Journal of European Studies articles from September 1993

Journal of European Studies archives from September 1993

Image and body: the optical alignment of Walter Benjamin and Luis Bunuel.
September 1, 1993... Language, mechanized as it were into a barrel-organ, supplies at once both instrument and tune.... I have attempted to illustrate the present state of our language, in its relation to literature, by a press-room of larger and smaller...

Changing perceptions of Jules Michelet as historian: history between literature and science, 1831-1874.
September 1, 1993... Intellectual relations between historians and literary critics have been particularly problematical since the 1950s, because the nature and cultural status of History have been seriously challenged by literary theorists and philosophers....

Something about nothing: Michel Tournier's 'La Jeune Fille et la mort.'
September 1, 1993... Lichtenberg sported ponderously with nothing: |A leg of mutton is better than nothing, nothing is better than Heaven, therefore a leg of mutton is better than Heaven.'[2] More to my present point, Swift: |I am trying an Experiment very frequent...

The triumph of chance over necessity. (linear versus circular concepts of historical progress)
September 1, 1993... It is a widely accepted belief among the French that Jean Baudrillard is the most pugnacious of their thinkers today Those who are familiar with his later writings, from the eighties onward, may not find it hard to share this belief. His style...

The Myth of Absolutism. Change and Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy.
September 1, 1993... This thoughtful, wide-ranging and often spikey book is a critical examination of the concept of absolutism. Henshall re-examines early-modern European history, more particularly that of France and England, in order to focus on the limits of...

The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century. Decline, Enlightenment, and Revolution.
September 1, 1993... This collection of sixteen essays and an introductory chapter, is based upon a 1987 conference. There are four sections: Three Dutch Revolutions, 1747, 1787, 1795; The Dutch Republican Tradition; The Dutch Enlightenment; and Dutch Culture in...

European Theatre: 1960-1990, Cross-cultural Perspectives.
September 1, 1993... 'European Theatre': the title raises impossible hopes, and the editor was wise gently to winch them down in his Introduction. "There may be more than one story; there is more than one way of telling', he writes (p. 1). Nevertheless, he does not...

Acts of Literature.
September 1, 1993... Acts of Literature is a collection of ten essays or excerpts, and an interview with Derrida from 1989. Of the ten essays, only two have not before appeared in English (at least in large part), namely 'Mallarme' (pp. 110-126), and 'Aphorism...

Dialogue and Narrative Design in the Works of Adalbert Stifter.
September 1, 1993... In the wake of Adalbert Stifter heute. Londoner Symposium 1983 and M. and E. Swales's Adalbert Stifter: A Critical Study (Cambridge, 1984), more individual aspects of Stifter's work have become the subject of the close critical scrutiny they...

Subversive Sublimities: Undercurrents of the German Enlightenment.
September 1, 1993... The inept and pretentious title arouses the worst forebodings. The first thing to be subverted in this volume is English orthography: 'compell', 'supercede', 'disspel', 'reputiate', 'perfectability', 'loose' (for 'lose') and 'ethymologically'...

Lenz: 'Der Hofmeister.'
September 1, 1993... The 'Critical Guides to German Literature' constitute an excellent series. The range of texts covered is broad and well chosen, and the individual contributors have managed to tackle their texts in a clear and approachable way that is suitable...

Herder Yearbook: Publications of the International Herder Society.
September 1, 1993... Yearbooks proliferate. In the field of German studies, the old-established ones are being joined by new entrants to the field, with North American scholarship well to the fore. Any Germanist thinking of starting up a yearbook in the area of...

Music and German Literature: Their Relationship Since the Middle Ages.
September 1, 1993... In his novel The Lyre of Orpheus (New York, 1988: 36) the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies writes 'musicians don't like dabblers, and literary men don't like people who cross barriers - especially musical boundaries.' German culture has...

