The nineteen essays and inedit collected in this rich volume stem from the 1998 Cambridge conference marking the eighty-year anniversary of Andre Gide's summer there with Marc Allegret. . . . The ...wide range of contributions add useful perspectives to what Gide in 1931 terms in his Journal "la question sexuelle" and which in light of current scholarship-especially feminist and queer theory-is timely albeit still troublesome for some. . . .
Je sais que le continent appelé « Littérature » est incommensurable et qu'il est habité par des peuples et des nations très différents sans parler de toute cette escouade d'écrits sirupeux qui ...envahissent jusqu'aux rayonnages des magasins d'alimentation et ont fait des petits dans les métropoles africaines (cf. les romans de la collection Adoras déclinée en romans et/ou adaptations télévisuelles depuis Abidjan, la capitale économique de la Côte d'Ivoire). Il se fera chapardeur à l'instar de Derek Walcott, poète de la minuscule Sainte-Lucie : « I had entered the house of literature as a / houseboy, / filched as the slum child stole, / as the young slave appropriated / those heirlooms temptingly left/ with the Victorian homilies of Noli tangere »4 .
Xavier Villaurrutia is a 20th Century intellectual Mexican writer best known for his poetry, fiction, and playwriting. My dissertation aims to study his prolific art criticism from 1926 to 1950 as a ...narrative literary genre that creates a third space for discussing Mexican culture. Traditionally, relations between art and Mexican modernity have been viewed in a deeply polarized way. On the one hand, we find an orthodox nationalist project committed to the Mexican society and working class, as exemplified by Diego Rivera’s murals or the work of avant-garde writers such as Manuel Maples Arce. Countering this conservative and nationalistic viewpoint we also find the cosmopolitanism of the Contemporáneos avant-garde group, to which Villaurrutia belonged. In order to dismantle this dualistic narrative I propose a third possibility that departs from Walter Benjamin’s media theory as well as Roland Barthes and John Berger’s photography theoretic and textual analysis to frame an understanding of visual representation, criticism and national culture in the Mexican modernity of the 20th century and its implications for the 21st century. Authors such as Rubén Gallo (2003) and Esther Gabara (2008) have portrayed Mexican modernity from the standpoint of media history and photography, respectively, to trace the ethics and aesthetics of representation of modernity. However, the intersectionality of poetic images, painting, photography, and cinema in art writing published in newspapers as well as in journals like Ulises, Contemporáneos, and El Hijo Pródigo have been almost completely overlooked. In order to fill this gap, I have revised works from Xavier Villaurrutia that reveal these intersections with the goal of expanding the scope of national cultural discourses during mid-twentieth century. These writings expose the poet’s will to establish himself as an active and critical spectator of the cultural policies. In addition, Villaurrutia shows the impact of technology and media, such as photography, in representations of nationalism. The Mexican author selected for this project is roughly contemporary to Walter Benjamin and, in many ways, displays a similarly original approach to media theory as the German critic, for which I consider him to be pioneering voice on visual and media culture in Latin America.
This study considers a group of distinctly modernist philosophers for whom aesthetic and reflective practices represented a way out of the paralysis of a culture dominated by narrowly conceived ...philosophical values. These modernist philosophers, I argue, helped to give birth to mode of experimental writing that Robert Musil called "essayism." I begin in Chapter One with an account of Walter Benjamin's experimental concept of melancholy and its intersection with the avant-garde practices of French Surrealism. Chapter One begins to contrast Benjamin's concept of melancholy with Friedrich Nietzsche's therapeutic efforts to transform and overcome melancholy on both a personal and a cultural level. Chapter Two changes course to pursue a comparative study of Nietzsche and his contemporary, William James. I treat them as proto-modernist philosophers whose efforts to overcome philosophy and replace it with experimental writing are intimately connected with their experimental concepts of melancholy. The efforts of James and Nietzsche represent what I see as an important bridge between Ralph Waldo Emerson's radical re-conceptualizing of melancholy and later modernist experimental writing. Before turning to Emerson, I read (in Chapter Three) Freud's 1915 essay "On Transience" alongside Virginia Woolf's essay "On Being Ill" and James's "Will to Believe." Chapter Four then focuses on Emerson's essay "Experience" as an anticipation of Nietzsche's concept of experimental writing, as well as a watershed moment in the long history of thinking about melancholy. Chapter Five reads Nietzsche's Ecce Homo as (in many respects) the ultimate Emersonian text, as well as something of a failed experiment. The study concludes with a series of close readings of Swiss writer Robert Walser, who inspired Max Brod to write: "After Nietzsche, there had to be Walser." I examine the ways in which Walser pursues the implications of Nietzsche's thought at the same time he explores quite different alternatives. Walser, I argue, is an example of a melancholy modernist who successfully converts philosophy into a form of experimental writing. By the end of the study, I hope my account of a modernist melancholy provides a context that sharpens our sense of how difficult it is to come "after Nietzsche."
