Search

Josef Haslinger’s story "Fiona und Ferdinand" (2006) revolves around a disclosed secret in its narrator’s childhood hometown, which implicates two (deceased) village elders in a decades-old rape and murder mystery long blamed on two anonymous “Russian soldiers.” The discovery of two partial skeletons locked in a bedroom trunk awakens the narrator’s memory: years before as a child, he unearthed the same skeletons after first spying a finger bone buried in a stream. The identification of the bones is central in determining the perpetrators of the rape/murder, but no one -- and in particular the narrator’s mother -- seems interested in hearing the testimony of the crime’s lone eyewitness, now an aged woman. Instead, the revelation evokes a collective effort to willfully impede any investigation into the truth, presumably as a means to maintain the town’s dual pretenses of order and respectability. "Fiona und Ferdinand" emphasizes Haslinger’s preoccupation with the Austrian failure to confront its own past, specifically via families as fundamental units of transmission and memory. In this analysis of the text, I explore Haslinger’s treatment of space, time, and memory in several ways. First, I examine how his notion of “officially sanctioned memory” intersects with a landscape that contains past and present alike. Second, I discuss how bodies, either the violated female body or the rotted skeletons Fiona and Ferdinand, are emblems that raise discussions of space, gender, and memory. Last, I consider collective memory and how it enables processes of forgetting. The reluctance to “dig up the past” is thematized in "Fiona und Ferdinand" using devices common throughout Haslinger’s oeuvre, and this paper will analyze the story through the lens of Haslinger-as-archaeologist, exploring how families, and the memories they possess, are both the key to truth and the foil to its revelation.

Since the mid-1990s in Spain, a renewal of interest in the history of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and Francoist dictatorship (1939-1975) has resulted in a surge of cultural and historiographical production related to the subject, as well as instigating a robust debate about how these difficult periods ought to be officially interpreted and commemorated. This so-called memory boom indicates that there is still an unresolved tension in Spanish society, and while there are many who speak in favour of a final reconciliation, the means of best achieving it are so contested that old divisions appear to have been paradoxically widened rather than diminished. The two novels which are treated in the present study Eduardo Mendoza’s Riña de gatos (An Englishman in Madrid; 2010), and Antonio Muñoz Molina’s La noche de los tiempos (The Night of Memories; 2009) make an important literary contribution to the debate, and although they are very different in tone and style, they evidence a mature, considered approach to the issues. Drawing upon the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope (the organisation of space-time in the novel), this paper will contend that the two works, in their different ways, inscribe and subvert the conventions of the classical historical novel in order to challenge historical myths and open up a dialogic space within which the reader can engage critically with the past. This narrative strategy prevents the war from being plotted as an inevitable tragedy, therefore emphasising the argument made by both novels that, contrary to popular belief, the civil war was not simply the result of a radical polarisation between the mythical “two Spains” eternally at war, but of a complex of factors, both national and international.

"The mystery of the appearance of a new being, a great mystery and an inexplicable one", as Shatov describes the birth of his wife's son, is one of the great unanswered questions in Dostoevsky's Demons. A baby boy is born to free-spirited former governess Maria Shatova just hours before her husband is killed by a secret clique of would-be revolutionaries. Shatov's murder and Kirillov's suicide precipitate the new mother's fatal illness and, consequently, the infant's death within three days of entering the world. Legally Shatov's son, biologically Stavrogin's, this nameless baby represents one of several apparently unfinished subplots within Demons. Why produce a child with such complicated origins, only to kill him off? Why transform a universal symbol of hope into banal tragedy? My paper examines the metonymy between the child's brief life and the novel's theme of abortive radicalism, both of which are linked by the figure of the nihilist midwife, Arina Prokhorovna Virginskaia.

The Caucasian spa resort is a significant setting in Russian literature of the nineteenth century. This paper will trace the origins and evolution of Russian fictional writing about watering places like Piatigorsk and Kislovodsk from romanticism until the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time it will consider the semiotic theories of Iurii Lotman’s Tartu-Moscow School and the ‘transtextual’ apparatus of the French narratologist Gérard Genette as ‘toolboxes’ for work on place in narrative.

This paper proposes that the forgotten Earl's Court Spanish Exhibition of 1889 provides a valuable window onto the complex relationship between the British and Spanish Empires at the moment of one's expansion and the other's fragmentation. Part I assesses the limited archival evidence together with media reports from both Spain and Britain to uncover the Exhibition’s origins in London’s Spanish expatriate business community and its takeover by British businessmen with interests in Latin America. Part II reconstructs the Exhibition’s layout and contents in order to explore how the contrasting geocultural logics of Spain’s renewed self-projection as a modern Empire and the longstanding British obsession with Spain’s Islamic past play out in the exhibitionary space and its contents. Part III analyses the rhetorical and imaginative strategies employed in British press coverage of the Exhibition, to argue that their coded representations of Spain and Spanish culture open the door to understanding the Exhibition in the context of Spain’s partial absorption into Britain’s nineteenth-century ‘informal empire.’