Showing papers in "Neohelicon in 2015"

Censorship in translation: The case of the People’s Republic of China

Abstract: This article studies censorship and translation in the PRC, focusing on how censorship, as a form of institutional (e.g. government, editorial, publishers’) control of the circulation of information and ideas, regulates the activity of translation in the country. It covers 60-odd years sub-divided into three periods: (1) the founding of the PRC to the Cultural Revolution (1949–1966), during which censorship in the translation and importation of foreign literature largely revealed a former Soviet Union influence; (2) the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), during which ultra-leftist political and ideological censorship was so severe that the translation of anything alien was strictly forbidden; and (3) the period from 1976 to the present day, during which time the country first experienced a gradual loosening of severe restrictions and then a more relaxed position on incoming foreign literature which, however, was accompanied more recently with re-enforced regulations of information circulated on the internet. The purpose of the paper is to explore the underlying factors for translational censorship in China and the factors that may have affected the changing or non-changing character of translational censorship; and, through the case of the PRC, to throw insights on how the study of translational censorship may contribute to our understanding of the cultural politics of translation in a broader context.

Intracultural translation into an ideological language: the case of the Japanese translations of Anne of Green Gables

Abstract: In Japanese literature, both original and translated, a virtual language that is not used by actual Japanese-speaking people has been used since the late nineteenth century. The language is named “yakuwarigo [role language]” because it can be employed in different ways to create different images of the speaker. During the period, the feminine ideal was related to women’s language, which is a type of yakuwarigo, and girls were instructed about how women should behave and speak. The function of yakuwarigo has been strengthened and repeatedly imparted to children, and consequently it has helped to instil women’s language in readers’ minds, and arguably reinforced the subordinate role of women in Japanese society. Therefore, this paper first investigates the history of yakuwarigo since the nineteenth century, and then explores the link between yakuwarigo and ideology by analysing the three Japanese translations of one of the most influential examples of children’s literature in Japan, Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, from polysystem and feminist perspectives.

Research on limitations of indirect literary translation and aspects of cultural vocabulary translation

Abstract: This paper explores limitations and problems occurring in the process of indirectly translating the korean novel Please Look after Mom into Thai using English as the vehicular language This paper explored cases in which the equivalence of translation was damaged or mistranslation occurred, analysing these by focusing on the mistranslation of cultureme Cultureme has been classified as including Norms, Ideas, and Material According to this study’s results, in the Norms category, after the pronoun, cognate language, and terms of address were expressed in English, they became highly unnatural expressions in the Thai language or did not properly express family relationships, producing mistranslations Regarding living customs, after the Korean customs and lifestyles with which Thai people are familiar were retranslated using poor vocabularies, they were translated into English, reducing equivalence In the Ideas category, after traditional beliefs related to rites of passage—such as marriage or death—practiced by both Koreans and the Thai, and related world views, were translated directly into English, they were retranslated insufficiently or omitted Lastly, in the Material category, after vocabularies related to Korean food culture—well known to the Thai—were translated into English, mistranslations and lack of equivalence resulted in ambiguous expressions

Alternate space–times in Robert Coover’s texts: some ontological questions

Abstract: Our reality or actual space–time is composed of highly complex and indeterminate but interconnected structures, and both natural sciences and contemporary literature refer to it as a world of pluralized rhythms and emergent potentialities, always becoming, in which values are relative and process-dependent. Aware of the discontinuity and relativity of any space–time creation, including our experiential reality and fictive realities generated by our minds, this article attempts to discern potential space-times in Robert Coover’s texts and depict their ontological landscapes. These ontological realms are often presented as characters’ self-generated fictions into which they get so immersed that they lose the ability to discern the real from the fictive, as they switch from one world to the other. This permits the protagonists’ momentary escape, but also causes their psychic fragmentation, blurring the distinction between fiction and reality. In the form of stories within stories or as representations, such as descriptions of photographs, games, movies, and TV programs, Coover’s texts demonstrate interconnections of fictional and real space-times, blurring their borderlines, and even collapsing into one another. Throughout his opus, Coover is raising questions about the nature of reality, being and becoming, including the query that concerns ontological issues of text and world, fact and fiction, creator and creature, and how does a specific space-time emerge, solidify, and evolve. Thus, the purpose of this article is to examine the specificity of alternate space-times in Robert Coover’s most challenged texts in terms of ontology.

