Political Fiction Research Articles

Identity Politics and Confessional Acts: Suzanne Voilquin's Souvenirs d'une fille du peuple

WOMEN IN FRENCH STUDIES Identity Politics and Confessional Acts: Suzanne Voilquin's Souvenirs d'unefille du peuple If, as William Spengemann asserts, "the self is a hard ground to plough" (xiii), then to this newcomer, the field of autobiography is yet more obstinate and fertile. I will not attempt here a discussion of "this gerne which is not one"; rather, I will situate Suzanne Voilquin's memoir in the framework of the social production of memory and identity. In Souvenirs d'unefille du peuple ou la Saint-Simonienne en Egypte, first published in 1866, Voilquin both recounts her Saint-Simonian "vie apostolique" and presents a frank account of her experience as a working-class woman in a bourgeois, capitalist world. From the very title of the memoir, Voilquin wears her marginal status as a badge: not only is she a "fille," she is also "du peuple," and one of those feminist "SaintSimoniennes " to boot. Identity—or the creation of the self—is clearly at stake in Voilquin's Souvenirs. As opposed to Leslie Rabine's interpretation of Souvenirs as structured around an overlapping of the reader-writer, motherdaughter , and doctor-patient relations,1 I will be studying Voilquin's autobiographical narrative through the lens of confession. As it is presented in Souvenirs d'une fille du peuple, the act of confession serves as a model of reading, of narrating, and, in the larger picture, of organizing social relations. Voilquin chooses this confessional mode not only to present her life story, but also to re-fashion the "autobiographical pact" in order to accommodate women's stories. And although the memoir follows a rather conventional style, Voilquin's challenge to both the social contract and the autobiographical pact is anything but conventional. But before turning to Voilquin's Souvenirs, I will first determine the differences between confession and contract, and examine the role confession played in the Ecole Saint-Simonienne. The model of confession serves to convey Voilquin's experience and to position the reader and the writer in a non-contractual bond. When I refer to "contract," I refer both to the social contract—or the political fiction detailing the individual's entry into society—and to the autobiographical pact—or, as Philippe Lejeune would have it, the implicit agreement between the reader and the writer to a "commitment to telling the 'truth,' use of ?,' etc." (130). Both compacts, or agreements, presuppose the ability to contract, which in turn already presupposes an autonomous (male, bourgeois) subject.2 I am not suggesting that women are by "nature" not autonomous, but rather that they are perceived as such, and therefore construed as unable to contract. Sidonie Smith comments that according to the ideology of "western selfhood," "the essential self is ... a 'free' agent, exercising self-determination over meaning, personal destiny, and desire. Neither powerless nor passive, it assumes and celebrates agency" (8). Although Lejeune assures us that he chose the word "pacte" more for its romantic than its political resonance, the romantic and the political are 55 WOMEN IN FRENCH STUDIES not so easily disentangled, since both the autobiographical pact and the social contract are predicated on an ideology of the self, on the myth of the autonomous subject. The autobiographical pact mirrors the social contract: the reader enters into an agreement with the writer, just as an individual enters into an agreement with society, through mutual recognition and implicit approval of certain laws and conventions. If the "pacte autobiographique" structures the presentation of the self through the form of contract, what happens to voices that are by law unable to contract? The Civil Code of 1804 constructed women as legal minors, outside the social contract and unable to represent themselves. Voilquin neatly evades the form of contract (and its bourgeois liberal overtones) by appropriating the form of confession. Whereas the bourgeois public sphere endorses liberty, yet reserves natural rights for white, property-owning men, every race, class, and gender has access to the confessional. According to its traditional definition, confession is a sacramental act, in which the priest gives pardon in exchange for the narrative of sins committed. Confession rehabilitates the sinner, and marks the penitent's re-entry into if not...

