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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.

Les Particules Élémentaires: Self–Portrait, Gerald Prince

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Perhaps no French novel in the past fifteen years has received more critical attention than Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires and perhaps none has evoked stronger reactions with regard to the (literary) values it espouses and represents. This (self-)portrait, like any portrait, accents certain features more than others. It concentrates on refuting charges of nihilism, reactionaryism, sexism, and racism; it stresses Houellebecq’s novel’s attention to form and its thematic clarity as well as its determination to say something rather than nothing; and, through a consideration of its references to various media, arts, and texts, of its pet peeves and true …

Proust’S Innovative Vision Of Literature As Seen Through His Correspondence, Pascal Ifri

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Marcel Proust’s monumental correspondence is filled with information about the man Marcel Proust and his daily life, but reveals very little about his ideas on art and literature or about the novel that consumed his life, A la recherche du temps perdu. Most of his letters paint an extremely polite and even obsequious man overly concerned with pleasing his correspondents or with organizing his social life while others provide information about his personal life. When he mentions his writing, it is usually in connection with practical questions or information he is seeking. Very rarely does he discuss his novel …

Gérard Bessette (1920-2005): A Monstre Sacré In French Canadian Literature, Steven Urquhart

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article examines Gérard Bessette’s relative marginalization in French Canadian literature by means of rereading his first novel, La Bagarre (1958) in terms of its monstrous aesthetic and its rapport with subsequent novels, notably Le Semestre (1979). Bessette’s first novel allows us not only to understand the deviant nature of his aesthetic and its evolution, but also how it relates to his individualistic and transgressive position with the French Canadian literary institution in which he embodies a monstre sacré, an author and a character of sorts, who is at once revered and cursed.

Creation And (Re)Presentation Of Historical Discourse In Isle Of Passion By Laura Restrepo, Daniela Melis

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Published in Colombia in 1989, but neglected until the author’s later distinction, Laura Restrepo’s first novel, Isle of Passion, focuses on historical facts, as well as on the issues that arise when the impact of events is articulated in official discourse. This study—drawing from Walter Mignolo’s idea of decolonial theory—explores how Restrepo’s attempt to rewrite history following “an-other logic, an-other language, an-other thinking” contributes to the decolonization of knowledge, being, community interests, and cultural heritage. The novel’s plot centers on a minor event in international history: the territorial dispute over the island of Clipperton, which was encountered by an …

Writers, Rebels, And Cannibals: Léonora Miano’S Rendering Of Africa In L’Intérieur De La Nuit, Magali Compan

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Léonora Miano’s first novel L’Intérieur de la nuit received a laudatory critical reception when it was published by the French publishing house Plon in 2005. The novel’s depiction of an act of cannibalism in a village of a fictional African nation provides the turning point and central event of the narrative. The novel’s cannibalism has also been central to its critical reception in the west. While many Francophone works have employed and developed the metaphor of the act of cannibalism, Miano “cannibalizes” in her novel in unique ways that prove simultaneously problematic and productively revealing.

This article considers the interviews …

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 …

History As Trash: Reading Berlin 2000, Peter Fritzsche

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The expectation that Berlin, at the cusp of the twenty-first century, should produce "big-city" novels that, like Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz in its own time, would catch the encounters, juxtapositions, and historical layerings of the newly reunified capital is perhaps unfair, and certainly a high bar, but it reflects widespread interest in literary representations of this brazenly, even insolently transformed city...

