Roberto Bolaño places as his epigraph to The Insufferable Gaucho lines from the conclusion of "Josephine": "So perhaps we shall not lose too much after all" (translation modified). With the ...withdrawal of Josephine from the scene, Kafka's narrator says, the mouse folk have not lost "too much." Josephine's song will be retrieved through its conversion from language/art into national anthem, from historical event into myth, from singular intervention into conventional "song." The "too much" is saved, but as just enough. In other words, "after all," the saving of the excess (one that is also less than nothing, itself a loss) represents its departure, just as the recall of Josephine's act as song names the disappearance of the same act. The turning of Josephine into a subject, as well as her conversion into the policeman of "Police Rat" (her surviving blood relative), signals the appropriation of the event of language for balance and consensus. In "Police Rat," the event, which is the death of species, morphs into another representation of the same species (the rat-mouse new species), so no one even notices the difference. No one can read the distinction between the being (man) that passes, and the being that displaces it, since the difference is reading itself, or language, whose last vestige is still creativity, learning, waste, which is what slips away in the process. Héctor inherits the trace, which is the trace of Josephine. Pepe, the nephew, is also an inheritor, though he labors to erase the trace. Thus Héctor, a rat who kills rats, and Pepe, a rat who kills rats (kills Héctor, yet receives the immunity of the sovereign), are doubles. Their respective acts are responses to the elimination of every surplus, one work undoing the work of the other. "Police Rat," like other Bolaño narratives, and like "Josephine," is thereby a spin-off of the mystery or detective narrative in which the suicide--language, literature, learning, leisure--goes off in search of its killer.
Reviews JONES, ROBERT W
Journal of American studies,
08/2013, Letnik:
47, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
...through the writing of fiction, authors expose the fallacy of American power. Placing the idea (and ideals) of America into a historical period that pre-dates any political or economic power for ...the country suggests that the plurality of American identity is important for Elbeshlawy's analysis. For the 'universal dream of home', of liberty and democracy ... ought to be a gloomy idea" (93). Since von Trier's film about America is built from his own imagination it is a perfect critical subject for Elbeshlawy, who is concerned about imaginings of America and the many imagined Americas.
At the outset of the novella The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Gregor Samsa wonders what has happened to him. The answer to this intriguing question has remained obscure--for Samsa, as well as for ...the novella's readers. Almost 100 years after the publication of the novella in 1915, one may now pose the questions what has happened to this novella in contemporary culture, the images of which are manipulated by unprecedented new technological media.
This article reads representations of China by Austrian Jewish authors around 1900 as projections of concern about their own Jewish identity, exploring the discursive context in which such borrowing ...occurred. It examines newspaper reports about Jewish communities in China as well as the translation and introduction of Chinese works by Martin Buber, which influenced the positive association between Chinese and Jewish people and culture. Hugo von Hofmannsthal's ‘Der Kaiser von China spricht’ (1897), Karl Kraus's Die chinesische Mauer
(1909) and Franz Kafka's
Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer
(1917) are discussed as depictions of China that also have relevance for the ‘Jewish question’ of the day.
Johannes Türk has argued that literature can function as an immunity mechanism, using the writings of Kafka as an example. Türk, however, theorizes immunity as a personal, individual coping strategy ...against one’s own mortal sickness and death. In this view, strongly influenced by Luhmann’s systems theory, literature has the capacity of providing us with an emotional skill set. The view that immunity mechanisms are a personal skill set leads to inevitable difficulties and limits our understanding of the functioning of a literary immunity. Kafka’s texts were written in a context in which problematic and destructive discourses about immunity were prevailing. By focusing on Kafka’s story
Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer
as an exploration of the problems with immunity discourse, I show that the different stylistic features of Kafka’s writing function as tactics to render destructive immunity discourses inoperative.
