Making a Whore of Freedom: Büchner's Marion Episode
No moment in Georg Büchner's drama has been assigned more significance as a marker of his radical modernity than the "Marion episode." Apparently unprecedented in form and content, this brief, enigmatic exchange between a prostitute and the protagonist of Dantons Tod [Danton's Death] is taken as the archetype of Büchner's jagged, proto-montage aesthetic, as the first example of his proto-psychological focus on the close rendering of sensation, and as the foundational statement of what is taken to be his proto-nihilist repudiation of history. This essay suggests that such impressions are mistaken. It reveals the Marion episode to be a tightly constructed allegory of French Revolutionary history, and one that takes as its precedent and pretence the most widely known work of pre-Revolutionary pornography in Europe, the once-forbidden Thérèse philosophe [Thérèse the Philosopher]. Linking the pornographic to the political, mirroring each in the other, the Marion episode, it suggests, does not use eroticism to break with history so much as to illuminate it, figuring the Revolution as a process shaped and driven by a libertine structure of desire that its violence exhausts and destroys. Rather than marking out Büchner as a proleptic modernist, the "Marion episode," it concludes, places him firmly, with Baudelaire, in second-generation modernity, registering the emergence of the modern from the destructive violence of the past.
Representing the French Revolution : literature, historiography, and art
Why is the anniversary of the French Revolution celebrated on July 14, the day the Bastille was stormed, rather than on August 26, the day the Declaration of the Rights of Man was signed? Why don t the French do as the Americans, who see their revolution epitomized by the signing of the Declaration of Independence? There is surely something to be learned from contemplating the difference between these two ways of representing a revolution, writes James Heffernan. In this volume, he and 13 other distinguished scholars consider representations of the French Revolution in literature, historical narratives, and art as central to understanding it. Challenging the idea that history is a body of fact separable from fictions wrought by literature and the visual arts, they show that study of a major historical event inevitably leads to study of representation."
Communist History: An Annual Bibliography (2005)
The subject of this bibliography is the scholarly literature of communist history. For the USA coverage is extensive. For the rest of the Anglophone world coverage is selective, while coverage for the rest of the world is more selective still. Coverage of the former and presently communist countries is largely limited to works dealing with the Communist parties of those countries. Anti-communism is covered selectively, with somewhat more emphasis on its interaction with communism than its nature as a movement/ideology per se. Coverage of related topics, i.e. the labor movement, Marxism, other strains of radicalism, etc., is highly selective and limited to items directly relevant to communism. For coverage of current reportage (newspapers, news weeklies, journals of opinion, Internet/WWW discussion lists, etc.) see the Newsletter of the Historians of American Communism and the Historians of American Communism Discussion List (h-hoac@h-net.msu.edu). The Bibliography is organized into seven sections, listed below. Sections 1–5 are form and genre based (monographs, serials, etc.), while sections 6 and 7 are format based (sound and visual, electronic). Entries are arranged alphabetically within each section. Where the number of entries warrants it, a section is divided into USA and Other. There is no index. Please be aware that most citations for items in electronic format are listed under their appropriate form/genre, i.e. articles in electronic serials are listed under serials. Section 7 (Internet, WWW, etc.) only contains citations for items in forms and genres irreducibly unique to the electronic environment, i.e. discussion lists (and postings and threads therein) and for those web sites and other electronic resources not subsumed under categories 1–7. Items cited are from the calendar year in the title of the Bibliography, with two exceptions, Internet/WWW items, where publication/creation date information is often unavailable or indeterminate, and older items not cited