Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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.

Writing The Experiences And (Corporeal) Knowledges Of Women Of Color Into Educational Studies: A Colloquium, A. B. V. M. M. Armstrong-Carela-Martínez-Pérez-Ruiz Guerrero

Pedagogy & (Im)Possibilities across Education Research (PIPER)

In this colloquium, we share collaborative ideas that came about during a weekend retreat. We center our discussions on Chicana and Black feminisms and Womanism, specifically addressing how women of color feminisms inspire us; imagining/defining space; tensions within our sisterhoods; transforming (inner)coloniality by embracing our lived herstories; and how Chicana and Black feminisms and Womanism transform educational studies. We leave readers with hopes for our-selves, our fields, our sisters, and for the world. While not exact tellings of our pláticas during our retreat, we capture and share the essence of burning questions, ideas, and hopes that arose for us when …

Cars, Space, And The Dynamics Of Power In Cuéntame Cómo Pasó ('Tell Me How It Happened'), Linda B. Bartlett

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Cuéntame cómo pasó 'Tell Me How It Happened,' Radio Televisión Española’s long-running television series, recreates Spain’s recent past from the late years of the Franco regime through the transition to democracy and beyond through the daily experiences of the fictional yet typical Alcántara family, thus functioning as a form of historical memory project. This critically-acclaimed program, which debuted in fall 2001, has attracted not only record-size audiences in its 18 seasons (to date), but also scholarly interest as well. While other studies have analyzed the use of the television medium to represent history, or critiqued its historical …

In And Out Of Place: Geographies Of Revolt In Camus's La Peste, Erin Tremblay Ponnou-Delaffon

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

From Roland Barthes to Shoshana Felman, some of the most insightful readings of Albert Camus’s La Peste (The Plague) have focused on its historical dimension. In contrast, this article attends to less studied spatial representations, bringing recent insights from human geography to bear on depictions of Oran and exile in the novel. From its start, The Plague insistently connects plot, spatial setting, and notions of normativity and transgression. Understandings of place—and in particular, who or what is out of place—catalyze contestation and shape Camus’s universalized ethics of revolt, one that views evil and suffering as always out of …

The Lesbian And The Room: Proust’S Invention Of Difference, Christina L. Stevenson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

More than a conflict between external activity and internal sanctuary, the room in Proust's writing is a figure that weaves a complex fabric of narrative perception. If, in his youth, Proust's narrator believed the room to be a refuge for containing an eroticized feminine Other, the wiser narrative voice reveals the room as offering the disruption rather than the fulfillment of desire. The perspective of childhood is interwoven with the retrospective voice of the adult narrator who dispels the naïve fantasies of the desiring youth. This paper illustrates that confronting the failure of desire becomes imperative for the Proustian narrator …

Nil Santiáñez. Topographies Of Fascism. Habitus, Space, And Writing In Twentieth Century Spain. Toronto: U Of Toronto P, 2013. Xiii + 411 Pp., Salvador Oropesa

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Nil Santiáñez. Topographies of Fascism. Habitus, Space, and Writing in Twentieth Century Spain. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2013. xiii + 411 pp.

Heroines, Hierarchies, And Space: The Fiction Of Cecilia Absatz, Naomi Lindstrom

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This examination of the fiction of Cecilia Absatz (Argentina, 1943), covers three novels: Féiguele (1976), the 1982 Té con canela ‘Tea with cinnamon’ and the 1985 Los años pares ‘The Even-Numbered Years.’ The continuities between the three texts, and especially the similarity of their female protagonists, who age from adolescence to the threshold of middle age, allow these novels to be read as a series. The primary focus of this study is the maturation of the protagonists as they struggle for autonomy while navigating different types of space. These include space that is marked by gender; identified as Jewish; and …

Mobile Thresholds, Immobile Phones: Staging Migration, Return, And The Empty Home In Recent Ecuadorian Theater , Amalia Gladhart

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the past decade, hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorians have emigrated, principally to Spain and the United States. A growing body of recent Ecuadorian plays has treated the experiences of the migrants and, tellingly, the experiences of those left behind. This essay focuses on three plays that present migration as a kind of threshold, a space of transition that is paradoxically temporary yet solid: Con estos zapatos me quería comer el mundo ‘With These Shoes I Meant to Take on the World,’ (2002) by Jorge Mateus and Pablo Tatés; El pueblo de las mujeres solas ‘The Village of Solitary Women,’ …