This paper looks at the intersection between human and animal bodies in J. M. Coetzee's postapartheid novel Disgrace (1999). My argument is that Coetzee employs postmodern notions about the overlap ...between human and non-human bodies and their proximity in his fiction. Although Coetzee problematizes our conception of the body in most of his other works, it is in Disgrace that we have a unique combination of human and animal bodies and a juxtaposition of each body against the other. Coetzee, I contend, writes within the rubrics of postmodern posthumanism whereby his works interrogate questions of life, death, embodiment, otherness, and the body. While it is characteristic of postmodernism to break down distinctions and to argue the irrelevance of borders, Coetzee applies this logic to his treatment of humans and animals and toward significant ethical and political ends. Through multiple encounters with animals, David Lurie in Disgrace is forced to reexamine the boundaries between animal and human life and, thus, to react differently to suffering and other forms of life around him. Index Terms--Coetzee, South African fiction, body theory, Disgrace, post-apartheid literature, postmodernism
This dissertation concerns the legacy within the Jewish American imagination of two related ideas: the pseudoscientific belief in the Jewish body’s inherent physical difference, and the conviction, ...shared by rabbis, sociologists, and Jewish advocacy organizations in the second half of the 20th century, that Jewish-gentile intermarriage threatened Jewish survival in America. The Jew’s association with illness and debility is central to the Nazi race theories that undergird the Holocaust; the postwar American anxiety over intermarriage responds to that destruction. Fearing that intermarriage may yield a second, “silent” Holocaust through assimilation, American Jewish leaders metaphorically equate exogamy (out-marriage) with genocide.I argue that the postwar fiction of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth attempts—not always successfully—to imagine a Jewish American life freed from the self-hatred traditionally directed toward the Jew’s body and his presumed inclination toward intermarriage. In chapter one, I demonstrate that Bellow’s fiction after Augie March overcomes his early squeamishness about representing the Jewish body; a noted caricaturist of the human form, the mature Bellow creates flamboyantly flawed, pained Jewish characters whose defiant bodies replace the antisemitic stereotype of Jewish inferiority with positive images of an embodied Jewish identity. In chapter two, I argue that Roth offers a model of Jewish identity that accepts intermarriage, assimilation, and other forms of attenuated Jewishness. While postwar sociologists and Jewish leaders fret that intermarriage signals the end of one’s Jewish belonging, Roth creates a cast of protagonists who remain Jewish despite their detachment from traditional institutions of Judaism.
Margarete Susman’s reflections on that evocative metaphor known as the “Jewish spirit” begin with the disconcerting identification of Jewishness with nihilism and modernity. This troubling ...association underlies the anti-Jewish tirades of numerous fin-de-siècle thinkers such as Richard Wagner and Wilhelm Marr. Despite the term’s overridingly negative connotations, Susman grapples with the “Jewish spirit” in her essays from the 1930s for the constructive purpose of articulating her unique vision of German Jewry’s cultural and intellectual legacy. Her reworking of this metaphor represents a unique form of Jewish self-affirmation that differs from both the Zionist and liberal responses to antisemitism. She does not seek to turn the “Jewish spirit” into a resource for collective self-identification, but to undo the very logic that posits this figure as an antithesis of the “German spirit.” In the process of rethinking Jewishness, Susman destabilizes the völkisch conception of Germanness. Not only does her account of the “Jewish spirit” subvert a prevalent antisemitic fantasy, but it also forms a pointed polemic against the identity politics of cultural Zionism. Responding to the reductive essentialism she attributes to both the German völkisch and Jewish-national ideals of collective identity, Susman’s notion of the “Jewish spirit” constitutes a poetically and politically imaginative attempt to interweave German Jewry’s particularistic heritage into the larger story of European modernity.