The Pan-African Movement and American Black Political Fiction, 1920s to 1950s: Themes of Alienation

The Pan-African Movement and American Black Political Fiction, 1920s to 1950s: Themes of Alienation

“Writing in the Dark”: The Political Fictions of American Travel Writing

Journal Article “Writing in the Dark”: The Political Fictions of American Travel Writing Get access David E. Johnson David E. Johnson Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Literary History, Volume 7, Issue 1, Spring 1995, Pages 1–27, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/7.1.1 Published: 01 March 1995

Contemporary lesbian writing: dreams, desire, difference

Theoretical Perspectives Political Fictions The Thriller The Comic Novel New Developments in Fiction - Fantasy and Sex.

Assessment, Equity, and Diversity in Reforming America's Schools

National standards and assessments are being proposed as a strategy for improving schools in the United States. However, proposed federal policies for implementation raise serious concerns about the extent to which national standards and assessments alone will help improve the quality of public education for all or whether it will serve to deepen the already severe educational and economic cleavages that exist in this nation, especially along racial/ethnic lines. We examine the implications of this policy for equity and diversity in terms of antecedent instructional conditions, the proposed test, the testing context, and the diversity of learners to be assessed. Without a strong and serious commitment to opportunity to learn, this policy serves as a symbolic and political fiction rather than an instrumental one in improving schooling outcomes, particularly for disadvantaged urban and racial/ethnic minority students.

The centre of things: political fiction in Britain from Disraeli to the present

Preface The Conversation of People who Counted The Literature of Crisis The Triumph of Disraeli Landscape with Candidates The Golden Age: the Mid-Victorian Political Novel Revolutionaries and Elitists, 1886-1914 In Time of Strife, 1914-26 Class? Nation? Commonwealth? The Fall and Rise of British Political Fiction Index

The fiction of C.S. Lewis: mask and mirror

Acknowledgements - Introduction - Lewis's Supernaturalism: Light and Darkness - Good, Evil and the Notion of the Self in Lewis's Adult Fiction - Images of Good and Evil in the Narnian Chronicles - Lewis's Political Fictions - Political Issues in Lewis's Juvenile Fiction - Facing the Feminine: Women in Lewis's Early Fiction - Masking the Misogynist in Narnia and Glome - Women as Saints and Slatterns in Lewis's Shorter Fiction - Bibliography - Index

Political Mythology and Popular Fiction. Edited by Ernest J. Yanarella and Lee Sigelman. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988. 200p. $37.95.

Acknowledgments Introduction: Political Myth, Popular Fiction, and American Culture by Ernest J. Yanarella and Lee Sigelman Nature, Human Nature, and Society in the American Western by John Moeller Democracy and Community in American Children's Literature by Timothy E. Cook Winning Isn't Everything: Sports Fiction as a Genre of Political Criticism by Thomas C. Shevory Political Change in America: Perspectives from Popular Historical Novels of Michener and Vidal by Samuel M. Hines Jr. Natural Law and Right in Contemporary American Middle-Class Literature by Ethan Fishman Our Reconsidered: Reflections on the Small Town in American Literature by Jean Bethke Elshtain The Paradox of Combat: Fictional Reflections of America at War by Cecil L. Eubanks The Machine in the Garden Revisited: American Pastorialism and Contemporary Science Fiction by Ernest J. Yanarella A Select Bibliography on Myth, Politics, and Popular Fiction

