{"title":"Circular Utopia(s): Alfred Wellm’s Morisco and the Socialist City","authors":"Stephan Ehrig","doi":"10.1093/fmls/cqad008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqad008","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In the context of the German Democratic Republic’s longstanding aesthetic and political discourse on social utopianism, this article will discuss Alfred Wellm’s novel Morisco (1987) and Halle-Neustadt as a key to understanding the relationship between the socialist new town and the East German cultural imaginary. Through Wellm’s novel, the article will argue that the construction of modernist new towns provoked a cultural response engaging with the rift between built reality and the utopian imagination/ambition of the classless, socialist city in different literary and visual media. Evoking Tommaso Campanella’s utopian City of the Sun (1602), the novel critically positions Neustadt within a cyclical Marxist eschatology, simultaneously expressing frustration with and hope for the progress of the socialist project. It therefore also represents the post-Stalin aesthetic shift from grand socialist realist narratives to subjective everyday perspectives, and the revived interest of authors in utopian themes in the 1980s against the backdrop of the Socialist Unity Party’s (SED) claim that socialism had already been achieved.","PeriodicalId":42991,"journal":{"name":"FORUM FOR MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41522983","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Community is the one true capital’: Ideologies of urban self-build groups in Anke Stelling’s Berlin novels","authors":"Hanna Henryson","doi":"10.1093/fmls/cqad006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqad006","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Privately organized collective housing is currently included in agendas for sustainable urban development in a range of European cities as a resource-efficient form of housing that prevents isolation and contributes to social cohesion within urban communities. However, research has shown that the recent surge of different forms of private-collective housing in Berlin could be a driver of gentrification and segregation. This article aims to uncover potential causes of the discrepancies between the ideological, and at times utopian, motivations underpinning self-build housing projects in the former East Berlin district Prenzlauer Berg, and their actual outcomes. I do so by analysing the literary (counter) discourse on self-build groups developed in Anke Stelling’s novels Bodentiefe Fenster [Floor-Length Windows] (2015) and Schäfchen im Trockenen (2018, published in English translation as Higher Ground in 2021). I show that the realization of socially progressive, or even utopian, plans for urban private-collective housing prove difficult, and sometimes impossible, for the characters in the novels, due to the influence of other societal structures such as gender and class inequalities, urban segregation and gentrification, discrimination and the neoliberal logic of individual competition and consumption.","PeriodicalId":42991,"journal":{"name":"FORUM FOR MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42314789","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Queering the Textual Politics of Alba de Céspedes’s Prima e dopo’","authors":"Tommasina Gabriele","doi":"10.1093/fmls/cqad010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqad010","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Alba de Céspedes’s Prima e dopo (1955) has generally been interpreted within the framework of the Italian Resistance and the subsequent disillusionment of Resistance ideals. While taking this interpretation into account, I argue that the central narrative of desire in Prima e dopo is not Irene’s relationship with her lover, Pietro, but Irene’s subversive desire for her maid, Erminia. I analyse and challenge some of the mechanisms and methodologies of Italian literary historiography that create and reproduce the disregard and devaluation of queer desire, specifically lesbian desire, in Italian narratives, and I identify scholarly, cultural and textual mechanisms that have rendered queer desire in Prima e dopo invisible. In sum, this article contributes to an Italian lesbian archive and lesbian literary historiography and argues that a queer reading of Erminia’s role in Prima e dopo enhances our understanding of the post-Resistance framework of the novel and its radical politics.","PeriodicalId":42991,"journal":{"name":"FORUM FOR MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46923362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dostoevsky and Modernity","authors":"Llewellyn Brown","doi":"10.1093/fmls/cqad009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqad009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42991,"journal":{"name":"FORUM FOR MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49223330","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contemporary Values Encounter Classic Illustrations in Rebecca Solnit’s Cinderella Liberator (2019)","authors":"Ana Oancea","doi":"10.1093/fmls/cqac068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqac068","url":null,"abstract":"Rebecca Solnit’s retelling of ‘Cinderella’ in Cinderella Liberator (2019) transforms the fairy tale by infusing a slew of modern ideas into its ‘once upon a time’. Cinderella becomes an independent, active, empowered heroine not only freed from servitude, but able to liberate others in her community from oppression. While the rewriting targets the morals and values of traditional ‘Cinderella’ texts, it is anchored in a specific version of the tale. Cinderella Liberator reuses illustrations Arthur Rackham produced for a 1919 Cinderella gift book by C. S. Evans. This article analyses the interplay of text and image in Cinderella Liberator to establish how the particularities of the Evans/Rackham version inflect the adaptation’s wider discourse on the Cinderella narrative. It focuses on images correlated with the fairy tale’s reassessment of the value and significance of work, the separation of social classes and of external appearance as an indication of moral values.","PeriodicalId":42991,"journal":{"name":"FORUM FOR MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138541862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Newstok, Scott. How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education","authors":"Peter Sutton","doi":"10.1093/fmls/cqad003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqad003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42991,"journal":{"name":"FORUM FOR MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45815363","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Concrete Poetry: A 21st-Century Anthology. Ed. by Nancy Perloff","authors":"Garry MacKenzie","doi":"10.1093/fmls/cqad001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqad001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42991,"journal":{"name":"FORUM FOR MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46237791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Högberg, Elsa. Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy","authors":"A. Dósa","doi":"10.1093/fmls/cqad002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqad002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42991,"journal":{"name":"FORUM FOR MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43350773","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ullyot, Michael. The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England","authors":"Elena Spinelli","doi":"10.1093/fmls/cqad005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqad005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42991,"journal":{"name":"FORUM FOR MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49441957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sainsbury, Daisy. Contemporary French Poetry: Towards a Minor Poetics","authors":"Matilda Nevin","doi":"10.1093/fmls/cqad004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqad004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42991,"journal":{"name":"FORUM FOR MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42994037","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}