Despite being a literary style for more than half a century, magical realism is an enigma that is difficult to define. While the term is seamlessly associated with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, magical ...realism’s loose definition has led critics to question its value to the progression of literary studies. To help remedy magical realism’s obscure definition, this thesis will be expanding on Kenneth Reed’s definition of magical realism, which he argues must use the neo-fantastic (the naturalization of magical elements in a text) to recast history. However, I argue magical realism must have a third characteristic, an identifiable deliberative purpose, inducing the audience to take social action.To support this claim, I will divide the thesis into five parts. The introduction will provide a brief outline detailing my definition for magical realism, as well as providing a detailed outline for the work as a whole. The first chapter will act as an overview of magical realism, detailing magical realism’s socio-political power, how that deliberative potential was lost, and the historical actors responsible. The second chapter will include a case study of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which will cover how the Colombian journalist combined the deliberative function of testimonio literature with the neo-fantastic and recasting of history to restore magical realism to its original definition. The last chapter will focus on Toni Morrison’s last book God Help the Child, where the author used my definition of magical realism to bring attention to Tarana Burke’s “me too.” movement, which was marginalized by the social media #MeToo movement after the book’s publication. The conclusion will consider the implications of this new definition and examine where magical-realist studies should focus going forward.
Time, sexuality, and subjectivity have been central to traditional understandings of modernism. In particular, women and queers are frequently positioned in these scholarly accounts as objects and ...symbols of these concepts rather than as agential subjects who also exert force on them with their own intentions, experiences, and perspectives. Addressing this scholarly limitation, this dissertation examines early twentieth-century German-language modernist literature of queer and female authors to explore the relationships between sexuality, time, and subjectivity during an era of unprecedented freedom and opportunities for these groups. It investigates how these three factors interact with each other and the role of the individual therewithin. Informed by queer and feminist theories, Frankfurt School philosophy, and literary theory, I undertake close readings of literary fiction as well as essays, letters, and diaries by Robert Musil, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Klaus Mann, Siegfried Kracauer, and Marieluise Fleißer to examine how individuals negotiate, shape, and are shaped by the dynamics between temporality and sexuality in fashioning themselves as subjects. The dissertation contributes to a new turn in queering German Studies as well as bringing the much-neglected German-language context to the Anglo-French-dominated fields of queer and feminist studies.Chapter 1 provides a theoretical and methodological introduction to the dissertation, defining the major terms of the study, while also situating the interventions it makes within German Studies, women’s studies, and queer studies. Chapter 2 reads Robert Musil’s Die Vollendung der Liebe as a text commandeered by the exuberant sexuality of its female protagonist. I show how the text narrativizes shifts in modern notions of temporality, subjectivity, and sexuality, revealing them as interconnected processes, while also illustrating their limitations, particularly as a male author writing about and through a female character. Chapter 3 draws on the figure of the Augenblick to interpret Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Eine Frau zu sehen as an account of lesbian utopia, a first-person narrative of a woman’s anticipation of a liberatory subjectivity through erotic fulfillment. I focus on how the protagonist’s desire comes to commander the writing of narrative and of self in a way that critiques contemporary queer theoretical debates around visibility, hope, and anti-futurity. Chapter 4 undertakes a comparative reading of Klaus Mann’s Der fromme Tanz and Siegfried Kracauer’s Georg, two Weimar-era novels that diverge in their use of queer pasts and queer presents, respectively, as sites to envision transgenerational forms of subjectivity and community. By foregrounding friendship as the relationship through which queer subjectivity can be birthed, it intervenes in the overwhelming emphasis on sex and romance in queer studies of time. Chapter 5 concludes with Marieluise Fleißer’s Mehlreisende Frieda Geier, explicating how shifting non-simultaneities of temporal discourses and systems interact with volatile notions of gender to influence individuals, their subjectivities, and their social worlds in ways both liberating and threatening.The dissertation makes the case for the specificity of literature as a medium and its role as a partner with its readers in making meaning and making worlds and in which we can see most clearly the pleasures, potentials, and pitfalls of queer and female lives and cultures—and better comprehend and thus bend these entwined phenomena that continue to exert power over the lives of the sexually marginalized.
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