Abstracts no. 108 (November 2007)

Eugene Green, “Civic Voices in English Beast Fables: The Owl and the Nightingale and The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.”
The diction in the two beast tales supports a strong affinity between them in theme and voice. Thematically, research already available reveals the poems’ diction associated with such matters as legal practices, musical performance, and domestic altercations. To this research, the argument presented here finds that the diction of both tales also contributes to a sense of avian voices as attuned to ranges of human voice, especially in civic settings. The argument speculates, too, on the poets’ use of noms de plume. As shaped by the two poets, the beast tale vibrantly voices both human contentiousness and the possibilities of reconciliation.

Herman Beyersdorf, “‘die-Heimat, verloren -.-‘”: ‘Vertreibungsliteratur’ and the Younger Generation(s).”
“Vertreibungsliteratur,” literature dealing with the flight and expulsion of Germans from the former eastern provinces and other settlement areas at the end of World War II, has been associated largely with writers of the “experiencing generation,” which includes authors such as Günter Grass, Siegfried Lenz, Christa Wolf, Horst Bienek and Arno Surminski. With the generation who experienced these events at the end of World War II gradually dying out, it was thought that the category of “Vertreibungsliteratur” would likewise recede as a historical phenomenon. However, in recent years there has been a marked resurgence of interest in this topic by authors who are the children and grandchildren of the experiencing generation.

This article looks at two recent novels by authors of the younger generation, and seeks to analyse how they deal with the events of “Flucht und Vertreibung,” and relate these events to the overall context of World War II and the Nazi regime. Reinhard Jirgl, born in 1953, in his novel Die Unvollendeten (2003) describes growing up in a Sudeten German family in East Germany, where “Vertreibung” was a taboo. Tanya Dückers was born in (West) Berlin in 1968, and her novel Himmelskörper (2003) seeks to uncover the past of her grandparents, and how they had managed to escape from Danzig in the last turbulent weeks of World War II. These two novels show that even after sixty years critical discussion of these events is being continued right into the younger generation.

Anna Gural-Migdal, “Paris comme parc d’attractions à la Disney dans Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain.”
Cette étude se donne pour objet d’analyser sous un angle essentiellement esthétique et culturel la représentation de la ville dans le film de Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain. Nous constatons en effet que dans ce film, la ville de Paris est transformée en un vaste parc d’attractions dont la conception culturelle et idéologique est semblable à celle de Disneyland. On peut voir, dans cette représentation de la ville, ce que Baudrillard appelle un “simulacre hyper réel” relevant d’une culture postmoderne qui témoigne d’une nostalgie du mythe d’origine, à travers une France et une francité idéalisées. À cet égard la vision du monde qui nous est proposée à travers le Paris de Jeunet fait écho à celle de Disney par son caractère expurgé, civilisé et sentimentalisé, où toutes formes de violence et de tensions sociales ou raciales sont éliminées, et où règne une culture du divertissement et de l’image.

[“Paris as Disney-like Amusement Park in Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain by Jean-Pierre Jeunet.” 
The goal of this paper is to analyze, from an angle that is both aesthetic and socio-cultural, the representation of the city in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s movie, Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain. In fact, we find that in this film the city of Paris is transformed into a huge amusement or theme park similar to Disneyland. Following Jean Baudrillard, we could see this representation of the city as “hyperreal simulation,” an element of postmodern culture that bears witness to the nostalgia felt for myths of origin, recreated in this film as an idealized France and Frenchness. In this way, the world view offered by Jeunet's representation of Paris echoes that of Walt Disney, by means of its sanitized, civilized, and sentimentalized aspect, where all forms of violence and social or racial tension are eliminated, and where entertainment and the dominance of image reign supreme.]

Halyna Koscharsky, “Identity and Independence in Ol’ha Kobylians’ka’s Valse Melancolique.”
This paper considers Kobylians’ka’s text, Valse Melancolique, as a local expression of a movement in both Europe and the West in the second half of the nineteenth century, which challenged the patriarchal order of the prevailing society. It aims to examine the dynamics of female-only relationships and the sense of identity and independence of women as presented by Kobylians’ka “using the patriarchal and populist codes available to her”. It applies Hundorova’s grid, according to which she categorises all of the characters in Kobylians’ka’s various texts, to the three protagonists in the Valse. In order to construct a general background of the culture and atmosphere of social condemnation, faced by women who did not fit in with the expectations of the time, the paper considers an overview of attitudes towards women in and out of the married state, in the West in the timeframe of the half-century under discussion.

Wendy Parkins, “Women on the Streets: Gender and Mobility in The Convert and Clash”
This article examines two novels which feature women's mobility in explicitly political contexts: the suffragette movement and the General Strike. The movement of the narratives between private spaces and public sites like political rallies, meetings or social events are means by which issues and conflicts may be linked across the social landscape, through the mediation of the ever-mobile heroines. While both novels posit women's (political) agency as newly enabled in twentieth-century modernity, the mobility of the heroines is, however, compromised or threatened by variations of the traditional heterosexual romance narratives. In The Convert and Clash, romance is ultimately renounced for the sake of the cause, privileging the public-political life of the heroine and her right to urban mobility.

Alistair Rolls, “Fetishising the Parisian Text-Scape in Frédéric Cathala’s L’Arbalète: La vraie vie commence.”

Karin U. Schestokat, “Memories of Africa: Stefanie Zweig’s Autobiographical Works.”