Literary Scene Research Articles

The Postcoloniality of Poor African Leadership in Achebe’s Fiction: A Close Reading of Arrow of God and A Man of the People

The paper aims at tracing the genesis of abuse of power and the irresponsibility that goes with it to its full blossoming in Achebe’s fiction through a close reading of Arrow of God and A Man of the People. Disenchantment with leadership in Africa, especially after independence, is not new on the African literary scene. But to Achebe, the problems associated with poor leadership in Africa did not start after independence. Failure in leadership only worsened in most African countries after independence due to the perpetuation of colonial vestiges. By doing a close reading of the two novels and by using the theory of postcoloniality, the researchers compare the traditional world of Ezeulu in Arrow of God to the post-independence setting of Chief Nanga in A Man of the People. The paper concludes that Africa has gone beyond the politics of post-colonialism and is now at the postcoloniality stage. In order for Africans to truly overcome the perennial problem of poor leadership, there is the need for us to first accept our role as a continent in contributing towards the failure of leadership in Africa. There is also the urgency to encourage grass root participation and understanding of modern democracy, to build stronger institutions and to put in place heavier punishments for those who abuse power.

Arabic Poetry and Terrorism: The Dictator Perishes and the Poet Remains

Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati is one of the most prominent twentieth-century Arab poets. His poetry makes a drastic shift from politically committed in the 1950s and 1960s to metapoetic in the 1970s onward. In his post-Nasserist works, al-Bayati interrogates the role of poets and the function of their poetry. This article explores some of the main metapoetic themes in al-Bayati's poem “Meditations on the Other Face of Love,” which was published in 1979. The article argues that al-Bayati consciously uses reflexive poetry as a platform to blur the line between poetry and literary criticism and to declare his discontent with the literary scene and the political status quo in the Arab world. The article also examines some of the poetry by Nizar Qabbani and Muzaffar al-Nawab, in relation to that of al-Bayati. These three poets provide a poetic discussion of “terrorism” against the hegemony of political discourse, and demand that Arab citizens reject their undignified lives by adopting resistance and rejecting terrorism.

Renovar votos com o futuro: nostalgia e escrita da história

Com este ensaio, viso estudar o conceito de nostalgia em um duplo movimento de entender mudanças na historiografia e de indagar a experiência do tempo atual. Apresento, em um primeiro momento, as abordagens que relacionam a nostalgia ao seu nascimento moderno e sua crítica, à experiência do tempo da modernidade historicista. Em um segundo instante, percebo uma mudança na perspectiva teórica da história que relaciona a nostalgia ao ataque ao realismo histórico por meio da conjunção entre memória e História. Por fim, correlaciono a nostalgia como cena literária com a experiência do tempo atual.

Quotidian Inequality

This essay examines narratives about class and inequality in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them (2007) and Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s The Dirty Girls Social Club (2003). These two novels entered the literary scene during a period of increased market neoliberalization, which has produced extreme social and economic inequality. Drawing on Latinx literary criticism and theories about neoliberalism and the free market, this essay maps out how these two novels reproduce and interrogate the market structures that make inequality appear normal and quotidian. One novel narrates the bourgeois sensibilities of six affluent Latinas; the other tells of the social injustice imposed upon and internalized by the racialized poor through the stories of four women in East Los Angeles. Although their characters are seemingly at opposite ends of the class spectrum, the novels nevertheless share the same ideologies about class. Indeed, these literary representations of latinidad and chicanidad directly engage the many structural mechanisms that ultimately normalize growing class disparity as part of our everyday lives. By narrating the neoliberal discourses of “success” and “failure,” the novels lay bare certain determining features of inequality, such as marketable ethnicity, social mobility, and entrepreneurship. For Their Dogs and Dirty Girls, rich and poor become embodied states of being that ultimately make inequality the standard social order.

Sinfonia e confessione. Forme letterarie e pitagorismo in José Vasconcelos e María Zambrano

The Vasconcelos and Zambrano attempt to reconcile life and reason, Wisdom and Philosophy, is particularly affected by the influence of the aesthetic and ‘musical’ component of Pythagoreanism. This, that would cross the history of philosophy as an heterodox current, intends to reassert itself, as much in Vasconcelos aesthetic thought as in Zambrano’s Poetic Reason, against the constraints of rationalism, its formal rigidity and its dogmatism. With this objective, their reflection about the complex articulation and declination of the history of philosophy in literary genres, as places of its intimate drama, flows in the analysis of two specific and, in some respects, similar forms of literature: the symphony (Vasconcelos) and the confession (Zambrano). The latter is nothing new in the literary scene but, recognized as true of Western thinking method, is proposed as a conditio sine qua non of its authentic rebirth. Symphony and confession, which in their analogical and musical process would realize the ancient Pythagorean inspiration, insist on the need to invalidate that world devoid of subject, to reveal the immobilism and the absolutism of the concept and to rethink the tragedy, as a genre and in its historical manifestations, to forestall its ending. They share, therefore, the same purpose: the fulfillment of an ‘ethical Hystory’.

Procédés de décrédibilisation dans al-Fīl al-azraq, roman noir d’Aḥmad Murād

Abstract Contemporary Egyptian author Aḥmad Murād writes works of fiction as well as crime novels. The detective genre emerged very late on the Arab literary scene in comparison to its birth in the 19th century in the West. Al-Fīl al-azraq (The blue elephant), that we are about to analyse, is based on a psychological story. It fits into the matrix of the black novel as it appeared in the United States in the interwar period and incorporates many of its strategies. In this article, we will try to uncover the processes of “decredibilization” established in the novel, in order to create “undecidability” as to the outcome of the investigation and to set up, from a hermeneutic point of view, some confusion of meaning. We will try subsequently to underline the distinctive features of the generic model of the novel, prominent among which, the open structure, the fantastic themes, the use of the vernacular and a certain social realism outlook.

