"A classic of modern literature, Paradiso was first published in Cuba in 1966. Written by Cuba's most important poet, it tells the story of Jose Cemi, who, in the wake of his father's death, comes of age in turn-of-the-century Cuba. Weaving the exhilarations and defeats of love into extraordinarily erotic verbal tapestries, Lezama Lima narrates Cemi's search for his dead father and for an understanding of love and the powers of the mind."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This book focuses on the novel Paradiso of Cuban author José Lezama Lima (1910-1976), and in particular on the protagonist José Cemí. It examines the development of Cemí according to the three distinct phases detailed by Lezama: the 'placentario' world of family protection, the awakening to the exterior world and the subsequent friendships made, and the eventual encounters with Oppiano Licario. Cemí's progression, and his growing ability to interpret and create texts, is analysed as analogous to the reader's progression through the novel. In this respect, both the reader and Cemí are obliged to interpret the complex symbolism according to interpretative skills acquired from the text itself. In a similar fashion, the connection between Cemí's 'guide' Licario, and the author Lezama is investigated. By exploring these connections between reader and protagonist, author and character, the author of this work suggests a radical and hitherto unexplored approach to the text of Lezama.
Lyrical, provocative, and highly original—a groundbreaking book by one of America’s smartest young poet-critics. In When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness, Rowan Ricardo Phillips pushes African American poetry to its limits by unraveling “our desire to think of African American poetry as African American poetry.” Phillips reads African American poetry as inherently allegorical and thus “a successful shorthand for the survival of a poetry but unsuccessful shorthand for the sustenance of its poems.” Arguing in favor of the “counterintuitive imagination,” Phillips demonstrates how these poems tend to refuse their logical insertion into a larger vision and instead dwell indefinitely at the crux between poetry and race, “where, when blackness rhymes with blackness, it is left for us to determine whether this juxtaposition contains a vital difference or is just mere repetition.” From When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness: Phillis Wheatley, like the epigraphs that writers fit into the beginning of their texts, is first and foremost a cultural sign, a performance. It is either in the midst of that performance (“at a concert”), or in that performance’s retrospection (“in a cafe?”), that a retrievable form emerges from the work of a poet whose biography casts a far longer shadow than her poems ever have. Next to Langston Hughes, of all African American poets Wheatley’s visual image carries the most weight, recognizable to a larger audience by her famed frontispiece, her statue in Boston, and the drama behind the publication of her book, Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral. All of this will be fruit for discussion in the pages that follow. Yet, I will also be discussing the proleptic nature with which African American literature talks, if you will, Phillis Wheatley.
In this volume, Deckard analyzes authors such as Malcolm Lowry, Leonard Woolf, Juan Rulfo, Wilson Harris, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Romesh Gunesekera to make a materialist study of the relation between paradise myths and the ideologies and economies of colonialism and neo-imperialism in literature from Mexico, Zanzibar and Sri Lanka.
What comes after postmodernism in literature? Hyperbolic Realism engages the contradiction that while it remains impossible to present a full picture of the world, assessing reality from a planetary perspective is now more than ever an ethical obligation for contemporary literature. The book thus examines the hyperbolic forms and features of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and Roberto Bolaño's 2666 – their discursive and material abundance, excessive fictionality, close intertwining of fantastic and historical genres, narrative doubt and spiraling uncertainty – which are deployed not as an escape from, but a plunge into reality. Faced with a reality in a permanent state of exception, Pynchon and Bolaño react to the excesses and distortions of the modern age with a new poetic and aesthetic paradigm that rejects both the naive illusion of a return to the real and the self-enclosed artificiality of classical postmodern writing: hyperbolic realism.
The Latin American studies collections at many community, junior and four year colleges, and large public libraries often contain materials that are too specialized, uneven, outdated, incomplete, or written in Spanish or Portuguese--thus rendering them essentially useless to English-reading patrons. Better materials are out there, but librarians simply have not had, until now, a good resource guide to help in locating them.This work, designed as an acquisitions tool for colleges and libraries, is an annotated bibliography of approximately 1,400 recommended books published from 1986 through 2000 in the field of Latin American studies. It is divided into chapters that deal with reference works, descriptive accounts and travel guides, the humanities, language and literature, the social sciences, and science and technology. For the purposes of this book, Latin America is defined as all geographic locations south of the Rio Grande. While these are chiefly Spanish and Portuguese speaking regions, works about French, English, and Dutch speaking areas are also included. The literary works of authors living abroad are included if they are considered quintessentially Latin American. Periodicals, children's literature, audio-visual resources, and works about the Hispanic and Latino experience in the United States are not included. The majority of the works presented here were selected based on reviews from Booklist, Choice, Hispanic American Historical Review, Library Journal, Los Angeles Times Book Review, New York Review of Books, New York Times Book Review and Publisher's Weekly; also consulted were the catalogs of major university presses that focus on Latin American studies.
The ‘Special Period’ in Cuba was an extended era of economic depression starting in the early 1990s, characterized by the collapse of revolutionary values and social norms, and a way of life conducted by improvised solutions for survival, including hustling and sex-work. During this time there developed a thriving, though constantly harassed and destabilized, clandestine gay scene (known as the ‘ambiente’). In the course of eight visits between 1995 and 2007, the last dozen years of Fidel Castro’s reign, Moshe Morad became absorbed in Havana’s gay scene, where he created a wide social network, attended numerous secret gatherings-from clandestine parties to religious rituals-and observed patterns of behavior and communication. He discovered the role of music in this scene as a marker of identity, a source of queer codifications and identifications, a medium of interaction, an outlet for emotion and a way to escape from a reality of scarcity, oppression and despair. Morad identified and conducted his research in different types of ‘musical space,’ from illegal clandestine parties held in changing locations, to ballet halls, drag-show bars, private living-rooms and kitchens and santería religious ceremonies. In this important study, the first on the subject, he argues that music plays a central role in providing the physical, emotional, and conceptual spaces which constitute this scene and in the formation of a new hybrid ‘gay identity’ in Special-Period Cuba.
