Juan Luis Martínez’s Philosophical Poetics is the first English-language monograph on this Chilean visual artist and poet (1942–1993). It has two principal aims: first, to introduce Martínez’s poetry and radical aesthetics to English-speaking audiences, and second, to carefully analyze key aspects of his literary production. The readings undertaken in this book explore Martínez’s intricate textual formalisms, the self-effacement that characterizes his poetry, and the tension between his local (Latin American, Chilean) aspect and the cosmopolitanism or transnationalism that insists on the global relevance of his work. Through his artistic engagement with a number of esoteric concepts—for example, his recuperation of pataphysical “logic” and Oulipian combinatorics, mathematical reasoning, Eastern thought, and the historical avant-gardes—Martínez creates a rigorous quasi-system of citation and erasure that is a philosophical poetics as well as a poetic philosophy. Juan Luis Martínez’s Philosophical Poetics thus addresses all major publications by this groundbreaking Chilean artist and poet in order to read his difficult, experimental texts by focusing on the tension he creates between philosophical, political, literary, and scientific discourses.
Bilingual anthology offers geographic and cultural diversity with stories from Central America, South America, and Spain. Featured authors include Silvina Ocampo, Julio Ramón Ribeyro, Augusto Roa Bastos, and many others.
Poets writing in Spanish by the end of the twentieth century had to contend with globalization as a backdrop for their literary production. They could embrace it, ignore it or potentially re-imagine the role of the poet altogether. This book examines some of the efforts of Spanish-language poets to cope with the globalizing cultural economy of the late twentieth century. This study looks at the similarities and differences in both text and context of poets, some major and some minor, writing in Chile, Mexico, the Mexican-American community and Spain. These poets write in a variety of styles, from highly experimental approaches to poetry to more traditional methods of writing. Included in this study are Chileans Raúl Zurita and Cecilia Vicuña, Spaniards Leopoldo María Panero and Luis García Montero, Mexicans Silvia Tomasa Rivera and Guillermo Gómez Peña, and Mexican-American Juan Felipe Herrera. Some of them embrace (and are even embraced by) media both old and new whereas others eschew it. Some continue their work in the vein of national traditions while others become difficult to situate within any one single national tradition. Exploring the varieties of strategies these writers employ, this book makes it clear that Spanish-language poets have not been exempt from the process of globalization. Individually, these poets have been studied to varying degrees. Globalization has been studied extensively from a variety of disciplinary approaches, particularly in the context of the Latin American region and Spain. However, it is a relative rarity to see poets being studied, as they are in this work, in terms of their relationship to globalization. Taken as a sample or snapshot of writing tendencies in Latin American and Spanish poetry of the late twentieth century, this book studies them as part of a greater circuit of cultural production by establishing their literary as well as extra-literary genealogies and connections. It situates these poets in terms of their writing itself as well as in terms of their literary traditions, their methods of contending with neoliberal economic models and global information flows from the television and Internet. Although many literary critics attempt to study the connections and relationships between poetry and the world beyond the page, few monographs go about it the way this one does. It takes a transatlantic approach to contemporary Spanish-language poetry, focusing on poets on poets from Spain and the American continent, emphasizing their connections, commonalities and differences across increasingly porous borders in the age of information. The relationship between text and context is explored with a cultural studies approach, more often associated with media studies than with literary studies. Literature is not treated as a privileged object of isolated study, but rather as a system of ideas and images that is deeply interwoven with other forms of human expression that have arisen in the last decades of the twentieth century. The result is a suggestive analysis of the figure of the poet in the broader globalized marketplace of cultural goods and ideas. Contemporary Hispanic Poets: Cultural Production in the Global, Digital Age is an important book for library collections in Spanish, Latin American and Iberian Studies, Chicano Studies.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, Argentina was in the midst of its worst economic crisis in decades, the result of years of drastic neoliberal reforms. This book looks at the way ideas about race and nationhood were conveyed during this period of financial meltdown and national emergency, examining in particular how the neoliberal crisis led to the critical self-questioning of the dominant imaginary of Argentina as homogeneously white – allegedly the result of European immigration and the extinction of most indigenous and black people in the nation-building age. The Darkening Nation focuses on how the self-examination of racial and national identity triggered by this crisis was expressed in culture, through the analysis of literary texts, films, artworks and music styles. By considering a wide range of artistic and cultural products, and different forms of racial identity and difference (white, indigenous, Afro-descendant, immigrant and negro as it is understood in local contexts), this study constitutes a timely addition from a literary and cultural studies perspective to recent academic enquiry into race and nation in Argentina.
In The Spanish American Novel, John S. Brushwood analyzes the twentieth-century Spanish American novel as an artistic expression of social reality. In relating the generic history of the novel to extraliterary events in Spanish America, he shows how twentieth-century fiction sets forth the essence of such phenomena as the first Perón regime, the Mexican Revolution, the Che Guevara legend, indigenismo, and the strongman political type. In essence, he views the novel as art rather than as document, but not as art alienated from society. The discussion is organized chronologically, opening with the turn of the century and focusing on novels from 1900 to 1915 that exemplify various aspects of the nineteenth-century literary inheritance. Brushwood then highlights the avant-garde fiction (influenced by Proust and Joyce) of the 1920s as a precursory movement to the “new” Latin American novel, a phenomenon that came into its own during the 1940s. He then examines the “boom” in Spanish American fiction, the period of extensive international recognition of certain works, which he dates from 1962 or 1963. In each era considered, the development of the novel is placed in dual perspective. One view—that of particularly significant novels in light of others published during the same year—is a cross section of the genre at one particular moment. The second view—that of a panorama of novels published in intervals between significant moments in the history of the novel—is more general and selective in the number of books discussed. Combining the historical with the analytical approach, the author proposes that the experience of a novel in which reality has been transformed into art is essential to our understanding of that reality.
Meets the needs of today's teachers and students Gathered to meet the upsurge of interest in Latin America, this collection features major critical articles dealing with the authors and texts customarily taught in colleges and universities in the United States. The articles are in English and Spanish, with a predominance of the former. Surveys a dynamic and exciting area of research Four Latin American writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature: Guatemalan Miquel Angel Asturias, Chilean Gabriela Mistral, Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Chilean Pablo Neruda. Also internationally recognized are the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, and the Chilean Isabel Allende, to name only a few. Moreover, the sociopolitical circumstances of the past four decades of Latin American history, and the growing importance of the region have resulted in the creation of Latin American studies programs in numerous American universities. All of this literary activity hasinspired innumerable dissertations, theses, books, and journal articles. Explores contemporary Latin Americanissues and concerns In the face of such an enormous proliferation of commentary, students of Latin America and its literature need a body of basic texts that will provide them an orientation in the various research areas and new schools of thought that have emerged in the field. Particularly important are the essays and articles that have appeared in periodicals and other sources that Anglo American readers often find difficult to obtain. Individual volumes available: Vol. 1 Theoretical Debates in Spanish American Literature 448 pages, 0-8153-2676-9 Vol. 2 Writers of the Spanish Colonial Period 456 pages, 0-8153-2678-5 Vol. 3 From Romanticism to Modernismo in Latin American Literture 352 pages, 0-8153-2680-7 Vol. 5 Twentieth-Century Spanish American Literature Since 1960 416 pages, 0-8153-2681-5
New World Maker reappraises Langston Hughes's political poetry, reading the writer's leftist works in the context of his practice of translation to reveal an important meditation on diaspora.