Digitising the world: globalisation and digital literature

Abstract: The focus of this study is to establish the aesthetic strategies related to globalisation that appear in digital literature in order to evaluate their possible classification as World Literature. This study proposes a conceptualisation for studying globalisation as a transcultural phenomenon based on theoretical developments of phenomenology, hermeneutics and social practices, including a classification of ways to address the links between digital literature and globalisation that appear in the texts considered here. The analyses of texts in different languages allow a wide and comparatistic approach, although a close reading of the German/English text Worldwatchers will provide more detailed types of strategies for the expression of globalisation through digital literature.

On the possibilities of developing a Chinese version of narratology

Abstract: Narratological studies in China have moved into a new phase, namely, constructing a Chinese version of narratology. The present author contends that discussing the possibilities of developing a Chinese version of narratology needs to clarify several issues, such as the rationale of constructing a Chinese version of narratology, the relationships between classical Chinese narrative and modern Chinese narrative, the differences between proposed contemporary Chinese narrative theory and classical Chinese narrative theory, the theories of Chinese narrative and that of western narrative and how to deal with other areas of narrative, such as movies, news media, paintings, sculptures and laws. The present author believes that the effort of constructing a Chinese version of narratology is a kind of endogenous force that is developed within the system of narratological studies and therefore, is of self-transformation and self-regulation within the science of the universal narratology and will take a significant part in the establishment of universal narratology, since any construction of a particular that results in progressive and cumulative qualities of the science will be helpful to attain the universal.

Experimental theatre in the twentieth century: avant-gardism, the absurd, and the postmodern

Abstract: Modern drama is still patently viewed as moving from the realistic Ibsen and the naturalistic Strindberg to the socially, politically, and psychologically oriented "problem plays" of the twentieth century (and beyond), fed occasionally by assorted "techniques" from aberrant avant-garde movements. This essay, agrues, by contrast, for a revisionist history of modern drama that would acknowledge the innovative and visionary contributions of "modernism," as linked to the historical and literary avant-garde, be it in the form of expressionism, symbolism, futurism, dada, or surrealism. From the inception of the absurd, moreover, avant-garde drama has certainly not ceased to proliferate. Yet in the late 1960s we entered the era of postmodernism, in which two events occurred to halt the "advance" of avant-garde drama. The first is the embrace by postmodern playwrights of a stylistic pluralism, an eclectic and often selfreflexive interweaving of different styles drawn from different time periods. The second is the deification of postmodern performance through the merging of author and director into a single "superstar." The most significant efforts of the avant-garde do continue to involve the self-conscious exploration of the nature, limits, and possibilities of drama and theater in contemporary society; but the vision of and for the future manifest in such work remains tentative and unclear, it is as though the avant-garde could not overcome the doubt and distrust foisted upon its potential for inspired vision.

Is it just too Catholic for us? The reception of I promessi sposi and the problem of religion and literature

Abstract: This paper examines the American and Italian reception of Manzoni’s I promessi sposi. It places the American reception of Manzoni within a larger context of the anti-Catholic nativism that has pervaded American society and academe. The reception of Manzoni in Italy, in contrast, is marked by anti-clericism. The case study of Manzoni’s reception raises the larger issue of the role of the study of religion within the discipline of literary studies.