Pluralist Theory-Fictions and Fictional Politics

Eve Tavor Bannet PLURALIST THEORY-FICTIONS AND FICTIONAL POLITICS Despite the now widespread practice of reading texts in contexts, context is rarely, if ever, invoked when French poststructuralist theory is considered.1 The divorce ofFrench theory from French politics and society has facUitated its appropriation by the new historicisms and by politicized literary criticism outside France. At the same time, this divorce has deflected attention from the social and political myths naturalized by theoretical structures, thus permitting French theory to present itself as a universally applicable tool. But French theory is not capable of making contemporary political points in every culture or of being harnessed to the study ofjust any historical period. The political fictions enshrined in French poststructuralist thought may have made sense in the political and discursive context of France in the late sixties and early seventies—even if they did prove largely ineffectual as "active interventions in history and politics."2 But the same political fictions enshrined in the same plural and decentered structures make little political sense when they are exported to other countries; and they make even less sense when they are imposed, as invariable grids, on the cultures of the past. The political force oftheoretical structures cannot be assessed without considering their function and reception in different social, political, and discursive contexts. For instance, the plural structures of French theoretical writings have found much more ready acceptance in the United States than they have, say, in England, because, as William E. ConnoUy has pointed out, "pluralism has long provided the dominant description and ideal of American politics."3 In the American context, where pluralism and decentralization are referential terms as well as 28 Eve Tavor Bannet29 highly prized values, nothing could be more intellectually and politically respectable than to espouse them, and it is not immediately obvious why the structures of French theoretical writings should be either fictional or questionable. The abstract universalism ofmuch political rhetoric also tends to mask the fact that there are almost as many varieties of pluralism as there are of novels or of criticism or of anything else.4 A Frenchman asserting that "The plural, the collection ofsingularities, this is just what power, capital, the law of value, personal identity, the identity card, the University, responsibility, the family and the hospital repress and quell,"5 is speaking in a particular discursive context. He is echoing two generations of French left-wing intellectuals who viewed with intense disfavor France's rapid transformation after World War II from a predominantly agricultural society into a modern, capitalist, industrialized, and—as they thought, "Americanized"—"technological society." French left-wing critics of modernization ignored what Raymond Aron and Michel Crozier tried to tell them: that France was not like America; that in America, the bureaucratic and technological organization of society was not accompanied by authoritarian centralism and dirigisme; and that totally centralized power, authoritarian control of the economy, the media, and education, and lack of direction from the margins to the center were peculiar to French social and political structures, and had been at least since Napoleon.6 As far as the French left was concerned, modern capitalist society was virtually indistinguishable from centralized direction. This is why they tended to argue that there is no difference between "totalitarianism" in Russia, America, and France, and it is why the Hegelian master-slave dialectic as expounded by Kojève became fundamental to the thinking ofthe French left. This identification ofmodern "Americanized" society with the programmed society also explains why French left-wing critiques of the symbolic and social order—including those of Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida—tend to be accompanied by stringent attacks on centralism, hierarchical structures of authority and domination , standardizationand programmed conformities,justas it explains their rejection ofall theoretical totalizations, whether modeled on Hegel and Marx or on structuralism and semiotics. In this peculiarly French context, the valorization ofthe margins over the center, militant nonconformity, and the assertion of difference, constituted a recognized contestatory political position. It also represented a potential, a projected and imagined alternative to the status quo in France. We should not forget that for the French left, decen- 30Philosophy and Literature tralization, pluralism, and the abUity to make...

Political Mythology and Popular Fiction.

Political Mythology and Popular Fiction.

Political Fiction, the Spirit of the Age, and Allen Drury.

Political Fiction, the Spirit of the Age, and Allen Drury.

Sons and Lovers: A Novel of Division and Desire , and: The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence , and: D. H. Lawrence: New Studies (review)

