Literary Criticism
The work presented in the volume in fields of the humanities and social sciences is based on 1) the notion of the existence and the "describability" and analysis of a culture (including, e.g., history, literature, society, the arts, etc.) specific of/to the region designated as Central Europe, 2) the relevance of a field designated as Central European Holocaust studies, and 3) the relevance, in the study of culture, of the "comparative" and "contextual" approach designated as "comparative cultural studies." Papers in the volume are by scholars working in Holocaust Studies in Australia, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Serbia, the United Kingdom, and the US.
The studies presented in the collected volume Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies -- edited by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Louise O. Vasvári -- are intended as an addition to scholarship in (comparative) cultural studies. More specifically, the articles represent scholarship about Central and East European culture with special attention to Hungarian culture, literature, cinema, new media, and other areas of cultural expression. On the landscape of scholarship in Central and East Europe (including Hungary), cultural studies has acquired at best spotty interest and studies in the volume aim at forging interest in the field. The volume's articles are in five parts: part one, "History Theory and Methodology of Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies," include studies on the prehistory of multicultural and multilingual Central Europe, where vernacular literatures were first institutionalized for developing a sense of national identity. Part two, "Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and Literature and Culture" is about the re-evaluation of canonical works, as well as Jewish studies which has been explored inadequately in Central European scholarship. Part three, "Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and Other Arts," includes articles on race, jazz, operetta, and art, fin-de-siècle architecture, communist-era female fashion, and cinema. In part four, "Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and Gender," articles are about aspects of gender and sex(uality) with examples from fin-de-siècle transvestism, current media depictions of heterodox sexualities, and gendered language in the workplace. The volume's last section, part five, "Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies of Contemporary Hungary," includes articles about post-1989 issues of race and ethnic relations, citizenship and public life, and new media.
Gombrowicz, Polish Modernism, and the Subversion of Form provides a new and comprehensive account of the writing and thought of the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. While Gombrowicz is probably the key Polish modernist writer, with a stature in his native Poland equivalent to that of Joyce or Beckett in the English language, he remains little known in English. As well as providing a commentary on his novels, plays, and short stories, this book sets Gombrowicz's writing in the context of contemporary cultural theory. The author performs a detailed examination of Gombrowicz's major literary and theatrical work, showing how his conception of form is highly resonant with contemporary, postmodern theories of identity. This book is the essential companion to one of Eastern Europe's most important literary figures whose work, banned by the Nazis and suppressed by Poland's Communist government, has only recently become well known in the West.
What does literature reveal about a country’s changing cultural identity? In History, Violence, and the Hyperreal by Kathryn Everly, this question is applied to the contemporary novel in Spain. In the process, similarities emerge among novels that embrace apparent differences in style, structure, and language. Contemporary Spanish authors are rethinking the way the novel with its narrative powers can define a specific cultural identity. Recent Spanish novels by Carme Riera, Dulce Chacon, Javier Cercas, Ray Loriga, Lucia Etxebarria, and Jose Angel Manas (published from 1995 to 2008) particularly highlight the tension that exists between historical memory and urban youth culture. The novels discussed in this study reconfigure the individual’s relationship to narrative, history, and reality through their varied interpretations of Spanish history with its common threads of national and personal violence. In these books, culture acts as mediator between the individual and the rapidly changing dynamic of contemporary society. The authors experiment with the novel form to challenge fundamental concepts of identity when the narrative acknowledges more than one way of reading and understanding history, violence, and reality. In Spain today, questions of historical accuracy in all foundational fictions—such as the Inquisition, the Spanish Civil War, or globalization—collide with the urgency to modernize. The result is a clash between regional and global identities. Seemingly disparate works of historical fiction and Generation X narrative prove similar in the way they deal with history, reality, and the delicate relationship between writer and reader.
Naciones Intelectuales explores the processes and works that laid the foundations of a new literary modernity in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. It focuses on the period from the signing of the Constitution in 1917, to the death of Alfonso Reyes in 1959, and analyzes the four elements of Mexican cultural practices: the notion of literature, the figure of the intellectual, the creation of academic institutions, and the definition of national identity that emerged through the various debates held by leading figures of the period. The book analyzes different key moments, controversies, and cultural interventions, which ultimately led the diverse aesthetic spectrum created by the revolution into becoming a highly institutional system of literature. This book offers a cartography of Mexican literary institutions unprecedented in scope, which will allow readers, students, and scholars to understand the construction of modern Mexican literature in a clear, rigorous, and systematic way.