5. Beyond the 'Vestibule': Amelia Alderson Opie's Letters to Henry Perronet Briggs, R. A.

This past summer, under the supervision of Dr. Shelley King, I transcribed and annotated two hundred-odd letters written by the Romantic-Victorian writer, Amelia Alderson Opie, to her cousin and Royal Academy artist, Henry Perronet Briggs. Opie was a somewhat enigmatic character: to reduce her life to its broadest strokes, she transformed from a bubbling, republican member of London's literary scene into a conservative, demure Quaker lady. Her first biographer, C. L. Brightwell, claims that Opie escaped the "various dangerous and seductive influences" of her youth, preferring in time the company of those "cultivated minds" which "actuated by holy principle" encouraged her own "awakened spiritual interest" (36-38). But the correspondence between Amelia Opie and her cousin, artist Henry Perronet Briggs, complicates that narrative of radical change. Although a practicing Quaker when she penned these letters, Opie displays some distinctly un-Quaker-like tendencies. In a much earlier letter, Opie likened correspondents who did not reveal their "real feelings" to her to those who refused her entry into their houses ("11 Mar. 1820"). Henry Perronet Briggs is, therefore, someone who is permitted to see far beyond Opie’s own public persona — beyond what Opie once likened to an individual's "vestibule" — for he is someone with whom she felt entirely at ease. This project thus sheds light not only on Opie's own character, but also points to the larger issues of identity and how they relate to the genre of biography itself.

Bloomsbury in Berlin: Vita Sackville-West's Seducers in Ecuador on the German Literary Marketplace

Vita Sackville-West is now best known as Virginia Woolf's muse, as a horticultural journalist, and as the creator of Sissinghurst's gardens. Yet during her lifetime, her works were translated energetically into German and she was cast in some German literary journals as a leading figure on the European interwar and post-war literary scene. This essay analyses how Sackville-West's short story, Seducers in Ecuador (Hogarth Press, 1924), made its 1929 debut in Germany as ‘Verführer in Ecuador’ in the journal Die neue Rundschau [The New Review]. This offers an interesting case study not only of how a work could change its medium through translation – from a free-standing novella to a short story in a literary journal – but also its context through the new set of juxtapositions and cultural associations it acquired by being absorbed into German periodical culture. The function of small magazines in promoting new ideas or forms of art has been well researched in the context of British modernist writing, but little attention has been paid to the reception of translations of such work in European journals. Yet they often functioned as important promotional conduits and were influential in shaping how authors gained footholds in foreign markets.

« Salauds de pauvres ! » (Du scandaleux Barnabooth)

ABSTRACTIs it scandalous to insult the poor? Some poets don't seem to care. From Baudelaire, who incited us to beat up the poor, to Larbaud who, via Barnabooth, his alter ego and spokesman, urged us to spit in their faces, insulting the poor echoes the predicaments of artistic creation. However, the controversy goes further. Larbaud pushes provocation to the limit by making a scene on the literary scene, setting up one of the most elaborate scams in the history of publishing. What is at stake, beyond the scandal, is the questioning of the bourgeois idea (for the bourgeois also get their share of insults) that a book belongs to its author, its publisher, or its audience. What is at stake in scandal, from the insult to morals to the morals of the scam, is the freedom of writing—risking getting ruined in the process.

Anthology of Unbearables

Anthology of Unbearables Richard Jeffrey Newman (bio) From Somewhere to Nowhere: The End of the American Dream The Unbearables; Ron Kolm, Shalom Neuman, eds. Autonomedia www.autonomedia.org 584 Pages; Paper, $19.95 Central to the success of any literary anthology is the clarity with which its editor communicates both the book's purpose and how that purpose is embodied in the book's structure. It matters, for example, if the works the editor has chosen represent an historical overview, a "best of" collection, a response to a specific political moment, or an exploration of a single literary form, like the sonnet. Because any anthology is, by definition, an exercise in imperfections, this orientation allows a reader at the very least to distinguish between those that can and should be forgiven—differences in taste and sensibility, say—and those that may be worth identifying as flaws, plain and simple. In his introduction to From Somewhere to Nowhere: The End of the American Dream, Ron Kolm, one of the book's editors, frames the collection as a response to the political, socioeconomic, cultural, and other changes we have seen in the United States between the bombings of 9/11 and the 2016 presidential election that brought Donald Trump and his administration to the White House. This framing raises some interesting questions. What does it mean to think of 9/11 as "somewhere," and of the United States under the Trump administration as "nowhere?" What does it mean that "nowhere" represents "the end of the American dream?" Whose dream, specifically, are we talking about? That last question is particularly apt because From Somewhere to Nowhere is an anthology of work by members of The Unbearables, a group of writers about whom Kolm unfortunately tells us absolutely nothing. To get some idea of who The Unbearables are and why they might matter, we have to rely on two of the people whose blurbs grace the anthology's back cover, the well-known science fiction writer Samuel R. Delaney (who also has an essay in the book) and the Austrian writer Elias Schneitter. "The Unbearables," Delaney writes, "started as a tongue-in-cheek way to give unaffiliated American writers a sense of community," an idea that Schneitter, in his blurb, develops more fully. "This lively 'gang,'" Schneitter says, "has taken it upon itself from the very beginning to quicken the artistic and literary scene, injecting fresh air into the often stale atmosphere of established and academic writing." The irreverence these descriptions imply is on display throughout the anthology's nearly six hundred pages, as is a self-conscious cultivation of outsider status, the potentially very rich lens through which Kolm and his fellow editors, Jim Feast and Shalom Neuman, clearly would like the work in the anthology to be read. The 9/11 attacks, after all, brought into stark relief—in a way we perhaps had not contended with since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941—the question of who truly "belongs" in the United States; and Donald Trump seems intent on doing everything he can to raise the stakes of that question, to the point where it does not feel like hyperbole to worry whether the foundations of our democracy will survive. The work collected in the six sections of From Somewhere to Nowhere—"9/11," "There Goes the Neighborhood," "Fusionism Centerfold" (an art portfolio), "It's The Economy Stupid," "O.W.S." (for Occupy Wall Street), and "Postscript: Trump"—take on this question of belonging, or not, with varying degrees of success, sometimes helped and sometimes hindered by the irreverent and self-conscious outsider status I discussed above. The pieces range from the immediate and visceral to the theoretical, intellectual, and even scholarly, but they all ultimately run up against the problem articulated by Thomas Zummer in the first few sentences of his "9/11" offering, "Some Notes on the Unspeakable:" What recourse do we have, we who work embedded so deeply in language, when words fail? When they fail so completely and utterly, in confronting tragedy of such proportion. Is there anything which authorizes our speech, we who remain outside the hole...

