Twentieth Century Literature

This study examines how Carson McCullers employs grotesque aesthetics in The Ballad of the Sad Café to deconstruct the ideal of the Southern Belle and challenge traditional gender roles in the American South. As part of the Southern Gothic tradition, the novella portrays eccentric characters whose non-normative bodies and behaviors expose the artificiality of femininity and masculinity. Through Miss Amelia, described as “sexless and white,” the hunchbacked Cousin Lymon, and the morally corrupted Marvin Macy, McCullers creates what Ioana Baciu has called a “third category” of gender that exists beyond the male–female binary. The analysis draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque body and Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity. For Bakhtin, the grotesque body is excessive, unfinished, and transgressive, undermining fixed social categories. Butler’s framework highlights that gender is not a biological essence but a repeated performance shaped by cultural norms. Combining these perspectives reveals how Amelia’s androgyny, Lymon’s inversion of masculine expectations, and Macy’s corrupted masculinity confront the rigid patriarchal order of the South. The dilapidated café and isolated town amplify these disruptions as grotesque spaces where alternative identities temporarily flourish, but Amelia’s eventual defeat demonstrates the fragility of resistance within entrenched systems of power. The study argues that McCullers employs the grotesque not merely as a literary motif but as a political strategy. By foregrounding bodily excess, inversion, and unconventional identities, she exposes the constructed foundations of Southern femininity while revealing the violent measures patriarchal systems employ to preserve authority. In this way, The Ballad of the Sad Café functions both as an extension of the Southern Gothic tradition and as a precursor to contemporary discussions of gender fluidity and non-binary identity. Ultimately, the novella demonstrates how grotesque aesthetics can destabilize gender norms and create spaces for alternative identities, yet also highlights the limitations of individual resistance under patriarchal control. McCullers’s text therefore offers a powerful critique of gender and authority that resonates with ongoing debates on identity and cultural power.

Riproduzione vietata ai sensi di legge (art. 171 della legge 22 aprile 1941, n. 633) Senza regolare autorizzazione, è vietato riprodurre questo volume anche parzialmente e con qualsiasi mezzo, compresa la fotocopia, anche per uso interno o didattico. Volume finanziato con fondi del progetto pot Università, scuole e territorio in rete per il patrimonio culturale materiale e immateriale: partecipazione, inclusione,

There were many scandalous texts in the twentieth century, but a disproportionate number of them were biofictions. Why is this the case? By looking closely at five biographical novels from the twentieth century, and I conclude that the scandal of biofiction is that it can and does reveal what we are at our deepest and most base level of being, thereby debunking the comforting myths that humans have of themselves.

Frank A. Collymore of Barbados, 1893Barbados, -1980, was perhaps best known as the editor of Bim, the regional literary magazine in the English-speaking Caribbean. He was also a poet, short story writer, eminent amateur actor, school-teacher and artist. Between 1944 and 1971 Collymore published five collections of poetry and an often reprinted study of 'Barbadian dialect'. In 1991, a collection of his short stories was published posthumously. In his later years he was often described as a 'literary genius' and as 'The Grand Old Man of West Indian literature'. He won honorary awards and wide recognition in the English-speaking region for his role in the development of Caribbean literature.

Frank A. Collymore of Barbados, 1893Barbados, -1980, was perhaps best known as the editor of Bim, the regional literary magazine in the English-speaking Caribbean. He was also a poet, short story writer, eminent amateur actor, school-teacher and artist. Between 1944 and 1971 Collymore published five collections of poetry and an often reprinted study of 'Barbadian dialect'. In 1991, a collection of his short stories was published posthumously. In his later years he was often described as a 'literary genius' and as 'The Grand Old Man of West Indian literature'. He won honorary awards and wide recognition in the English-speaking region for his role in the development of Caribbean literature.

Monica Redlich (1909-1965) died relatively young, but lived an interesting life, leaving two remarkable but neglected children's books (or Young Adult novels), four challenging adult novels, one amusing book of social feminist satire, some nostalgic guides for simple tourism, several humorous column-articles, and a fragment, about fifty pages, of autobiography. In 1937 she married Sigurd Christiansen, a Danish diplomat, spent the years of World War II in Denmark, under Nazi German occupation from 1940 to 1945, and then travelled with her husband and his work to the USA and Spain and other countries. In the 1930s, Redlich was a successful and popular writer, albeit with a small output, but always of high quality. She was a professional woman. Now all her books are out of print, with the possible exception of Five Farthings (1939: reprinted by Margin Notes Books in 2011), her second Young Adult novel. Secondhand copies of Redlich's books are increasingly rare and expensive. This article discusses Redlich's two Young Adult novels, Jam Tomorrow (1937), and Five Farthings, while placing these in the larger context of her life and adult writing, and associated artists. As a children's, or Young Adult, author, Monica Redlich may be a two-hit wonder. But her books deserve to be remembered, reprinted, and enjoyed afresh by modern readers. She is an author to rediscover and savour.

