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Although various critics have drawn attention to the importance of cinema in Patrick Modiano's writing, there has so far been no substantial or systematic account of the phenomenon, and a first goal of this study is to remedy that omission. Secondly, in a period when the momentum of cultural narrative practice has been heading more in the direction of cinema than of literature, Modiano's work offers a more general insight into some of the cultural and artistic tensions between literature and cinema in contemporary France. This study argues that, rather than being in conflict with cinema, Modiano's narratives help define a certain modus vivendi, a way for literature to participate with cinema in what appears as a new and more variegated space in French culture.

Viele Archive bewahren Zeugnisse zum Schrecken des Holocaust, die in historische und sozialwissenschaftliche Forschungsarbeiten Eingang gefunden haben. Zusätzlich zu Dokumenten, die deskriptiv verfasst wurden mit Blick auf ihre wissenschaftliche Nachnutzung, existieren Zeugnisse, die in literarischer Intention verfasst wurden: Sie haben zum Ziel, Erfahrungen in den Konzentrationslagern nachzuvollziehen, ohne dass notwendig Fakten beschrieben werden. In diesen Arbeiten verschwimmt die Grenze zwischen Geschichte/Wissenschaft und Literatur, denn sie greifen, obwohl sie als literarische Werke konzipiert sind, auf autobiografische Zeugnisse zurück; die Verfasser/innen versuchen, das Grauen der eigenen Erfahrungen zu erklären, indem sie diese fiktionalisieren. Es sind Arbeiten, in die wahre Begebenheiten einfließen, die aber in literarischer Intention erzählt werden, Arbeiten, die sich an ein breites Publikum wenden und teilweise erheblichen Einfluss gewonnen haben. Dies ist der Fall für das Werk von Jorge SEMPRÚN, ein spanischer Autor, der versuchte, die Wahrheit in seiner literarischen Arbeit "zu erfinden". Seine autobiografischen Novellen sind in dem Niemandsland der Autofiktion angesiedelt.

With the supposition that architectural discourse has an interdisciplinary nature, this study aims to display the way literary fiction borrows several themes from architectural discourse in order to form its "literary spaces" as well as the way architectural discourse borrows several themes from other social sciences, especially from sociology. Thus, new wave science fiction writer J.G. Ballard's literature provides a fruitful resource for the construction of this study. It will be demonstrated that spatial data within the five selected works of Ballard exist in a similar way within architectural discourse of the recent past that criticizes modern architectural movement via several themes. An analysis will be made parallel to the discourses of the critiques of modern architectural discourse. In this sense, intersecting both the discourse of architecture and that of Ballard, there emerge three common themes to focus on: social isolation, class discrimination as a result of social isolation, and alienation in the modern world. While displaying the mediatory role of architectural discourse between sociology and literary fiction through reading in the spatiality of the text, the study will also draw lessons to be learned from Ballard's works emphasizing the production of design theory through the field of discourse.

Verlagsinfo: In this trenchant and lively study Brian McHale undertakes to construct a version of postmodernist fiction which encompasses forms as wide-ranging as North American metafiction, Latin American magic realism, the French New New Novel, concrete prose and science fiction. Considering a variety of theoretical approaches including those of Ingarden, Eco, Dolezel, Pavel, and Hrushovski, McHale shows that the common denominator is postmodernist fiction's ability to thrust its own ontological status into the foreground and to raise questions about the world (or worlds) in which we live. Exploiting various theoretical approaches to literary ontology - those of Ingarden, Eco, Dolezel, Pavel, Hrushovski and others - and ranging widely over contemporary world literature, McHale assembles a comprehensive repertoire of postmodernist fiction's strategies of world-making and -unmaking.

In Informe contra mí mismo Eliseo Alberto appropriates and configures as literary genre the political informe that Cuba's socialist government has solicited from thousands of its citizens over the years. In Alberto's informe (originally "commissioned" by the Cuban government, but elaborated and marketed for the international literary community some twenty years later) the state ideological apparatus becomes, literally, the pre-text for a narrative of disillusionment. Alberto's text is more, however, than an instance of revisionist history, since the ambitious experimentation with narrative form and historiographical convention represents a serious inquiry into the nature of these discourses. Indeed, while the binaries of literature and history, poetry and politics, storytelling and argumentation structure the narrative, they are not resolved, ultimately, in favor of one term over the other, but rather performed and deconstructed. Informe contra mí mismo is published in a historical juncture in which Cuba appears to face just two choices, represented by the metanarratives of socialist revolution, on one hand, and of the inexorable globalization of capital, on the other. These choices, however, offer Cuba a national narrative either of protracted resistance to global capitalism under a totalitarian regime or of wholesale capitulation. Informe contra mí mismo begins to lay the discursive groundwork from which alternative narratives might emerge. (Cuban Stud/DÜI)