Spoiling The Stories: The Rise of Israeli Women's Fiction by Tamar Merin

Reviewed by: Spoiling The Stories: The Rise of Israeli Women's Fiction by Tamar Merin Orian Zakai SPOILING THE STORIES: THE RISE OF ISRAELI WOMEN'S FICTION, by Tamar Merin. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016. 216 pp. $99.95 cloth; $34.95 paper; $34.95 ebook. Tamar Merin's Spoiling the Stories: The Rise of Israeli Women's Fiction offers a sophisticated perspective on Israeli women's prose from the Statehood Generation (a group of writers who began publishing during the 1960s and 1970s) and their writings' relationship to the male-centric canon of modern Hebrew literature. The book's three main chapters each offer a nuanced discussion of the literary corpus of one author: Yehudit Hendel, Amalia Kahana-Carmon, and Rachel Eytan, respectively. The analysis is guided by a mode of literary influence Merin terms "intersexual dialogue," a form of intertextuality in which women authors negotiate gender assumptions through poetics of dialogue, appropriation, and revision regarding their literary fathers, namely, canonical Hebrew figures such as S. Y. Agnon as well as non-canonical figures such as David Fogel and Uri Nissan Gnessin (p. 6). Along with drawing well-deserved attention to a group of writers who are little known to the English reader, this book is significant for offering an insightful discussion of the way women's literary voices are shaped within textual traditions that ostensibly privilege male voices. Women authors of the Statehood Generation did not gain as much critical and popular acclaim as their male counterparts. Notably, male authors of that generation such as A. B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz are the most widely read and translated Israeli authors even today. In contrast, Hendel, Kahana-Carmon, and Eytan are little known outside of Israel, and even among the Israeli reading public their work rarely resonates beyond the halls of academic and literary circles. This disparity speaks to the patriarchal structures that inform modern Hebrew literature and that Merin interrogates in this study. The introduction to the book aptly discusses the challenges that characterized women's entry into Hebrew literature. In traditional pre-Zionist Jewish society, women were excluded from studying the classic Hebrew texts of the Torah, the Midrash, and the Talmud and thus did not learn Hebrew. Women were therefore at a disadvantage when modern Hebrew language and literature emerged in the late nineteenth century, with few women participating in the fledgling literary scene. Furthermore, the traditional role assigned to the author of Jewish and Hebrew texts is that of an observer of the house of Israel, a poet-prophet whose mission is to comment on the situation of the people and guide them. Coming from a minority cultural position, women could not master the authority to comfortably occupy this position. Finally, women's positions in the field of Hebrew literature were limited by the androcentrism of the Zionist project [End Page 466] with its emphasis on the figures of the military hero and the halutz, the virile worker and defender of the land. Under these circumstances, women's entry into the Hebrew literary scene was a complicated endeavor. In setting out to chart the place of women within Hebrew literary history, the feminist scholar, Merin contends, faces a related issue, namely, how to account for the relationship between women authors and a literary tradition that is mostly masculine without reenacting a patriarchal Oedipal plot in which women's writing is subjugated to the symbolic order of the father. Against the grain of the Oedipal structure, Merin offers the term "intersexual dialogue" to encompass "the various literary strategies employed by Israeli female prose fiction writers expressing their voice within a male dominant and (still) inherently Oedipal literary tradition" (pp. 5-6). Through this framework, Merin is able to describe a bi-directional relationship between the women authors of the Statehood Generation and their literary fathers, in which women echo but also subvert and challenge masculine narratives. Chapter one focuses on the work of Hendel from the 1950s. Analyzing Hendel's novella Almanato shel Eliezer (1947; Eliezer's widow) and novel Rehov ha-Maderegot (1956; Street of Steps, 1963), Merin shows how Hendel invokes Agnon, a literary father rejected by the generation of authors before her. Adopting...

