Novelas correspondidas: G��mez de la Serna y Max Aub

[es] Hacia fines de los a��os cincuenta, Ram��n G��mez de la Serna y Max Aub publicaron en el exilio dos novelas claves para sus respectivas obras, Cartas a m�� mismo (1956) y Jusep Torres Campalans (1958). Son dos textos experimentales que puestos en relaci��n ofrecen reflexiones significativas acerca de la novela contempor��nea escrita en castellano. [en] Towards the end of the 50���s, Ram��n G��mez de la Serna and Max Aub published during their exile two significative works, Cartas a m�� mismo (1956) and Jusep Torres Campalans (1958). These two experimental novels put together offer significant thoughts about the contemporary novel written in Spanish.

Contemporary Australian masculinities and De Certeau���s concept of la perruqe in Christos Tsiolkas��� novel The Slap (2008)

This paper will focus on how Christos Tsiolkas the author of The Slap (2008) invites us to view the complex range of private lives of his male characters living in suburban Melbourne through their daily routines, conversations and innermost thoughts. On the surface most appear to be participating in and achieving a certain level of success in their lives. However, this novel reveals when we agitate and dig below the ���practices of everyday life��� there is often a disquiet simmering away under the facade of family harmony, male bravado and contentment. This paper will argue that as a result of dissatisfaction with the established order of their lives, each man has managed to create another level of meaning for himself, his own form of la perruque (De Certeau 2011: 29),the concept of living proposed by Michel De Certeau. A treatment of the characters in this article draws on, and is used to illustrate the paradigm.

The Narrative Turn in the French Novel of the 1970s

The most important French literary movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the nouveau roman, radically questioned the idea of the novel as storytelling, claiming that narratives create a false illusion of the world���s intelligibility. However, in the 1970s storytelling finds its way back into the French novel ��� a shift that has been characterized as the ���return of the narrative���. In my article, I argue that the ���narrative turn��� in the French novel of the 1970s can be seen as a turn towards a fundamentally hermeneutic view of the narrative mediatedness of our relation to the world. From a hermeneutic perspective, the nouveaux romanciers ��� insofar as they reject the narrative in order to disclose the discontinuous, fragmentary and chaotic nature of reality ��� hang onto the positivistic idea that ���real��� is only that which is independent of human meaning-giving processes. By contrast, the hermeneutists, such as Paul Ricoeur, consider also the human experience of the world to be real, and largely narrative in form. This view is shared by the principal novelists associated with the narrative turn, such as Michel Tournier to whom man is a ���mythological animal���. However, after the nouveau roman , narratives have lost their innocence: they no longer appear as ���natural��� but are conscious of their own narrativity, historicity, and the way they represent only one possible ��� inevitably ethically and politically charged ��� perspective into reality. By making storytelling thematic and by telling ���counter-stories��� that question prevailing models of sense-making, Tournier and other ���new storytellers��� strive to promote critical reflection on the stories on the basis of which we orient to the world and narrate our lives ��� both as individuals and as communities.

History, revolution and the British popular novel: historical fiction in the romantic age

���History, Revolution and the British Popular Novel��� takes as its focus the significant role which historical fiction played within the French Revolution debate and its aftermath. Examining the complex intersection of the genre with the political and historical dialogue generated by the French Revolution crisis, the thesis contends that contemporary fascination with the historical episode of the Revolution, and the fundamental importance of history to the disputes which raged about questions of tradition and change, and the meaning of the British national past, led to the emergence of increasingly complex forms of fictional historical narrative during the ���war of ideas.��� Considering the varying ways in which novelists such as Charlotte Smith, William Godwin, Mary Robinson, Helen Craik, Clara Reeve, John Moore, Edward Sayer, Mary Charlton, Ann Thomas, George Walker and Jane West engaged with the historical contexts of the Revolution debate, my discussion juxtaposes the manner in which English Jacobin novelists inserted the radical critique of the Jacobin novel into the wider arena of history with anti-Jacobin deployments of the historical to combat the revolutionary threat and internal moves for socio-political restructuring. I argue that the use of imaginative historical narrative to contribute to the ongoing dialogue surrounding the Revolution, and offer political and historical guidance to readers, represented a significant element within the literature of the Revolution crisis. The thesis also identifies the diverse body of historical fiction which materialised amidst the Revolution controversy as a key context within which to understand the emergence of Scott���s national historical novel in 1814, and the broader field of historical fiction in the era of Waterloo. Tracing the continued engagement with revolutionary and political concerns evident in the early Waverley novels, Frances Burney���s The Wanderer (1814), William Godwin���s Mandeville (1816), and Mary Shelley���s Valperga (1823), my discussion concludes by arguing that Godwin���s and Shelley���s extension of the mode of historical fiction initially envisioned by Godwin in the revolutionary decade, and their shared endeavour to retrieve the possibility enshrined within the republican past, appeared as a significant counter to the model of history and fiction developed by Walter Scott in the post-revolutionary epoch.