In Romantic Revisions Lauren Rule Maxwell traces the transatlantic circulation of Romantic poetics and argues that its conceptualization of landscape allows authors to negotiate imperial politics of location by investigating the relationship between a subject's place and his position of power. While many postcolonial scholars and critics have dismissed Romantic poetry as a mode of resistance, Maxwell suggests that, on the contrary, it has provided contemporary writers in the U.S. and Canada with a means of charting the literary and cultural legacies of British imperialism in the New World. Maxwell examines five twentieth-century novels from former British colonies in the Americas—Kincaid's Lucy, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Harris's Palace of the Peacock. Although these novels are set in a variety of locations and timeframes, they all share a preoccupation with British colonial influence.
This exploration of class, feminism, and cultural identity (including issues of race, nation, colonialism, and economic imperialism) focuses on the work of four writers: the Mozambican Mia Couto, the Portuguese José Saramago, the Brazilian Clarice Lispector, and the South African J. M. Coetzee. In the first section, the author discusses the political aspects of Couto’s collection of short stories Contos do nascer da terra (Stories of the Birth of the Land) and Saramago’s novel O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis). The second section explores similar themes in Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K and Lispector’s A hora da estrela (The Hour of the Star). Marques argues that these four writers are political in the sense that they bring to the forefront issues pertaining to the power of literature to represent, misrepresent, and debate matter related to different subaltern subjects: the postcolonial subject, the poor subject (the "poor other"), and the female subject. She also discusses the "ahuman other" in the context of the subjectivity of the natural world, the dead, and the unborn, and shows how these aspects are present in all the different societies addressed and point to the mystical dimension that permeates most societies. With regard to Couto's work, this "ahuman other" is approached mostly through a discussion of the holistic, animist values and epistemologies that inform and guide Mozambican traditional societies, while in further analyses the notion is approached via discussions on phenomenology, elementality, and divinity following the philosophies of Lévinas and Irigaray and mystical consciousness in Zen Buddhism and the psychology of Jung.
Berlin, Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw are cities indelibly marked by more than forty years of Soviet influence. Urban Cultures in (Post) Colonial Central Europe explores the ways in which these major urban centers have redefined their identities in the last two decades. The author suggests that they are both Central European and (post) colonial spaces and that the locations of their (post)coloniality can be found predominantly in communicative and media processes and their results in architecture, film, literature, and new media.
Agata Anna Lisiak analyzes Berlin, Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw as (post)colonial cities because their politics, cultures, societies, and economies have been shaped by two centers of power: the Soviet Union as the former colonizer, whose influence remains visible predominantly in architecture, infrastructure, social relations, and mentalities, and the Western culture and the Western and/or global capital as the current colonizer, whose impact extends over virtually all spheres of urban life. The cities discussed are not exclusively postcolonial or solely colonial: they are “in-between” the two predicaments and, hence, are best described as (post)colonial. The (post)colonial and “in-between peripheral” identities and locations of the Central European capitals complement each other, and their analysis provides a relevant perspective on the transformation processes that have been shaping the region after 1989.
The term anamorphosis, from the greek ana (again) and morphe (shape), designates a variety of perspective experiments that can be traced back to the artistic developments of the 1500's and 1600's. Anamorphic devices challenge viewers to experience different forms of perceptual oscillation and uncertainty. Images shift in front of the eyes of puzzled spectators as they move from the center of the representation to the margins, or from one side to the other. (A) Wry Views demonstrates that much of the literature of the Spanish Golden Age is susceptible, and indeed requires, oblique readings (as in anamorphosis).
Aesthetics of Equilibrium is the first book-length comparative analysis of the theoretical prose by two major Latin American vanguardist contemporaries, Mario de Andrade (Brazil, 1893-1945) and Vicente Huidobro (Chile, 1893-1948). Willis offers a comparative study of two allegorical texts, Huidobro's "Non serviam" and Mario's "Parabola d’A escrava que nao e Isaura."