A Companion to Juan Rulfo by Steven Boldy

Reviewed by: A Companion to Juan Rulfo by Steven Boldy David Dalton Boldy, Steven. A Companion to Juan Rulfo. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2016. 218 pp. ISBN: 978-18-5566-307-7. In A Companion to Juan Rulfo, Steven Boldy undertakes the momentous task of engaging all of Juan Rulfo's literature and much of his photography. Boldy handles this daunting task admirably. He provides no traditional theoretical framework or unifying methodology; rather, he establishes the texts —and later images— and their relation to Rulfo's life as his primary focus. This approach allows him to highlight intratextual similarities across Rulfo's oeuvre while also providing in-depth close readings of individual works. The extensive scope of Boldy's book makes it mandatory reading for students and scholars interested in any aspect of Rulfo's work. The introduction has two principal aims: firstly, it shows how Rulfo's life experience bled into his writing. Boldy makes the (perhaps uncomfortable) observation that Juan Rulfo's maternal grandfather was a powerful hacendado (5); as such, much of the source material for Pedro Páramo was Rulfo's own family. Boldy also explains how the murder of Rulfo's father, Cheno, haunts both Pedro Páramo and "Diles que no me maten" (7–9). Beyond focusing on biography, Boldy also discusses how Rulfo's problematic relationship with the Mexican literary scene impacted his writing. Life circumstances made it impossible for Rulfo to receive a formal education, and numerous writers and critics held that against him. Boldy argues that Rulfo's embattled relationship with the national literary scene discouraged him from publishing his literature despite his significant commercial and critical successes. Chapter 1, "El llano en llamas" engages Rulfo's well-known collection of short stories. Rather than prove a single thesis, Boldy provides historical and biographical background as well as close readings of each story. As he argues, "Rulfo's tales tell the story of two Mexicos, although in most cases only one of these Mexicos is ever present: the defeated and unhappy peasantry" (30). The other Mexico, of course, is the increasingly urban and modern one to which most of Rulfo's readers belong. The tension between these two Mexicos sits at the heart of Boldy's reading. Indeed, Boldy notes that most critics argue that "Rulfo either gives a voice to the people or offers an elite product neutralizing that voice for safe and voyeuristic consumption by the national bourgeoisie" (32). He does not attempt to reconcile these conflicting claims, but his treatment of Rulfo's texts suggests that he gleans useful insights from both. After an interesting discussion of Rulfo's use of narrators and voices, family, and space, Boldy finishes with close readings of each of the stories from the collection. [End Page 151] Chapter 2, "Pedro Páramo," begins with a discussion of the central yet peripheral role of Juan Preciado as the novel's primary narrator. Afterward, Boldy identifies three abusive patriarchal figures: Pedro Páramo, Padre Rentería, and Bartolomé San Juan. Boldy associates Pedro Páramo with power and death. He then notes Padre Rentería's responsibility for Comala's purgatorial conditions; the priest's avarice makes him incapable of giving absolution, which condemns the entire town to Purgatory. Boldy then defends his problematic assertion of Bartolomé San Juan as an abusive patriarch by arguing convincingly that the character raped Susana San Juan while she was a child. Boldy dedicates an especially interesting discussion to the novel's "interpolations": those moments where the narrative takes place at one time but ghostly voices provide commentary in the present. He finishes the chapter by asserting "ultimate otherness" between Pedro Páramo and Susana San Juan. His final claim is that "the self and other become fused, not in oneness, but in mutual ignorance" (161). Chapter 3, "El gallo de oro," discusses Rulfo's novella of the same title, which was first published in El gallo de oro y otros textos para cine (1980). Interestingly, this chapter does not mention that the novel was published alongside another text, La fórmula secreta, a short, poetic text that formed the base of Rubén Gámez's eponymous, 1965 film...

Wound-up worlds and The Wind-up Girl: on the anthropology of climate change and climate fiction

ABSTRACT In recent years, climate fiction has exploded on the literary scene. Meanwhile, climate change is occurring in the Mekong river basin. In this paper, I put these phenomena into contact in an ontologically multi-sited ethnography of climate change and climate fiction. Rather than assuming a radical separation between real and fictive worlds, this entails a comparison that moves back and forth between the realms. On the one hand, as objects of ethnography, works of cli-fi can be examined in terms of the climate-changed worlds they construct and the responses generated within those worlds. On the other hand, as objects for ethnography, these worlds and responses can be laterally compared with different situations, like those found around the Mekong basin. Inhabiting a zone of indiscernibility between Mekong climate change and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Wind-up Girl, I suggest that lateral comparisons of climate change and climate fiction make it possible to broaden the imaginative spectrum of climate futures and to recover the “strange and adventurous task of believing in this world.”

