Meridian Critic

This study of cyborg as a myth developed by the American feminist Donna Haraway in “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 1991) emerges at the crossroads of feminist theory, technology, and science fiction. The aim of this article is to explain and define the cyborg myth, and then to propose a lecture of cyberfeminism - and to a large extent of postfeminism - from which it originates. Finally, it will be of interest to see to which extent cyborg is not only a concept used to discuss identity, as for the “colored women” cited by Haraway in her manifesto, but also a writing which concerns more specifically the power to survive to difference.

Through a simultaneous comprehension of Michel Houellebecq’s novel La Possibilité d’une île (2005) and Juan Eduardo de Urraza’s novel La Sociedad de las mentes (2001), this article attempts to demonstrate that the novelistic representation of the post-human, which is built in a strong relationship with new technologies, is invariably linked to an ontological reflection on the nature of beings, which can define their essence only beyond the limits of traditional humanity. After having been characterized as agents who, by their neo-technological configurations, dominate a collapsed humanity, the post-human protagonists are analyzed through their response to the question of existential dissatisfaction, while facing their problematic subjectivity. Cognitive and anthropological perspectives are finally revealed, breaking up with those of the traditional novel and emphasizing the human experience of the contemporary, in its links to new technologies.

In the period between 1870 and 1914, the development of new technologies—systems of transportation, communication, and mechanical reproduction—gave rise to the tourist industry and flooded the Parisian marketplaces, museums and Universal Expositions with cultural artifacts and photographs brought back from France’s colonies. This mass influx of “objets sauvages” fundamentally altered the metropolitan population’s experience and imagination of the colonies, and caused a new form of exoticism to emerge, as modernist French authors such as Guillaume Apollinaire invented new literary techniques to express this change in perspective. In this essay, I argue that the aesthetic principles developed by Apollinaire in his essays on art, including “simultanéisme,” “nouveau monde,” and “esprit nouveau,” and put into practice in his dramas and poetry, reflect the emergence of a modernist form of exoticism in literature at the turn of the 20th century, as a consequence of the proliferation of new forms of media and transportation that provided access to the distant cultures that inspired artistic work.

The corporatization of the publishing world has lead to a change in the canon formation from the traditional author-based kind to one that manufactures taste to suit a consumerist audience. Poetry as an art form that counters the violence of bureaucratic governments and MNCs has suffered a serious decline for no reason except that it has the potential for social transformation. The general decline of the humanities and social sciences, with the exception of economics - which has a strong institutional bias -, reflects the overall control mechanisms at play in the production of certain knowledges termed as useful while excluding others. This is the context where one needs to place the avant-garde poet. The avant-garde poet is as much a fiction writer as she could be a pamphleteer, a graffiti activist, a drug-induced mystic or simply anyone overwhelmed by a sense of nothingness. My paper recognizes in avant-garde poetry the defiant and consciously stylized nature of writing as opposed to the inspired and dreamy kind of creativity, while it shows how such a stylization can lend itself to conformism of another kind. The avant-garde poet walks the thin line that separates political conformism from creative rebellion. To challenge conventional forms of writing is not merely to reject mainstream notions of the fall of the poem as opposed to the rise of a fiction-based readership, but to work proactively to dismantle institutionalized forms of discrimination and serve as a voice to the marginalized that Fanon metaphorically refers to as “the wretched of the earth.” My paper examines what it means to be an avant-garde poet in the global context.

Science-fiction appears as the place where technology is joined to literature. However, this alliance seems artificial insofar as technology appears generally as a superficial and heterogeneous element, which doesn’t really integrate the narrative. The study of technology in Niourk (1957), Oms en série (1957), and L’orphelin de Perdide (1958) by Stefan Wul shows the function of technological objects in the techniques of anticipation and the intertextual dimension of texts. Indeed, the technological object, as a new invention, participates in the futuristic projection. Besides, present under several forms in science-fiction works, it reveals the membership of Wul’s novels to the science-fiction domain. The technological object also reveals the intertextual relation between Wul’s novels and the myth of Prometheus.

In this article I will explore the dynamics of the relation between literature and technology by concentrating on the didactics of literature. Indeed, teaching literature must take into account the latest technological developments and the new media forms, especially since the pupils are supposed to get acquainted with these in order to be active participants in the public life of today’s information society. I will consequently describe an experiment implemented in a class of Swedish pupils at upper secondary level. They worked in small groups with an ICT facility which was used to present French speaking writers from outside continental France. This teaching method gave the pupils the opportunity to be not only passive consumers, but active producers of knowledge, something that contributed to enhancing their creative and collaborative competences.

