Showing papers in "Modern Language Review in 2011"

'The twilight of utopia': British dystopian fiction and the Cold War

Abstract: This essay analyses British dystopian fiction in the cultural and political context of the Cold War. Although the conflict dominated international history during the latter half of the twentieth century, its impact on literary production has rarely been explored in British scholarship. The genre of dystopianism is used to demonstrate the significance of East-West hostilities to modern fiction. Ranging from George Orwell to Ian McEwan, J.G. Ballard and Martin Amis, and including reference to a number of rarely studied texts, the essay examines such key themes as authoritarianism, propaganda, technology, decolonisation, nuclear anxiety, anti-Americanisnm and anti-communism.

Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis and Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks : Exchanges between Scientific and Imaginary Accounts of Sexual Deviance

Abstract: Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia sexualis (1986) belongs to a large body of turn-of-the-century psychological and sexological writing which often mixes fictive and factual narratives of sexual deviance, blurring the boundaries between literature and science and providing ample material for authors of fiction. Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks is a case in point, for it directly reflects Kra.-Ebing's theories on the origins and physical and psychological markers of homosexuality on numerous levels.

Illegible Writing: Michaux, Masson and Dotremont

Abstract: This article examines the reasons for the collective fascination, among painters and writers of the 1950s, with the materiality of the sign. It analyses forms of illegible writing invented by Henri Michaux, Andre Masson, and Christian Dotremont, showing how these creations undermine the visual/scriptural and abstract/figurative dichotomies, and challenge the viewer's preconceptions about the act of reading and the creation of meaning. The article concludes that these artists constitute, together with many others of the period, a second wave of Modernism which sets itself against the dominance of postmodernism in the ensuing years.

The avoidance of divorce in Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften

Abstract: Starting from Walter Benjamin's insight into the importance of marital dissolution in Die Wahlverwandtschaften, this article argues that the work is one in which divorce is an omnipresent narrative possibility that Goethe's novel is fascinated by, but ultimately shies away from. The compulsive discussion, and avoidance, of divorce in the novel is examined in the context of the legal, ideological, and social framework in place at the time it appeared. The article concludes by demonstrating the central role that Die Wahlverwandtschaften played in debates about divorce reform in the 1840s and again at the end of the nineteenth century.