This essay attempts to demonstrate how Louis Adamic's material and intellectual influence, as well as his textual model, contributed to the writing of the Filipino American foundational text, Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart (1946), a classic of Asian American literature. Starting with the renowned friendship between the two authors and emphasizing Adamic's support in guiding Bulosan through the ethnic expectations of the US editorial market-with the suggestion of the autobiographical genre-, this essay argues that Bulosan's employment and subversion of the immigrant autobiography was partly modeled on Adamic's semi-autobiography Laughing in the Jungle (1932), a heterodox European immigrant autobiography centered on class issues, social struggle, and the deconstruction of the American dream. The essay offers a brief comparative recognition of immigrant autobiographies written by European and Asian immigrants and their different canonical understanding through the classic works by William Boelhower and Elaine H. Kim. Then, drawing from archival materials and intertextual analysis, the essay argues that America Is in the Heart's structure, the narrator's skepticism toward assimilation policies and his attachment to the country of origin, are indebted to Adamic's influence because of formal and thematic similarities with his semi-autobiography. Nonetheless, the US colonial history Enrico Mariani of the Philippines and the author's background rooted in rural Pangasinan, set Bulosan's text apart from both the European American and Asian American autobiographical "traditions" and thus from the model of Younghill Kang-even though the two undergo the same racial prejudice by the editorial market. America Is in the Heart subverts the immigrant autobiographical genre by re-signifying the concept of "America," juxtaposing American ideals with the harsh realities of violent exploitation and discrimination experienced by Filipino migrant workers. In doing so, it reframes "America" as a symbol of solidarity between racialized workers against the fascist corporate manifestations that worried Adamic in the 1930s.

The legend of the Golem is "one of the most enduring and imaginative tales in modern Jewish folklore and…perhaps the most famous of all modern Jewish literary fantasies" (Dekel and Gurley 241-42). The second most popular Jewish fantasy creature, the dybbuk, is a possessing ghost. By contrast, most golems lack this complex personality and knowledge of the past. They are new, limited constructs: either a blank slate like Frankenstein's monster or a programmed tool like the brooms in The Sorcerer's Apprentice. However, in the recent Jewish fantasy boom, some authors are getting more creative and inventing golems inhabited by wise spirits. These new golems reckon with the near-annihilation of the past even as they battle the rising threat of the present. Wrath Becomes Her by Aden Polydoros (2023) explores the darker side of the golem legend. In Lithuania 1943, Ezra builds a golem to commemorate his daughter Chaya and avenge her death. As Vera teams up with the partisans, she explores her life as a golem, experiencing Chaya's memories but also questioning her own role in the world. Thane Rosenbaum's The Golems of Gotham (2003) tells another Holocaust ghost story-with the second and third generations haunted. Here, the possession brings forward a unique healing by allowing the ghosts voices.

Perspectivas actuales sobre la enseñanza, el conocimiento y la práctica educativa 2025 Saberes en tensión: Perspectivas actuales sobre la enseñanza, el conocimiento y la práctica educativa Sandra G. Rodríguez (Ed.) Todos los derechos reservados. Ni la totalidad ni parte de este libro puede reproducirse ni transmitirse sin permiso escrito de Editorial Dykinson S.L.

The main issue of the present study is the examination of the story "The Patient Stone" based on Joseph Campbell’s (1904-1987) Hero’s Journey theory. The value and significance of this research lie in the cultural and mythological importance of folk tales as well as the theoretical worth of Campbell’s theory. This interdisciplinary study is conducted using a descriptive-analytical method. Its main question is: How do the stages of the story "The Patient Stone" correspond to Campbell’s Hero’s Journey? The hypothesis is that, given the mythical nature of this story, although not all stages of the Hero’s Journey may be applicable, it certainly includes many of them. The outcome of the research is that in the story "The Patient Stone," the hero undergoes a perilous journey without receiving help from an external individual. The twelve stages of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, including "The Call to Adventure," "Crossing the Threshold," "Difficult Trials," "Crisis," "Resurrection," and "Return to the Ordinary World," are present in this story; however, it lacks the stages of the hero’s refusal of the return, the magical flight stage, and the arrival of external help to bring the hero back, and he simply returns to the community.

Giuseppe Angioletti tra rondismo e memoria. Continuità e metamorfosi della prosa narrativa: la 'fase Carabba' L'opera di Giuseppe Angioletti costituisce una delle esperienze più significative della narrativa italiana tra le due guerre e nel secondo dopoguerra, tanto per la sua capacità di recepire le suggestioni culturali europee quanto per la sua vocazione a un'osservazione morale e civile che si fa via via più consapevole e matura; in questa traiettoria i volumi Il buon veliero (1930), Servizio di guardia (1932) e L 'Europa d'oggi (1934), pubblicati dall'editore Carabba di Lanciano, segnano la fase cosiddetta rondista dell'autore, vale a dire quella che maggiormente risente del clima della "Ronda" e di un ideale di prosa pura, sorvegliata, limpida, con una tendenza al controllo formale e a una sorta di classicismo moderno, mentre il precedente Il giorno del giudizio (1928), edito a Torino, rappresenta piuttosto un'opera di esordio ancora irrequieta e non del tutto assimilabile a quella stagione, benché già attraversata da alcune tensioni che verranno poi assorbite e disciplinate nel quadro stilistico successivo . Nel romanzo d'esordio infatti la narrazione tende spesso a farsi spezzata, discontinua, con improvvisi slanci lirici che testimoniano la ricerca di una voce personale: De Robertis parlò di «scrittura a tratti febbrile»[2], segno che la misura rondista non era ancora conquistata, ma già si intravedeva in alcune pagine la volontà di limpidezza che troverà forma compiuta nei libri successivi. Con Il buon veliero Angioletti approda a una dimensione narrativa compiuta. La metafora navale del titolo diventa emblema di una scrittura che intende attraversare il mare aperto delle esperienze mantenendo una rotta sicura, sorretta dal rigore

The Cullen family in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005-2020) series is one of the largest of these family units in contemporary vampire literature. Whilst the Cullens assimilate with humans, their home and family are a separate entity on the edge of the town. The queer family of Louis, Lestat, and Claudia in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) shows the creation of a non-traditional family with an exploration of their subversive interactions. Both Meyer and Rice use their extensive world-building to explore their family units and understand why their vampires have chosen to leave the solitary stereotype behind. Whilst the creation of these family units can show a positive and empathetic transformation for the modern introspective vampire, there is also a commentary to be made about why this has occurred and why humans now seek to transcend the liminal boundaries of this Other world. Meyer admits Bella Swan into the Cullen family, Rice brings in Madeleine as a surrogate mother for Claudia, and many other twentieth and twenty-first-century texts and media now portray the human outsider being accepted by vampires more readily than their fellow humans. This shift in the humanity of the vampire reflects scientific and technological advancements, the liminal nature of the Gothic genre itself, and the changing audience that needs a contemporary vampire to relate to.