Cosmopolitanism and the translation of children’s literature: Zheng Zhenduo as a case study

Abstract: Cosmopolitanism in early twentieth-century China was chiefly associated with political ideals. The author contends that as an intellectual discourse, cosmopolitanism also made a visible impact on the literary landscape. Literary translation was a field where the cosmopolitan spirit was most clearly discerned, and children’s literature is especially relevant to cosmopolitan thinking due to its association with humanist ideals in the Chinese enlightenment endeavor. After an attempt at defining cosmopolitanism in its specific historical and contextual background, this article moves on to a detailed look at Zheng Zhenduo’s (1898–1958) cosmopolitan consciousness and its link with his advocacy for translating children’s literature. The selection of genres and authors, and the strategies of translation are examined in detail. The case helps to reveal that the translation of children’s literature in early twentieth-century China, which first grew out of the Chinese nationalist movement, came to be increasingly tinged with deep cosmopolitan ramifications that sought continuously to disrupt mainstream nationalist discourse. The article also shows that the translator, caught in the vicissitudes of the early twentieth century, disrupted the frequently-assumed dichotomies between the cosmopolitan and the local, and between cosmopolitanism and patriotism, not through theory or discourse, but through the very act of translating. As such, the historical case of China might also provide some interesting insights into the role of children’s literature translation in constructing the world we inhabit.

Footnotes: Why and how they become essential to world literature?

Abstract: Footnotes that include supplementary and cultural messages are necessary for world literature studies In world literature studies, we always expect perspectives that are macro, summarizing and concise Yet given the countless literary works worldwide and the mortality of human beings, to give a close reading of all literary works seems to be the least probable method even for the most talented scholar With the help of those footnotes however, “distant” readings with a comprehensive and comparative perspective can also produce solid argument For translations, footnotes expand the working domain of translators where they can put cultural and contextual information that is necessary for readers They enable translators to preserve the “whole” original work without sacrificing the meaning, form or taste of it The claim of “untranslatability” is thus invalidated

The monumental language game in Augustine’s Confessions

Abstract: Based on my idea of self-closing textual patterns (Hungarian Studies, 1996/2) I describe a special type, stylistic and rhetorical at once, as a “themes summarizing verbal pattern” (1). Recently I found an elaborate instance of the pattern, hitherto unnoticed, in the Confessions (AD 397) by Augustine (2). In Book 10 it is a centre of the textual and conceptual organization of the work as its components appear in distinct form in Book 1 and act as a premise to the last three Books (3). This “themes summarizing verbal pattern” is an integral part of Augustine’s stylistic and rhetorical innovation based on the Bible and the popular use of Latin in North Africa. A clue to Augustine’s use of the “themes summarizing verbal pattern” is perhaps his familiarity with Punic linguistic and cultural traditions.

La Sphérologie d’Édouard Glissant. Notes sur une modélisation littéraire de la globalisation

Abstract: Cet article interroge la pensee et la construction du monde chez Glissant selon une double perspective, litteraire et anthropologique. Depuis Soleil de la conscience : poetique I (1956) jusqu’au roman Tout-monde (1993), en passant par l’anthologie de la poesie du Tout-monde (2010) et les essais de poetique, Glissant repart de la prise en compte de la Terre, saisie dans sa forme spherique, pour parvenir a des notions definitoires de sa poetique (Tout-monde, Chaos-Monde, geomorphisme). Envisagee selon cette approche spherologique, qui la figure comme un grand recipient destine a accueillir toute la diversite (demesure) du monde, la Terre est porteuse d’une dimension anthropologique forte, qui, chez Glissant, se traduit par le dessin d’une jonction inextricable entre le monde et l’homme. Cette tension geomorphique apparente Glissant a d’autres penseurs contemporains tels que Peter Sloterdijk et Bruno Latour, qui, a partir d’une reflexion sur la forme meme du monde, reflechissent, comme l’auteur martiniquais, sur les enjeux inedits que pose la nouvelle mesure du monde globalise et sur la place de l’homme dans celui-ci. L’article analysera ainsi l’apport de Glissant a une modelisation litteraire du monde global, notamment a travers sa notion de « mondialite », concue en opposition a celle courante de « mondialisation ».

