John Neubauer

Cultural History after Foucault

Both as historian and maker of culture, Foucault infused numerous disciplines of study with a new conceptual vocabulary and an agenda for future research. His ideas have called central assumptions in Western culture into question and altered the ways in which scholars and social scientists approach such issues as discourse theory, theory of knowledge, Eros, technologies of the Self and Other, punishment and prisons, and asylums and madness. The contributors to this volume indicate Foucaults achievements and the suggestive power of his work, as well as his methodological weaknesses, historical inaccuracies, and ambiguities. Above all, they attempt to show how one can use Foucault to go beyond him in opening new approaches to cultural history. Though comprehensiveness was not attempted, their essays broach the major controversial aspects of Foucauldian cultural history - the position of the subject, the fusion of power and knowledge, sexuality, the historical structures and changes - and they explicitly analyze them with respect to antiquity, the Renaissance, and the nineteenth century. In this collection, Neubauer presents analyses by historians, literary scholars, and philosophers of the entire, transdisciplinary range of Foucaults oeuvre, emphasizing the rich suggestiveness of its agenda. The breadth of the undertaking makes it suitable for seminars and graduate courses in numerous departments.

Globalizing Literary History

In the last decades, national and transnational literary histories have continued to take different approaches. The typical new national literary histories have discarded the teleology of grand narratives by chopping up the chronological line into individual essays on specific subjects, each attached to a single date. They compensate for the temporal disintegration with a cultural broadening of literature’s scope and occasional international references. The transnational counter trend has been producing regional histories (of Latin America , East-Central Europe , the Iberian Peninsula and Scandinavia ), a history of literature in the European languages sponsored by the ICLA, and schemes for global approaches. Moving towards globalization poses the problem of coordinating vast and divergent empirical information. Two suggestions may help moving towards global perspectives: 1) replace the traditional period concepts with landmarks based on the introduction of new writing technologies, and 2) conceive of literary and cultural history as a sequence of adaptations. The latter may offer opportunities to interlink culture and biology.

Voices from Exile: A Literature for Europe?

Exile, for all of its pain and suffering, has offered European writers a way to step out of their national linguistic and cultural environment. Did exiled writers make use of this opportunity, and start writing a ‘literature for Europe’? By no means all did; many of them sealed themselves off in order to maintain the purity of their mother tongue, while others ‘opened up’ and adjusted to the culture of their host country, often even by adopting its language for their writing. Considering these questions, Pascale Casanova’s La Republique mondiale des lettres 1 is of great help, although her models are Joyce, Beckett, and other writers, who were not exiles in a literal sense. Many ‘genuine’ exiles retained the national mentality of their youth.

Zrinyi, Zriny, Zrinski

Opera tends to be an international art. The national operas that emerged towards the middle of the nineteenth century represent a deviation, because they made use of librettos in the vernacular and often employed elements of a native musical tradition. More often than not, they thematized events from the national past in order to strengthen the nations sense of identity. I argue that national operas ought to be seen as an important element of the national awakening that took place in Europe, especially in its Eastern and Southern parts, and relate its textual, musical, and institutional dimensions to the linguistic and literary awakenings. Yet, paradoxically, national awakenings and national operas often relied on foreign ideas and artistic currents. Ivan Zajcs Croatian national opera, Nikola Šubih Zrinski (1876), for instance, is based on Theodor Körners anti-Napoleonic German play Zriny (1812), which, in turn, was inspired by Friedrich Schlegels Vienna lectures on literary history and Hungarian historical materials. By means of this case study I show that, contrary to their explicit ideology, national awakenings and national operas seized whatever came their way, often reductively adopting hybrid or foreign materials for national purposes.