This paper explores the concept of deterritorialization in Athol Fugard's Blood Knot through the philosophical frameworks of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, focusing on how Fugard's characters transcend the oppressive restrictions of apartheid using symbolic actions and postdramatic techniques. The study employs a multidisciplinary approach, applying Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical concepts to analyze Blood Knot through three primary lenses: temporal displacement, symbolic landscapes, and embodied contradictions. These elements are examined to reveal how Fugard manipulates time, space, and the physicality of his characters to reflect the process of deterritorialization. By analyzing how identity markers and power dynamics are portrayed and subverted within the play, the approach combines philosophical theory with literary analysis to uncover the deeper layers of resistance and transformation within the characters' experiences under apartheid. The analysis demonstrates that Fugard's characters rise above apartheid's constraints by engaging in symbolic and embodied actions, which reflect the fluidity of identity and resistance to oppressive systems. The manipulation of time, symbolic environments, and physical struggles within the play illustrates a deeper process of deterritorialization, where characters disrupt the rigid social and political structures imposed on them. By examining the play through philosophical and symbolic lenses, the study highlights Fugard's nuanced portrayal of resistance and the fluid, dynamic nature of identity under oppressive regimes, providing a richer understanding of the complexities of identity and power within the play's historical and political context. Contribution/ Originality: This study contributes to the existing literature by offering an interdisciplinary analysis of Blood Knot through Deleuze and Guattari's concept of deterritorialization. It highlights how Fugard's characters resist apartheid through symbolic, spatial, and temporal strategies, enriching discussions on identity, power, and postdramatic forms of resistance.

Highlights of the historical development of structured and creative/free dance experiences for children within the curriculum of early childhood education in the 20th century are sketched. Although some educators dissented with the practice, in the 1920s most dance activities for young children were structured. The following decade was characterized by a gradual shift toward freedom of movement and a recognition of individual rhythms. In the 1940s, during World War 11, there was a hiatus in developing new creative movement programs. The 1950s brought an emphasis on freedom of movement that extended to the nursery school level. Exchange of ideas between early childhood educators and dance educators began to increase during the 1960s. In the 1960s and early 1970s, dance experiences were characterized by freedom combined with a small amount of structure. Presently, early childhood and physical educators agree with the idea that movement (1) plays an integrated part in the curriculum for the young child; and (2) should be construed as a way of knowing, finding out, testing, and expressing oneself that is reciprocally and causally linked with feelings. (RH)

Elizabeth Goudge's historical novel Gentian Hill (1949) is one of her eleven Devon novels, written between 1940 and 1963. Living for more than ten years in Devon, Goudge was inspired by the local people and the history of the region. Gentian Hill is a long novel with a simple central here-and-now story about two main characters, a young girl and a teenage boy, and a complicated tapestry of subplots, backstories and long-ago legends involving a large number of major adult characters. The novel is set in Devon, and London, around the time of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, which features briefly, against the backdrop of the long wars against Napoleon. But its subplots reach back initially to the French Revolution, and then further back to King Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries, and ultimately as far back as the Crusades. This article explores issues that arise within the novel, such as relations between Roman Catholics and Protestants; fear, cowardice, duty and courage; recurring patterns of relationships and reincarnation; dreams and telepathy; and Christianity contrasted with pagan folklore and belief. It clarifies the challenging tangle of mysteries that swirl through the novel. Finally, it concludes that, despite its apparently old-fashioned simplicity, this is a powerful novel, typical of Goudge's other writing, rich with fantasy elements, history, and the supernatural. It is one of Goudge's masterpieces.

This paper introduces Teeth in Our Lungs: A Commentary on Sherwin Bitsui’s Dissolve by situating Sherwin Bitsui’s long poem within both Indigenous and broader modernist traditions. Dissolve is read as a cultural lament comparable to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and as a celebration of resilience akin to Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. Like Eliot, Bitsui voices fragmentation and cultural disintegration, yet unlike Eliot, his language remains animated by a living source of inspiration. Like Whitman, Bitsui affirms the sacred power of poetic speech, though not through the self as divine muse, but through Wind—an Indigenous refiguration of inspiration that grants access to fractured memory without closure.
The paper explores how Dissolve overlays sacred imagery upon secular experience, as in the transformation of hospital gowns into “looms of lightning,” a technique that recalls Navajo sandpainting where the mythic past and everyday present interpenetrate. Through such images, Bitsui decolonizes the classical muse and embodies a spiritual ecology rooted in land and language. The analysis highlights how the poem functions simultaneously as lament, celebration, and ritual transformation. Its visionary metaphors—pixelated heel bones, plows of harvested light, and teeth throbbing in lungs—exemplify poetry’s unique power: not to alter the world technologically, but to alter how we perceive and inhabit it.
The introduction also frames the student essays in the volume, which follow Billy Collins’s advice to hold poems “up to the light like a color slide” rather than torture them for hidden meanings. While not expert ethnography, these essays read Dissolve as a source of truth about mourning, survival, and the making of a new sacred. The paper thus positions Bitsui’s poem as a contemporary locus of inspired speech, inviting philosophical reflection on poetry’s role in a time of cultural and ecological crisis.