After Machiavelli is an examination of the triangular relationship of "re-writing"-a dynamic process encompassing both creative newness and awareness of historical profundity"-the "hermeneutic attitude:' and Machiavelli's poiesis. Specifically, it addresses four questions: First, to what degree can we speak of intersection (interaction) among this triad? Second, what common ground do all three actually share? Third, in what particular manner do the act of "re-writing" and the "hermeneutic attitude" manifest themselves in the writings of Niccoli Machiavelli? And last, what bearing does this have on the reader, heir to Machiavelli's literary legacy?
This is an intelligent study of an important topic, one not treated in this manner and deserving of a new investigation. It brings to bear, in particular, various recent critical concepts such as 'text' and 'intertextuality' that provide a new understanding of Gide's use of myth." Catharine Savage Brosman "Genova's study ... is an important contribution to our knowledge of Gide the writer and the man."Pierre L. Horn, Wright State University
Rojas's Celestina (1499) is perhaps the second greatest work of Spanish literature, right after Don Quixote, and Delicado sought to surpass it with La Lozana andaluza (1530), an important precedent of the picaresque novel.Both works were written during the height of the Inquisition, when the only relatively safe way for New Christian writers of Jewish extraction like Rojas and Delicado to express what they felt about the discrimination they suffered and their doubts regarding the faith that had been forced upon their ancestors was in a covert, indirect manner. Some scholars have detected this subversive element in Rojas' and Delicado's corrosive view of the Christian societies in which they lived, but this book goes far beyond such impressionism, showing through abundant textual evidence that these two authors used superficial bawdiness and claims regarding the morality of their respective works as cover to encode attacks against the central dogmas of Christianity: the Annunciation, the Virgin Birth, the Incarnation, and the Holy Trinity.This book, which will generate controversy among Hispanists, many of whom have refused to examine these works for non-Catholic views, will be of interest not only to students and scholars of Spanish literature, but also to those involved in Jewish studies, Medieval European history, and cultural studies.
In this book, prominent Italian American creative writers discuss the ways their heritage has impacted their works. For many, there has been a distinctive separation between their involvement with their families and the culture the immigrants brought to this country and their rise to positions of prominence in academic or literary circles in the United States. In trying to establish a unified identity, they have faced many conflicts between home values and the beliefs of a wider society. As writers, they discuss the ways their conflicts are represented in their works. They also discuss the ways that their childhood memories of immigrants, their practices have been a strong foundation for their creativity. In addition, five scholars in the field of Italian American literature critically analyze works by many of the creative writers in this anthology and discuss the future of the field.
The author defines and analyzes the new type of theatrical perspective invented by Samuel Beckett. She begins with an overview of the major changes of the definition of perspective in a variety of domains of twentieth-century knowledge (e.g., art, science, philosophy, psychology), then discusses the concepts of time, space, and movement which underlie Beckett's notion and use of perspective in the theater. The Broken Window shows how Beckett translates a number of twentieth-century esthetic and philosophical concerns-the impossibility of separating subject and object, the indeterminacy of time and space, the inevitability of movement and change-into specific dramatic techniques, and traces their evolution through close textual analyses of six plays. Hale chose to analyze Endgame, Cascando, Film, Eh Joe, A Piece of Monologue, and Rockaby because they represent both diverse periods of Beckett's career and the variety of media in which he has pursued his formal experimentation-stage, radio, film, and television.
Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600-1681) is generally acknowledged to be the master author of autos sacramentales, one-act pageant plays that usually dramatize the myths of the Fall and Redemption. Since the auto was supervised by both the church and the state, it is typically held to be an art form that serves theology and the dominant powers of the time. Basing her examination of Calderon's autos on modern theories of allegory, Viviana Diaz Balsera focuses on the seductive power of the dramatic, visible level of the allegorical auto and questions the widely held assumption that Calderon's autos harmonize the dramatic and religious discourses that constitute them. In her readings of Los encantos de la Culpa, Eljardin de Falerina, La nave del Mercador, La vida es sueflo, and Lo que va del Hombre a Dios, she instead finds a disjunction between the literal, poetic level and the religious, theological meaning. With its splendid scenes, poetic fables, and elaborate music, the auto ironically has the potential to reproduce the seductive function it frequently attributes to the Devil and/or the forces of evil. Rather than the dogmatic champion of the Catholic Church, the auto emerges as conflictive, ambivalent, and moving, participating in the very dangers of sensual pleasures it seeks to warn against.