Vengeance and mercy in Anna Karenina

Abstract: Tolstoy’s famous novel begins with an epigraph, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” which leaves out the purported speaker of these words in Romans 12:19 (“sayeth the Lord”). As a result, these opening words allow for major ambiguities in understanding the motives of the novel’s characters. The Lord’s power to avenge wrongdoing, which asks that human beings strive to be merciful, can become the prerogative of any first-person subject. As is seen in Vronsky’s mother’s harsh condemnation of Anna near the novel’s end, such language allow for pitiless self-righteousness to overwhelm the true goal of humble forgiveness. This paper considers the implications of this ambiguity by examining the dialectic of vengeance and mercy that runs through Tolstoy’s novel. Emphasis falls on Anna and her husband Karenin, but the discussion also includes telling episodes involving Dolly Oblonsky (Anna’s sister-in-law) and Konstantin Lyovin, Anna’s counterpart in the novel’s second plot. The issues explored range from the power of compassionate forbearance and the problematic impact of authoritative words on people’s behavior to social ostracism, the transience of peak experiences, and the anguish of losing one’s capacity to forgive, not just other people, but—tragically—one’s very self.

Religious discourse and metapoetic reflection in Jean Paul’s novels: The “Rede des toten Christus”, the “Clavis Fichtiana”, and Kain’s monologue in “Der Komet”

Abstract: Starting from a brief sketch of Jean Paul’s general attitude toward religious and theological discourse and its biographical background, the study focusses on central texts of the German writer which refer to sermons and the communication practice of religious teaching as well as topics of metaphysical interest. In this thematic context, especially the interelation between body and soul and the issue of mortality and immortality are of crucial relevance. Several of Jean Pauls most important novel chapters are written as poetical sermons: “The Dead Christ proclaims that there is no God”, “Clavis Fichtiana”, and Kain’s monologue in “Der Komet”. They turn out to be altogether auto-reflexive, poetological texts: By imagining literary characters and narrators, and even his own literary alter ego “Jean Paul” as preachers addressing a community of listeners, Jean Paul models literary communication stressing the effects of written texts on their reader’s souls. With regard to the issue of mortality, his poetical sermons can be described as thought experiments exploring nihilistic concepts.

Newer archaeologies of the soul: avatars of religious consciousness in modern European fiction

Abstract: The juxtaposition of cultural eras and belief systems reached a new encyclopedic scale in poetic narratives and anthropological treatises from the Renaissance onward as we see in the works of Rabelais and Kircher. In the romantic age, Goethe’s completed Faust established a new epochal standard for probing the story of human spiritual development over millennia. Heirs to this rich tradition, authors such as Mann and Joyce felt liberated to re-examine mythological patterns and varieties of religious consciousness as a crucial heritage against the backdrop of modern strains of negation and deconstruction of belief systems. Combining self-critical irony with brilliant depictions of literary and psycho-historical avatars, their novels finally suggest a spiritual super-reality that emerges from the colossal repertory of evolutionary evidence.

Constructing postmodernism with incredulity to metanarrative: a comparative perspective on McHale’s and Hutcheon’s postmodern poetics

Abstract: With the postmodern incredulity to the legitimacy of metanarrative, how should we construct a totalizing, “better” theory about postmodernism? Focusing on this paradoxical concern, this article scrutinizes Brian McHale’s and Linda Hutcheon’s different constructions of postmodern poetics with a comparative perspective to expose their respective strong points and drawbacks. The criteria of self-consistency, inner coherence, scope, productiveness and interest, proposed by McHale, are carefully examined to prove their effectiveness as good, but not the absolute, standards of judgment for preferring one construction over the other. Since postmodernism is but a discursive artifact, rather than a real-world object with a clear boundary, literary constructions about postmodernism can only be pluralist, little narratives; there is no true/wrong distinction between them, and each will justify its values, usefulness and interest in its own ways. Comparatively, McHale’s postmodern poetics is more formalist, while Hutcheon’s more cultural and political, but their approaches, viewpoints and interests can be well complementary.

