A Play Between Fiction and Non-fiction: Retelling a Story of Exile and Disappearance in Missing (una investigación) (2009) by Alberto Fuguet

2021 ◽  
Vol 98 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-212
Author(s):  
DENISSE LAZO-GONZÁLEZ
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Alberto Fuguet ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
The Way

This article explores the way in which Missing (una investigación) plays with the limits between fiction and non-fiction in dealing with two of the most prominent issues of the politico-historical Chilean context of the twentieth century: exile and disappearance. It does so through a close reading of the novel’s narrative form and its relationship to the context that the novel addresses. It attempts to demonstrate that, despite its setting outside Chile and an author who is apparently not interested in ideological debates, the novel is charged with local Chilean socio-political issues inherited from the second half of the twentieth century and presents us with an alternative approach to those issues, as well a problematic reading of them.

Think Pink

Ballet Class ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 247-276
Author(s):  
Melissa R. Klapper
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Consumer Products ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Girl Culture ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Physical Challenges ◽  
The Way

Ballet has come to be an important part of girl culture, in part because so many girls in the United States take ballet at some point in their lives. Consumer products like dolls and music boxes have brought ballet into girls’ homes and reinforce a problematic link between ballet and femininity, though real girls who take ballet class are often quite thoughtful about the way ballet empowers them. Books for children, both non-fiction and fiction, have been important examples of the intersection between ballet and girl culture since the early twentieth century. Children’s ballet books deal with artistic expression, physical challenges, competition, gender, sexuality, racial and ethnic diversity, class barriers, and many other elements of real girls’ experiences with ballet class.

scholarly journals Secondary Art and the Two-Story House: Kuwabara Takeo and the Comparative Imagination in Mid-Century Japan, 1935–1947

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Adam Bronson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Comparison ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Cross Cultural Comparison ◽  
The Way

This article focuses on the life and ideas of Kuwabara Takeo, a cultural critic and scholar of French literature who became renowned for his 1946 critique of haiku as a “secondary art” in comparison with the novel. By reconstructing Kuwabara's intellectual trajectory from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, I show how this famous essay was in part an effort to respond to Karl Löwith's famous critique of Japanese intellectuals. Löwith argued that Japanese intellectuals were insufficiently critical towards their own culture, due to the way that they compartmentalized practices and ideas associated with either Japanese culture or Western civilization. Kuwabara resisted such tendencies through the practice of cross-cultural comparison. His work gained encouragement from and responded to Löwith's critique in a way that illuminates the role that comparisons played in the intellectual culture of mid-twentieth-century Japan.

scholarly journals Critical Dystopia: Local Narrative in the Threshold in Ahmed Khaled Towfik’s Utopia

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-194
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
System Structure ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Totalitarian Regime ◽  
Critical Orientation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Knowledge Memory ◽  
Critical Dystopia

This study is an exploration of critical dystopia within a postmodern context. Literary and historical viewpoints associate dystopia with the failed utopia of twentieth-century totalitarianism manifested in regimes of extreme coercion, inequality, and slavery. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, of whose perspective this study makes use, theorize that critical dystopia provides a potential for change through rejecting the traditional dystopian ending marked by the subjugation of the individual. Problematizing critical dystopia further, the study proposes that the critical orientation of this sub-genre originates mainly from the “local narrative” of a subject whose agency generates from his position in the “threshold” between those in and under control, combined with the “counter-conducts” he uses to acquire knowledge, memory, and awakened consciousness. As a full agent, the subject resists the “utopian” “metanarrative” of an oppressive system/structure and offers possibilities of meaning in a process of “différance” which entails a potential for change. This proposition is clarified through the close reading of Ahmed Khaled Towfik’s Utopia (2011; first published in Arabic in 2008). The novel is discussed as a critical dystopian text in which Gaber, the subject in the “threshold,” opposes the totalitarian regime of Utopia in his “local narrative.”

scholarly journals Women’s Political Status: Female Difference and Public Involvement in Diamela Eltit’s Fuerzas especiales

2021 ◽  
pp. 91-110
Author(s):  
Denisse Lazo-González ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Public Involvement ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
State Repression ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Political Status ◽  
The Way

This article analyzes Fuerzas especiales’ representation of women’s political status and public involvement. From a close reading of the protagonist-narrator’s role as the breadwinner of her family and drawing insights from feminist political theory, this work conducts a theoretically-informed textual analysis of the novels’ view of female public involvement at work in a context of state repression. It aims to unveil the way in which the novel engages critically with the ambiguities of a model of women’s political participation based on female difference and the politics of motherhood.

scholarly journals “It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind”

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloe Leung
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Physical Gestures ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Mind