Reviewed by: Sons and Lovers: A Novel of Division and Desire, and: The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence, and: D. H. Lawrence: New Studies Daniel R. Schwarz Ross C. Murfin . Sons and Lovers: A Novel of Division and Desire. Boston: Twayne, 1987. 147 pp. $18.95. Jeffrey Meyers , ed. The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence. New York: St. Martin's, 1987. 207 pp. $25.00. Christopher Heywood , ed. D. H. Lawrence: New Studies. New York: St. Martin's, 1987. 184 pp. $25.00. In the past decade we have had many excellent specialized studies of Lawrence. But, in my judgment, Lawrence now needs a substantial synthesizing critical study that takes account of what we now know of his historical and personal background and of his relation to other writers and thinkers. Collectively, the books under review certainly contribute to our understanding of Lawrence. Yet what we need is a major study by a powerful critic, who would create a dialogue between texts and theory, between newer theory and traditional approaches, even while sifting through the vast research on Lawrence with intelligence and verve. Among the questions that should be asked: How and why did Lawrence's form develop and evolve? How did his concept of character and characterization change? How does his "carbon" theory of the psyche as outlined in the famous letter to Garnett reflect developments in the English and European cultural and intellectual milieu? What are the appropriate theoretical questions to ask about Lawrence's language? Do we need an aesthetic and narratology for Lawrence that is different from the other writers of the modern British period? How does Lawrence's language signify in the intense and strained passages, such as the opening and closing chapters of The Rainbow and the famous "Ever and Again" passage of the chapter "Anna Victrix"? How can we discuss the symbolic speech acts of such works as The Man Who Died and St. Mawr? How does Lawrence's use of idiomatic and colloquial speech undermine such poststructuralist master terms as "writerly"? How does Lawrence use his letters as a threshing ground to test his ideas and fictional voices? (Of The Rainbow he wrote: "Now you will find [Freida] and me in the novel, I think, and the work is of both of us" [#718, Letters].) What are the reasons that his political fiction founders? Is Lawrence less a primitive and more of an intellectual—albeit a quirky one—than we thought? Ross C. Murfin's study of Sons and Lovers is part of a new Twayne Series devoted to individual works. Apparently, each of these volumes will abide by a formula that stipulates chapters on "Historical Context," "The Importance of the Work," and "Critical Reception" before doing a critical analysis and concluding with an annotated bibliography. If, as I suspect, these books are intended for a student audience and for prospective teachers, it would be nice if they were available in inexpensive paperbacks. Murfin is a sophisticated critic whose prior work on Lawrence's poetry deserves respect and makes him a good choice for such a volume. Murfin reads closely and is attentive to the novel's intricacy and evolving form; he discusses the Miriam-Paul relationship with insight and sees how Paul is the source of their problems: "Lawrence's achievement lies in suggesting that there is a tragic tension inside the self—between primoridal instinct and modern Western reason, between sensuality and a counterforce called 'virginity,' even between 'male' and 'female' habits and yearnings—that produces tragic conflicts without." But if this is Lawerence's achievement, does it happen in part because of the breakdown in distance? One wonders if Murfin shouldn't be somewhat self-conscious about [End Page 279] method and show an awareness of the current critical environment. I believe that the oscillating relationship between Lawrence and the narrator as well as between the narrator and Paul is crucial to the form of Sons and Lovers and to the interpretation of every scene. Although Murfin alludes to these relationships, he needs to be more aware of them, and the issue of how we discuss an author in a text needs to be addressed. While this is not...

Gender and genre: Feminist rewritings of detective fiction

This paper presents an analysis of the detective fiction genre and its use by feminist writers to reveal the practices of race, class, and sexual politics in contemporary society. I begin with a brief survey of the conventions of detective fiction, against which I then conduct a detailed analysis of three detective novels by women, Amanda Cross's Death in a Tenured Position (1981), Valerie Miner's Murder in the English Department (1982), and Barbara Wilson's Murder in the Collective (1984). In each case the political practice of the text is evaluated, particularly in relation to the writer's particular inflection of generic convention. Death in a Tenured Position is found to be a predominantly conservative text with the detective performing many of the roles of the traditional male detective. Both Murder in the English Department and Murder in the Collective work more innovatively with genre conventions to produce highly politicized texts, though Murder in the Collective capitulates finally to the lure of convention with a surprisingly conservative ending. Murder in the English Department is the most radical text and succeeds as “political fiction” though without the suspense of the classic Whodunnit.