This paper will consider the politics of lesbian modernist friendship. In The Politics of Modernism, Raymond Williams has famously argued for the concept of 'community' as a structuring principle within modernism and the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century: 'the artists and writers of this phase found the only community available to them: a community of the medium; of their own practice'. 1 Here, of course, Williams refers to aesthetic and artistic practice, but I want to suggest that, given the deep embedding of lesbian sexuality and identity within the modernist milieu, we might well augment Williams' meaning by talking in terms of sexual and emotional practice. Whilst the major urban centres of modernity are crucial physical and material sites in which the lesbian modernist group becomes possible and identifiable, I want to argue here that the lesbian modernist group functions most powerfully as a cultural site or space, which is created through the complex network of friendship and affective bonds and relationships. Out of the consideration of lesbian modernist friendship, I want to speculate on the importance of friendship to Richardson, both textually -and here my focus will be on March Moonlight -and in terms of her life and cultural production. Such a model of friendship requires redefinition against prevailing notions of friendship, incorporating intimate issues of affect and desire, as well requiring us to think more broadly about the terms of the sexual and cultural politics which might be embedded in friendship practice. In The Politics of Friendship, Derrida commits himself to proving that friendship has a politics, and to theorising those politics. Further, Derrida seeks to argue that aspects of the political -in broader socio-cultural terms -might well be elucidated by 2 www.livingphilosophy.org/Derrida-politics-friendship.htm. Accessed 09.09.09. 3 Ibid.

In Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence entwined the lives of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, and their relationships with two men, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, where Lawrence explores the intricacies of love and human relationships in Women in Love. The story revolves around themes of desire, existential reflection, and the fight for individual individuality in romantic relationships and is set in early 20th-century England. Through a queer feminist lens, this essay examines the psychological agony and latent lesbian desire in D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1920). It contends that an undercurrent of same-sex desire suppressed by hetero-normative patriarchy is shown in Lawrence's depiction of female relationships, especially that of Gudrun Brangwen. Gudrun's strong emotional connection to her sister Ursula and her attraction to the feminine sculptor Loerke imply an implicit rejection of conventional male-dominated relationships, even as her hostile relationship with Gerald Crich devolves into violence and emotional collapse. Based on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's theories on homosocial desire and Adrienne Rich's concept of ‘compulsory heterosexuality,’ this study reinterprets Gudrun's psychological struggle and emotional separation as manifestations of suppressed lesbian potential rather than pathology. In the end, the book becomes a place of conflict between queer female subjectivity and male-centered narrative control.

Through a feminist postcolonial theoretical lens, this article puts forth a new reading of Mohamed Mrabet's novella The Big Mirror. Written by a male Moroccan writer in 1977, a short while after Morocco's emergence from colonial rule, The Big Mirror has yet to be read and scrutinized from a gendercritical perspective. Given that post-independence is a period so critical for the development of gender relations in Morocco, literary works featuring female characters as central figures to the plot and the themes present an opportunity to extract knowledge about female representation and agency in that particular context. This article argues that The Big Mirror, like many other narrative texts written in this period, fails to represent the female character in an unideological and gender-neutral way. Through the use of the Spivakian theory of the subaltern and the impossibility of her representation, this article argues that by claiming to speak for the female character, this narrative effectively silences her and effaces her agency. As a result, the female character becomes strongly inscribed in a masculinist discourse that capitalizes on the literary trope of the madwoman as a means to further occlude female agency rather than promoting it.

This short essay revisits J.M. Coetzee’s The Vietnam Project (Dusklands, 1973), offering a fresh examination of its unsettling exploration of myth, guilt, and violence, and placing it in dialogue with the ongoing tragedy in Gaza and Israel. Through Eugene Dawn, Coetzee illuminates how the failings of empires are projected onto both public and private life, transforming family relationships into battlegrounds of their own. The essay traces these echoes in contemporary conflicts, where narratives, symbols, and myths shape the destinies of nations and individuals alike. Drawing on Socratic reflection, it asks whether injustice can ever be answered with further injustice, proposing that breaking this cycle may be the only path to genuine peace. Timeless and haunting, Coetzee’s work demands attention to the violence inherited—and the stories told to justify it.