“…leur anachronisme devient flagrant”: Georges Bataille, aristocracy, and writing in the interwar period

Abstract: This paper analyzes the critical role of aristocracy in Georges Bataille’s 1928 short novel, Story of the Eye. It begins by examining several of his interwar articles, highlighting the centrality of figures like the Marquis de Sade, medieval knights, and Nietzsche’s noble masters in Bataille’s critiques of bourgeois capitalism, nationalism, and fascism. The paper goes on to demonstrate that aristocratic elements introduce these same critiques into Story of the Eye. Considering manuscript variants as well as the first published edition of the book, the paper recovers allusions to contemporary socio-political issues of interest to Bataille at the time, including the conditions for proletarian revolution and the rising pressures of far-right ideologies in France and across Europe. Finally, it addresses the distinction between Bataille’s explicitly political writings and his literary texts, arguing that the ironic and tragic representation of aristocracy in Bataille’s early fictional work helps him create a writing practice that engages in socio-political critique while avoiding some of the polemics and pitfalls of interwar intellectual discourse.

The aristocratic avant-garde: Le Comte Étienne de Beaumont and “Les Soirées de Paris”

Abstract: Aristocratic patronage of the historical avant-garde remains a relatively understudied phenomenon, if only because the aristocracy seemed the avant-garde’s natural enemy and what the avant-garde sought to supplant. This article examines the 1924 “Les Soirees de Paris,” a five-week-long series of commissioned ballets, plays, and performances financed by Le Comte Etienne de Beaumont. Paying close attention to the social divide in Tzara’s Mouchoir de Nuages, this article seeks to show the fraught relationship between the aristocracy and the Parisian avant-garde. Beaumont’s intervention into the Parisian cultural field was an attempt to derail the growing influence of the market but also had a more positive motivation in attempting to showcase the “best” of “new” French art. If Beaumont was bitingly satirized in Raymond Radiguet’s Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel, this “last Maecenas of the arts” was a more complex figure who deserves closer examination for the role that he played in bringing together a series of artists—Cocteau, Picasso, Satie, and Tzara—in a lavishly produced series of original works.

Writing beyond borders: Derrida, Heidegger, and Zhuangzi in Brian Castro’s After China

Abstract: As is well recognised, the issue of cultural hybridity is central to the work of Australian author Brian Castro who is also of Chinese, Portuguese and English descent. As a writer it is perhaps no wonder that Castro is also deeply concerned with the ways in which language, and particular language systems such as Chinese and English, construct identity. He is in good company, as such metalinguistic skepticism has been a central tenet of Eastern and Western philosophical traditions for centuries. Castro’s novel After China draws attention to the complicated reality of cross-cultural influence and comparative philosophy by opening a dialogue between Eastern philosophers Laozi and Zhuangzi and Western thinkers such as Derrida and Heidegger. In doing so, Castro not only demonstrates the creative potential of cross-cultural fertilization but also explores the idea of ‘cultural hybridity’ in much greater depth by questioning the ontological implications of such cross-cultural hermeneutics.

Biblical/modern intergenerational conflict: four modern German poets on “Abishag the Shunammite”

Abstract: In this article, I would like to focus on four poems written with almost the same background: the German world at the beginning of the twentieth century. An additional factor connecting the four poems is their biblical theme: Abisag of Sunem. The poems are ‘Abisag von Sunem’ (by Agnes Miegel); ‘David und Abisag’ (Erstes Buch der Konige, Kapitel 1.1–4)’ by Franz Theodor Csokor; ‘Abisag’ by R.M. Rilke; and ‘Abisag’ by Hedwig Caspari. Each poem presents a new reading of the biblical text. Furthermore, my interpretation will demonstrate that this group of poems can be read as referring to two subjects: the generation gap and the lack of communication as its consequence. The use of the biblical story of King David and Abisag and its end with Solomon’s murder of Adonijah is employed as a key that allows a variety of interpretations of the diverse approaches to the general themes which concerned the writers at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Aristocratism in modern German literature: portrait of an age and image of timelessness

