Medievalism Disoriented

This chapter examines the valency of the Middle Ages in the recent French political imaginary, tracing how the nationalist medievalisms of recent decades can be read as a response to the perceived threats and uncertainties of globalization. The chapter explores the heated debates sparked by neoreactionary commentator Éric Zemmour’s use of the Middle Ages to account for France’s apparent loss of identity in the era of multiculturalism and the globalized economy. It also analyses how these debates play out in three recent novels that offer medievalist explorations of contemporary French identity: Jérôme Ferrari’s Sermon on the Fall of Rome (2012), Michel Houellebecq’s notorious 2015 novel Submission, and Mathias Enard’s 2015 novel Compass. By examining these texts together, the chapter offers an account of how France in the age of globalization has used the Middle Ages to understand its own long, contradictory love affair with ideas of nation, empire, and world.

Scripting Gabriel García Márquez’s Life

Any biographical essay on the famous Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) must take into account biographies that have already been written—including, of course, Dasso Saldívar’s thoughtful García Márquez: El viaje a la semilla; La biografía (1997), Gerald Martin’s excellent Gabriel García Márquez: A Life (2008), and Stephen M. Hart’s Gabriel García Márquez (2010)—counterbalanced by García Márquez’s own autobiography, Vivir para contarla (2002). This article (1) sets out the intrinsically significant events of Gabo’s life and the impact they had on his development as a writer (journalist, film critic, cultural/political commentator, writer of short fiction and long fiction); (2) focuses on the osmosis between his life and his literary work, including an analysis of the first and only volume of his memoirs and how they overlap with his literary works and, indeed, are at times overwhelmed by them, as present in particular in El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985), inspired by his parents’ love affair, in which the version of events provided by the novel supersedes the “real” sequence of events; and (3) uses the notion of doubleness—evident in his life via the opposition between his “real” family and his “false” family of illegitimate offspring, produced by his grandfather’s wanton ways, as well as the figure of the “double” in his fiction and particularly Cien años de soledad (1967)—as a structuring device of the article’s emplotment.

Queer Pedagogy

This essayistic chapter dissects case studies of two international queer feature films from the 1980s and two queer shorts from twenty-first-century Quebec, all of which boldly grapple with—and arguably perform—queer pedagogy: Abuse (Arthur J. Bressan Jr., 1983, USA), A Strange Love Affair (Eric de Kuyper, 1985, Belgium, Netherlands), Rituels queer (Richard E. Bump and Ryan Conrad, 2013, USA, Quebec), and Rousings (Jamie Ross, web series, 2015, Quebec). Alongside, the author ponders pedagogical relationships over the years with his queer students, in terms of both their scholarly and artistic work and anecdotal memories of interactive relations between mentor and students. Inspired by Jane Gallop’s anecdotal theory, and in the shadow of the #MeToo sex panic, this autobiographical essay calls for far-ranging cultural and political conversations about sexuality and pedagogy, and their complex relations to cinephilia and the specificity of queer cultures.

http://www.folia.ac.me/image/38/Dora%20Kelemen.pdf

This paper analyzes female characters in two early works by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky– Poor Folk (1845, Bednye liudi) and The Double (1846, Dvoinik). It considers the literary methods used to represent those characters, as well as their relation to the male main character and some aspects of gender construction in these works. It is shown that the importance of female characters in these two works is directly connected with their (real or imagined) influence on the male main character. Consequently, a female character can play an important role in the novel even if she doesn’t personally appear in it. Women are fatal for both male characters, albeit for different reasons. Drawing on the research of Neuhäuser (1979), this article shows some further similarities in the basic structure of both works. They share the form of a love affair accompanied by intertextual references, as well as a narrated previous relationship of the male character, both of them serving as an additional explanation of the current love affair. The epistolary form of Poor Folk leads to self-representation being the main way of showing Varvara Dobroselova’s character, while Klara Olsuf’evna of The Double is depicted both from the perspective of the auctorial first-person narrator, as well as from Goliadkin’s perspective. The auctorial narrator of The Double ironizes not only Klara Olsuf’evna, but also other characters and social practices of the Petersburg society. The internal monologues and the free indirect speech of Goliadkin, however, show signs of a negative, even misogynistic attitude towards the character of Karolina Ivanovna and partially also to Klara Olsuf’evna. Lastly, Poor Folk introduces themes to Dostoevsky’s work, which occupy him until the end of his life and manifest themselves in their more recognizable form in his later works.

Mourning the Mamalith

Mourning the Mamalith: A Graphic Response to GriefOn February 17, 2021, my mother, Ingrid Margarethe Phyllis Gertrud von Reitzenstein Claussner, falls and breaks her neck while doing what she loves most: going to church. "Jesus is the most important person in my life," she once told me. Always subordinate to her divine love affair, my mortal relationship with her was complicated. At key moments throughout my life, starting in infancy when I needed her care and protection most, she was absent. Due to my mother's early childhood trauma, she was unable to get too close to anyone, even to me, her only child. Jesus was her answer to every question, no matter what the question. This level of devotion to an invisible entity was incomprehensible to me, but I loved my mother with every ounce of my being. On February 18, 2021, Gracie is born on a ranch in Nebraska. Her mother dies shortly after giving birth—not from complications of having puppies, but from eating part of a towel. On February 19, 2021, my mother dies in the hospital in Tucson, Arizona.On May 1, 2021, my wife and I drive to Nebraska to pick up Gracie the boxer puppy. She is ten weeks old but still just a teeny five-pound runt. She grows very quickly and continues to thrive. Nevertheless, I have recurring panic attacks at night in response to dreams and spontaneous mental images of Gracie's tiny, vulnerable body. I can't shake the feeling that something might happen to her, and that I may not be able to protect her.In early June, the morning after another night of anxiety and insomnia, I tearfully call my wise therapist friend, Leslie. She tells me that when one's mother dies, part of the grieving process requires that one re-experience every fraught moment and emotion: "You are healing not just your own relationship with your mother, but you are healing your entire maternal lineage. You must relive everything on a deeper level now, even if you've already worked through these feelings before." I realize that my nightly anxiety attacks aren't really about Gracie, but about my own vulnerability when I was an infant. I am re-experiencing those early moments through my visceral connection with this tiny mammal who depends on me. This short comic looks at the mysterious connection between processing childhood vulnerability and trauma, more-than-human and human interdependence, and psychosomatic healing. As I've done in some of my previous work, by materializing thoughts as drawn and written sequential vignettes, I hope to gain and share insight about the mysterious dynamics of embodied cognition.

Of Secret

Love affair is secret. Extra-marital affair is greater secret. Love is a holy matter. As such love between two lovers hailing from two different religions is holiest secret.

The Devil Finds Work

Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work (1976) has proven challenging since its publication because readers and critics have trouble classifying it. The challenge may be related to a common feature of Baldwin criticism, namely a tendency to compare late career works to early ones and to find them lacking: the experimental nature of later works of nonfiction like No Name in the Street (1972), The Devil Finds Work, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985) does not square easily with the more conventional essays that made Baldwin famous in his early years. I attempt to reframe The Devil Finds Work not through a comparison to other Baldwin essays, but rather through a comparison to his fiction, specifically the novel Giovanni’s Room. I posit that a greater appreciation for Devil can result from thinking of it as a story, specifically the story of a failed love affair.