The Divided Heritage: Themes and Problems in German Modernism.
September 1, 1993... The title of this collection of essays, the result of a symposium staged in the mid-1980s in connection with the Royal Academy's mammoth exhibition of twentieth-century German painting and sculpture, is misleading. Given that the critical...

Briefe an den Sohn 1904 bis 1945.
September 1, 1993... Kathe Kollwitz, who, in 1919, at the age of 52, became the first woman member of the Prussian Akademie der Kunste, is relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. This is probably because her understated and largely representational work...

Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Theatre.
September 1, 1993... Professor Yates's comparison and contrast of the careers of Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal deals principally with the moral, social and political issues addressed in their plays or raised by the responses of the theatre and press of the time to...

Schnitzler's Vienna.
September 1, 1993... In Schnitzler's Vienna Dr Thompson sets out 'to establish Schnitzler's position as a chronicler and critic of the society of his day', 'to structure Schnitzler's treatment of the various individual members of his own society and the social...

Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848-1849.
September 1, 1993... There are, broadly speaking, three main interpretations of the 1848 revolution in Germany: as a revolution which aimed to bring about national unity; as a social conflict or class war; and, finally, as a modernization crisis. On each account...

Understanding Thomas Bernhard.
September 1, 1993... This well-informed study delivers what the series editor promises: an explanation of the sociological and historical background of the writer and an account of his literary qualities. In the introduction Dowden argues that Bernhard is a...

Die zweite Geburt: Figuren des Jugendlichen in der Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols.
September 1, 1993... Peter Grotzer's principal interest in this broadly conceived comparative study is how the concepts of 'youth'/'youthfulness' are translated into literary characters and what their metaphorical function is. He deliberately avoids widening the...

Stefan Heym: The Perpetual Dissident.
September 1, 1993... The sub-title of Peter Hutchinson's book on Stefan Heym, 'The perpetual dissident', is well chosen. Throughout his turbulent career, whether in the Third Reich, the United States of America, the German Democratic Republic, or now...

Victor Serge: The Uses of Dissent.
September 1, 1993... An awareness of the contradictions that inhabit the commitment to a political cause and a sensitivity to the dialectical conflict in literature are characteristics which, in Bill Marshall's Victor Serge. The Uses of Dissent, define Serge's...

Paul I of Russia: 1754-1801.
September 1, 1993... This impressive biography may be read on three different, though interrelated, levels - as a study of the enigmatic tsar's life and personality, as a history of his brief reign (1796-1801), culminating in his assassination in a palace coup, and...

A History of Russian Poetry.
September 1, 1993... This is a pioneering work: the first attempt, in English, at a comprehensive history of Russian poetry, spanning a thousand years from the late tenth century almost to the present. There has been plenty of recent scholarship on particular...

Antichrist.
September 1, 1993... These two volumes form part of a new series, published with the help of a desk-top program. They are excellently produced and provide a fascinating contribution to the study of Russian literature of the twentieth century. Antichrist is the...

Russkii literaturnyi avangard. Materialy i issledovaniia.
September 1, 1993... These two volumes form part of a new series, published with the help of a desk-top program. They are excellently produced and provide a fascinating contribution to the study of Russian literature of the twentieth century. Antichrist is the...

Christianity and the Arts in Russia.
September 1, 1993... In 1988 the millennium of the official conversion of Russia to Christianity was marked by a plethora of conferences worldwide. The results, though bibliometrically impressive, have tended to be too uneven in quality and too diffuse in theme to...

Time Within Time: The Diaries, 1970-1986.
September 1, 1993... The diaries of the late Soviet film director, Andrei Tarkovskii, date from 1970 to the year of his death, 1986. Already published in German in 1989 under the more suitable title of Martyrolog, they have not yet appeared in Russia - not for...

Mikhail Bulgakov - A Critical Biography.
September 1, 1993... For many years specialists have followed with dose attention the publications in Russian and English of the eminent British Bulgakov scholar, Lesley Milne. Drawing on an immense range of published and archival sources, including a number of...

