Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Aoife Connolly. Performing The Pied-Noir Family: Constructing Narratives Of Settler Memory And Identity In Literature And On-Screen. Lexington Books, 2020., Tessa Nunn

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Aoife Connolly. Performing the Pied-Noir Family: Constructing Narratives of Settler Memory and Identity in Literature and On-Screen. Lexington Books, 2020. ix, 223 pp.

Frances Gateward And John Jennings. The Blacker The Ink: Constructions Of Black Identity In Comics And Sequential Art. Rutgers Up, 2015., Evan B. Thomas

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Frances Gateward and John Jennings. The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art. Rutgers UP, 2015.

The Disembodied Subject: Resistance To Norms Of Hegemonic Identity Construction In Carmen Naranjo’S Diario De Una Multitud, Regan Boxwell

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Costa Rica, whose civil war ended in 1948, represents a distinct literary space in which problematics of subjectivity were debated long before such dialectics appeared overtly in the rest of the isthmus. Carmen Naranjo’s novel Diario de una multitud (1974) is situated in this context, and her novel demonstrates a preoccupation with the heterogeneity of tico identity.

Naranjo favors a collective representation of the urban citizenry. Through the perceptual liminality of the individual subject, the friction generated by its absence, the constant blurring that resets the boundaries of specific identities, and the disappearance of the private realm, Naranjo avoids inscribing …

Maurice Echeverría’S Labios: A Disenchanted Story About Lesbians In Guatemala’S Postwar Reality, Yajaira M. Padilla

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the last two decades, lesbian, gay, and queer literary studies have gained significant ground in the broader field of Latin American cultural studies. Within this growing body of critical work, however, the Central American region and its literature have been largely ignored. This article, which focuses on the representation of lesbians and queer desire in the Guatemalan novel Labios (2004) ‘Lips’ by Maurice Echeverría, seeks to contribute to such a lack in Central American perspective. This essay contends, Echeverría’s text, one of a growing number of recent Central American narratives to call attention to and portray gay, lesbian, and/or …

Migration And The Foreign In Contemporary Spanish Poetry: El Sueño De Dakhla (Poemas De Umar Abass) By Manuel Moya, Debra Faszer-Mcmahon

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Many critical studies have addressed the issue of immigration in contemporary Spanish narrative and film, but far fewer have analyzed this topic within the context of poetry. The representation of immigrant experience in poetic texts is significant not only because poetic works have received less attention, but also because of the significance of poetry within North African and Islamic culture. Manuel Moya’s recent award-winning collection places the question of North African immigration as a central concern. The text purports to offer a compilation of poetry produced by the Western Saharan immigrant Umar Abass, who currently resides in Madrid. The work …

Moving Forward With The Past: History And Identity In Marie-Célie Agnant’S La Dot De Sara, Kennedy M. Schultz

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Francophone writers and theorists have long worked to establish a cultural identity true to their collective past and free of Western authority and influence. They reflect in their works the need to find their own voice and validate their own perspective in the face of a history fraught with colonial influence and domination. Marie-Célie Agnant, a Francophone writer of Haitian descent living in Montreal, addresses this search for history and identity through the lens of Haitian immigrant characters in her works, namely La Dot de Sara (1995), Le Livre d’Emma (2001), and Un alligator nommé Rosa (2007). Agnant’s works treat …

Motherhood As Performance: (Re)Negotiations Of Motherhood In Contemporary German Literature, Alexandra Merley Hill

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

While the birth rate in Europe remains low, the role of motherhood is hotly debated in Germany—particularly in conjunction with the revival of feminism in that country. In the context of these debates, this article analyzes the representation of mothers in three contemporary novels by German authors: Himmelskörper (2003) by Tanja Dückers, Die Gunnar-Lennefsen-Expedition (1998) by Kathrin Schmidt, and Die Mittagsfrau (2007) by Julia Franck. All three books are informed by a feminist perspective, but only Die Mittagsfrau offers a new way of thinking about motherhood; while Dückers and Schmidt ultimately do not depart from the connection between motherhood and …

No Mere Reflection: Mirrors As Windows On Russian Culture, Julia Chadaga

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay traces the development of mirror use in Russia from the medieval period to the modern day with particular attention to the dynamic interplay between the utilitarian and symbolic functions of this object. I examine how the discourse around mirrors in Russia was shaped by a preoccupation with border-crossing and identity that is distinctive to Russian culture as well as by mirror lore from other world traditions; and I demonstrate that the presence of mirrors shaped the production of imaginative literature in profound ways. The essay focuses on several key functions of the Russian mirror: as a site of …