Cristian Tudor Popescu, a well-known journalist and fiction author, is one of those writers whose work has blurred the boundaries between reality and imagination. In our view, both his early short-stories and editorials, which made his name, belong to the “imaginative fiction” genre. By seemingly incongruous means, his writings make up for the shortcomings of the present and display the intellectual and political ability to discuss the social environment, restructuring our daily experience interpretation framework. The mundane is the launching pad for insightful inquiries on the social intercourse and present-day public strata.

Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain cannot be read only as a novel of time, but also as a novel of technology. It describes the development of a young engineer during the last seven years before the outbreak of World War I and concentrates itself on new technologies. Their risques serve as symbols for human hubris and are debated referring to the shipwreck of the Titanic. The contrast between life/love and death becomes transparent by technical means when the own body is x-rayed and the own prospective death or the death of the beloved is realized, or when the new technology of film (in the ‘bioscope’ cinema) offers the possibility of preserving ghostly phenomena, shadows of transient actions by actors beyond death.

The present paper is part of a larger study, dealing with aspects related to Batman as an iconic figure in American popular culture. One of the issues is that of technological devices employed by the superhero in the comic books and their by-products – graphic novels, animated series, movies, novelizations –, and of their relation with the different phases in the development of the capitalist society, from industrialization to consumerism. We found it necessary to trace that in older works of non-mainstream literature, such as Jules Verne’s featuring Captain Nemo, in order to better understand the evolution of technology and its impact on the reading public.

Certainly, at the beginning of the 21st century we are facing a change regarding the cultural paradigms that cannot keep intact neither our reality nor our way of dealing with it. We no longer live in a monocultural world, and the influence of the ICTs in arts and life itself is increasing day by day. We can not escape the analysis of this process with respect to the literature and our own concept of reader. This paper aims to analyse the influence of the two new paradigms in the literary text is, the new questions proposed to us by the new texts, and their supports, and how these questions are to be structured and should be interpreted.

This article aims to analyze the presence of Fashion in Spanish poetry since 1950 with special emphasis on the correlation between the use of a lexicon specifically reserved for fashion and the construction of a female poetic subject that seeks its place in a poetry scene historically constructed by male voices.

Marguerite Duras in L'Amant offers through creative writing, a speech representation of the past. The past is always approached as a mass problem for narrative authority in question. Photography as a narrative tool emphasizes the artificiality of all representation of the past. To do this, photography is discussed as a means to subvert the representation of the past and not as confirmation of the event. Our article has also aimed to show the limits and possibilities of fiction when it tries to represent the past of the group or individual. Fiction and writing of history intersect to emphasize that the event has been forgotten despite the efforts of authorities to anchor the narrative to narrative referents personal and historical. Writing ‘‘oblivion’’ remains dependent on spatiotemporal metaphors on which it rests. Forgetfulness and memory fit in time and space in various perspectives and distances of travel discourse.

Charles Dickens’ Bleak House is a masterpiece that explores the eerie world of everyday-life in London and the impact of the preconscious and the unconscious realms, traces of death and misery, madness and dreams as phenomena in the familiar world of routine. In the center of the dangerous fog that penetrates everything, the Chancery Court is puzzling with his inscrutable processes, destroying many people whereas only the lawyers and judges seem to benefit from the proceedings. In Kafka’s novel The Trial, too, the mysterious court leads the sinister undertow to the fluctuation of the protagonists between dreams and insanity, and a penetration of the familiar everyday world with an uncanny effect and order, the usual power of the unconscious.

The paper is an analysis of identity negotiation and construction in Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, a novel which begins with Umberto Eco’s statement that “Characters migrate”. This summarizes the book: Pip descends on the island of Bougainville while the children on the island escape to the world of Dickens. The main aspects that will be analyzed revolve around the topic of identity construction: the perception and defining of “the other”, mining as a metaphor for the intrusion exerted by colonizing powers, the finding of a voice and the story of an initiation, that of Matilda’s continuous negotiation of her relationship with Charles Dickens’s universe.

In King Lear, Shakespeare uses the techniques of reduction and negation in order to baffle the reader’s consciousness. Basically, characters reduce language to a means of distorting, deceiving and betraying. Shakespeare packs his work with negations to the extent that everything familiar becomes abolished altogether, the consequence being a massive reduction in the possible implications of language and the reader’s failure to form solid mental images.

In I.L. Caragiale's comic plays we sometimes find, apart from the proper characters -those indicated by the author in the "Persons of the Play"-, a number of characters who do not appear on stage, being instead evoked by those who do appear. Our remarks refer especially to the comedy A stormy night (O noapte furtunoasã), in our attempt to show that such characters, despite not making an appearance on stage and not taking direct part in the dialogue, do exist in the dramatic universe of the comedy. They are presented - mainly in narrative sequences - by the onstage characters, their lines are reproduced by the latter, and they have obvious dramatic functions. The absent characters indirectly add details that give depth and round off the portrayal of onstage characters, as well as contributing to the evolution of the dramatic conflict.