Abstract: While forms of a “new-nobility (Neuadel) discourse” arise and are discussed in the German cultural landscape of the early twentieth century, concepts of exclusiveness and inclusiveness are constantly aestheticized in German literature until the middle of the century by means of a renewed aristocratic semantics. In different ways, both Thomas Mann’s novel Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers [Felix Krull, Confessions of Felix Krull: Confidence Man] (1954) and Ernst Wiechert’s novel Das einfache Leben [The Simple Life] (1939) show that aristocratic, noble protagonists attain a considerable new significance in modern literature via their connection to specific historical contexts as well as to a putative timelessness.

God, ethics, and the novel: Dostoevsky and Vasily Grossman

Abstract: This essay explores how Dostoevsky, in the four great novels of his maturity (Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov) and Vasily Grossman, the author of the Tolstoyan, Soviet-era novel Life and Fate, both attempt to “think God” (penser Dieu), as Emmanuel Levinas puts it, on the basis of ethics (a partir de l’ethique), outside of the question of ontology—outside, that is, of the question of God’s existence or non-existence.

‘Un paria par en haut’: noblesse et grâce dans L’émigré de Paul Bourget

Abstract: As he writes L’emigre (translated as The Weight of the Name) in 1906, Paul Bourget is an author who matters in the French literary landscape. His right wing politics, newfound Catholicism and attachment to the Parisian social elite put him in an ideal position to chronicle the consequences of the separation of Church and State on the French nobility. While L’emigre at first appears to be grounded in current events, it quickly ends up being the portrait of a whole class. In the eyes of Bourget, it seems as if the nobility is about to disappear, and overtaken by a sense of urgency, he makes it his purpose to carefully represent the conservative French nobility of the Belle Epoque. In so doing, he offered his readers one of the most complete and didactic accounts of what constituted the noble habitus.

L’espagnolisme de Henry de Montherlant et le régionalisme de Jean de la Varende. Enjeux nobiliaires d’une géographie imaginaire

Abstract: Henry de Montherlant and Jean de La Varende are two 20th-century French authors of noble birth. Montherlant’s predilection for the Mediterranean region and La Varende’s preference for his birth province, Normandy – areas typified by a strong connection to their respective pasts – provide these authors with the material for a large number of interwar narratives. Montherlant projects his status as a noble writer onto the Mediterranean sphere, a region characterized by a “distinction,” which is exemplified, for instance, in Spanish “proudness”. Montherlant’s Spain is marked by the nobility and, as such, seems to be similar to the Arabic world: as a whole, the area functions as a guardian of history and of noble customs. La Varende’s noble posture is revealed by his projection onto a Normandy of the past, and by his desire to uphold the image of a Norman province characterized by traditional values linked to its noble inhabitants. In short, both authors constitute their aristocratic ethos on the basis of their attraction to a certain region.

Reading ethics and the body in Geling Yan’s The Flowers Of War

Abstract: Michel Foucault has written of the body that it is also directly involved in a political field. This understanding of the body and its direct relation to political realms may also illuminate much in the war context of Chinese Resistance against Japanese Invasion (1937–1945) which saw an intense focus in many of the social and political issues in China feeding into historical inquiry on the performance of the human body. In recapturing this history Geling Yan turned out her novella The Flowers of War, rendering a different perspective into the Japanese rape of Nanjing notoriously known as the Nanjing Massacre. As a writer, Yan projects a cogent historical vision, and throughout the novella, she makes particular demands on her readers who must serve as capable interpreters of the historical record of the Nanjing Massacre. In interpreting this work, both writer and readers participate in constituting the cultural currency of the traumatic experience resulting from the Japanese seizure of the city and assigning value to the varied subjectivity Chinese women assume in the narrative. Here we read the body as a realm of meaning and follow the ways the female Chinese characters including the prostitutes of the Qin Huai River brothels teach us to read it. Human behavior is central to most literary texts which demand ethical responses. The Flowers of War is exactly a case in point.

