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Cuban author Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) was a key figure in the foundation of contemporary Latin American fiction. By taking a critical position vis-a-vis the restitutionary current in Latin American studies, James Pancrazio provides a highly innovative re-reading of Carpentier's work.
This collection of essays grew out of a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute directed by Frederick A. de Armas and contains essays by the director, some of the visiting faculty, and the participants. The book seeks to develop the link between mythology and the comedia through a number of approaches, including astrology, cartomancy, pre-Socratic elemental cosmology, iconography, hagiography, metamorphoses, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Jungian principles, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Santayana's poetics, syncretism, gender studies, and Vedic theories.
Many twentieth-century Spanish American writers sought to give voice to their countries' native inhabitants. Drawing upon anthropology and literary theory, this book explores the representation of orality by major Spanish American anthropologist-writers: Lydia Cabrera, Jose Maria Arguedas, and Miguel Barnet. These writers played a quintessential role of the Spanish American writer from colonial times to the present: they inscribed the mythical world of a vanishing Other by creating a poetic effect of orality in their ethnographies and narratives. This book argues that supposed differences between oral and written culture are rhetorical devices in the elaboration of literature, specifically modern fiction in Spanish America. Fictionalization of the oral requires adherence to the theory of a great divide between orality and literacy. Because the texts considered here are predicated on the ideality of speech, a contradiction underlies their shared desire to salvage oral tradition. This book explores how anthropologist-writers have addressed this compelling dilemma in their anthropological and narrative writings. at Tufts University.
This work examines four Latin American writers--Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Cesar Vallejo, and Ricardo Piglia--in the context of their respective national cultural traditions. The author proposes that a consideration of tragedy affords new ways of understanding the relation between literature and the modern Latin American nation-state. As an interpretive index, this tragic attunement sheds new light on both the foundational works of modern Latin American literature and the counter-foundational literary critiques of modernization and nation-building. Topics include Borges's short story "El Sur" in relation to the Argentine "civilization and barbarism" debate, Juan Rulfo's novella "Pedro Pa...
This groundbreaking study examines how modern Colombian literature—from Gabriel García Márquez to Juan Gabriel Vásquez—reflects one of the world’s most tumultuous entrances into globalization. While these literary icons, one canonical, the other emergent, bookend Colombia’s fall and rise on the world stage, the period between the two was inordinately violent, spanning the Colombian urban novel’s evolution into narco-literature. Marking Colombia’s cultural and literary manifestations as threefold, this book explores García Márquez’s retreat to a rural romanticism that paradoxically made him a global literary icon; the country’s violent end to the twentieth century when its largest economic export was narcotics; and the contemporary period in which a new major author has emerged to create a “literature of national reconstitution.” Harkening back to the Regeneration movement and extending through the early twenty-first century, this book analyzes the cultural implications of Colombia’s relationship to the wider world.
Rosman persuasively demonstrates how they explore ways of being in common - the communal relation - when the notion of a common being - a totalized conception of community - is shown to be untenable. In doing so she incorporates and looks beyond her predecessors theoretical resources to urgent contemporary preoccupations with how to imagine identity in a "post-national" moment."--Jacket.
Neoliberalism in Mexico - characterized by free markets, by the privitization of thousands of State enterprises, and by influence from Washington and Wall Street - has forever changed the political climate, making it necessary to theorize new paths for the future. Indeed, liberal ideology champions not only economic freedom but individual liberty as well: In the canon of liberal texts, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations coexists with John Stuart Mill's The Subjugation of Women, a biting commentary on gender inequality. The debate over neoliberalism in Mexico is not exclusively a left-right conflict. Many leftists see ties with the U.S. as a means to promote social change even though they oppose neoliberal economics; many on the right, while supporting neoliberalism, fear social influences from the North. This volume focuses on the neoliberal debate in plays by four Mexican authors: Sabina Berman, Vicente Lenero, Victor Hugo Rascon Banda, and Alejandra Trigueros. These playwrights stage the complexity of neoliberalism, providing insight into a global trend and its manifestation in Mexico. Stuart A. Chapel Hill.
Broken Souths puts Latina/o and Latin American poets into sustained conversation in original and rewarding ways.
Furthermore, she argues that this contest has been enacted literally and figuratively on the stage of human bodies as sites of domination and resistance. Examining works by Pia Barros, David Benavente and the Taller de Investigacion Teatral, Ariel Dorfman, Diamela Eltit, and Isabel Allende, Political Bodies engages emergent feminist critiques of authoritarianism in terms of gender and class, history and language.
Science Fusion draws on new materialist theory to analyze the relationship between science and literature in contemporary works of fiction, poetry, and theater from Mexico. In this deft new study, Brian Chandler examines how a range of contemporary Mexican writers “fuse” science and literature in their work to rethink what it means to be human in an age of climate change, mass extinctions, interpersonal violence, femicide, and social injustice. The authors under consideration here—including Alberto Blanco, Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla, Sabina Berman, Maricela Guerrero, and Elisa Díaz Castelo—challenge traditional divisions that separate human from nonhuman, subject from object, culture from nature. Using science and literature to engage topics in biopolitics, historiography, metaphysics, ethics, and ecological crisis in the age of the Anthropocene, works of science fusion offer fresh perspectives to address present-day sociocultural and environmental issues.