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Corrupting Capitalism: Michael Ende’S Momo And “Cathedral Station”, Heike Polster

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Michael Ende, the well-known author of The Neverending Story, foresaw dramatic changes in the fabric of society resulting from a turn toward neoliberal policies. One such far-reaching and dangerous change has to do with a diminishing of temporal autonomy, the ability to freely determine the use and meaning of our time. This article explores how neoliberalism is shaping our concept of time and our experience of it. In an effort to demonstrate the process and the line of reasoning behind the monetization of time, and to connect time to more qualitative considerations of the human condition, I shall demonstrate …

Time’S Deadly Arrow: Time And Temporality In Narratives Of Immaterial Labor, Sabine Von Dirke

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The article investigates the discourse on time and temporality in non-fictional and fictional accounts of paid, white collar labor, or, in the broader terminology of Maurizio Lazzarato, immaterial labor since the last quarter of the twentieth century. More specifically, it brings the critique of neoliberal capitalism by two influential social philosophers, Richard Sennett and Oskar Negt, in dialogue with fictional narratives of white collar labor: Rainer Merkel’s novel, Das Jahr der Wunder (The Year of Miracles, 2001), W.E. Richartz’s Büroroman (Office Novel, 1976) and Wilhelm Genazino’s Abschaffel-trilogy (1977-1979). Sennett and Negt’s non-fictional accounts contrast living and working conditions under …

Introduction, Necia Chronister, Lutz Koepnick

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The task of this special issue is to unearth the often denied logic of neoliberal rationality in Germany over the last few decades by exploring how various literary texts, films, and artistic projects, at the level of both content and formal experimentation, have sought to visualize the ramifications of deregulation and ceaseless self-management. The volume features scholarly work on various literary texts, performances, films, time-based art works, and theoretical interventions that explore the nexus between neoliberalism, new media culture, and the landscapes of temporal experience.

Crypts Of Hélène Cixous’S Past, Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Through a reading of Cixous’s Inside (1986), Or: Les lettres de mon père (1997), Reveries of the Wild Woman (2006) and Si Près (2007), this article explores the diverse allegories of “enclosure” in the figure of the crypt containing Cixous’s father. Part of the allegory entails a process of mourning not only for the defunct father but for Algeria as well where he is encrypted. The crypt (father’s cave or tomb) as the place and the process of writing imposes the de-cryption of the secret cavities of Cixous’s texts where she is enclosed, inside the father’s cave, in the cavity …

Cœur, Temps And Monde In Le Forçat Innocent Of Supervielle: A Poet’S Existential Metaphors Of Prison And Shelter, Franck Dalmas

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Poet Jules Supervielle has a marginal status in twentieth-century French literature as he was not engaged in any prominent movement of his time (Symbolism, Futurism, or Surrealism). In that regard, his poetry is neither nationally colored nor aesthetically connoted. It might well be the reason for his lacking consideration in the literary canon. But these differences must get our special attention. Supervielle was not born in France and he was to live and write his works in a state of existential angst, divided, as he always felt, between his native Uruguay and his French legacy. As such, the poet developed …

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 …

The Realization Of A Virtual Past In Günter Grass's Crabwalk , Paul A. Youngman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In his 1999 Nobel lecture, Günter Grass declares narration to be "a form of survival as well as a form of art." He sets out to demonstrate this declaration in his latest novella Crabwalk (2002), in which he echoes Walter Benjamin's concerns regarding war and information. The twist for Grass, the author who writes exclusively on his Olivetti typewriter, is that he analyzes the Internet as a narrative medium in his most recent work. This paper analyzes Crabwalk as a look at various forms of media—oral memories, historical monographs, film, and a website—through which humans narrate the past, in this …

Going Under: The Metro And The Search For Oneself In Julio Cortázar's "The Pursuer" , Patricia E. Reagan

