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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Between Female Dialogics And Traces Of Essentialism: Gender And Warfare In Christa Wolf's Major Writings, Sabine Wilke
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 …
From Exile To Affirmation: The Poetry Of Joseph Brodsky, David Patterson
From Exile To Affirmation: The Poetry Of Joseph Brodsky, David Patterson
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This article examines the relation between the exile of the poet from his homeland and the "exile of the word." The notion of the exile of the word pertains to the poet's problem of re-introducing meaning to the word—an excess of meaning that conveys more than the word can normally convey—through his poetry. Showing how the poet in exile becomes a poet of exile, the article examines what poetry has to do with a larger difficulty of exile and homelessness in human life. Brodsky's poetry, the article argues, addresses this very difficulty. The article concludes that the human capacity to …
What's In A Name: Elective Genealogy In Schwarz-Bart's Early Novels, Clarisse Zimra
What's In A Name: Elective Genealogy In Schwarz-Bart's Early Novels, Clarisse Zimra
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This essay considers the question of the textual inscription of history in Solitude, Plat de porc and Télumée, by focusing on a narrative feature present in all three: the naming scene, wherein characters claim elective descent from a real historical figure, the pregnant mulatto woman, Solitude, captured and executed after the battle of Matouba in 1802 on Guadeloupe. Every Schwarz-Bart novel to date contains at least one scene, often several, staging this retelling of specifically Guadeloupean origins: the resistance to the reinstatement of slavery, and the ensuing tragedy on Matouba. In Un Plat de porc aux bananes vertes (1967), …
Inventing Antillean Narrative: Maryse Condé And Literary Tradition, Leah D. Hewitt
Inventing Antillean Narrative: Maryse Condé And Literary Tradition, Leah D. Hewitt
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
As a Guadeloupean black woman novelist, Maryse Condé highlights the tensions in Caribbean culture between traditional and modern values, among ethnic groups, and between the sexes. She combines a representative view of an Antillean writer's specific concerns with a postmodern view of literature as multicultural, polymorphous intersection. The opening portion of this essay argues that Condé's personal literary trajectory embodies a general process of identity formation in post colonial literature, one that passes from the alienation of the individual, to the affirmation of collective movements and positive models, and finally, to a critical, playful outlook in which identities are continually …
The Mother Tongue Of Leila Sebbar, Danielle Marx-Scouras
The Mother Tongue Of Leila Sebbar, Danielle Marx-Scouras
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Leila Sebbar grew up in French colonial Algeria where her parents taught French to the indigenous children. The daughter of a metropolitan French woman and an Algerian, Sebbar is a croisée. At the height of the Algerian War, Sebbar left her homeland to pursue her university studies in France. She became a French teacher and made France her home. Sebbar writes in her mother tongue, but she treats it like a foreign language. Although she never learned Arabic and left Algeria, her paternal identity haunts all of her writings. Anchored by the notion of exile, Sebbar drifts between two …