The aristocrat as average man: the uses of “aristocracy” in Ortega’s The Revolt of the Masses

Abstract: This article studies the concept of “aristocracy” in The Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gasset. While the work’s definition of “aristocracy,” in opposition to the concept of “mass-man” or “average man,” is generally studied in its metaphorical sense, the present article analyses the role of aristocracy in a referential sense, i.e. as referring to a privileged social class. It does so on two different levels. First, an analysis of references to the aristocracy elucidates the complex communicational strategy of the book, which appeals to both Spanish and European readers. Second, it is argued that references to the history of aristocracy as a social class point to the central, but ultimately eluded, question of the work: the reasons for the tragic disintegration of 19th-century civilisation into its exact opposite.

Relieving pain in Marguerite Duras’s ‘La douleur’ and ‘Albert des Capitales’

Abstract: This study will focus on how psychic pain is externalized in two short texts from Marguerite Duras’s La douleur. I will first argue that the collection’s opening work, “La douleur,” may be viewed as a trauma testimony, as a sub-genre of autobiography. Duras the narrator shows us how her psychic pain generates physiological symptoms. In the course of the narrative, we come to understand that her symptoms are the same as the ones she images her husband, Robert L., suffering from in Dachau. Duras also projects her pain onto her surroundings, transforming the Paris of her mind’s eye into the bleak landscape where she believes her husband has perished. In “Albert des Capitales,” we find what amounts to an externalization of psychological suffering through behavior as the protagonist, Therese, transforms herself from victim to victimizer during the interrogation of a “donneur,” a suspected collaborator. Her ordering the torture of the donneur is the result of the psychic pain caused by the uncertainty of her husband’s fate. “La douleur” and “Albert des Capitales,” I will argue, are two sides of the same coin, two different women—both Duras’s avatars—who find themselves in equally stressful circumstances but who unconsciously process their stress in divergent ways.

Uneasy riders: some literary modernists and the aristocracy

Abstract: A significant strain of thought in European modernist literature identified the formal achievement and classic timelessness to which its high art aspired with the historical aristocracy and its traditions. At the same time, modernist authors portrayed the twentieth-century deadend of this aristocracy through the demise of one of its potent symbols: the horseman-soldier. Novelists (Proust, Ford, Roth) explored the class-inflected idea of the artwork within depictions of a changing society. Lyric poets (Rilke, Yeats) located an aristocratic realm of aesthetic play apparently outside of history. Both kinds of writers assimilated this artistic/noble realm with childhood immaturity on the one hand, with death on the other. In this attraction to an expiring aristocracy, such modernism was uncertain how grown-up and modern it wanted to be.

The aristocracy of objects: shops, heirlooms and circulation narratives in Waugh, Fitzgerald and Lovecraft

Abstract: This paper explores the tension between social elites and consumer culture in the 1930s by analyzing the representation of shops, objects and (non)capitalist modes of circulation in stories by Evelyn Waugh, F. Scott Fitzgerald and H.P. Lovecraft. Although these authors wrote different forms of literature about distinct types of aristocrats, they highlight a similar struggle between consumer goods and various non-commercial objects, like non-portable heirlooms, alluring commodities and alien alloys.

Transgression in the works of Bret Easton Ellis: the case of Imperial bedrooms

Abstract: The paper argues that Imperial bedrooms, Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel to date engages, among other things, with the author’s own fiction on manifold levels: it does not only mark his return to the minimalist mode of writing, but effectively reclaims narrative authority from cinematic adaptations of Ellis’s oeuvre, negotiates the terms of the fictional autobiographical pact set up by his previous novels, most notably Less than zero and Lunar park, and, finally, reinterprets and exposes, within the generic boundaries of the California noir teemed with existential(ist) issues, what Baudrillard called "the perfect crime” committed by contemporary media.