Urban Pastoral: Tradition And Innovation In Apollinaire's "Zone" And Rilke's "Zehnte Duineser Elegie", Eleanor E. Ter Horst

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Two early twentieth-century poets, Rainer Maria Rilke and Guillaume Apollinaire, create new relationships to literary traditions and thus reconfigure the meanings of modernity. In Apollinaire's "Zone" and Rilke's "Tenth Duino Elegy," the city represents what is most distincively modern and revolutionary about poetic practice, yet it also provides a link to the literary and historical past. The city in these poems is a site of poetic potentiality, where time is no longer characterized by the rigid separation between past and present, and where space is not geograpically delineated. Through the poets' use of metaphor and apostrophe, which create a suspension …

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 …

Atlantic Nessologies: Image, Territory, Value , Francisco-]. Hernández Adrián

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay addresses the emerging field of Atlantic Studies and questions the status of "the Atlantic" as an object of study. Rather than assuming a self-evident grid where Atlantic cultural phenomena oscillate between such poles as "centers and peripheries," or "the colonizer and the colonized," I consider a different formulation of the Atlantic. Taking as a starting point an analysis of a poem by Tomás Morales, a modernista poet from the Canary Islands, my essay outlines the notion of "Atlantic nessologies." Three parallel departures are offered from this analysis: image (or the realm of the imaginary); territory (or spatial and …

Proustian Metaphor And The Automobile , Shawn Gorman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In Marcel Proust's Sodome et Gomorrhe, the automobile produces a transformation in the relationship between space and time and, by analogy, a parallel transformation in art. In Proust's famous notion of involuntary memory, the similarity of a past sense impression to a present one leads to transcendence of time and space, and ultimately to metaphor. The metonymical speed of the automobile endlessly chases the sort of metaphorical "simultaneity" at work in involuntary memory. Structurally, the automobile offers the possibility of bringing together two terms by eliminating the middle term (time, space) that separated them; yet the automobile is never …

The Public Becomes Personal: From Ernaux's Passion Simple To Journal Du Dehors, Michelle Scatton-Tessier

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Drawing on an interview in April 1997 with contemporary French writer Annie Ernaux, this article analyzes the interplay between female narrators and quotidian spaces in Passion simple (1991) and Journal du dehors (1993). Ernaux's writing career, spanning nearly thirty years, develops continually from depictions of physical spaces and the gestures or attitudes these spaces prescribe. Ernaux's spaces are not neutral; each bears the strong markings of a specific social class and gender. As this study illustrates, a radical shift exists between the author's 1991 and 1993 texts. Here, she distances herself from the traditional domestic space, as depicted in Passion …

Reconfiguring Boundaries In Maryse Condé'S Crossing The Mangrove , Deborah B. Gaensbauer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Maryse Condé's 1989 novel, Crossing the Mangrove, presents a compelling performance of the complicated patterns of place and space inherent in the social masquerade of a small, isolated, Guadeloupean village. Because the novel corresponds to Condé's return to a Caribbean "stage" to continue a long process of questioning mapped configurations of identity, critical attention has focused on the character of Francis Sancher, the returning "stranger," whose wake serves as both frame and catalyst for the action. Insufficient attention has been paid to the role of Mira Lameaulnes, Sancher's rejected mistress and the mother of his child, whose story the …

Cocteau Au Cirque: The Poetics Of Parade And "Le Numéro Barbette" , Jennifer Forrest

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Parade (1917) was a joint effort production with libretto by Jean Cocteau music by Erik Satie, decor, costumes, and curtain by Pablo Picasso, and choreography by Léonide Massine. It was not only Cocteau's first truly original work, but, as Pierre Gobin contends, Parade is central to an understanding of the structures that would inform all of his subsequent work. Equally central, proposes Lydia Crowson, is Cocteau's July 1926 Nouvelle Revue Française article on "Le Numéro Barbette." The essay on the transvestite striptease trapezist Barbette offers a poetics of the theater that will have changed little by the time of his …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Geography, (M)Other Tongues And The Role Of Translation In Giannina Braschi's El Imperio De Los Sueños, María M. Carrión

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Big Apple seems to be the central axis for the readerly and writerly "I" in El imperio de los sueños (Empire of Dreams), by Giannina Braschi. Readers can easily realize that the text is not just about New York, but that it actually journeys through praise and blame, drinking and dancing, talking and perversing many other cities and landscapes. El imperio is a space of bohemia with streaks from the Latin American Quarter in Paris, the barrio chino barcelonés, the zaguanes of Borges's Buenos Aires, from colonial houses in Old San Juan; it evokes dandy places, …

