Hokenson, Jan W.

“Building Cosmopolitical Solidarity from the Antigone.” takes an in-depth look at
how the Antigone by Sophocles has been used by social movements and
social/politically concerned playwrights, theorists and activists as either a tool for
discursive and performative resistance, or as a way to reinforce status-quo state rule
since at least the Enlightenment to present day. I argue that Sophocles’ characters
Creon and Antigone are not ideal images for social movements who seek a
cosmopolitical democracy. Rather it is to Sophocles’ Chorus and the Watchman that we
must turn when proposing democratic cosmopolitanism. Thus, a new communication
approach is proposed: a choral dialogue driven by pragmatic logic and employing an
aesthetic, often comedic, improvisational experience. Further, this work strives to unite
theories from social science, social movement theory, rhetoric, philosophy and theatre.
Its aim is to offer practical tools for social movements who wish to gain international,
cosmopolitical, stature and to encourage a progressive democratic space. Core study
groups include the Project for a New American Century, Reverend Billy and the Church
of Stop Shopping, ACT-UP, and the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army.

The ceuvre of Jeanne Marie Le Prince de Beaumont, the public intellectual whose
pedagogical journals and epistolary novels were routinely shelved in private eighteenthcentury
libraries alongside the works of the period's most famous philosophes, today
remains virtually unknown. Beyond the scant available studies limited to her pedagogy
and fairy tales, it is time to explore the theoretical aspects of those and other of her texts
as significant alternatives to traditional Enlightenment discourse as epitomized in the
contemporary philosophes.
Through her personal roles of governess to British and French aristocracy, editor
of a French-language periodical featuring such contributors as Voltaire and Graffigny, and author of internationally recognized pedagogical manuals, the most famous of which
included her timeless version of "Beauty and the Beast," Beaumont challenged a nascent
female audience to actively participate in the intellectual discourse of their society, and
used her real-world experience to develop a pedagogical methodology founded on the
ideals of thought, debate, and action ("penser, parler, agir"). A Cartesian insistence on
the separation of mind and body informed much of her argument in favor of women's
intellectual capacity, and carried through to her discussion of such socio-political topics
as women's equality, agrarian reform, religious tolerance, and social stratification. Not
just a gatekeeper of information or a synthesizer of male-produced theories on education
and other issues of social concern, she was rather an innovative thinker advancing active,
personal commitment to public issues at all levels regardless of gender or social status.
Also, promoting theories rooted in the mentoring of women by women as a means of
personal realization, Beaumont further advanced French Enlightenment universalism
through debate, reason, and action.

As one of the founders of the realist novel, Balzac is praised for
having invented returning characters and interwoven chronologies that
serve to challenge the decadent social mores of his time, but critical
discussions of Balzacs's work continue to neglect his use of satire in
social criticism. Different modes of satire occure in his LePere Goriot
(1835), Le Bat de Sceaux (1829), Gobseck (1830), La Maison
Nucingen (1837), Le Depute dArcis (1847), and La Femme
abandonnee (1822), which together attest that Balzac achieves his
ambition to become both the Rabelais and the Moliere of his era.

In their essays and fiction, both Virginia Woolf and Christa
Wolf address epistemological limitations inherent in
patriarchy. In A Room of One's Own, Woolf investigates the
gendered roles of author and character in Western literature
and literary tradition. In Voraussetzungen einer
Erzaehlung: Kassandra, Wolf analyzes the history and
repercussions of Western patriarchal social structures in
aesthetics and politics. Woolf's Between the Acts and
Wolf's Nachdenken ueber Christa T. and Kassandra enact
literary transitions past a prescriptive epistemology, which
categorizes all experience according to gendered
preconceptions of reality, to a unified view of aesthetic
experience. Moreover, critical response to their writing
reflects an historically grounded shift in interpretation.
Woolf's contemporaries were interested in stylistic and
technical innovations. Critics writing after 1970 have
focused chiefly on the epistemological implications in the
works of both authors.