Fifty Years of American History: An Interview with Edmund S. Morgan

I T has been a little more than half a century since the path of Edmund Morgan, then an undergraduate at Harvard, first crossed that of Perry Miller. The encounter was decisive for Morgan, confirming his historical calling and launching him upon a productive and influential career. Since then he has authored, coauthored, or edited nineteen books, and is well along on his twentieth, a study of Anglo-American political fictions.1 Several of these books, notably The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution; The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop; Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea; and American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, have become fixed in the canon of early American historiography. Canonical or otherwise, Morgan's books and essays follow a consistent pattern: they are based on exhaustive research in primary sources; emphasize human agency as against historicist forces; and are written in precise and graceful prose. This combination of rigor, empathy, and lucidity is intended for, and has succeeded in capturing, a broad audience. Morgan is read by secondary school students, undergraduates, and graduate students, as well as by his specialist peerssome sixty of whom were trained in his seminars. Morgan, who turned seventy in January i986, has retired from his Sterling Professorship at Yale University. He has been succeeded by John Demos, late of Brandeis University. To mark the occasion of his retirement, I asked Morgan to participate in a formal, taped interview. He agreed, remarking that this was the first time he had been interviewed. The questions were designed to reveal something of Morgan the person, as well as Morgan the historian. How had he become interested in

Nerval’s Léo Burckart The Duplicity of Power and the Power of Duplicity

Nerval’s Léo Burckart The Duplicity of Power and the Power of Duplicity Ross Chambers I N 1835 STENDHAL abandoned Lucien Leuwen, discouraged by the illiberal atmosphere prevailing in Rome as in Paris, and more especially by the news of the réintroduction of censorship in France. A novel concerned with the electoral practices of the July Monarchy had now little chance of achieving publication; and Stendhal turned to Henry Brulard and soon after to La Chartreuse de Parme, where the portrayal of political maneuvering takes cover under a representation of restora­ tion Italy. The frenzy in which La Chartreuse was written suggests some­ thing of the return of the repressed. The strategy of displacing the fictive reference to another place and/or period so as to permit indirect com­ mentary on the author’s own society is, of course, a classical one: it had been employed a little earlier (1834) by Lorenzaccio, a play which, how­ ever, was judged unperformable and did not see the planks until the end of the century. There is crying need for a critical monograph on the political fiction of the 1830’s, but I undertake here only to read another drama of the period which was in fact performed, in spite of its political thrust. After problems with the censorship apparatus which have been documented by Jean Richer in his edition of the play, Léo Burckart was staged in 1839 at the Porte Saint-Martin. The play is an excellent example, therefore, of what was possible in the way of public oppositional writing (and more specifically in the theatre, a traditional bête noire for censors) during the years of disenchantment that followed the July revolution. Taking up the socially sensitive question of political assassination in the wake of Loren­ zaccio, but also of Fieschi and his “ machine infernale,” Nerval’s play (the collaboration of Dumas is most evident in the firmly constructed plot) could not afford simply to dramatize, as it does, the phenomenon of political duplicity. It needed a duplicity of its own, a duplicity of writing, a simple manifestation of which is the adoption of the cover tac­ tic already referred to (the political realities of Louis-Philippe’s France being addressed via a representation of post-Napoleonic Germany in the year 1819). 56 Su m m e r 1987 C h a m b e r s But the duplicitousness of Léo Burckart goes considerably further, and I propose to treat it, first, as a text-book case of the mutual involve­ ment it permits us to discern between the duplicity of power and the oppositional duplicity of artistic production, and second as a startingpoint for an inquiry into the relationship (of difference and similarity) between oppositional writing in two periods of post-revolutionary dis­ enchantment that, at first sight, seem very similar: the early years of the July Monarchy and those of the Second Empire.1 It is symptomatic, for example, that when Nerval applied in 1838 for the censor’s permission to perform his play, this office was operating without legal status. The law voted in 1835 was of two years’ duration only, and was never renewed, so that the defacto censorship that existed throughout Louis-Philippe’s reign had lost its de jure legitimacy as early as 1837. This is a fine example of the trickiness of power and the in­ authenticity in which it is exercised, the very phenomenon about which Musset, Stendhal and Nerval wrote and which Nerval attempted to oppose more directly by a court challenge. Quite possibly the sense of its own illegitimacy is what led the censor’s office, in 1838, to pay particular attention to the climactic scenes of Act IV (or the VeJournée in the 1839 text which Nerval reprinted in Lorely and which will be my reference here).2 Amid masks, disguises, betrayals and counter-betrayals galore, we witness a gathering of secret societies, explicitly described as a replica of the diplomatic congresses of the era, in which a minister passes him­ self off as a student, students impersonate the Prince’s soldiery, and two complementary characters function, one (Paulus) as a double agent...