Playtime in Vienna: The Austrian Literary Scene Finds Its Sense of Humor

Playtime in Vienna The Austrian Literary Scene Finds Its Sense of Humor by Mandakini Pachauri & Keija Parssinen A t the new Literaturmuseum, nestled in a historic building on Johannesgasse in Vienna’s 1st District, there is a wall devoted to the word Kafkaesque, displayed in a half-dozen languages. Though Kafka was Czech, he spent much of his life in Vienna, and the city claims him as a native son. Beneath the Kafka wall, one of the museum’s founders and curators, Hannes Schweiger, begins reciting a poem by Ernst Jandl, a midcentury Austrian poet and translator famous for his Sprechgedichte, or sound poems. Thanks to the poem’s intrinsic playfulness and Schweiger’s enthusiastic performance, the German words traverse the linguistic divide, bringing smiles to the faces of the American students who make up his audience. Schweiger informs us that there is a push to make jandling a verb denoting a kind of experimental wordplay, though it has yet to gain the traction of Herr Kafka’s adjective. Next, our group files into a small movie theater, where we watch Jandl jandling in front of thousands of fans in Royal Albert Hall, including a reverent Allen Ginsberg. The Literaturmuseum, which opened in 2015 and is affiliated with the city’s National Library, offers a glimpse of the country’s literary history as a kind of palimpsest, where the emergence of giants like Thomas Bernhard and Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek can be understood in the context of predecessors like Stefan Zweig and Ingeborg Bachmann. The museum also does an impressive job of representing the dualities of Austrian literature, allowing ESSAY 14 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2018 Kafka’s absurdism and Jandl’s avant-garde playfulness to butt up against the sobering realities of history; a section of the museum is devoted to those Austrian writers murdered in the Holocaust as well as those who survived the violence. A haunting telegram from Hannah Arendt, sent from New York City on May 23, 1941, says only, We are saved. A chilling display resembling a train schedule lists the names of writers beside the names of the concentration camps where they died. In the context of this history, one begins to understand why Bernhard, in his novel Woodcutters, writes, “I hated Vienna yet could not help loving it.” It is a city where, in 1913, Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, and Stalin all resided, frequenting the elegant Kaffeehäuser and nurturing the dark ideologies that would disfigure the world in just a few short years. It is a place that birthed both world wars, with their attendant traumas, as well as modern psychoanalysis, courtesy of Sigmund Freud, who practiced out of his home in the 9th District (the home has been turned into a museum). The aesthetics of twentieth-century Austrian literature are inextricably linked to the traumas of the country’s past: Bernhard’s relentless rants against Haus Wolfsegg—a stand-in for House Austria—in his masterwork , Extinction; the sinister, fascistic mother figure in Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, as well as the graphic violence of the prose. Even Jandl’s silly stylings reckon with war: in one of his most famous sound poems, “schtzngrmm,” the words reproduce the sounds of weaponry. An experimental writers’ collective called the Vienna Group, of which Jandl was a member, emerged after World War II seeking to preserve the Austrian dialect from German influence and to valorize free expression as a means to oppose totalitarianism. It is impossible not to read these authors in a Freudian context, doomed to perpetual struggle against the brutalities of the fatherland. But step into twenty-first-century Vienna, and the city—its writers and literary advocates—present a very different face. Beneath the city’s formal, elegant surface pulses an energetic, playful, and vibrant literary scene, one peopled by writers and tastemakers who understand the past but are not burdened by it; who engage with the troublesome political questions of the day but are also free to make art for art’s sake. On a midsummer evening, a thousand people gather in the central square of the MuseumsQuartier, a sprawling arts complex housed in what was formerly the Habsburg stable. Technically, they...

Playtime in Vienna: The Austrian Literary Scene Finds Its Sense of Humor

Playtime in Vienna The Austrian Literary Scene Finds Its Sense of Humor by Mandakini Pachauri & Keija Parssinen A t the new Literaturmuseum, nestled in a historic building on Johannesgasse in Vienna’s 1st District, there is a wall devoted to the word Kafkaesque, displayed in a half-dozen languages. Though Kafka was Czech, he spent much of his life in Vienna, and the city claims him as a native son. Beneath the Kafka wall, one of the museum’s founders and curators, Hannes Schweiger, begins reciting a poem by Ernst Jandl, a midcentury Austrian poet and translator famous for his Sprechgedichte, or sound poems. Thanks to the poem’s intrinsic playfulness and Schweiger’s enthusiastic performance, the German words traverse the linguistic divide, bringing smiles to the faces of the American students who make up his audience. Schweiger informs us that there is a push to make jandling a verb denoting a kind of experimental wordplay, though it has yet to gain the traction of Herr Kafka’s adjective. Next, our group files into a small movie theater, where we watch Jandl jandling in front of thousands of fans in Royal Albert Hall, including a reverent Allen Ginsberg. The Literaturmuseum, which opened in 2015 and is affiliated with the city’s National Library, offers a glimpse of the country’s literary history as a kind of palimpsest, where the emergence of giants like Thomas Bernhard and Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek can be understood in the context of predecessors like Stefan Zweig and Ingeborg Bachmann. The museum also does an impressive job of representing the dualities of Austrian literature, allowing ESSAY 14 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2018 Kafka’s absurdism and Jandl’s avant-garde playfulness to butt up against the sobering realities of history; a section of the museum is devoted to those Austrian writers murdered in the Holocaust as well as those who survived the violence. A haunting telegram from Hannah Arendt, sent from New York City on May 23, 1941, says only, We are saved. A chilling display resembling a train schedule lists the names of writers beside the names of the concentration camps where they died. In the context of this history, one begins to understand why Bernhard, in his novel Woodcutters, writes, “I hated Vienna yet could not help loving it.” It is a city where, in 1913, Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, and Stalin all resided, frequenting the elegant Kaffeehäuser and nurturing the dark ideologies that would disfigure the world in just a few short years. It is a place that birthed both world wars, with their attendant traumas, as well as modern psychoanalysis, courtesy of Sigmund Freud, who practiced out of his home in the 9th District (the home has been turned into a museum). The aesthetics of twentieth-century Austrian literature are inextricably linked to the traumas of the country’s past: Bernhard’s relentless rants against Haus Wolfsegg—a stand-in for House Austria—in his masterwork , Extinction; the sinister, fascistic mother figure in Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, as well as the graphic violence of the prose. Even Jandl’s silly stylings reckon with war: in one of his most famous sound poems, “schtzngrmm,” the words reproduce the sounds of weaponry. An experimental writers’ collective called the Vienna Group, of which Jandl was a member, emerged after World War II seeking to preserve the Austrian dialect from German influence and to valorize free expression as a means to oppose totalitarianism. It is impossible not to read these authors in a Freudian context, doomed to perpetual struggle against the brutalities of the fatherland. But step into twenty-first-century Vienna, and the city—its writers and literary advocates—present a very different face. Beneath the city’s formal, elegant surface pulses an energetic, playful, and vibrant literary scene, one peopled by writers and tastemakers who understand the past but are not burdened by it; who engage with the troublesome political questions of the day but are also free to make art for art’s sake. On a midsummer evening, a thousand people gather in the central square of the MuseumsQuartier, a sprawling arts complex housed in what was formerly the Habsburg stable. Technically, they...