El Canto III Ae Altazor con su rechazo de la poesia ("Basta señora arpa de las bellas imágenes") quiere terminar con una era, fortificar la palabra a través de la muerte de sus enunciados más débiles ...aun cuando eso implique dejar el lenguaje de todos los días y crear aquello que Huidobro llama una "música del espíritu." Es precisamente en los textos tempranos y en Memorial de Isla Negra donde quien habla, conjetura dudas acerca de sí mismo y se convierte en alguien que, desdoblado, critica su propio derecho a la escritura y al testimonio, En ese movimiento produce la posibilidad de una interlocución cuya función fundamental radica en la fundación de su propio derecho a repetir lo insoluble: Quien así se pasea es necesariamente un solitario, muy distinto del de la voz gregaria que proliferará más tarde en encomios al mundo natural, los trabajadores, la belleza de la mujer, la potencia masculina y la esperanza en un mundo mejor. Por eso dice en "Sabor" que "mis criaturas nacen de un largo rechazo:/ay, con un solo alcohol puedo despedir este día" (18) y el caballero solo del poema así titulado está asediado por seres que atentan contra cualquier sensación de bienestar: como un collar de palpitantes ostras sexuales rodean mi existencia solitaria, como enemigos establecidos contra mi alma, como conspiradores en traje de dormitorio.-(59) A través de Residencia en la tierra entramos en un terreno oscuro e inseguro donde el poeta vulnerable e incómodo, se piensa como opuesto a cualquier definición triunfalista de su papel en la cultura y en el mundo.
My dissertation deals with the ethical philosophy of the Greek poet and Nobel Prize winner Odysseus Elytis (1911-1996). Responding to the "ethical turn" in literary scholarship, I scrutinize the ...notion of ethos and ethics, which permeates Elytis' writing, and its place in Elytis' poetic universe. Revolving around Elytis' "theory of analogies," this topic involves a number of diverse and complex literary dialogs, from Plato and Plotinus to German and Greek Romantics, forming part of an unwavering aesthetical and ethical worldview—an alternative cultural, spiritual, and political paradigm Elytis sought to establish. I often encountered little-noticed textual connections which show deeper background contacts, such as the permeating role of Platonism in the literary formation of many among these authors, or Elytis' reading of Friedrich Hölderlin which was at times surprisingly compatible with Heidegger's. I also argue that Elytis' reception of ancient philosophers and poets, such as Empedocles or Pindar, was often intrinsically connected with the ethical considerations of his times. The dissertation includes archival material from the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki and the Gennadius Library in Athens, which confirmed many of my hypotheses about Elytis' intellectual preoccupations.
L'oeuvre de Françoise Sagan a longtemps été décriée. Cette étude s'attache à réhabiliter son génie et son oeuvre à travers l'influence du bovarysme définit par Jules de Gaultier en 1892. Ce dernier ...s'appuie sur l'oeuvre de Gustave Flaubert pour dégager une psychologie type, à savoir « le pouvoir départi à l'homme de se concevoir autre qu'il n'est ». À la lecture des romans de Françoise Sagan, le lecteur se rend compte d'une unité qui entoure son oeuvre. Nous analyserons successivement la personnalité bovaryques des personnages, puis la thématique bovarienne des romans de Sagan, pour enfin comparer le roman Madame Bovary de Flaubert avec son équivalent saganien : Un peu de soleil dans l'eau froide. En somme, cette étude se propose de mettre en perspective le bovarysme à travers les romans de Sagan pour redécouvrir tout le talent littéraire de cette écrivaine.
My dissertation explores cultural production in Chile during the 1980s, as opposed to the "cultural blackout" that characterizes the first phase of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. I frame the decade ...between two plebiscites: the first one approved Pinochet's so-called Constitution of Liberty on September 11, 1980 amidst severe restrictions for the opposition and vote fraud, and the second plebiscite managed to oust the dictator on October 5, 1988 with record numbers of eligible voters participating. These bookends show a stark contrast between the beginning and the end of the period and thus raise the question of how the country made the shift from dictatorship to democracy. Chilean society transformed in great part because people were able to shed their fears, which begs the question, how did this come to pass? In 1983 the government allowed certain openings in the political sphere in order to contain massive protests and demonstrations. In the showdown between the military regime and the opposition, where eventually democracy prevailed, culture played a key role. At a time when political parties were banned and public gatherings considered illegal, Chileans found alternative ways to oppose the military government and circumvent its censors. In this climate, I argue that artistic expression took on political meaning and provided collective experiences for the people. I explore this phenomenon with case studies that illustrate the relationship of art to politics and the relationship between the artist and his public: namely Raúl Zurita's poetry and participation with CADA (Art Actions Collective), Los Prisioneros' rock music, Ramon Griffero's underground theater Teatro Fin de Siglo, Marco Antonio de la Parra's novel El deseo de toda ciudadana (1988), and the television Campaign for the "No" vote in 1988. Throughout the research I found that innovations in the arts—poetry, music, theater, narrative and the audiovisual media—offered people a much needed forum for expression. The resistant energy of the people was impossible for a dictator and his army to root out, because it had been crystallizing in multiple layers and in unlikely places throughout the decade.
This project examines the intersection of fictional writing and editorial work in the careers of two of post-war Italy's leading literary figures, Natalia Ginzburg and Italo Calvino. I explore the ...ways in which these writers, working for Einaudi – the most prestigious Italian publisher of the time – could control the forms in which their works came to be published and at the same time sought to shape the reception, both nationally and internationally, of their own books. At the same time, I analyze how the aesthetic choices of these writers are influenced by their privileged position as editors, literary agents, and readers of others' works for publication.