Voici un résumé synthétique des thèmes centraux et des insights émergents de cet échange, structuré en trois axes majeurs : la quête de sens par le risque et l’aventure, l’articulation entre pratiques extrêmes et spiritualité, et la confrontation à l’absence et à l’amour comme mystère.
Ce résumé capture l’essence de ces explorations, tout en mettant en lumière les ponts entre philosophie, action et transcendance.
________________________________________
1. Le risque et l’aventure : une quête de sens existentielle
Pourquoi le risque nous attire-t-il ?
• Facteurs multidimensionnels : Le goût pour les activités à haut risque (alpinisme, sports extrêmes, etc.) s’explique par une combinaison de facteurs anthropologiques (héritage évolutif, rituels de passage), ontologiques (quête de sens, dépassement de soi), neurobiologiques (dopamine, adrénaline), culturels (valorisation sociale), et spirituels (expérience du sacré, transcendance).
o Exemple : L’alpinisme ou le base-jump offrent une expérience du sublime (Kant), où la confrontation avec le danger révèle une connexion à quelque chose de plus grand que soi.
• Le risque comme besoin de l’âme : Non pas un besoin vital, mais un besoin symbolique de défis, de transcendance et de sens. Les sociétés modernes, en minimisant les risques physiques, ont créé un vide que certains cherchent à combler par des risques intellectuels, spirituels ou créatifs (engagement militant, art, quête de vérité).
o Citation clé : « Le risque n’est pas un besoin essentiel de l’âme au sens strict, mais il en est souvent l’expression privilégiée quand celle-ci cherche à se manifester. »
• Addiction et équilibre : Le risque peut devenir pathologique (addiction comportementale), mais il peut aussi être canalisé vers des pratiques qui unifient corps, esprit et âme (ex. : méditation en montagne, arts martiaux philosophiques).
________________________________________
2. L’articulation entre pratiques extrêmes et spiritualité
Méditation et alpinisme : la présence extrême
• La montagne comme miroir de l’esprit : L’alpinisme, comme la méditation, exige une attention totale à l’instant présent. La confrontation avec la peur, le vide ou l’altitude devient une métaphore de la confrontation avec soi-même.
o Exemple : Reinhold Messner décrit l’Himalaya comme un « lieu où l’on ne peut mentir à soi-même » — une expérience proche du samādhi (absorption méditative).
• La respiration comme pont : En méditation comme en alpinisme, la maîtrise du souffle (prāṇāyāma) est cruciale pour gérer la peur, l’effort et l’altitude. Elle devient un outil d’ancrage dans le présent.
• Le sommet comme métaphore : Atteindre le sommet n’est qu’une étape ; redescendre (réintégrer le quotidien) est le vrai défi, tout comme en méditation, où l’éveil doit se vivre dans la vie de tous les jours.
o Citation : « Avant l’éveil, je coupais du bois et portais de l’eau. Après l’éveil, je coupe du bois et porte de l’eau. »
Philosophie et arts martiaux : le corps comme laboratoire de sagesse
• Les arts martiaux comme philosophie incarnée : Ils partagent avec la philosophie un questionnement sur la nature humaine (ex. : « Qu’est-ce que la force ? ») et une recherche d’équilibre entre action et non-action.
o Exemple : L’aïkido, où l’on utilise la force de l’adversaire pour le déséquilibrer, illustre la dialectique philosophique (retourner les arguments pour révéler leurs failles).
• Le mushin (esprit sans esprit) : État de conscience où l’esprit ne bloque pas l’action, comparable au flow (Csikszentmihalyi) ou à la présence stoïcienne (agir sans être entravé par ses pensées).
• La chute comme enseignement : En philosophie comme en arts martiaux, l’échec est un maître : accepter ses limites (Socrate : « Je ne sais qu’une chose, c’est que je ne sais rien ») permet de grandir.
________________________________________
3. L’amour et l’absence : un mystère à habiter
L’amour comme présence-absence
• Le désir et le manque : L’amour, comme le mirage dans le désert, se révèle par son absence. Il n’est pas une possession, mais une quête perpétuelle qui donne sens à l’existence.
o Citation : « Le miroir me renvoie mon visage ; toi, tu restes invisible. » (votre texte).
• Le silence comme langage : L’amour invisible se manifeste dans le silence, les interstices, les attentes. Comme en poésie soufie ou en zen, c’est dans l’absence de preuves que la foi en l’amour se renforce.
o Exemple : « L’amour consiste à se tenir l’un en face de l’autre, à se garder l’un l’autre, et pourtant à ne pas se toucher. » (Rilke).
Écrire comme pratique de résistance
• L’écriture comme ancrage : Face à la vacuité ou à l’absence, écrire devient un acte de survie, une façon de fixer l’éphémère et de dialoguer avec l’invisible.
o Citation : « Écrire, c’est aussi ne pas parler. C’est se taire. C’est hurler sans bruit. » (Marguerite Duras).
• L’écriture comme foi lucide : Elle permet de créer du sens là où il semble manquer, transformant le doute en cheminement et l’absence en présence.
o Exemple : Votre choix de vous raccrocher à l’écriture dans les moments de vacuité illustre cette résistance créative.
________________________________________
Synthèse finale : un équilibre dynamique
Votre échange révèle une tension féconde entre :
1. Le besoin de risque (physique, intellectuel, spirituel) comme réponse à l’ennui existentiel et à la quête de sens.
2. L’articulation entre pratiques extrêmes et spiritualité (méditation/alpinisme, philosophie/arts martiaux) comme moyen de réunifier l’être (corps, esprit, âme).
3. L’amour comme mystère : une force qui se dévoile par son absence, exigeant une foi sans preuve et une persistance sans garantie.
________________________________________
« Le désert n’est pas un vide. C’est un lieu où l’Amour, comme le mirage, nous apprend à voir au-delà des apparences. » (Et l’écriture, comme l’alpinisme ou les arts martiaux, en est une des voies.)

Available for the first time in paperback, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara reflects the poet’s growth as an artist from the earliest dazzling, experimental verses that he began writing in the late 1940s to the years before his accidental death at forty, when his poems became increasingly individual and reflective.

L’apporto di De Nicola consiste soprattutto nell’aver fatto emergere un lato meno noto della figura di Sbarbaro, attraverso il recupero di materiale biografico, attingendo in modo particolare alle fonti epistolari. Uno dei maggiori intenti del volume riguarda per l’appunto lo sradicamento dello
scrittore dalla definizione di poeta schivo e malinconico, rivelandone idiosincrasie, sodalizi e altri aspetti della biografia funzionali alla comprensione dell’opera omnia. Pur riconfermando il quadro
critico di studi sbarbariani, la monografia offre nuove testimonianze documentarie, rendendo più puntuale lo stato dell’arte sull’autore.