The Cinquecento Italian Madrigal in Theory and Practice: The Case of Filippo Massini (1559–1618)

The Cinquecento Italian Madrigal in Theory and Practice:The Case of Filippo Massini (1559–1618) —In memory of Prof. Eraldo Bellini I The second half of the sixteenth century was the period of greatest popularity of the Italian Renaissance poetic madrigal. Poet and jurist Filippo Massini greatly contributed to this development, providing, in addition to an extensive production of madrigals, a theorization of this verse form. His academic lecture Del madrigale (On the Madrigal), composed in the early 1580s, carefully analyzes all the key characteristics of the madrigal and also provides practical suggestions on its composition. Massini's comprehensive reflection on the madrigal takes into account the interplay between theory, practice, and mainstream aesthetic preferences. Although it is proposed as a summary of Pietro Bembo's theories, the lecture actually expands them, bringing them into line with the transformed literary scene and widespread compositional practice of the second half of the sixteenth century. This keen interest in the practical side of the verse form is easily explained in light of the vast output of madrigals he produced during his life. He left three collections of this verse form and included more than one hundred madrigals in his main collection of Rime, published in 1609. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Massini did not develop any particular interest in the madrigal as a musical composition. His few notes in the academic lecture on the madrigal's musicality and harmony (which will be analyzed below) are indebted to Bembo's theories, and still contemplate the madrigal exclusively as a literary composition. Contemporary composers similarly [End Page 217] overlooked Massini's madrigal production, which has never been set to music. For this reason, this essay will be devoted to Massini's academic lecture in the light of contemporary debates on the literary madrigal, and will not reflect on the madrigal as a musical composition. Analyzing this theoretical piece of writing, I will address the following questions: How should Massini's position be considered within the aforementioned debate on this verse form? What are the main distinctive characteristics of Massini's concept of the madrigal? More specifically, how loyal is Massini to Pietro Bembo's theories, of which he declares himself a follower? The second part of this paper will assess whether Massini was consistent in translating his theory into practice. In other words, I will consider whether his literary production corresponds to the idea of the madrigal that emerges from the lecture. To assess this, I will provide an outline of Massini's madrigal production and compare his compositions to the suggestions given in the lecture. II The rediscovery of Filippo Massini's literary production is due to Quinto Marini and Mirko Volpi.1 These two Italian scholars recognized the Perugia-born poet as one of the most important men of letters active in the Milan area at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries. Marini and Volpi have observed the capacity of Massini's poetry to merge and balance the more established Petrarchan tradition with the innovative, and to some extent controversial, rhetorical features characteristic of the emerging Seicentesco poetry. More recently, Uberto Motta has recognized in Massini's literary production a clear intent to defend the freedom of poetic expression, and Roberta Ferro has traced his presence in the literary milieu of Milan at the beginning of the Seicento.2 Born in Perugia on May 1, 1559, Massini devoted his life to his career as a jurist and his vocation as a man of letters. After graduating in 1580 in utroque iure, he taught law at the local University of Perugia. He left his hometown in 1590, moving to Fermo on the Adriatic coast. He was later appointed law professor at the universities of Pisa, Pavia, and Bologna, where he died in May 1618 at the age of fifty-nine.3 In the sixteen years spent in Pavia, Massini had [End Page 218] the chance to play an active part in the cultural life of the city, participating in the prestigious academies of the Affidati and the Intenti, and republishing in 1611 his volume of academic lectures, entitled Lettioni. The first edition of this collection had been...

Somewhere in Space by Talvikki Ansel

Reviewed by: Somewhere in Space by Talvikki Ansel Carol Quinn Talvikki Ansel. Somewhere in Space. The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Talvikki Ansel’s third collection of poems, Somewhere in Space, received The Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. In sumptuous detail, these poems consider displacement, folkloric narratives and origins, and the buffer zones that exist between human subjectivity and the natural world—subjects that have long been present in Ansel’s poetry. In the poet’s quest for an authentic engagement with nature (often via rigorous, complex, and elaborate meditations), the poems of Somewhere in Space both invoke what might, in Scandinavia, be called friluftsliv, and attempt to replicate that experience for a reader. In Nordic countries, the term friluftsliv is used to describe an expansive, possibly oceanic state of mind that human beings may experience upon leaving urban life behind and returning to a more natural setting. Hans Gelter of the Luleå University of Technology defines friluftsliv—meaning “free air life”—as “a philosophical lifestyle based on experiences of the freedom in nature and the spiritual connectedness with the landscape.” Gelter traces the word’s origin to Henrik Ibsen’s 1859 poem “On the Heights,” where, in the course of being in a cottage in the wilderness, the poem’s narrator declares, “This is Friluftsliv for my thoughts . . .” In contemporary Scandinavia, friluftsliv may be taken into consideration in aspects of life ranging from elementary education to real estate sales to work-life balance. Gelter argues for a historical opposition, however, between friluftsliv and “tourism,” suggesting that tourism is only “a superficial acquaintance with nature.” Following a current of thought that would strictly differentiate between social issues and the natural world, some readers could potentially view Ansel’s meditations upon nature as escapist in a time of political unrest, when the poetry of protest is by necessity an ascending force on the American literary scene. Ansel’s turning to nature is actually a daring political choice, however, in an era when climate change—quite possibly the greatest crisis of this century—has been brought on by humanity’s lack of regard for, and attempts to separate itself from, the natural world. Central to Ansel’s project in Somewhere in Space is the poem “Mycorrhizae”: When you dig up a tree, keep some of the soil around the roots, webby strands wrap the taproot, the calm anchor, reach horizontal through duff and toad dung, damp mold. Things move so discreetly sometimes, I didn’t even notice. A tiger’s ear flares in shade. Was that the water molecule’s elemental split? The sleight of hand described on page twenty? No, not exactly, you prop a shingle barrier up to shelter a wind-torn cabbage sprout. Strawberries edge the bed, an upside down pot keeps rain from the post hold, another adage proved: plant at the new moon, a stitch in time saves nine, if you must leave, don’t go bare, take some dirt with you. “Mycorrhizae” proposes, among other things, that the world is more complicated than the artificial categories and dichotomies that human beings invent. Mycorrhizae are fungi that form a symbiotic relationship with a plant’s root system and act as a conduit between that plant and the soil around it. Transplants can fail, the poem suggests, if such connections are not taken into consideration. [End Page 21] Displacement is an issue that recurs throughout Talvikki Ansel’s poetry. In My Shining Archipelago, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1996, Ansel meditates upon transplantation and alienation in the sonnet sequence “Afterwards: Caliban,” a long poem that imagines the life of The Tempest’s Caliban in London, after he has been taken from Prospero’s island. In Somewhere in Space, “Mycorrhizae” suggests that human beings who spend their lives confined to cities and workplaces—with the associated stresses, alienation, isolation, and sensory deprivation—are like transplants with bare roots: we are far more likely to survive if we remember our connections to the natural world. In other poems, Ansel seeks to find emblems for human displacement, as in “Places to Swim”: In town this week, two people found goldfish balanced in...

