Steven Ungar

Modiano and Sebald: Walking in Another's Footsteps

This article studies Patrick Modianos Dora Bruder (1997) and W.G. Sebalds Austerlitz (2000) in conjunction with a contemporary literature of diaspora grounded in the extended aftermath of World War II. Both texts straddle fiction and testimonial accounts such as memoirs, letters, and video/audio recordings. In addition, both raise questions with which traditional historians seldom contend, even when they group these questions under the category of memory. What understanding of the recent past might these two narratives promote? What do they imply—individually or as a set—concerning the nature and function of the historical subjectivity that literature can convey? Each in its own way, Dora Bruder and Austerlitz override conventions of literary genre by mixing elements of novel, autobiography, and essay. Accordingly, language becomes a prime point of inquiry in conjunction with the double question most likely to be raised in terms of the historical record: who is writing and to what end or purpose? These questions, in turn, direct inquiry to enunciation and point of view as components of historical subjectivity associated with the literature of a post-World War II diaspora.

Introduction: The Powers of Cinema

THE ESSAYS IN THIS VOLUME are the product of two workshops— the first held at the Château de la Bretesche in Brittany in 2007, with a 2009 follow-up at the Dartmouth College Minary Center in New Hampshire—on the general topic of militant cinema. Addressing slippery terms such as “engagement,” “commitment,” “activism,” and “militancy,” we eventually enlarged the frame to formulate the topic as “The Powers of Cinema.” Because of our collective conversations at these workshops, followed by individual rethinking and rewriting, the resulting articles intersect and talk to each other, creating a network of themes that echo and reverberate across the present volume. Each of the contributors approaches the overall topic from a specific angle, and with different aims and assumptions. As a result, the articles explore gradations and even combinations of disclosure, denunciation, critique, and militancy. Several essays reassess the significance of well-known films by reframing them within a pointed political analysis. Sue Harris compares four films produced over more than three decades that look at a single political scandal: the disappearance and probable murder of Moroccan independence leader Mehdi Ben Barka. Steven Ungar looks back on René Vautier’s Afrique 50 from the perspective of a longer-term analysis of colonial cinema not available when the film appeared in 1950. Ivone Margulies scrutinizes Eric Rohmer’s Triple Agent under a political lens seldom applied to that filmmaker. Other essays bring classical questions of militancy to bear on specific films. Martin O’Shaughnessy assembles a corpus of recent documentaries about the world of work, asking what level of agency workers have attained in contemporary France, and what contribution the films’ representations of workers have made toward supporting their struggles. Still other essays explore the question that Dalton Krauss poses pointedly: Can cinema change the world? Nathalie Rachlin sees that question in juridical terms as a matter of witnessing and justice. Lynn Higgins takes it more literally as a matter of how we see, and how cinema can make us see differently. Other concerns cutting across these themes include: the legacy/aftermath of colonialism (Harris, Margulies, Ungar, Watts); the social dimensions and potential effectiveness of comedy (Krauss, Higgins); the construction of his-

Atmosphère, atmosphère: On the Study of France Between the Wars

Street Noises: Parisian Pleasure, 1900-1940 by Adrian Rifkin and Shanghai on the Métro: Spies, Espionage, and the French Between the Wars by Michael B. Miller are test cases for issues of historiography related to period and duration in the study of France between 1919 and 1940. Of added relevance to these issues is the fact that Rifkin and Miller both question distinctions between elite literary cultures linked to book publishing and new forms of mass reproduction enhanced by technologies of sound reproduction and illustration. A concluding excursus explores recent theories of urban space symbolized by the street as a site of interaction and exchange.

R.B. Polygraphe

Introduction to the special issue This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol5/iss2/2