'The Brothers Karamazov' and the Poetics of Memory.
September 1, 1993... This is one of the most interesting and thoughtful studies on The Brothers Karamazov in recent years. Dr Thompson combines rigorous literary analysis with sensitive integration of the spiritual redemptive vision so fundamental to this novel....

Invented Truth: Soviet Reality and the Literary Imagination of Iurii Trifonov.
September 1, 1993... The cover of this comprehensive study of the man who was arguably the best prose writer of the last Soviet decades shows him seated in a living room in America. It is taken from a photograph credited to the Ardis Photo Archives, reproduced...

Power and Pleasure. Louis Barthou and the Third French Republic.
September 1, 1993... Seventy-two years of age at the time of his death in 1934, Louis Barthou spent nearly half a century in public life. In that time, he served as a lawyer, journalist, deputy, senator, cabinet minister and commissioner of the League of Nations....

Litterature et fascisme: les romans de Robert Brasillach.
September 1, 1993... Rasson's book begins promisingly. Making clear his personal lack of sympathy for Brasillach's political attitude he aims, through a critique d'opposition, to arrive at an understanding of what is specifically fascist about Brasillach's novels...

Zola: 'L'Assommoir.'
September 1, 1993... It is not entirely perverse to calculate that a comprehensive critical bibliography (of a Grant & Cutler kind) of work devoted to L'Assommoir since 1876 would have precisely the proportions of this volume. For it may serve to bring into sharper...

The Proustian Fabric.
September 1, 1993... During the reading aloud of Francois le Champi a double censorship occurs as Marcel's mind wanders and his mother omits the love-scenes. Proust thus provides early on in the novel an instance of that partiality (subjective in that we can never...

Urban Rivalries in the French Revolution.
September 1, 1993... When Jacques Chirac signed the decree which transferred the prefecture of Var from Draguignon to Toulon on 4 December 1974 there followed violent demonstrations. The move was seen as going against the right-wing government's avowed policy of...

Voices from the North African Immigrant Community in France: Immigration and Identity in Beur Fiction.
September 1, 1993... In his recent publication, Voices from the North African Immigrant Community, Alec G. Hargreaves has produced the most conclusive study to date of North African Immigrant literature in France. In this work he charts the main tendencies of Beur...

Rimbaud's Theatre of the Self.
September 1, 1993... In the impeccable and challenging reading of |Le Bateau ivre' which opens Rimbaud's Theatre of the Self, James Lawler writes: This is not only ecstasy, but the awareness of ecstasy: the self defines as it goes.' Lawler's own project is one of...

Essays on the French Revolution: Paris and the Provinces.
September 1, 1993... Despite the Annales tradition and the lead given by Richard Cobb, many historians still see Paris as the fountainhead for all Revolutionary events. Wanting general conclusions, they neglect regional differences. French centralization even...

Moliere a l'Ecole republicaine: De la critique universitaire aux manuels scolaires, 1870-1914.
September 1, 1993... Professor Albanese has found an intriguing subject and treats it in a fashion that is well-informed and informative, interesting and revealing, even if not entirely persuasive. Though he provides a survey of the development of critical...

Mauriac: Therese Desqueyroux.
September 1, 1993... Mauriac's slim, best known novel is one of the most discussed and rewarding works of French fiction of the modem period. To undertake a study of this size and hope to indicate even some of the novel's richness and diversity is therefore a...

The Use of Abuse: The Polemics of the Dreyfus Affair and Its Aftermath.
September 1, 1993... With the opening of the floodgates to gutter-journalism in France after the passing of the 1881 press law, there was everything to encourage and very little to stop a stream of abuse being conveyed to the public by the cheapest press in the...

Gustave Flaubert: 'Madame Bovary.'
September 1, 1993... Stephen Heath's book follows hard on the heels of Rosemary Lloyd's Madame Bovary (Unwin Hyman, 1990) with a consequent compounding of the problems of repetition and focus inherent in the genre of the critical guide. The dual emphasis of the...