Although they have been neglected in the critical study of A Ia Recherche de
temps perdu. staircases play a crucial role in the great architecture of Proust's text.
Evoking the most recent theories of time and space, the Proustian staircase at once moves
and docs not move; it is both fluid and tl·ozcn, as an object in material space and in the
mental space of memory. From simpler architectural construct to overarching metaphor,
the staircase transfonns into a space-time amalgam resonating throughout the text. From
grand marble staircases to fetid back stairs, Proust also uses stairways to dramatize
ascending, socially ambitious characters and abject, declasscd failures . More than just a
representation of social hierarchy or scientific progress, however, Proust's staircases
model life and time, both their progression and their decay, and ultimately the coming-towriting
of the narrator.

Emile Zola 's Rougon-Macguart novels describe the essential
corruption of the Second Empire. In the cycle of novels,
this epoch of rapid industrialization, before it ended in
the Franco-Prussian debacle of 1871, enriched th e
entrepreneurial Rougon branch but brutalized the proletarian
Macquart branch of Zola's socially symbolic family. The
majority of critics, past and present, either neglect or
regret one major aspect of Zola's fictional portrayal of the
period: the cumulative animal and machine imagery in the
cycle's meticulously prepared settings, diction, epithets,
and names. Such intricate veins of imagery constitute
Zola''s architectonic symbolism. And the author's didactic
sub-texts, especially in Le Ventre de paris, L'Assommoir,
Nana, Germinal, and La Bete humaine, give the cycle its
universality and its humanistic power.

Since 1970, translation studies have broken the dichotomous mold of the "word for word" or "sense for sense" translation, shifting from a linguistics focus to a new approach that investigates the context and confluence of the social/political factors that form the cultural background of a language. In the light of this "cultural turn," this study comparatively investigates the apparent differences between the two versions of the novella "Maldito amor" and "Sweet Diamond Dust" by the critically acclaimed Puerto Rican Rosario Ferre. To read Ferre's two versions taking into account translation theorist Lawrence Venuti's concepts of "foreignizing" or "domestication" of a text, evidences the need of new theoretical formulations to critically situate these rare cases of authors who "write between languages," and (re)create their work in another language.

Although China provides the stage for most of the action of La Condition Humaine, the presence of Europe is felt throughout the text. In this ostensibly historical novel, Malraux dramatizes the tragic events that took place in Shanghai in March and April 1927: a failed coup attempt by marxist revolutionaries and the bloody scission between general Tchang-Kai-Shek's Kuomintang and the communist party. Europe is thus present in the very premises of the story, through marxism. The influence of the Old Continent permeates all the characters in one way or another, even those from Asia, mainly China, who display this influence in their political, social, religious and artistic outlook or behavior. Malraux uses the characters of the story to deliver a subtle though scathing critique of Europe, in sharp contrast to the traditional, pre-World War One depiction of the continent as the center and provider of culture for the whole world. Europe was the center of the universe, the source of all solutions and explanations in all fields of endeavor, solidly established on the concepts developed since the Renaissance: rationalism, materialism, and individualism. These concepts, which also gave birth to capitalism, were all present in the European colonial system imposed on the new territories and are the object of Malraux's critique.

The reading of Nadja may seem effortless at first, given that the novel's two hundred pages include fifty pages of illustrations. These pictures are of two kinds, photographs and drawings. Breton's different expressive modes, verbal and graphic, combine two opposite worlds, the written reference to the real Parisian places and the surreal sphere depicted in the avant-garde portraits and drawings. One of the primary surrealist technique is to mix different elements, such as illusion, the fantastic, and the dream in order to create a new world, free of any banal reality or logic to transport the reader out of mundane time-space. Therefore, the readers' problem is to determine whether these pictures are a graphic enhancement supplementing the verbal text, or on the contrary, a disjunctive element added to disturb the reader and to confuse the understanding of the verbal text with graphic enigmas.

In The Power and the Glory, Travels with My Aunt, Our Man in Havana, and the short story "Under the Garden," texts in which Graham Greene often alludes directly to Cervantes's Don Quixote, this modern novelist uses Cervantean techniques of fictionality to explore the relation of the fictive and the real. Greene's pervasive theme of escaping a mundane existence and crossing into a new realm, a world created by the character's imagination, is elucidated by Wolfgang Iser's critical concept of boundary-crossing and related categories of transgressive fictionality. Particularly in these texts, Greene demonstrates his literary historical position as an inheritor of the Quixote and of Cervantes's awareness of the novel as, in Robert Alter's phrase, a "self-conscious genre."