Reflections on the History of Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe

When I was eleven, Budapest radio would often interrupt its programme with the warning: ‘Achtung, achtung, Lichtspiele. Krokodil Gross, Krokodil Gross, kommen Nelke, Strandbad, Eidechse’, a grotesque coding that signalled the coming of allied bombers.1 The metal sirens, so different from those of Homer, started shrieking, and whistling bombs exploded near and far from the shelter I shared under an assumed name with some fi fty people. More than fi fty years later, on 23 May 1996, Mario Valdes from the University of Toronto asked me to join a long-term collaborative project to write a Comparative Literary History of East-Central Europe. Mario’s original invitation named three other scholars and spoke of a single volume that was to be published in 1999. I gladly accepted the invitation — largely in order to understand better those crocodiles from my childhood during the war. Little did I know that the three other editors would soon step down, that the single volume would swell to four, and that it would take fourteen rather than three years to complete the project. Luckily, I was able to team up with Marcel Cornis-Pope, an ideal partner, in turning crocodiles into handsome elephantine volumes. We stubbornly persisted in pursuing the project because we believed that all people in East-Central Europe — whatever their ethnicity, religion, language, or gender — had had similar traumatic experiences, and that literature was a powerful means to deal with such memories. Where else but in literature and fi lm can one seriously consider fl ying crocodiles?

Crises of Memory and the Second World War (review)

Crises of Memory and the Second World War, by Susan Suleiman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 286 pp.

Jules Verne et le Danube

29.95. Remembering, its personal, cultural, and political functions, has been for some time a major concern of cultural theorists such as Maurice Halbwachs, Paul Ricoeur, Jan and Aleida Assmann, and Pierre Nora. Building on their studies, Susan Suleiman carefully and subtly analyzes in her new book a number of concrete cases that exemplify, in various ways, crises of memory. Such crises are, for her, a moment of choice, and sometimes of predicament or conflict, about remembrance of the past.... At issue in a crisis of memory is the question of self-representation. In the crises of memory that she examines, individual self-representation overlaps with-and sometimes becomes the crux of-collective self-representation; put another way, individual remembrance takes on collective significance, occasionally becoming a conflicted affair of memory (p. 1). The examined cases concern revisions or corrections of an individual or collective remembrance of World War II and the Holocaust, memories that raise questions about the workings and the reliability of memory. Of particular interest to Suleiman is the function of literature (and, generally, art) in remembering traumatic experiences:[C]ontinuous revision is the literary performance of the working through trauma (p. 158). Shifting memories signify thus the strength, not unreliability of literature. The book starts out with three essays (on Sartre, the Aubrac Affair, and commemorations of Jean Moulin and Andre Malraux) that analyze revisions of what could be called glorifying memories of the French resistance. The next three chapters on artistic memories concern Marcel Ophulss film hotel Terminus, Istvân Szabos film Sunshine, and Jorge Sempruns Buchenwald memoirs. Of the last three chapters, the first one juxtaposes Binjamin Wilkomirski s forged Auschwitz memoirs with Eli Wiesels revisions of his first account of the train ride to Auschwitz. The second one analyzes transformed images of the Holocaust in the experimental writings of George Perec and Raymond Federman, two writers whom Suleiman assigns to the 1.5 generation of survivors, i.e., persons who were children during World War II. The final chapter constitutes reflections on forgetting and forgiving. With the exception of Szabos Sunshine (English and Hungarian), Wilkomirskis Fragments (first published in German), and Federmans writings (in English, though he was born in France), the examined works belong to the French cultural sphere, although many of the authors have a non-French, mostly Eastern European background. Suleiman deliberately avoids broad general theses and conclusions, but her essays are interconnected, above all, by means of two preoccupations: confrontations of individual, communal, and official memories, and a preoccupation with the value of artistic and fictional memories, especially in their relation to the professional memories of historians. In her view, memories are dynamic, in that they are constantly revised, rewritten, and repeated with difference. Does this make them less reliable? Some professional historians and all those who seek some kind of indubitable truth may think so. But Suleimans criteria are broader and more flexible. Moving towards a general historical truth may occur when a nation reconsiders its past (always involving, of course, only a segment of the population). As Suleimans first chapters show, reconsidering the postwar view that an overwhelming part of the French population resisted the Nazis and the Vichy government was a painful revision of the image that most French people had of their country, but a necessary step towards an adequate view of what happened. As we know from the history of many other nations, such admissions of guilt and shame are always very painful and politically sensitive. …

Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen or Literary History with Multiple Timelines

AbstractTowards the end of his life Jules Verne wrote four novels that involve the Danube basin:Mathias Sandorf (1885),Le château des Carpathes (1892),Le secret de Wilhelm Storitz (1910), andLe beau Danube jaune (written in 1901; first published 1988). Neither the Danube itself, nor a new preoccupation with women or death can be said to link all four of them. Alternatively, one may consider these texts as parts of an unintended “roman du fleuve,” a cycle ofFamilienromane in Freud’s sense, in which the plot is based on conflicts among family members. Seen this way, Verne’s narrators portray clashes among siblings in the “Danubian family,” sympathizing now with this now with that nation. The main characters of these novels are not, however, defined by their ethnic affiliations.nLe pilote du Danube (1908), a radically revised version ofLe beau Danube jaune by Verne’s son Jules, may be linked to Péter Esterházy’s work, both for being mentioned inHahn-Hahn grófnő pillantása — lefelé a Dunán (1991) and for representing a rewriting of the father.

Vargas Llosa's La Ciudad y los perros and the European Novel of Adolescence

Frantisek Palacký, the great Czech historian and leader of the conservative nationalists, opened his 1866 essay on Austria’s Concept of State by asking whether Austria is a unified whole with a single purpose, destination, and mission. Is it, he asked, “a living organism” or “just a conglomerate of nations and people without order and internal cohesion” (1)? Palacký was for several decades an Austro-Slav. He believed that the various nations and ethnic groups could be accommodated in a federated Monarchy, within which the various nationalities would enjoy equal right. But his question could be answered at the time only negatively. In the first place, of course, because in 1866 it was fairly obvious already that Austria was going to share the power with the Hungarians but not with the Czechs, let alone the other nationalities. Furthermore, whatever way power was to be shared, no configuration was to be a “living organism”, for this applied then only to people who were held together by a common language. Indeed, the metaphor of a biological organism guided not just Palacký’s thinking but all the national awakenings of the nineteenth century that led to the founding or reestablishment of the nations now existing in East-Central Europe. This leading image of most historiography and literary histories in the region was reinforced in the nineteenth century through Darwinism and social Darwinism, and it lived on even in movements that turned against the romantic tradition. The Polish positivists of the 1870s, for instance, denounced the romantic dreams but their “realistic” program of building an integrated society spoke of “Organic Work”. Advocating cooperation and the sharing of responsibility, they treated society as an organism and stressed the harmonic interaction among its parts. Thinking of society and history in terms of organic bodies and their growth is still very much with us, though it has become evident that the metaphor of a “living organism” often leads to exclusion and violence, as well as the internal suppression of elements considered “foreign”, diseased, or infectious. Organic concepts still structure most literary histories, though perhaps in a less pathological vocabulary: they describe how the biographies and the oeuvres of writers “develop” in “phases” (the organicism

The Fin-de-Siecle Culture of Adolescence.

In his paper, Vargas Llosas La Ciudad y los perros and the European Novel of Adolescence, John Neubauer investigates Mario Vargas Llosas 1962 novel about cadets in a military school located just outside of Lima, Peru. The life of a gang (the dogs) in the city and on the premises is described from constantly changing perspectives. Neubauers article looks at Vargas Llosas work in terms of features one finds in narratives about adolescents in European literatures around 1900 and where these texts can be read with three main foci found in them. Thematically, the texts focus on the city and urbanity and on the problematics of the concept and workings of peer groups while stylistically the texts show their authors experimentation with new narrative forms. John Neubauer, Vargas Llosas La Ciudad y los perros and the European Novel of Adolescence page 2 of 5 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 3.2 (2001):