The Russian ballet was celebrated amongst the Bloomsbury group in the early twentieth-century. Throughout 1910s-1930s, Virginia Woolf enjoyed Russian ballets such as Petrushka, Le Spectre de la Rose and Scheherazade staged by Michel Fokine and Sergei Diaghilev. The expressivity of the dancing body rectifies words which, as Woolf delineates in “Craftsmanship,” are dishonest in articulating emotions (Selected Essays 85). This paper thus divulges an oppositional thinking that belies Woolf’s modernist aesthetics – a compulsion to give words to emotions that should be left unsaid. In To the Lighthouse (1928), this “silence” is communicated in the dancing gestures that populate the novel. Juxtaposing the context of Woolf’s attendance at the ballet with her concurrent composition of Lighthouse, I shall argue that the aesthetic convergence between Woolf’s prose and the Russian ballet is not a coincidence – that Woolf very much had the ballet in mind when she wrote. Woolf’s and the Russian ballet’s shared aesthetics however, do not characterise this paper as a study of influence the Russian ballet had on Woolf. Rather, Woolf involuntarily deploys the language of dance/ballet in articulating ineffable emotions. I will offer a close reading that scrutinizes the underexplored physical gestures of Mr and Mrs Ramsay with a perspective of dance. In projecting emotions, Woolf’s novel sketches a reciprocal network between the dancing body and the mind. I conclude by suggesting that the communicational lapses do not sentence the failure of but sustain human kinship. By extension, the Russian balletic presentation of the dancing body will also reanimate the mind-body conundrum that has haunted academia for centuries.

The Novel after Film

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Foltz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Public Culture ◽  
Visual Language ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aldous Huxley ◽  
Moral Purpose ◽  
Modern Novel ◽  
The Way

The Novel After Film examines how literary fiction has been redefined in response to the emergence of narrative film. It charts the institutional, stylistic, and conceptual relays that linked literary and cinematic cultures, and that fundamentally changed the nature and status of storytelling in the early twentieth century. In the cinema, a generation of modernist writers found a medium whose bad form was also laced with the glamour of the popular, and whose unfamiliar visual language seemed to harbor a future for innovative writing after modernism. As The Novel After Film demonstrates, this fascination with film was played out against the backdrop of a growing discourse about the novel’s respectability. As the modern novel was increasingly venerated as a genre of aesthetic refinement and high moral purpose, a range of authors, from Virginia Woolf and H. D. to Henry Green and Aldous Huxley, turned their attention to the cinema in search of alternative aesthetic histories. For authors working in modernism’s atmosphere of heightened formal sophistication, film’s violations of style took on a perverse attraction. In this way, film played a key role in changing the way that novelists addressed a transforming public culture which could seem at moments to be leaving the novel behind.

Bishops, Priests, and CELAM

2020 ◽  
pp. 193-216
Author(s):  
Erika Helgen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Catholic Church

This chapter examines the evolution of the role and image of Latin American priests and bishops during the second half of the twentieth century. This period saw the emergence of new forms of clerical and episcopal organization, such as CELAM (the Latin American Episcopal Conference, or Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano), as well as new ideas regarding clerical training, pastoral care, and hierarchical obedience. Such developments not only shaped the way in which priests and bishops approached social and political issues, but also transformed how the clergy thought about fundamental ecclesiological questions regarding the nature and mission of the Catholic Church.

How Mariama Bâ Became World Literature: Translation and the Legibility of Feminist Critique

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (5) ◽  
pp. 1239-1255
Author(s):  
Tobias Warner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mariama Ba ◽  
English Edition ◽  
The Way

How did Mariama Bâ‘s 1979 novel Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter) become one of the most widely read, taught, and translated African texts of the twentieth century? This essay traces how the Senegalese author's work became recognizable to a global audience as an attack on polygamy and a celebration of literary culture. I explore the flaws in these two conceptions of the novel, and I recover aspects of the text that were obscured along the way—especially the novel's critique of efforts to reform the legal framework of marriage in Senegal. I also compare striking shifts that occur in two key translations: the English edition that helped catalyze Bâ‘s success and a more recent translation into Wolof, the most widely spoken language in Senegal. By reading Letter back through these translations, I reposition it as a text that highlights its distance from an audience and transforms this distance into an animating contradiction.

scholarly journals Demitologizacja negatywnego wizerunku wilka w powieści Wilk zwany Romeo Nicka Jansa

2020 ◽  
pp. 203-215
Author(s):  
Anna Naplocha
Keyword(s):  
17Th Century ◽  
Gradual Change ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Negative Perception ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Negative Beliefs ◽  
The Way

The article deals with the issue of refuting the negative perception of the wolf among the inhabitants of Alaska in the novel A Wolf Called Romeo by Nick Jans. The pejorative perception of the wolf’s existence has its source in the persecution of this predator that began in the 17th century. Nick Jans’ non-fiction novel relates to the seven-year coexistence of Juneau residents in Alaska with a lone, untamed wolf. This novel demythologizes stereotypical, negative beliefs about wolves. This song is an important voice on the policy of protecting wolves in Alaska and is a literary illustration of the stages of gradual change in the way people perceive wolves from a negative to an affirmative attitude.

Virginia Woolf

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Sellers
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
Room Of One's Own

This chapter traces Virginia Woolf’s development as a writer of non-fiction, focusing on her prolific output as an essayist. It sees close links between her ongoing experimentation with the novel form and the evolving form of her essays, and argues that her alterations in style were an integral aspect of her attempt to articulate a response to her largely Victorian inheritance, to the seismic shifts taking place in society and understanding in the early decades of the twentieth century, and to the politics and culture of the 1930s dominated by the rise of fascism. While the chapter ranges across all of Woolf’s essays, there is particular discussion of her 1920 A Room of One’s Own and her 1938 Three Guineas.

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