A „Nyájas Olvasó” egy, az egyszerűség kedvéért nevezzük
így: tanulmánygyűjteményt tart most a kezében, amely
Lengyel Péter, a kortárs magyar prózairodalom egyik kiemelkedő jelentőségű alkotójának pályáját tekinti át. Ha
meg kellene nevezni néhány kulcsszót e próza jellemzésére,
akkor a mese, a történet, a nyomozás mindenképpen közöttük lenne. A nyomozás arra utal, hogy a történet ugyan
nehezen kibogozható, s bár mindig maradnak homályos
részletek, megfejtetlen mozzanatok, az igazság és a valóság
azért felvillantható. A mesélés, a történet elmondása ezért
is kitüntetett fontosságú elem ebben a prózában, mert lényegében minden Lengyel-szöveg arra utal hol világosan,
hol rejtélyesen, hogy egyetlen történet részesei vagyunk
mindannyian. Lengyel Péter e tekintetben archaikus szerző, és a klasszikus modernitás alapjain szocializálódott: látja a széttördelt egészet, s ezért láttatja a töredékeket, de
mindig mögéjük rajzolja egészüket is. Regényei ezért is hatalmas olvasmányok: úgy mutatják az elbeszélés nehézségeit, hogy közben a „nyájas olvasó” (és azért nyájas, mert
a szerző valóban nyájasként kezeli) falja a történetet. Tökéletesen igaza volt egykoron Balassa Péternek (aki igazi nagy
olvasója volt Lengyel Péternek) abban, hogy „prózájának
hihetetlen előzékenysége, olvasó-központúsága” van. Nyájas az olvasóhoz. Ars poeticája talán éppen ezzel foglalható
össze: őrzés, elmondás és továbbadás. A regény ezek szerint
nem csak esztétikai kategória, s ezzel az állásponttal minden bizonnyal meglehetősen egyedül áll Lengyel Péter.
Mondjuk így: magányos. (Dérczy Péter)

A Térérzékelések – térértelmezések című kötetünk központi témája: az ember és
a tér közötti kapcsolat. Az ún. „térbeli fordulat” társadalom- és humántudományi
tartalmai és a kultúratudomány térfogalmai mellett leginkább a térkutatás
és az irodalmi szövegértés lehetséges viszonyrendszerét kívánja megvilágítani.
Ehhez a képzeletbeli és a valós terekkel és helyekkel kapcsolatos nemzetközi
kutatásokat helyezi vizsgálódása középpontjába, elsősorban magyar és francia
elméleti és szépirodalmi művek, illetve művészeti alkotások vizsgálatán keresztül.
Noha a 20. századi térpoétika, a geo/térfilozófia és újabban a geokritika
jórészt a fordításoknak köszönhetően már nem idegen a magyar elméleti
és kritikai gondolkodás számára, ezek elméleti bázisára épülő interpretációkat
felvonultató, vagyis a térpoétika hatóerejét bemutató tanulmánygyűjtemény
mindeddig magyar nyelven még nem látott napvilágot.

While acknowledging Frank 's [4] work on the significance of spatial perception in literature, we employ Genette 's [5] distinction between narrative and story. We understand narrative to mean the narrative text, the signifier, the utterance. By story, we mean the set of events we narrate, that is, the signified [a]. Narrated events take place in a complex world, with its own spatial and temporal rules and configurations determined by the scope of meaning of the author. We refer to this world, which is essentially the Bakhtinian chronotope [6], as the story world, and it provides the framework for our research. For Zoran , the story world comprises two levels, one spatial and one temporal. The topographical level, that is, space as a static entity, is constructed by units of place. Place can be a point, a surface, or a volume characterized by continuity and having distinct boundaries. The chronotopic level is a structure imposed on space through events and movements, constructed by zones of action defined by the internal coherence of the events they describe, ignoring topographical boundaries [b]. illuminates the connection between the shaping of the story world and meaning through the "topological level." This Volume 4 Issue 1, 2024 Article Information

As a comparative study of four minority language literatures, this article offers an analysis of the work of four vanguard writers. The study is undertaken from Casanova’s perspective that work written in minority languages by authors originating from late nineteenth or early twentieth century emergent nations should be regarded as “littératures combatives”. Following the analysis of their early works written, the strategies of Frisian author Kalma, Welsh playwright Lewis, Scots poet MacDiarmid and Breton writer Hemon are compared. The study argues that the four authors had to take a step backwards in order to leap forward into the post-Great War era.

This paper utilizes the deconstruction theory of Jacques Derrida to perform an extremely close reading of some chosen poems by John Ashbery, where the poets portrays the postmodern concepts. It provides a thorough overview of how Ashbery talked about fantasy through the language that later became his signature. By means of the use of Derrida's approach, it is shown that in the middle are the myriad zones of obscurity, contradiction, and also many interpretations. This poetry, through critical scrutiny of the lingual pattern and the concept/allusion system, enlightens how the principle of Ashbery's works confuses the approach to traditional thoughts and also perverts semantic stability. This analysis of Ashbery portrayed his questioning wanderings in the sphere of the unattainable notions of the sense in the post-modern context that extend the interpretations of the philosophical basis of postmodern literature.