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Johnny's metaphysical experience on the metro in Julio Cortázar's "The Pursuer" catalyzes his perception. The metro incident and the ensuing commentary propel all the elements of the narrative. The metro facilitates the development of Johnny's character; relates his character to Charlie Parker; aids our comprehension of the relationship between the metro and Johnny's music; and establishes the metaphysical difference between Johnny and Bruno. The subway is also physical space in which Cortázar reveals a view of time perception in which chronological time succumbs to subjective time. Johnny's metacognitive search for the yonder marks a change in Cortázar's narrative preoccupations and …

Introduction: Rethinking Spain From Across The Seas, Jill Robbins, Roberta Johnson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

For much of the twentieth century, critical studies of "Peninsular Spanish Literature" largely followed a generational paradigm that stressed the peculiarities of Spanish history and texts written by Spanish men in the Castilian language, thereby circumscribing the literary within the boundaries of a specific form of national identity...

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 …

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 …

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 …

Narrative And Simultaneity: Benjamin's Image Of Proust, Louis Simon

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

We can better understand Proust's approach to literary activity in A la recherche du temps perdu and Walter Benjamin's reading of the novel in his essay "The Image of Proust" by recognizing how the experience and concept of simultaneity, as opposed to linearity or narrative progression, underlies these texts. Though Proust's novel represents a linear narrative, the writer's activity, which Benjamin characterizes as "the attempt to charge an entire lifetime with the utmost awareness," engages a supralinear dimension of lived experience that binds literary activity to the present moment. Readings of the Benjamin-Proust relationship that focus on an exclusively linear …

Fundamentally Grounded [Gründlich Mit Grund], Elke Erb

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Translated by James Rolleston et al.

An East German poet examines her own production in the years 1991-1995. Precise images, e.g. of animals and landscapes both primeval and immediate, are correlated with the precise date and manner of their emergence from the poetic unconscious. The poet's self-questioning is autobiographical, professional, and social: What is the correlation between linguistic work and play and the ongoing transformation of a social order? What do intimate moments and enigmatic images tell us about the new realities of a capitalist collectivity? A key to the meaning of wrenching change is found in Erb's intensive involvement …

Writing A Dynamic Identity: Self-Criticism In The Work Of Tchicaya U Tam'si, Chaibou Elhadji Oumarou

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Very few Africans have had the courage to express their outrage at the stifling African traditions with the vigor and consistency of U Tam'Si. In fact, self-criticism is a major theme in Tchicaya's work as he strives to build a dynamic identity through a dynamic writing style. A dynamic identity changes with time and it is directed toward the future as opposed to static identity, which is concerned with only the past. This essay problematizes his efforts to create that identity and explores the rationale behind his self-criticism. Not content with his identity, he looks for a dynamic model 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 …

Text And Subject Position After Althusser, Antony Easthope

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Althusser's achievement is that he redefined Marxism. He reconceptualizes history and totality in terms of different times, construes knowledge as the outcome of a process of construction, and interprets subjectivity as an effect of ideology and unconscious processes. Unfortunately, Althusser's functionalist view of ideology claims that the subject recognizes itself as a subject because it duplicates— reflects—an absolute subject. However, Lacan's notion of the mirror stage remedies this fault. Lacan's subject always misrecognizes itself in a process of contradiction that threatens the stability of any given social order. Moreover, unlike Foucault's subject, which is limited in that subjectivity is folded …

Practicing Nostalgia: Time And Memory In Nabokov's Early Russian Fiction , Philip Sicker

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Nabokov's earliest Russian fiction reveals his lifelong preoccupation with time and his complex strategies for preserving heightened moments of experience. Dissatisfied with the brevity of involuntary (Proustian) recall, his émigré protagonists strive to inhabit their Russian past more fully through a painstaking process of aesthetic re-creation. Beginning with a handful of vivid recollections, the hero of Mary gradually fabricates a past that is more intensely real than the original. Nabokov's most mature characters, however, recognize the solipsistic danger and utility of living in a vanished mental paradise. Turning to the present, they find unexpected beauty in the arrangement of ordinary …