Afterwords: reparative queer death and the contemporary Irish novel, 1960-2000

Given that an extant comprehensive study of homosexuality and the twentieth century Irish novel has yet to produced, this thesis is an attempt at rectifying such a gap in research by way of close textual analysis of writing from the latter half of the century���that is, from 1960-2000. Analysis of seven novels by four male authors ��� John Broderick, Desmond Hogan, Colm T��ib��n and Keith Ridgway ��� lead to one overarching feature common to all four writers becoming clear: the homosexual or queer is always dying or already ���dead���. ���Dead��� is placed in inverted commas here as it is not only biological death that characterises the fate of gay men in the aforementioned literature. In the first instance, such men are also always already ���dead������that is, by light of their disenfranchisement as homosexual or queer, they are, in socialized terms, examples of the ���living��� dead. Secondly, biological death neither fully obliterates the queer body nor its disruptive influence. Consequently, one of the overarching ways in which I read queer death in the late twentieth century Irish novel is through the prism of its reparative ���afterw(a)ord���. On the one hand, such readings are temporally based (that is, reading from a point beyond the death of the protagonist - or their ���afterward���); while, on the other hand, such readings are stylistically premised (that is, reading or interpreting the narrative itself as an ���afterword���). The current project thus constitutes an original contribution to knowledge by establishing variant ways of reading the contemporary Irish novel from the point of view of the queer ���unliving���. In assessing such heterogeneous aspects of contemporary queer death, the project a) contributes to recent, largely Anglo-American-based literary theoretical research on the queer and the eschatological, and b) provides a more contemporized literary base upon which future research can uncover a continuum of Irish queer writing in the twentieth century, one concerned with writing prior to 1960 and not limited to writing my men, in which death and same-sex desire are at parallel angles to one another.

Hope in the Most Unlikely Spaces: Thawra and the Contemporary Arabic Novel

In the early to mid-twentieth century, many novelists in the Arab world championed Arab nationalism in their literary reflections on the social and political struggles of their countries, depicting these struggles primarily in terms of spatial binaries that pitted the Arab world against the West, even as they imported Western literary models of progress and modernity into their own work. The intense experience of national awakening that infused their writing often placed these authors at a literary disadvantage, for in their literature, all too often the depth and diversity of Arabic cultures and the complexity of socio-political struggles across the Arab world were undermined by restrictive spatial discourses that tended to focus only on particular versions of Arab history and on a seemingly unifying national predicament. Between the Arab defeat of 1967 and the present day, however, an increasing number of Arab authors have turned to less restrictive forms of spatial discourse in search of a language that might offer alternative narratives of hope beyond the predictable, and seemingly thwarted, trajectories of nationalism. This study traces the ways in which contemporary Arab authors from Egypt and the Sudan have endeavoured to re-think and re-define the Arab identity in ever-changing spaces where elements of the local and the global, the traditional and the modern, interact both competitively and harmoniously. I examine the spatial language and the tropes used in three Arabic novels, viewing them through the lens of thawra (revolution) in both its socio-political and artistic manifestations. Linking the manifestations of thawra in each text to different scenes of revolution in the Arab world today, in Chapter Two, I consider how, at a stage when the Sudan of the sixties was both still dealing with colonial withdrawal and struggling to establish itself as a nation-state, the geographical and textual landscapes of Tayeb Salih���s Season of Migration to the North depict the ongoing dilemma of the Sudanese identity. In Chapter Three, I examine Alaa iii al-Aswany���s The Yacoubian Building in the context of a socially diseased and politically corrupt Egypt of the nineties: social, political, modern, historical, local, and global elements intertwine in a dizzyingly complex spatial network of associations that sheds light on the complicated reasons behind today���s Egyptian thawra. In Chapter Four, the final chapter, Gamal al-Ghitani���s approach to his Egypt in Pyramid Texts drifts far away from Salih���s anguished Sudan and al-Aswany���s chaotic Cairo to a realm where thawra manifests itself artistically in a sophisticated spatial language that challenges all forms of spatial hegemony and, consequently, old and new forms of social, political, and cultural oppression in the Arab world.

The Historical Novel of Contemporary Capitalism

Special dossier on ���La fiction politique���, eds. Emily Apter and Emmanuel Bouju.