City Profile: Amsterdam

A msterdam is much more than first meets the eye. From afar, Amsterdam seems to consist of only the scandalous Red Light District and the somber Anne Frank House. But up close, this often-underestimated Dutch haven presents art and experience in spades. Arriving in this near-cartoon metropolis puts travelers in a dreamlike state: in a bustling capital where cars aren’t allowed, the tringtringing of bikes fills your ears as they whiz past multicolored pastel houses, down cobblestone streets running parallel to the canals. At first, the patternless layout of these narrow streets is disorienting, but, as you adjust to the sensory overload, you find you don’t mind; in fact, you surrender to it willingly. Literature thrives here. Secondhand bookstores line the canals in the “9 Straatjes” (Nine little streets), like the Boekie Woekie, which specializes in selfpublished and small-press books. Every Friday, Squi puts on an outside book market , where shoppers find novels, poetry, and nonfiction written in dozens of languages . Just around the corner stands the American Book Center, a four-floor library and store with wall-to-ceiling bookshelves, Beauty and the Beast style. As if that’s not enough to fill your dreamy days, every year in May, the city puts on the Amsterdam Literary Festival, which accepts submissions from all genres and proffers the world’s largest book market, with over one thousand stalls. It’s impossible not to acknowledge the ghost of Anne Frank and both the museum and statue erected in her memory. Her legacy has given birth to a rich literary scene: dozens of writing workshops meet monthly , like the Amsterdam Writers Guild, full of creatives from different backgrounds and cultures. Artists here mingle easily; most speak two or three languages. The Van Gogh Museum alone brings in hundreds of people daily from around the world. Open since 1973, it holds the largest collection of paintings and drawings by Vincent Van Gogh and his contemporaries; though Starry Night resides in the MoMA in New York City, you can still see Self-Portrait, Sunflowers, and Almond Blossoms. For those equally interested in writing as well as reading, there’s the Perdu, the center for Dutch poetry. It boasts creative workshops, exhibits, a theater, and a small publishing house. The Mezrab Storytelling School hosts a three-day introduction course to allow you to get a feel for what the professional courses might be like, should you seek a more permanent relationship with the city. The inhabitants welcome international influence, and because of this, the town has become a melting pot of perspectives, preserved by an easygoing nature and inviting aura. Amsterdam offers something for everyone, from the traveling student to the serious artist. Its door is open to all—you only have to knock. A WLT intern, Taylor Hickney has a degree in English writing from the University of Oklahoma and will begin pursuing an MFA in fiction at the New School in August. Commas are important, and she hates surprises. A big thanks to Amy Poehler for getting her this far in life. Notebook city profile Amsterdam by Taylor Hickney WHAT TO READ BY THE CANAL David Hewson The House of Dolls Pan Books Hendrik Marsman Three Dutch Poems Trans. Jacquelyn Pope WLT website Richard Milazzo “Artaud in Amsterdam” and other poems in Prayer in a Wolf’s Mouth: Poems 2013–2014 Lower Canal Books Deborah Moggach Tulip Fever Dial Press Dubravka Ugrešić The Ministry of Pain Trans. Michael Henry Heim Ecco PHOTO: KIRK FISHER/PIXABAY WORLDLIT.ORG 5 ...

Two Gifts from Goethe: Charlotte von Stein's and Charlotte Schiller's Writing-Tables

