this essay examines the ways in which Condé negotiates this impasse in her novel, creating a narrative field of knowledge that allows for its own lacunae and maintains multiple registers of …

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 …

Moving On? Memory And History In Griselda Gambaro's Recent Theater, Gail Bulman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

For more than forty years, Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro has dramatized the social and political climate of her homeland. This article examines three of her plays from the late eighties and early nineties, using both Freudian and performance theories, in order to show how these works document the range of emotions in post Dirty War Argentina and, at the same time, postulate ways of coping with the memories of those years. Beyond traditional memory-theater, these plays demonstrate the trauma of remembering by highlighting different phases in the memory process and by conceptualizing stages in the grief of a traumatized nation. …

A Literary Form For Love: Yves Navarre's My Friends Are Gone With The Wind, Richard M. Berrong

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In My Friends Are Gone with the Wind (Ce sont amis que vent emporte, 1991), one of his last and most innovative texts, Yves Navarre (1940-1994), one of the most important contemporary French novelists to deal significantly and regularly with gay themes, returns to his preoccupation with the dangers that the forms inherent in traditional literary narrative pose for the expression of authentic human experience. The narrator, Roch, wants to capture the reality of his love for David, in part to prove to what he sees as a largely hostile heterosexual world that gays are as capable of loving …

Recollecting Wondrous Moments: Father Pushkin, Mother Russia, And Intertextual Memory In Tatyana Tolstaya's "Night" And "Limpopo", Karen R. Smith

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

With their references to Alexander Pushkin, Tolstaya's "Night" and "Limpopo" respond to the cultural crisis of 1980s Russia, where literary language, bent for so long into the service of totalitarianism, suffers the scars of amnesia. Recycling Pushkin's tropes, particularly his images of feminine inspiration derived from the cultural archetype of Mother Russia, Tolstaya's stories appear nostalgically to rescue Russia's literary memory, but they also accentuate the crisis of the present, the gap between the apparel of literary language and that which it purports to clothe. "Night," an ironic reworking of Pushkin's "Queen of Spades," dismantles the nostalgic imagery of his …

Unveiling French-African Memory, Boniface Mongo-Mboussa

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Whereas the question of memory has become central to French identity, notably in regards to the Vichy period, French-African memory has been systematically obscured…

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...

Between Amnesia And Anamnesis: Re-Membering The Fractures Of Colonial History, Anne Donadey

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Greek word "anamnesis," a term used by several contributors to this section, means "remembrance," or going back (in time) through memory…

Memory And Authenticity, Randolph Starn

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Ten years ago Natalie Davis and I decided to put together a special issue of Representations we would call "Memory and Counter-Memory…

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 …

Dissonant Voices: Memory And Counter-Memory In Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's Autobiografia Del General Franco, José F. Colmeiro

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Vázquez Montalbán's unauthorized autobiography of General Franco is built upon the use of dissonance as a strategy of resistance. The novel reveals the author's "professional schizophrenia" resulting from the dramatic authorial split as Franco's fictional ghostwriter and anti-Franco public persona, refracted internally in the split narrator of the text. This monumental construction of language and memories puts forth a metafictional examination of the conflicting relationship between history and fiction. Challenging traditional notions of authorship, referentiality, and self-referentiality, Autobiografia del general Franco obliges us to examine the dissonant discourses of historiography and memory and to ascertain the political function of writing …

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 …

Between Female Dialogics And Traces Of Essentialism: Gender And Warfare In Christa Wolf's Major Writings, Sabine Wilke

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The relationship between memory, writing, and the question of how we define ourselves as gendered subjects is at the center of Christa Wolf's work. Her literary production, starting in the late fifties with a rather naive and un-selfconscious love story, has undergone a dramatic shift. In her more recent texts, Wolf sets out to rewrite classical mythology to make us aware of those intersections in the history of Western civilization at which women were made economically and psychologically into objects. The present essay seeks to locate Christa Wolf's evolving conception of gender and warfare within the contemporary theoretical discussion on …