The American poet, writer, and critic Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most important figures in Romanticism in American literature, establishing Gothic literature's themes of darkness, madness, and psychological exploration. Besides horror-themed stories and poems, he is also known to have invented the detective fiction genre. His story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) is one of the most famous detective stories in the history of detective fiction. These books by Poe not only made a worldwide impact but also had a great impact on Turkish Gothic literature. As Gothic literature became more accepted with books published in Turkey, so did the cover arts on the translations, which became more visually appealing and engaging. This study examines the 2024 translation of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" by Edgar Allan Poe, using Gerard Genette's analysis of intertextual and paratextual elements. The goal is to understand how the intertextual and paratextual elements on the front cover of this recent Turkish translation influence readers' interpretation and experience of the novel. There has not been much research done on front covers before regarding the issues of intertextuality. In that regard, this study could potentially explore the impact of intertextuality and paratextuality on reader interpretation and engagement with front covers. The result shows that the analysis of the 2024 version of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" by Ren Publishing successfully helps readers gain a better understanding of Poe's broader literary universe, making the story more meaningful to them.

A. Robert Lee (ed.), Karen Tei Yamashita: Fictions of Magic and Memory (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, , $.). Pp. . ISBN     . A. Robert Lee's collection of essays on Karen Tei Yamashita is organized around the thorny question of how to categorize Yamashita's fictions into existing genres. The essays' analyses suggest that traditional genre categorizations are inadequate to explain Yamashita's literary interventions, or they draw on theories from outside literary studies to account for Yamashita's avant-garde aesthetics. In so doing, the essays succeed in fulfilling Lee's intended aim of showcasing the "virtuosity" of Yamashita's imagination (). For instance, the first chapter, by Cyrus R. K. Patell, situates Yamashita's oeuvre in the context of what he calls "emergent literature," a genre that he says "can serve as a remedy to some problems posed by contemporary multiculturalism … that insist on separate ethnic, racial and sexual traditions" (). For Patell, Brazil Maru (), Circle K (), I Hotel (), and Anime Wong: Fictions of Performance () are examples of emergent literature that put the local stories of Asian immigrants in Japan, the US, and Brazil into transnational contexts. Another attempt to put content and form together for the understanding of Yamashita's transnational fictions is chapter  by Ruth Y. Hsu, which uses vocabulary from chaos theory, including "fractals" and "butterfly effect" (), to explain the disparate-seeming and yet intricately connected plotlines in Tropic. Sandwiched between these two chapters are chapters that constitute a second narrative arc in Lee's collection, one that draws attention to the material traces that globalization left behind. John B. Gamber's chapter is the standout example; it examines how Through represents a jungle of nonbiodegradable junk like plastic "remains" and shows, in turn, a global ecological system that is forever "remade" by it (). Bella Adams's chapter is also worthy of attention. Centering on Yamashita's Through and Ruth Ozeki's Meat (), the chapter reads the novels as climate fictions ("cli-fis") that push back against what critic Ursula K. Heise calls the trope of the "ecological family romance" ()a tendency that some novels about the environment have in eliding natural crises from the center of the narrative with family reconciliation at Reviews 

This philosophical essay explores the concept of the soul from a personal and non-traditional perspective. The author argues that the soul is not a mystical or supernatural entity, but rather the essence of human consciousness-composed of thought, imagination, inference, and creative energy. The essay examines how this mental energy can transcend time, as observed in prophetic dreams, and proposes that what we call "spirit" is the immortal potential of the conscious mind. It also suggests that thought, like energy, is never destroyed, and thus the legacy of great thinkers is a form of spiritual immortality.

This article explains why Traven wrote The Cottonpickers in serialized form before he finished The Death Ship, and how he wrote it. It also explains why the Death Ship was actually published before the Cottonpickers in the year 1926, and why the initial title of the Cottonpickers serial when it was printed as a book was The Wobbly, and changed back to The Cottonpickers in 1929.

In this cultural history of the computer, Benjamin Mangrum shows that comedy has been central to how we've made sense of the technology's sweeping effects on public life and private experience. From the first Broadway play to include a computer in the 1950s to popular films like "You've Got Mail" and joke-telling digital assistants, Mangrum assembles an extensive archive of work by writers, filmmakers, programmers, engineers, and other technologists who have coupled comedy with computation. Many have used comedy to make the computer seem ordinary. Others have tried to stage the assimilation of computers within corporate life as a kind of comic drama. Mangrum describes these and many other ways in which comedy and computation have come together as a new genre of experience: the comedy of computation.

The modern world exalts advances in technology, but we are constantly haunted by the specter of falling behind and becoming obsolete. Mangrum examines how comedy serves as a stage for working out these conflicted modes of experience in writing by Dave Eggers, Curtis Sittenfeld, Ishmael Reed, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., among others, arguing that when we look at the comic forms that shape the cultures of computing, we come to better understand the tensions and contradictions internal to the social world we inhabit.

Ronald Blythe, founding President of the John Clare Society and acclaimed author, died in 2023 aged 100. His friend Ian Collins has written his biography and it is a story of a person who overcame immense difficulties including extreme poverty,  a limited formal education and criminalisation as a gay man for the first 45 years of his life to become a celebrated chronicler of his Suffolk world, and beyond. His hard-won life as a writer reached new heights in his late writing, even in his seventies and eighties. In conversation with Professor John Goodridge at the 2025 John Clare Festival, Collins offers important insights and new information on a unique literary figure, his struggles and achievements. This is a transcript of that conversation.