Miguel de Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares, a collection of short stories in the tradition of Boccaccio, has a solid foundation in the history of Golden Age Spain. Joseph V Ricapito studies Cervantes's work from the point of view of "novelized history" or "history novelized." In line with current New Historical thought, he argues that literary production is largely from life and experience, and that Cervantes was acutely aware of the problems of his day.The novelas offer us a glimpse of Cervantes's Spain and include a cataloguing of the social, political, and historical problems of the time. Ricapitc shows how Cervantes fictionalizes the problems of unpopular minorities like Gypsies and conversos (Jewish converts to Catholicism); the difficulties of social mobility in a Christian setting; the presence in society of differing and even outlandish individuals; and the oppressive role of honor, which was popularized by Lope de Vega and later formed a leitmotiv of Spanish drama. In his analysis of Cervantes's creative response to history, Ricapito relates the novelas to the works of Lope de Vega and Mateo Aleman and shows how Cervantes brings to life many literary topoi and places them in a realistic, credible framework in which the historical presence is strongly felt. In Cervantes's treatment of Spain's waning prestige in Europe, we see his vision of human behavior. His view is stern, his critique is sharp, and he is sensitive to external stimuli.
While Victor Hugo's lasting appeal as a novelist can in large part be attributed to the unforgettable characters that he created, character has been paradoxically the most criticized and least understood element of his fiction. Character and Meaning in the Novels of Victor Hugo provides readers with a deeper understanding of the complexities and nuances that characterize both Hugo's novel writing and the nineteenth-century French novel, and will thus appeal to the specialist and non-specialist alike.
Modern poetry on ruins performs an awakening call to the lurking real, to the violence of history in the making. The attacks in New York on September 11, 2001, and in Madrid on March 11, 2004, provoked diverse political reactions, but the imminence of the ruins triggered a collective historical awakening. The awakening can take the shape of bombs in Kabul and Baghdad, or political change in government policies, but it is also palpable when poetry voices a critique of the technological warfare and its versions of progress.
Contemporary events and the modern ruins are reminiscent of the political impact that the Spanish Civil War and the two World Wars had on poetry. In Cities in Ruins: The Politics of Modern Poetics, Cecilia Enjuto Rangel argues that the portrayal in poetry of the modern city as a disintegrated, ruined space is part of a critique of the visions of progress and the historical process of modernization that developed during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Enjuto Rangel analyzes how Charles Baudelaire, Luis Cernuda, T. S. Eliot, Octavio Paz, and Pablo Neruda poeticized ruins as the cornerstones of cultural and political memory, and used the imagery of ruins to reinterpret their historical and literary traditions.
This volume contains selected papers of conferences organized by the editor, Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, in 1999 and 2000 in Canada and the U.S. on various topics of culture and literature in Central and East Europe. Based on the (contested) notion of the existence of a specific cultural context of the region defined as "Central Europe," contributors to the volume discuss comparative cultural studies as a theoretical framework for the study of Central and East European culture(s) (Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek), modernism in Central European literature (Andrea Fábry), Central European Holocaust poetry (Zsuzsanna Ozsváth), gender in Central European literature and film (Anikó Imre), Austroslovakism in the work of Slovak writer Anton Hykisch (Peter Petro), Kundera and the identity of Central Europe (Hana Pichova), public intellectuals in Central Europe after 1989 (Katherine Arens), contemporary Austrian and Hungarian cinema (Catherine Portuges), the notion of peripherality in contemporary East European culture (Roumiana Deltcheva), and Central European Jewish family history in the film Sunshine (Susan Rubin Suleiman). The volume includes a bibliography for the study of Central European culture (Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek).
