Vol. 25 No. 1 (2024)
Artes

The Orphans of Love

PDF HTML
Alberto Castelli
Hainan University, China
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59533/Verb.2024.25.1.2

Published 07-06-2024

Keywords

  • Allende,
  • Barthes,
  • Duras,
  • Nietzsche,
  • Recalcati

How to Cite

Castelli, A. (2024). The Orphans of Love. Verbum – Analecta Neolatina, 25(1), 27–50. https://doi.org/10.59533/Verb.2024.25.1.2

Copyright (c) 2024 Alberto Castelli

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

The psychological tension between intimacy and distance, self-revelation, and estrangement accounts for much of the fascination and allure Marguerite Duras’ The Lover and Isabel Allende’s The Japanese Lover exert upon their readers. While both texts concern a knotty tangle of characters searching for love in the wreckage of the 20th Century, central to the narrative is the enigma of the absence. Love is a muted passion, a dialectical interplay between presence and absence, between creation and destruction, the “how much” the author reveals or conceals has to do with how much love can endure.

PDF HTML

References

  1. Adler, Laure (1998): Marguerite Duras. Paris: Gallimard.
  2. Alphant, Marianne (1984): “Duras a l’atat sauvage” and interview with Marguerite Duras. Liberation.
  3. Barthes, Roland (1978): A Lover’s Discourse, trans. by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.
  4. Bishop, Michael (1998): The Poetry of Marguerite Duras. In: Bettina L. Knapp (ed.) Critical Essays on Marguerite Duras. New York: G. K. Hall. 178–194.
  5. Calder, John (1996): Obituary: Marguerite Duras (4 March 1996) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-marguerite-duras-1340299.html
  6. Castelli, Alberto (2019): The Disenchantment of History and the Tragic Consciousness of Chinese Postmodernity. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 21.4. https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.3085
  7. Cixous, Hé1éne & Michel Foucault (1976): A propos de Marguerite Duras. Cahiers Renault-Barrault 89: 8–22.
  8. Derrida, Jacques (1991): Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. In: Peggy Kamuf (ed.): A Derrida Reader. New York & London: Harvester.
  9. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1989): The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Penguin.
  10. Duras, Marguerite (1985): The Lover, trans. By Barbara Bray. New York: Pantheon.
  11. Feal, Rosemary G. & Yvette E. Miller (eds.) (2002): Isabel Allende Today: An Anthology of Essays. Pittsburgh, PA: Latin American Literary Review Press.
  12. Genova, Pamela A. (2003): Marguerite Duras and the Contingencies of Modern Autobiography: ‘L’Amant’. Modern Language Studies 33(1/2): 44–59. https://doi.org/10.2307/3195307
  13. Goffman, Erving (1959): The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
  14. Hart, Patricia (1989): Narrative Magic in the Fiction of Isabel Allende. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses.
  15. Hellerstein, Nina S. (1991): ‘Image’ and Absence in Marguerite Duras’ ‘L’Amant.’ Modern Language Studies 21(2): 45–56. https://doi.org/10.2307/3194870
  16. Kristeva, Julia (1989): Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia, UP.
  17. Kristeva, Julia & Katharine A. Jensen (1987): The Pain of Sorrow in the Modern World: The Works of Marguerite Duras. PMLA 102(2): 138–152. https://doi.org/10.2307/462543
  18. Lacan, Jacques (2015): Transference: the Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VIII, trans. by B. Fink. Malden, MA: Polity.
  19. Ladimer, Bethany (1999): Colette, Beauvoir and Duras: Age and Women Writers. Gaines-ville: University Press of Florida.
  20. Leader, Darian (1997): Promises Lovers Make When It Gets Late, New York: Faber & Faber.
  21. Marini, Marcelle (1977): Territoires du feominin avec Marguerite Duras. Paris: Minuit, 1977. https://doi.org/10.3917/minui.marin.1977.01
  22. Marini, Marcelle (1985): Une femme sans aveu. L’Arc 98: 6–15.
  23. Martinoir, Francine de (1984): Rev. of L’Amant, by Marguerite Duras. La Nouvelle Revue Franqaise 383: 92–95.
  24. Morgan, Janice (1989): Fiction and Autobiography/Language and Silence: L’Amant by Duras. The French Review 63(2): 271–79. http://www.jstor.org/stable/394759
  25. Murphy, Carol (1982): Alienation and Absence in the Novels of Marguerite Duras. Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum.
  26. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1974): The Gay Science, trans. by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage.
  27. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2006): Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. by Adrian del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
  28. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1990): Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin.
  29. Plato (2008): Symposium, trans. by M.C. Howatson. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  30. Recalcati, Massimo (2019): Mantieni il bacio. Milano: Feltrinelli.
  31. Ruddy, Karen (2006): The Ambivalences of colonial Desire in Marguerite Duras’s “The Lover”’. Feminist Review 82: 76–95. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400263
  32. Shabrang, Hoda & Karimi, Golnaz (2020): Post-Colonial Reading of Isabel Allende’s The Japanese Lover. International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation.
  33. Stoler, Ann Laura (1989): Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th Century Colonial Cultures. American Ethnologist 16(4): 634–660. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1989.16.4.02a00030
  34. Sundquist, Eric J. (1993): To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  35. Tateichi, John (1984): And Justice for All: An Oral History of the Japanese American Detention Camps. New York: Random House.
  36. Taylor, Sandra C. (1993): Jewel of the Desert: Japanese American Internment at Topaz. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
  37. Thompson, Zoë Brigley (2016): Beyond Symbolic Rape: The Insidious Trauma of Conquest in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover and Eileen Chang’s ‘Lust, Caution.’ Feminist Formations. 28(3): 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2016.0041
  38. Vircondelet, Alain (1994): Duras: A biography, trans. by Thomas Buckley. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press.
  39. Williams, James & Janet Sayers (2000): Revisioning Duras: Film, Race, Sex. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. https://doi.org/10.5949/UPO9781846313943
  40. Yeager, J. A. (2001): Colonialism and Power in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. In: J. B. Winston & L. C. P. Ollier (eds.) Of Vietnam. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.