Proust And Benjamin: The Invisible Image, Beryl Schlossman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Benjamin's essay "Zum Bilde Prousts" questions the status of the image even as it leafs through the possibilities and variations that form it—as photograph, figure, representation, disappearing trace or promise of creation. As the image of Proust's novel, Benjamin's text takes up the elements of A la Recherche du temps perdu (poetic language, autobiography, critical commentary) in the terms of Benjamin's theory of allegory reflected through the Proustian strategy of reading and writing. "Zum Bilde Prousts" examines the traditional markers of "art" and "life," locating Proustian recherche—and Benjamin's image—in the deep waters beyond them. Through an interpretation of Benjamin's …

Forgetting To Remember: Anamnesis And History In J. M. G. Le Clézio's Desert, Kathleen White Smith

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Unlike most of Le Clezio's previous works. Desert has a specific historical framework. The story of the young boy Nour records the struggle of the Saharaoui people of the western Sahara to claim their land from the French invaders of the early twentieth century. A second narrative, set in the present, continues that story through the experiences of Lalla: unlike the story of her predecessor, the narrative in which she figures has no clear reference to the current, militant political situation established in the western Sahara by the independence movement known as Polisario. Containing both story and document, text and …

Bakhtin And Buber: Problems Of Dialogic Imagination, Nina Perlina

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Recent publications of biographical materials on Mikhail Bakhtin demonstrate that he was familiar with the writings of Martin Buber. The philosophical and aesthetic verbal expression of Buber's ideas within the time-spatial universe of Bakhtin's own awareness allows us to discuss this obvious biographical evidence in a wider cultural context. The central opposition of Buber's and Bakhtin's systems is the dialogic dichotomous pair: "Ich und Du" (I and Thou), or "myself and another." Bakhtin's dialogic imagination is rooted in the binaries of the subject-object relations which he initially formulated as "responsibility" and "addressivity," that is to say, as individual awareness and …

Towards A Poetry Of Silence: Stéphane Mallarmé And Juan Ramón Jiménez, Mervyn Coke-Enguídanos

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In an era of apparent dissolution, "la Obra" of Juan Ramón Jiménez, like "l'Oeuvre" of Stéphane Mallarmé, has for its goal the attainment of timelessness. In both poets, the concept of absolute Time—the timelessness of eternal Time—is yoked with the ideal of silence. But this is no ordinary silence, and certainly not the kind that results from inadequacy of expression. It is the silence of perfection, the expression of the ineffable: pure Poetry. Since the poetic language is the silent language of thought, both Mallarmé and Juan Ramón seek to convey the pure idea. In so doing, both must stringently …

Käfka's Influence On Camara Laye's Le Regard Du Roi , Patricia A. Deduck

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In Le regard du roi, Camara Laye attempted to assimilate into his own fictional world the structure, techniques, and themes which he found in the works of Kafka. A close analysis of the novel reveals not only significant influence, but direct imitation of Kafka. Although certain Kafkaesque techniques—for example, the limited perspective, and the dispensation with time and space as measurable quantities—are often used effectively in the novel, they lose much of their intricate complexity in a fictional world allowing, as Laye's does, for positive resolution. Such techniques become integral and meaningful elements only when Laye uses them within …

Points South: Ambrose Bierce, Jorge Luis Borges, And The Fantastic, Howard M. Fraser

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The debt of Borges's "A Secret Miracle" to Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" both in theme and technique has been noted in recent criticism. However, a careful study of the two works reveals striking differences, particularly with respect to the treatment of time. Based on Todorov's study of the fantastic, this article attempts to show how Bierce's influence on Borges parallels the general development of psychological realism and its transformation into surrealism. While it is true that the allusive qualities of Borges' work recall thematic and technical aspects of Bierce, nonetheless the American Hispanophile is a precursor …