The Basque Country: The Heart Of Spain, A Part Of Spain, Or Somewhere Else Altogether, Paddy Woodworth

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Basque Country exhibits contradictory symptoms of good health and chronic internal rupture. A flexible and robust economy and a vibrant cultural life are undermined by opposed senses of identity, which make almost any statement about the region deeply contentious. The verifiability—or otherwise—of Basque nationalist and Spanish nationalist readings of Basque history and culture matter less today than the fact that they are held with genuine conviction by big sectors of Basque society. Both traditions have their own legitimacy, but neither has been capable of fully acknowledging or including the other. Paradoxically, Francoism reinforced Basque nationalist identity, and anxieties about …

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 …

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 …

"Oneself As Another": Identification And Mourning In Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder, Susan Rubin Suleiman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Taking off from Paul Ricoeur's book Soi-même comme un autre (Oneself as Another), this essay discusses two kinds of identification in Modiano's relation to Dora: identification as appropriation, where the writer "assimilates" Dora's story in order to explore his own relation to his parents, especially his father; and identification as empathy, where the writer underlines the differences between his and Dora's stories and also seeks to come to a historical understanding of what happened to her. In that process, he also evokes the fate of other Jews who, like Dora and her family, were deported from France. I conclude …

Texts Of Light And Shadow: Dickens And Lautréamont In Alejandra Pizarnik's Sombra Poems , Beth Zeiss

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In her poetry, the Argentinean Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-72) persistently explores the transformations that the poetic subject undergoes in language. She articulates a cycle wherein the subject's desire to (re)create herself as a presence in language is followed by the desire for death, the absence of the self, when her desire becomes frustrated by language's inadequacies. As yet, the importance of the theme of the fluctuating self in language as developed by Pizarnik in a series of poems protagonized by Sombra, has not been analyzed. The character Sombra appears in six fragment-like poems published posthumously in Textos de Sombra (1982) and …

Orphans Of The Motherland: Puerto Rican Images Of Spain In Jacobo Morales's Linda Sara , Wadda C. Ríos-Font

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Puerto Rican identity has been confounded by Puerto Rico's prolonged colonial relationship to Spain (nearly 80 years longer than that of most other Latin American colonies) and its abrupt change in status to that of United States protectorate in 1898 after the Spanish American War. Increasingly, Puerto Rican identity has been theorized in sole reference to the political relationship with the United States. The residual presence of Spain and Spaniards in the construction of the new Puerto Rican collective, and the denial or nostalgia that might still be elicited by the former empire, have gradually receded into the background. Perhaps …

Origins, Loss, And Recovery In Patrick Modiano's Voyage De Noces And Dora Bruder , Ann L. Murphy

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

By alluding to the writing of his 1990 novel Voyage de noces in the course of the narration of 1997 Dora Bruder, author Patrick Modiano invites an examination of the connections between these two works. This paper demonstrates how Voyage de noces and Dora Bruder, when studied together as a sort of diptych, are informed by what commentators have described as Modiano's simultaneous preoccupations with the expression of absence and loss, on the one hand, and with the use of writing to compensate for these, on the other. Specifically, a formal and thematic relationship between these two texts …

Where Am I? Who Am I? The Problem Of Location And Recognition In Helena Parente Cunha's Woman Between Mirrors , Joanne Gass

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Helena Parente Cunha's novel, Woman Between Mirrors explores the many ways in which a dominant and domineering patriarchy can and does impose itself upon its subjects through what Louis Althusser calls interpellation. Parente Cunha's woman, a true twentieth-century heroine, faces her divided self—a self determined by ideology—and begins a quest which will end when she becomes an "I" before her shattered mirrors. But before that can happen, she must author herself, and, in the process of writing herself, she must overcome the demons of location and recognition. In the material sense, the woman must locate herself geographically, historically, socially, and …

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 …

The Politics Of Race And Patriarchy In Claire-Solange, Âme Africaine By Suzanne Lacascade , Valérie Orlando

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Racial discrimination, colonialism, marginalization, and imperial politics are the components of Martinican author Suzanne Lacascade's 1924 novel, Claire-Solange, âme africaine. This little-known work is shrouded in mystery. Less information is available about the author or under what circumstances she conceptualized and completed her novel. Lacascade probably contributed to various reviews and journals of the first days of the Négritude movement. The novel offers one of the first discourses on race, racial mixing, hierarchy, and colonialism as construed by blacks and whites. The author defies the power of men over women in French society of the early twentieth century. Racialized …