The scholarship in the volume Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America represents the proposition that, given its vitality and excellence, Latin American literature deserves a more prominent place in comparative literature publications, curricula, and disciplinary discussions. The editors of the volume argue that there still exists, in some quarters, a lingering bias against literature written in Spanish and Portuguese and that by embracing Latin American literature more enthusiastically, comparative literature in the context of comparative cultural studies would find itself reinvigorated, placed into productive discourse with a host of issues, languages, literatures, and cultures that have too long been paid scant attention in its purview. Following an introduction by the editors, the volume contains papers by Gene H. Bell-Villada on the question of canon, by Gordon Brotherston and Lúcia de Sá on the First Peoples of the Americas and their literature, by Elizabeth Coonrod Martínez on the Latin American novel of the 1920s, by Román de la Campa on Latin American Studies, by Earl E. Fitz on Spanish American and Brazilian literature, by Roberto González Echevarría on Latin American and comparative literature, by Sophia A. McClennen on comparative literature and Latin American Studies, by Alberto Moreiras on Borges, by Julio Ortega on the critical debate about Latin American cultural studies, by Christina Marie Tourino on Cuban Americas in New York City, by Mario J. Valdés on the comparative history of literary cultures in Latin America, and by Lois Parkinson Zamora on comparative literature and globalization. The volume also contains a bibliography of scholarship in comparative Latin American culture and literature and biographical abstracts of the contributors to the volume.
The papers in this volume represent recent scholarship about Booker Prize Winner Michael Ondaatje's oeuvre by scholars working on English-Canadian literature and culture in Canada, England, Japan, New Zealand, and the USA. Papers in the volume are Victoria Cook, "Exploring Transnational Identities in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost"; Beverley Curran, "Ondaatje's The English Patient and Altered States of Narrative"; Marlene Goldman, "Representations of Buddhism in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost," Stephanie M. Hilger, "Ondaatje's The English Patient and Rewriting History"; Hsuan Hsu, "Post-Nationalism and the Cinematic Apparatus in Minghella's Adaptation of Ondaatje's The English Patient"; Glen Lowry, "The Representation of 'Race' in Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion"; Jon Saklofske, "The Motif of the Collector and Implications of Historical Appropriation in Ondaatje's Novels"; Sandeep Sanghera, "Touching the Language of Citizenship in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost"; Eluned Summers-Bremner, "Reading Ondaatje's Poetry"; Winfried Siemerling, "Oral History and the Writing of the Other in Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion"; Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, "Ondaatje's The English Patient and Questions of History"; Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, "Selected Bibliography of Critical Work about Michael Ondaatje's Texts" and "A List of Michael Ondaatje's Works"; Bioprofiles of Contributors and Index.
Articles in this volume focus on theories and histories of comparative literature and the emerging field of comparative cultural studies. Contributors are Kwaku Asante-Darko on African postcolonial literature, Hendrik Birus on Goethe's concept of world literature, Amiya Dev on comparative literature in India, Marián Gálik on interliterariness, Ernst Grabovszki on globalization, new media, and world literature, Jan Walsh Hokenson on the culture of the context, Marko Juvan on literariness, Karl S.Y. Kao on metaphor, Kristof Jacek Kozak on comparative literature in Slovenia, Manuela Mourão on comparative literature in the USA, Jola Skulj on cultural identity, Slobodan Sucur on period styles and theory, Peter Swirski on popular and highbrow literature, Antony Tatlow on textual anthropology, William H. Thornton on East/West power politics in cultural studies, Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek on comparative cultural studies, and Xiaoyi Zhou and Q.S. Tong on comparative literature in China. The articles are followed by a bibliography of scholarship in comparative literature and cultural studies, compiled by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven Aoun, and Wendy C. Nielsen.
In this book the author gets to the very core of what makes a successful and dynamic enterprise. Building upon his earlier work, The Ascendant Organization, and slaying a number of business fads and sacred cows along the way, he shows how to energize the enterprise in key areas such as leadership, teamwork, and innovation. With the use of many examples and cases and building upon considerable experience he shows the way forward for companies to achieve a sense of purpose and to energize their organizations. If you are tired of the latest business fad, then this will be the book for you.
This book constitutes an attempt to theorize the process of the emergence, in eighteenth-century New Spain, of a position of intellectual subjectivity differentiated from that established by the regime of Spanish imperial authority. The principal concern has been to trace how certain groups of criollo intellectuals try to construct such discourses, paradoxically, out of the framework of available European systems of knowledge and representation. In this fashion, it was sought to discern the outline of an ideological program for criollo political and cultural hegemony in the eighteenth century