Berlin Heinrichplatz: The Novels Of Ulrich Peltzer, Christian Jäger

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

For at least a decade Germans have been waiting—waiting for literature, waiting for the great Berlin novel, waiting for the great novel of reunification…

Theorizing The Role Of The Intermediary In Postcolonial (Con)Text: Driss Chraïbi's Une Enquête Au Pays , Anjali Prabhu

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The paper is a study of the role of the "intermediary" as exemplified by Inspector Ali in Driss Chraïbi's novel Une enquête au pays. This reading traces his role as the intermediary through a close reading of the construction of this space — between higher levels of administration, implying the more elite strata in Moroccan society, and the Berber peasants who live isolated in the mountains, struggling to subsist. Ali has claims to both of these locations: to the former through education and his position in the police force and to the latter through ancestry and the culture of …

When I Means We: A Reading Of School In French Caribbean Apprenticeship Novels , Pascale De Souza

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

While most critics agree that the quest for identity which underlies much of post-colonial literature is illustrated in the thematic approaches adopted by writers, this study further the argument by suggesting that it also conditions writers' selection of narrative strategies. In its representation of subjectivity in process, the apprenticeship novel seems to offer an enticing model of self-completion. This narrative strategy, however, presents particular complexities when used to portray coming of age in a society divided along ethnic lines. Simon Gikandi argues with regards to the Caribbean that the probability of a quest for identity reaching fruition is nil, but …

Christian Oster's Picnic, Warren Motte

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

With eight novels published by the Editions de Minuit in the last decade, Christian Oster has established himself as one of the most interesting figures in a cohort of new French writers who are gradually redefining the novel as literary form…

Borders Of The Self In Alfredo Véa's The Silver Cloud Café , Roberto Cantú

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

I am proposing an analysis of a novel by Alfredo Véra, Jr., The Silver Cloud Café (1996). As the author of a narrative trilogy that includes La Maravilla (1993), and Gods Go Begging (1999), Véa has produced, in The Silver Cloud Café, a novel that is central to the trilogy's interpretation. In my analysis, I discuss how Véa's novels question borders of the self—understood as ethnic or racial—through notions of a personal education (in La Maravilla, Alberto's; in The Silver Cloud Café, Zeferino's) in which characters count on the pedagogical guidance of Yaqui shamans, manongs from the …

Maria Vargas Llosa's El Hablador As A Discourse Of Conquest , José Castro Urioste

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In this article I study how Mario Vargas Llosa's El hablador proposes to deconstruct indigenist narrative and promotes the assimilation of Indian cultures under the model of modernity. In this sense, the novel El hablador is written as a discourse of conquest in which the construction of the self—through the evocation of various oppositions—represents an allegory of modern nation. I begin my article with the analysis of the notion of discourse of conquest, as well as one of its most reiterated images of power, the "civilization-barbarism" dichotomy. I follow this with an analysis of the oppositions through which the representation …

Missing Persons: Cherokee's Parrot And Chatterton's Poet , Leonard R. Koos

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay explores the problematic nature of selfhood in the detective genre as established by Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) and most recently reformulated in two metaphysical detective novels, Jean Echenoz's Cherokee (1983) and Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton (1987). Poe's detective Auguste Dupin is described as having a "Bi-Part Soul," which permits him to vacate himself in order to construct the narrative solution to a crime. This duality, in the postmodern detective novel, is transformed into an irrevocable dislocation of the subject. Cherokee's onomastic devalorization of the story's characters and simulation of the human subject in the …

Cardinal's The Words To Say It: The Words To Reproduce Mother, Eilene Hoft-March

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Words to Say it, an autobiographical novel by Algerian-born Frenchwoman Marie Cardinal, earned praise for the accuracy with which it documents a classic psychoanalysis. Quickly sketched, the plot seems to suggest that the separation from an overpowering mother is effected by paternal language and phallic law—the normal, normative psychic itinerary of the human subject. In its reconsideration of the Oedipal, this essay explores Irigaray's idea of the ambiguities of separation from mother and the possibility that the story of (feminine) subjectivity begins with the mother, begins with affiliation and affirmation even as it speaks of separateness. From this …