Two Gifts from Goethe:Charlotte von Stein's and Charlotte Schiller's Writing-Tables Linda Dietrick It is well known that before and after his transformative journey to Italy (1786–88), Goethe enjoyed two intense, decade-long friendships: with Charlotte von Stein in the decade before Italy, and with Charlotte Schiller from 1794 until the latter's death in 1805. What is less known, even now, is that both Charlotte von Stein and Charlotte Schiller were writers in their own right. In 1779 and 1794, Goethe gave the gift of a desk or "writing-table" (Schreibtisch) to Charlotte von Stein and Charlotte Schiller, respectively. In what follows, I explore the histories of these two gifts and the associated acts of gift-giving as staged by Goethe in these two phases of his life. As pieces of furniture used for the purpose of writing, and as gifts from a male writer to women who also wrote, the two desks suggest a range of meanings for both the giver and the two Charlottes who were the recipients. Social theorists have long argued that gifts are never "free," but always figure in a complex system of social relationships founded upon mutual expectation and obligation. As we shall see, Goethe's gifts are good examples of that.1 Charlotte von Stein (1742–1827) was a lady of the court of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, serving chiefly as a companion to Duchess Luise, the wife of Goethe's patron Duke Karl August, and to his mother the Dowager Duchess Anna Amalia. She had been married since 1764 to Karl August's master of stables, Josias von Stein, and had borne seven children, of whom only three had survived infancy. Soon after Goethe's arrival in Weimar in 1776, she became the object of his intense desire. Of the thousands of letters and notes they exchanged, only Goethe's (about 1600) have survived.2 Those letters document an intimate though most likely platonic relationship, as well as a fully shared social and intellectual life. Stein introduced him to the intricacies of aristocratic court life, and Goethe introduced her to his many literary and scientific pursuits, for which her education and reading made her the ideal dialogue partner. Their relationship was interrupted when Goethe abruptly departed for Italy in 1786, and it eventually broke off when, after his return in 1788, he entered a common-law relationship with Christiane Vulpius, a young woman of lower social status. Charlotte Schiller (1766–1826), née von Lengefeld, was born into impoverished nobility in Rudolstadt, 40 km from Weimar. Charlotte von Stein, as a friend of the family, was present at her christening, and when the younger Charlotte reached adulthood, the two women became close [End Page 203] friends, a relationship that continued for the rest of their lives. Charlotte von Lengefeld was married to Friedrich Schiller in 1790, and they had four children together before Friedrich's death at the age of 45. Charlotte von Stein's side of the two women's correspondence is still extant and can be read at the Goethe and Schiller Archive (GSA) in Weimar and, in heavily abridged and amended form, in volume 2 of Ludwig Urlichs' Charlotte Schiller und ihre Freunde (1862).3 The GSA holdings comprise 165 letters.4 The first letter dates from 1783 and the last from 1825, but the vast majority are from the decade and a half leading up to 1799, when the Schillers moved from Jena to Weimar, close to Stein. The letters not only chronicle Charlotte von Stein's and implicitly Charlotte Schiller's relationships with the famous male writers, but also offer insider knowledge of the literary scene: who and what was being read and talked about during this significant period in German culture. This epistolary conversation links Jena and Weimar long before Goethe and Friedrich Schiller began their own friendship and collaboration in 1794. It also documents the fact that both Charlottes were active as writers. The literary works of Charlotte von Stein include, in addition to several poems and translations, four dramas that have survived and can be attributed to her: the short drama Rino (1776), the tragedy Dido (1794), the comedy...

Mark Twain, American Humorist by Tracy Wuster

Reviewed by: Mark Twain, American Humorist by Tracy Wuster Linda A. Morris Tracy Wuster. Mark Twain, American Humorist. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2016. xvi + 483 pp. This is an ambitious book, and it accomplishes what it sets out to do—to explore in the terms of the time Mark Twain's changing and growing reputation as an "American humorist." From today's perspective Twain's reputation would not appear to be in doubt, but Tracy Wuster carefully shows that his status as a humorist was reflected and debated in literally hundreds of contemporary newspaper and magazine reviews and reports. This is the lasting contribution of Mark Twain, American Humorist. Wuster confines his examination to the years between 1865 and 1882: from the time Samuel Clemens left California to the publication of The Prince and the Pauper, Twain's first solo-authored novel. One could quibble over his decision to end the study before the publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but it is the author's prerogative to define the scope of his own work. As it stands, this is a hefty work of scholarship, and one could not hope for a study in greater depth. It references more than 170 newspapers and periodicals, and more than 250 books and articles. The footnotes alone fill 70 pages. Tracy Wuster is singularly well-positioned to undertake this work as a recognized Twain scholar and as an emerging leader in the field of American humor per se. He does not disappoint. Wuster breaks his argument into eight substantive chapters, roughly following in chronological order Twain's work and reputation. But first he "sets the scene" (1) in a wonderfully clear introductory chapter in which he lays out the goal of the book and the terms in which he follows the development of Mark Twain's "cultural positioning" (10). Deeply embedded in this positioning is the mid-nineteenth century notion of a hierarchy of humor, from humor "of a low order" (27) to "literary humor" or "quality humor" (5). Mark Twain's path along this road was by no means a straight one or a sure one, as this book carefully documents. Of its eight chapters, three are concerned with Twain's reputation abroad, focusing on his lecture series and the publication of Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad. Much of the rest of the book focuses on Twain's personal and professional relationship with William Dean Howells and Twain's uneasy place among the literary elite. Mark Twain's place among the American "quality writers" was never fully secure (139). Nor did he ever fully know his place there, as certain key words that appear throughout this study suggest: "anxiety" (29), "irreverence" (16), "imposter" (307), and "quality" [End Page 374] (363), as in "literary quality" (5), "moral quality" (363), and "quality humor" (5). One especially interesting term that the author cites a number of times is "racy" (36). It's a term Twain's reviewers used with some frequency, and as Wuster points out, its meaning then was not the same as it is now. In the nineteenth century it referred to the soil and to fertility, as in "of the soil." It appears to have been a term of approbation, and the author's emphasis on nineteenth-century terminology throughout the book brings this to the fore. The role Howells played in furthering Twain's career has been widely discussed among Twain scholars, but I think it is fair to say that his profound influence on Twain's reputation has not been as fully explored as it is here. It is revealed to us through the extent that Howells promoted Twain's work through the Atlantic Monthly, the numerous reviews that Howells wrote of Twain's work, and the way Howells carried Twain into the very heart of the American literary scene. Wuster explores in new ways Twain's infamous speech at John Greenleaf Whittier's birthday in 1877, in which Twain represented three of the literary giants seated in the room as having been impersonated in a western miner's cabin by imposters. Twain (and Howells) famously came to believe that the speech was a major blunder and miscalculation...