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 …

A Stranger In Berlin: On Joseph Roth's Berlin Discourse , Sabine Hake

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

As the quintessential urbanite, Joseph Roth continues to be extremely relevant to ongoing public debates on Berlin's identity as the new center of a multicultural society and architecture of postmodern urbanity…

The Integration Of A Fragmented Self In The Works Of Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, Malva E. Filer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Literary creation is always a transposition of individual and collective experiences…

Surreal And Canny Selves: Photographic Figures In Claude Cahun , Gayle Zachmann

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In her 1975 essay, Le Rire de la méduse, Hélène Cixous enthusiastically announced that it was high time for women to enter into discourse. A full half-century earlier, Claude Cahun (1894-1954), a powerful writer and a haunting photographer and artist, was already inscribing herself, Woman, and a woman's voice in visual and verbal self-portraits, photomontages, prose texts, poetry, and aesthetic and political treatises. Cahun's uncanny interventions in both verbal and visual discourse cannily interrogate conventions of literary and pictorial representation and the constructions of self, gender and culture that they exhibit. Insistently asking readers and spectators, "What's wrong with …

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 …

Crossing Francophone Boundaries: Beckett's Fictions, Beryl Schlossman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Although Samuel Beckett's œuvre is bilingual in French and English, his writing is generally considered to be the product of a single national identity…

Interview With Ghada Amer, Estelle Taraud

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Interview with Ghada Amer

From War Films To Films On War: Gendered Scenarios Of National Identity—The Case Of The Last Metro, Leah D. Hewitt

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

If France's ongoing struggle for self-definition in the late twentieth century involved new conceptions of citizenship and nationality, in short what it means to be French, this struggle also entailed the search for an accurate portrayal of a past in which France could recognize itself...

Böll And The Burgundians: Myth And The (Re)Construction Of The German Nation , David N. Coury

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Since its "rediscovery" by the Romantics, the Nibelungenlied has evolved not only into the German national epic, but has come to be synonymous with Germany and "Germanness." After the misappropriation of the saga by the Nazis, the myth, as well as the themes associated with it had become tainted, like all things heralded for their "Germanic" nature, in the immediate post-war era. One of the first writers in the post-war era to again explore the function of myth and recontextualize the saga was Heinrich Böll. Böll set about to reexamine the mythic elements of the story and did so by …

(Ef)Facing The Face Of Nationalism: Wrestling Masks In Chicano And Mexican Performance Art , Robert Neustadt

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Masks serve as particularly effective props in contemporary Mexican and Chicano performance art because of a number of deeply rooted traditions in Mexican culture. This essay explores the mask as code of honor in Mexican culture, and foregrounds the manner in which a number of contemporary Mexican and Chicano artists and performers strategically employ wrestling masks to (ef)face the mask-like image of Mexican or U.S. nationalism. I apply the label "performance artist" broadly, to include musicians and political figures that integrate an exaggerated sense of theatricality into their performances. Following the early work of Roland Barthes, I read performances as …

Crossing Laterally Into Solidarity In Montserrat Fontes's Dreams Of The Centaur , J. Douglas Canfield

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Fontes's novel begins with a corrido announcing typical themes of murder and revenge. But the novel has from the outset been interimplicated in a history of the persecution of the Yoeme (Yaquis) at the turn into the twentieth century. Its three main protagonists become mavericks on the border, as they cross ultimately not only into safety in Arizona but into solidarity with the oppressed. Such crossings are existential, resulting in new identities that eschew racial or ethnic purity but instead embrace mixed ethnicity, or mestizaje (to borrow key concepts from Anzaldúa). Such crossings are lateral, non-hierarchic. But Fontes does not …

Fan Letters To The Cultural Industries: Border Literature About Mass Media, Claire Fox

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The concentration of the Mexican and U.S. cultural industries in cities outside of the border region and the intermittent outsourcing of Hollywood movies to production facilities in Baja, California, have had a marked impact on the literary practice of "fronterizo" 'border' intellectuals. This essay discusses the theme of the cinema in three narratives by authors from the U.S.-Mexico border region: "Hotel Frontera" ("Border Hotel"), by Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, "Canícula," by Norma Elia Cantú, and "The Magic of Blood," by Dagoberto Gilb. These narratives provide ethnographic information about the reception of nationally distributed mass media in the border region; at the …