Abstracts AUMLA 113 (May 2010):

Guido Ernst Freisberg: “Aber Man Soll Kleine Formeln Machen! Max Frisch and his Spanish Travel Diaries.”

Aleksandra Hadzelek, “Places of Exile: the Transculturation of Spanish Exiles in Mexico.”
This paper examines the self-identification of Spanish exiles from the Civil War as expressed in their writing. Issues of national identity, uprooting versus “transrooting”, transculturation, and concepts of home and belonging are discussed from the perspective of Spanish writers in their host societies; these authors’ self-representations are examined as well. The study also explores the concept of exile from the point of view of language: the Spanish writers studied in the paper are exiled in a Spanish-speaking country, allowing them the extraordinary opportunity to flourish creatively while at the same time posing questions of identity and belonging.

Two case studies are conducted to exemplify the notion of shattered identities expressed in the writings of Spanish exiles. The linguistic transformation in Max Aub's writing is analysed as an example of a complex process of transculturation affecting the Spanish exile community in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries. The insurgence of autobiographical writing among Spanish exiles is examined to portray, as Michael Seidel argues, that the actual role of an exiled writer is to bring back what was lost.

The paper draws on these examples to discuss the concept of transtierro as opposed to destierro. While the Spanish term desterrado, or uprooted from one's land, is usually used for a general condition of exile, José Gaos (a Spanish exile in Mexico) creates a term: transterrado, or “transrooted” to another land. The concept of transtierro (transrooting) has been widely used as an alternative to destierro (uprooting), to describe those who adopted the new land as their own and integrated into the host society. In a situation of transtierro, the language, the common past and similarities in the culture allow some exiles from one country to ultimately feel at home in another.

Michael Hollington, “Dickens, the City, and the Five Senses.”
This essay begins by noticing Dickens's enthusiastic 1856 reading of The Five Senses by George Wilson. Its aim is to try to show that the Dickensian city cannot be properly described and understood if we emphasise only its visual aspects, as is often the case. With few exceptions, scholars have neglected Dickens's highly developed sense of sound, of smell, of taste, of touch - despite firsthand evidence such as that of a member of the All the Year Round office staff that "Mr Dickens was a man who lived a lot by his nose", for instance. The aim here is to correct this imbalance by paying attention to the full panoply of the senses in The Uncommercial Traveller, emphasising three points: 1) that the Dickensian flaneur and urban detective habitually employs the other senses besides sight in order to decode the city; 2) that non-visual stimuli often trigger off memories of childhood in Dickens's work - as in Proust's; and 3) that Dickens's understanding of sense experience of a non-visual kind is that it operates as a kind of contagion.

Danijela Kambascovic-Sawers, “’Her Stubborne Hart to Bend’: the Sonnet Sequence and the Charisma of Petrarchan Hatred.”
The way sonnet sequences develop fictional uses of the first-person voice deserves more critical attention than it has received. This essay offers a comparative analysis of the imagery of hatred and insult in four Renaissance sonnet sequences which claim praise as their primary purpose (Petrarch, Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare), seeking to offer a fresh perspective on the way remodeled Ovidian myth, gender, autopoetics and ethics interact in sonnet-sequence characterisation. It follows the development of the use of derogatory treatment of the beloved as a means of increasing the reader’s interest in the desiring self and suggests that the tradition which could be called Petrarchan hatred governs the character and the influence of the sonnet sequence genre alongside that of Petrarchan love.

Dennis Walker, “An Arab-Australian Speaks after Half a Century: Wadi’ ‘Izz Al-Din Mundhir.”

Geoff Wilkes, “‘Es ist nicht meine Schuld, ich habe alles getan, alles…Oh, ich Schwein, ich Schwein‘: Writers’ Responses to Nazism in Irmgard Keun’s Nach Mitternacht.“
Nach Mitternacht (1937) explores writers’ responses to Nazism through its characterisations of the novelist Algin and the journalist Heini. The secondary literature has overlooked significant aspects of those characterisations. This article develops the prevailing negative interpretation of the conformist Algin by showing how the narrative incorporates subtle references to his artistic and moral corruption which have escaped critical notice. More importantly, the article challenges the predominant, largely positive interpretation of the nonconformist Heini by arguing that ultimately he is criticised for abrogating his responsibility to writers’ continuing struggle against fascism. This criticism is primarily conveyed through the resonances between Heini’s story and that of the novel’s unsophisticated narrator, Sanna. Thus Nach Mitternacht offers an unsympathetic portrait of an anti-Nazi writer which is comparatively untypical of antifascist exile literature.