Line of flight: Gilles Deleuze, or political science fiction

Line of flight: Gilles Deleuze, or political science fiction

Une fiction politique : la nation

A Political Fiction : the Nation. The work of Jenö Szücs enables one to suggest some hypotheses regarding the genesis and properties of the concept of nation. Far from being an accidental form of national consciousness, populism expresses a demand for inseparably logical and political order, that of grounding in nature (in «language and customs») the symbolic violence inherent in the historically contingent forms of the general principle of popular sovereignty.

Reflections on 'PNR'

This is a good time for me to talk about PN Review, because I have lately agreed to have my name, along with C. H. Sisson's, removed from the masthead of the magazine. There remain, as 'contributing editors', Nicholas Tredell,John Pilling, and Dick Davis all these, like heretofore Sisson and me, subordinate to the Managing Editor, Michael Schmidt. This change permits of the polite fiction that I can write impartially; it means in any case what we all agree on: that the pioneering phase of the magazine is over, and so can be looked back upon to some purpose. I will say frankly that the latest issues (numbers 37 and 38 are the latest to hand as I write) represent an assurance and an accomplishment such as Schmidt and Sisson and I always yearned towards, but mostly felt we had fallen short of. In PNR 37 Schmidt, explaining Sisson's and my withdrawal, said: 'Neither was ever entirely happy with PNReview. It has not lived up to their hopes, though it is perhaps better than they expected.' This is a just estimate of my sentiments, and I dare say of Sisson's; but with the important qualification that our hopes may well have been misplaced, the aspirations of an out-distanced generation. Tredell and Pilling and Davis represent a generation neither less stringent than ours, nor with different stringencies, but with a surer sense of priorities among them. What is threatened is the free exercise of the literary intelligence; on that we all agree. But the threats to that freedom don't always come from those quarters where Sisson and I tend to look for them. Perhaps the greatest achievement of PNR (which is to say, in this context, of Michael Schmidt) has been the discovering and identifying of responsible intellectuals like Tredell and Pilling and Davis, to whom must certainly be added certain others like Stephen Romer and Michael Hulse. These younger men are as vigilant as Sisson and I tried to be, but with a better sense of where vigilance is called for. Probably, from a selfish point of view, the chief profit of my several years association with the magazine has been my getting to know C. H. Sisson, whom I take to be one of the most remarkable Englishmen of our time. This is not to say that Sisson has won me over to his view of English history. Rather, in the course of making me take account of his views, Charles Sisson has enlarged my notions of what Englishness consists in. It is not easy to say how far this enlarged awareness, of what is meant by the central letter in our acronym ('N' for 'Nation'), was communicated to our juniors. Much of the time (I speak for myself, but I suspect for Sisson also) there was a besetting

Marin Preda and the New Poetics of Contemporary Political Fiction

(1986). Marin Preda and the New Poetics of Contemporary Political Fiction. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 117-128.

VICTOR SERGE AND THE POETICS OF POLITICAL FICTION

Orthodox poetics of the novel has viewed politically radical fiction as a violation of the novel's proper form. The case against radical fiction is, superficially at least, a strong one, for the novel's development as a form is intimately bound up with a conception of the individual as the site and source of meaning and value. The dilemma for the radical novelist is how to offset the methodological individualism of the novel's typical form and still write a satisfactory novel. Victor Serge wrote several novels in the thirties and forties which succeed as radical fiction by replacing the isolated individual with a collective protagonist. The relevance of his work to South African writing can be seen in the recent controversy between Njabulo Ndebele, who supports the privileging in fiction of individual subjectivity, and radical critics, who have insisted on displacing the individual in favour of the collectivity.