Filling The Empty Space: Women And Latin American Theatre, Kirsten F. Nigro

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In recent years, Latin American women have begun to appropriate and fill a space once empty of their presence. This essay looks at the work of four such women, (Diana Raznovich and Cristina Escofet of Argentina, Raquel Araujo of Mexico and the Peruvian Sara Joffre), to see how they give substance and voice to their particular concerns. In the process, this essay focusses on: 1) the notion of gender as performance; 2) the feminist deconstruction of narrative; 3) the female body in theatrical space; and 4) new, postmodern ways of doing feminist political theatre.

Spanish American Women Writers: Simmering Identity Over A Low Fire, Ksenija Bilbija

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

After establishing the parallel between the kitchen and the alchemist's laboratory, this article shows that traditionally, the kitchen has come to symbolize the space associated with the marginalization of women. However, the recent explosion of the novels dedicated to the resemantization and reevaluation of the realm of the kitchen is the best evidence that it is also a space from which much creativity emanates. A close reading of two such cookbook/novels, Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel and Like Potatoes for Varenike by Sylvia Plager, points toward a quite parodic and critical gender perspective. Furthermore, it calls for a …

The Perilous Journey From Melancholy To Love: A Kristevan Reading Of Le Médianoche Amoureux, Karen D. Levy

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Since the publication of Michel Tournier's first novel Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique in 1967, in which his protagonist Robinson makes fruitful the very earth of his desert island and eventually accedes to the cosmic transcendence embodied in his mentor and companion Vendredi, this contemporary French writer has boldly explored alternative forms of sexual expression that challenge traditional biological definitions of identity as well as norms of accepted behavior. The basis of his investigations is the anguish-ridden separation from the maternal, as experienced under diverse manifestations usually by male characters, and the irremediable solitude which then stretches over that …

The Lessons Of The Living Dead: Marcel's Journey From Balbec To Douville-Féterne In Proust's Cities Of The Plain: Part Two, Jonathan Warren

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

By analyzing the narrative of Marcel's journey by the "little train" from Balbec to Douville-Féterne the essay engages with the Proust criticism of Georges Poulet, Paul de Man, and Julia Kristeva to support Hayden White's claim that "it is legitimate to read Proust's narrative as an allegory of figuration itself." Like the Madeleine episode, this one serves as a point from which retrospection and prospection radiate. Central to the discussion is the description of Verdurins' dinner party guests as they stand ready to board the train on the platform at Graincourt: their vivacity, compared to a sort of extinction, suggests …

Street-Signs: The City As Context And As Code In The Novels Of Claire Etcherelli, Sara Poole

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The piece aims to consider the novels of Claire Etcherelli as examples of le roman parisien, and to examine the different roles the city is made to play in them. It looks briefly at Etcherelli's debt to the literature of the nineteenth century; at the significance of using real place names in such realist fiction; at Paris as political fulcrum; at why most of Etcherelli's characters live on the fringes of the city. The second half concentrates on Elise ou la vraie vie and attempts to illustrate how in this novel Paris becomes an extended and elaborate metaphor for …

A Reconsideration Of Two Spanish Women Poets: Angela Figuera And Francisca Aguirre, John C. Wilcox

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the last decade, poetry written by women in Spain experienced a "boom," as one close observer of the scene has noted, with the result that young women poets on the Peninsula have begun to receive the attention they merit. It is therefore an opportune moment to turn our critical attention toward the poetry written by women earlier in the twentieth century.

Angela Figuera (1902-1984) and Francisca Aguirre (b. 1930), two "uncanonized" mid-twentieth century Spanish poets, are presented here as challenging the androcentric culture of their time. Figuera critiques the male-dominated poetic canon as she develops a gynocentric poetics; poems …

History, Violence And Poetics: Saint-John Perse And René Char, Nathan Bracher

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay explores the parallel yet opposite stances taken both personally and textually by Perse and Char with respect to drama of World War II. While Perse remained disdainfully aloof from public affairs after the defeat and proclaimed in his poetry his solidarity with all humanity, Char explicitly linked his writing to events, yet sought to create a human space removed from history's upheavals. Striving to transcend the vicissitudes of individual existence, Perse celebrates an epic vision of history that overlooks and even condones its violence. Focusing on the inconsistent, fragmentary nature of existence, Char prevents us from having any …