In this groundbreaking study, Jonathan Greenberg locates a satiric sensibility at the heart of the modern. By promoting an antisentimental education, modernism denied the authority of emotion to guarantee moral and literary value. Instead, it fostered sophisticated, detached and apparently cruel attitudes toward pain and suffering. This sensibility challenged the novel's humanistic tradition, set ethics and aesthetics into conflict and fundamentally altered the ways that we know and feel. Through lively and original readings of works by Evelyn Waugh, Stella Gibbons, Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett and others, this book analyzes a body of literature - late modernist satire - that can appear by turns aloof, sadistic, hilarious, ironic and poignant, but which continually questions inherited modes of feeling. By recognizing the centrality of satire to modernist aesthetics, Greenberg offers not only a new chapter in the history of satire but a persuasive new idea of what...

«Chroniques italiennes», 46 (1/2024)

Questo saggio, dedicato alla ricezione di Baudelaire da parte di Alberto
Savinio intende far emergere l’importanza della lezione baudelairiana a partire dalla riflessione che, negli anni Quaranta, lo scrittore dedica al poeta francese. Come si intende dimostrare, tale lezione non consiste in un modello testuale da imitare, quanto nel carattere rivoluzionario del gesto con cui Baudelaire iscrive la propria poesia in una dimensione temporale, mortale e caduca, agli antipodi di un’arte o di una bellezza eterne e ideali. Il saggio
rintraccia e approfondisce le sfumature molteplici che la rivoluzione «copernicana» inaugurata da Baudelaire assume lungo l’originale riflessione di Savinio: dalla sua connotazione metafisica – che avvicina il gesto del poeta a quello filosofico di Nietzsche – a quella politica. Il saggio intende, inoltre, mettere in luce l’importanza che il giudizio di Apollinaire riveste nella riflessione di Savinio e, a questo scopo, si concentra sul presunto
«dilettantismo pessimista» di Baudelaire, nel quale Apollinaire individua la causa dell’immoralità della sua poesia, mentre Savinio vi ritrova il suo indirizzo morale, oltre che il suo senso profetico.

Cet article, consacré à la réception de Baudelaire chez Alberto Savinio,
entend mettre en lumière l’importance de l’héritage baudelairien chez ce dernier, à partir de la réflexion qu’il développe au cours des années 1940 sur le poète français. Nous montrerons que cet héritage ne consiste pas en un modèle textuel à imiter, mais repose plutôt sur le caractère révolutionnaire du geste par lequel Baudelaire inscrit sa poésie dans une dimension
temporelle, mortelle et transitoire, aux antipodes d’un art ou d’une beauté éternelle et idéale.
L’article retrace et approfondit les multiples nuances que prend la révolution
« copernicienne » inaugurée par Baudelaire dans la réflexion originale de Savinio : de sa connotation métaphysique – qui rapproche le geste du poète de celui, philosophique de Nietzsche – à sa connotation politique. Cet article entend également souligner l’importance de la position d’Apollinaire dans la réflexion de Savinio et, à cette fin, se concentre sur le présumé « dilettantisme pessimiste » de Baudelaire, dans lequel Apollinaire reconnaît la
cause de l’immoralité de sa poésie, tandis que Savinio y trouve sa direction morale, ainsi que son sens prophétique.

Tems l, b r nesne, f k r, grup veya kavramın, başka b r şey n sembol k olarak yer ne geçme, tasv r etme ya da onu tanımlaması anlamına gelmekted r (Hall, 1997). B lg , bakış açısı veya düşünceler n anlaşılmasına olanak sağladığı ç n çok çeş tl alanlarda öneml b r yer şgal etmekted r. Tems l, çoğunlukla b r anlamı nşa etmek, letmek ve anlaşılmasını sağlamak ç n kaynağı şaret eden b r gösterge yaratmayı ve b r kame yerleşt rmey kapsamaktadır. Tems l kavramı, sanat, matemat k, pol t ka, sosyoloj ve medya çalışmaları g b çeş tl alanlarda yaygın b r şek lde çalışılan ve üzer ne teor ler nşa ed len b r zem ne sah pt r. Tems l n çok çeş tl alanlarda öneml b r yer şgal etmes n n temel neden anlamı nşa etmede ve nşa ed len anlamın yaygınlaştırılmasında esnek b r yapıya sah p olmasıdır. Tems l, gerçek dünyanın karmaşıklıklarını letmek ve yansıtmak ç n semboller, mgeler, kel meler, denklemler ve eylemler kullanmaktadır. B r ressamın fırça darbeler , b r matemat kç n n denklemler , b r pol t kacının söylemler , b r f lmdek karakterler ya da b r kültürün semboller bunlara örnek olarak göster leb l r. Bütün bu tems l aracıları dünyamızın çeş tl yönler n nasıl algıladığımızı, yorumladığımızı ve onlarla nasıl l şk kurduğumuzu

The trope of interracial adoption is complex but fairly common in American literature, particularly as it results in the racist and racialized hallmark of displacing and depicting Black women as bad Black mothers-the antithesis of White maternity. This essay posits the trope's genesis at the center of abolitionist writer Harriet Beecher Stowe's extraordinarily influential anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. The novel has been heralded as the most significant literary accomplishment by an American writer, both nationally and internationally, during the nineteenth century. Notwithstanding, Stowe's novel sets in motion the cultural ideology that Whiteness-in the form of adoption by a free, White, Christian mother / savior-is a direct route out of bondage for enslaved Black children. Necessarily and in direct response, Harriet E. Wilson's autobiographical novel, Our Nig, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's poem, "Moses: A Story of the Nile," bring the complicated anti-Black and White constructions of power, motherhood, consanguinity, and kinship into sharp relief. Taken together, their writings form an episodic and polyscopic perspective on belonging, bondage, freedom, and agency. Most importantly, Wilson's and Harper's texts amplify the historical remainder of and tension between ways of understanding racialized adoption and insist that the literary (human) being that is the Black mother be made legible.