Volume 55, Issue 2

Émeric Bergeaud wrote Stella (1859), his novelistic account of the Haitian revolution (1791–1804), at a most turbulent moment in Haitian history. Faustin Soulouque rose to power in the late 1840 s and soon began to pursue his political opponents with violent means. Coming from a “Boyerist” background, Bergeaud fled the country in 1848 and settled in St. Thomas where he worked on his novel while his health deteriorated. Despite his precarious life in exile, Bergeaud remained silent about Soulouque in his decisively political novel Stella . As Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Madeleine Dobie, and others have shown, the history of slavery has often been silenced in literature and public debate, but what does it mean for Bergeaud to silence the present and focus on the past? I argue that Stella in fact makes a significant intervention in the debates about mid-19 th -century Haiti. Instead of confronting Soulouque directly, however, Bergeaud addresses a pair of structural problems of which I consider Soulouque and his policy emblematic expressions: decolonization and nationalization. Most existing readings have emphasized Bergeaud’s reflections on history, but in this contextualized analysis, I show that Bergeaud looks not only to the past but also and importantly to nature and natural right(s) philosophy in his novelistic search for a way forward for Haiti.

Realistic conceptions of genuinely fantastic literary or mythical characters, such as Theodor Fontane’s Melusine, represent what Umberto Eco refers to as “floating individuals.” These characters are transfictional as they are highly decontextualized from their narrative origin and thus a challenge for intertextuality and intermedia studies: the name implies a relationship with another text or medium but the representation does not offer any information about the relationship’s quality. To examine the range of (re-)presentation strategies and to shed some light on the transfictional background of the character as it is represented in Theodor Fontane’s novel Der Stechlin , I borrow ‘interfigurality’ as an umbrella term from Wolfgang G. Müller. Fontane’s myth-reflexive intermedia strategies come fully to the fore in contrast with the unknown novel Lady Melusine by Eufemia von Ballestrem on the one hand and in comparison with contemporary art on the other. The localization within an intermedia network reveals that the practice of the literary re-production of realistic characters as a “work on myth” (Blumenberg) is reflexive and critical or affirmative towards popular usage such as branding, labeling, or namedropping.

Ever since their translation in the course of the 20 th century, the works of Kafka have been widely appreciated by French intellectuals. Kafka’s greatest admirers include Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Paul Sartre, both of whom consider his work an exemplary illustration of their own poetical-philosophical views. This is remarkable, because Blanchot’s and Sartre’s respective views are generally conceived of as opposites. Apparently, then, these two authors who are so divergent in their philosophical views and literary criticism, as well as in their own literary works, find themselves on the same page in their appreciation of Kafka. I will argue that this shared appreciation not only reveals some unexpected points of agreement between them, but also facilitates an interesting intellectual encounter between Blanchot and Sartre in the late 1940 s. It is, we will see, only on the basis of an agreement with regards to Kafka’s work that their ways can part.

Comparative research focused on medieval literature continues to be characterized by many desiderata, especially with regard to the fruitful relationships between late medieval verse narratives, mæren , and the famous Italian storyteller Boccaccio and his Decameron . This paper brings to light four significant Middle High German verse narratives from the 13 th or early-14 th century that demonstrate remarkable similarities with stories contained in Boccaccio’s Decameron . While the study of Boccaccio’s sources has traditionally been focused primarily on Old French (fabliaux) or Latin sources, here I introduce a number of texts that were composed just a few decades earlier and which express, in surprising parallel, strikingly similar themes that could be straight from the textbook the Italian poet might have drawn from. We have, of course, no specific evidence as to Boccaccio’s direct familiarity with late-medieval German literature, but the motif analysis reveals major parallels between the examples in The Decameron and in those mæren .