From The Sea Wall To The Lover : Prostitution And Exotic Parody, Pascale Bécel

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This analysis of the two novels highlights Marguerite Duras' equivocal stance with regard to colonial Indochina where she grew up at the beginning of the century. As The Lover rewrites The Sea Wall in the autobiographical mode, the emphasis shifts from an explicit denunciation of colonialism and an implicit subversion of the Lotilian novel, to a parody of exotic themes and narratives. However, by focusing on the two young protagonists' construction of themselves as femmes fatales and prostitutes, this discussion reveals that the politics of gender and race remain at odds in Duras' fictional autobiographies. The cultural other (qua a …

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 …

The Conspiracy Of The Miscellaneous In Foucault's Pendulum, Ken Kirkpatrick

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Like Name of the Rose, Foucault 's Pendulum grows out of and comments on Umberto Eco's theoretical work. Eco's decision to turn to a conspiracy, rather than a straight detective format for his second novel fits with his recent concern about how interpretative communities function in a period of divisive, diffuse critical theory. Yet Foucault's Pendulum does not merely amplify or dramatize his position; rather, it undermines it by becoming excessively involved in generating conspiracy. It is a satire in which the thing satirized proves more interesting and engaging than the satirical position. Nevertheless, Eco does raise concerns about …

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 …

Ideology And Structure In Giardinelli's Santo Oficio De La Memoria, Gustavo Pellón

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The article studies the most recent novel by Argentine novelist Mempo Giardinelli from the point of view of its polyphonic structure. Santo Oficio is compared to one of its models, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and the respective modern and postmodern aesthetics ofboth novels are discussed. Giardinelli's approach in this ambitious novel is contrasted with that of major authors of the Latin American Boom. A family tree of the Domeniconelle family, the protagonists of Santo Oficio, is included.

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 …

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 …

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, …

The Political Alienation Of The Intellectual In Recent Zairian Fiction, Janice Spleth

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

A high proportion of recent Zairian fiction features intellectuals—educators, priests, students, and professionals—as major characters who are in some way alienated from society. This study documents the extent of this occurrence in novels by Mbwil a Mpang Ngal, V. Y. Mudimbe, Bolya Baenga, and Pius Ngandu Nkashama and, at the same time, relates the situation of the intellectual as seen in these works to some of the social and political factors peculiar to Zaire's colonial history and post-independence evolution. Analyses of individual novels provide the basis for a discussion of Belgian colonial policies regarding the évolué, the ambiguous role …

Numa And The Nature Of The Fantastic In The Fiction Of Juan Benet, David K. Herzberger

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Perhaps the most rewarding critical approach to the novels of Juan Benet is one that encompasses the irrational and seeks to reveal the mysterious— one that can be closely identified with the notion of the fantastic. The view of the fantastic developed in the present study is based on a synthetic modification of the precepts of Todorov and Rabkin, and places emphasis on the hesitation of the reader when confronted with a diametric reversal of the laws of the text. Both the literary theory and prose fiction of Benet can be closely linked to the fantastic: the former through Benet's …

Politics And The New African Novel: A Study Of The Fiction Of Francis Bebey, W. Curtis Schade

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

From its inception African fiction has been strongly marked by political themes. In the late 1950's the virulent satire of Mongo Béti and Ferdinand Oyono stated the case against the denigration of African values inherent in all aspects of the colonial system. Their style and message subsequently gave way to novels focusing upon the drama of the transition of power at the moment of Independence. Whether optimistic or disillusioned, many of these novels featured real events and people, often thinly disguised, and sought to give an «inside» picture of that historical moment. Other tendencies developed in the late 60's, most …

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 …

The Changing View Of Abortion: A Study Of Friedrich Wolf's Cyankali And Arnold Zweig's Junge Frau Von 1914, Sabine Schroeder-Krassnow

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

With the end of the nineteenth century, women start becoming more independent, demanding more rights, making a place for themselves in society. The docile woman who is seduced by the socially higher male and in desperation commits infanticide begins to fade from literature. At the same time a new woman with a fresh vitality emerges and deals with the old problem of pregnancy and abortion. Two works which treat this type of woman are examined and the parallels as well as the differences between the portrayal are established. Although the heroines in Wolf's play and Zweig's novel come from different …