Social Realism and the Contemporary Ecuadorian Novel
Author: Michael Carstens
Publisher:
Published: 1972
Total Pages: 406
ISBN-13:
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Poso Wells
Author: Gabriela Alemán
Publisher: City Lights Books
Published: 2018-08-21
Total Pages: 154
ISBN-13: 0872867811
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCelebrated Ecuadorian author Gabriela Alemán's first work to appear in English: a noir, feminist eco-thriller in which venally corrupt politicians and greedy land speculators finally get their just comeuppance! "In the squalid settlement of Poso Wells, women have been regularly disappearing, but the authorities have shown little interest. When the leading presidential candidate comes to town, he and his entourage are electrocuted in a macabre accident witnessed by a throng of astonished spectators. The sole survivor—next in line for the presidency—inexplicably disappears from sight. Gustavo Varas, a principled journalist, picks up the trail, which leads him into a violent, lawless underworld. Bella Altamirano, a fearless local, is on her own crusade to pierce the settlement's code of silence, ignoring repeated death threats. It turns out that the disappearance of the candidate and those of the women are intimately connected, and not just to a local crime wave, but to a multinational magnate's plan to plunder the country's cloud forest preserve. Praise for Poso Wells: "The story is a condemnation not only of the corrupt businessmen and the criminal gangs that rule Poso Wells but also of the violence against women that plagues Latin America's real slums."—The New Yorker "One part Thomas Pynchon, one part Gabriel García Marquez, and one part Raymond Chandler, Alemán’s novel contains mystery, horror, humor, absurdity, and political commentary … A concoction of political thriller and absurdist literary mystery that never fails to entertain."—Kirkus Reviews "A wild, successful satire of Ecuadorian politics and supernatural encounters. … Alemán’s singular voice keeps the ride fresh and satisfying."—Publishers Weekly "Poso Wells is ironic, audacious, and fierce. But what is it, exactly? A satire? A scifi novel? A political detective yarn? Or the purest reality of contemporary Latin America. It's unclassifiable—as all great books are."—Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream "Poso Wells is brilliant, audacious, doubtlessly playful and at the same time so dark and bitter. A truly unforgettable book."—Alejandro Zambra, author of Multiple Choice
Constitutive Visions
Author: Christa J. Olson
Publisher: Penn State Press
Published: 2013-11-15
Total Pages: 305
ISBN-13: 0271063637
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Constitutive Visions, Christa Olson presents the rhetorical history of republican Ecuador as punctuated by repeated arguments over national identity. Those arguments—as they advanced theories of citizenship, popular sovereignty, and republican modernity—struggled to reconcile the presence of Ecuador’s large indigenous population with the dominance of a white-mestizo minority. Even as indigenous people were excluded from civic life, images of them proliferated in speeches, periodicals, and artworks during Ecuador’s long process of nation formation. Tracing how that contradiction illuminates the textures of national-identity formation, Constitutive Visions places petitions from indigenous laborers alongside oil paintings, overlays woodblock illustrations with legislative debates, and analyzes Ecuador’s nineteen constitutions in light of landscape painting. Taken together, these juxtapositions make sense of the contradictions that sustained and unsettled the postcolonial nation-state.
Imagining Ecuador
Author: LuisA. Medina Cordova
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Published: 2022-11-22
Total Pages: 204
ISBN-13: 1855663589
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWinner of the 2020-21 AHGBI-Spanish Embassy Publication Prize In March 1999, in an effort to stave off financial collapse, the Ecuadorian government suspended all banking operations and froze all bank accounts in the country for a period of five days. This episode, the Feriado Bancario, represents the peak of the worst financial crisis in the nation's history and one which had far-reaching and long-last effects on society, politics, the economy, and cultural production. The very idea of 'Ecuador' was transformed, as Ecuador became a country marked by constant interaction with the world beyond its borders. This book explores how contemporary Ecuadorian authors are reimagining the nation following the Feriado Bancario. Starting from a rereading of Ecuador's national novel, Jorge Icaza's Huasipungo (1930), which saw the nation as rooted in the land, the book examines post-crisis fiction which offers an image of Ecuador as a transnational space. It posits that these novels - Eliécer Cárdenas' El oscuro final del Porvenir (2000), Leonardo Valencia's Kazbek (2008), Carlos Arcos' Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga (2013), and Gabriela Alemán's Humo (2017) - both reflect and explain the new reality of Ecuador as a nation that can no longer be defined by its territory. At the same time, the book uses the Ecuadorian case to challenge the conceptualisation of Latin American literature as 'post-national' and to show how countries on the periphery of the global literary market can, from the very fact of their minoritarian position, enrich and better define World Literature.
British Social Realism
Author: Samantha Lay
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2019-07-25
Total Pages: 159
ISBN-13: 0231501617
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBritish Social Realism details and explores the rich tradition of social realism in British cinema from its beginnings in the documentary movement of the 1930s to its more stylistically eclectic and generically hybrid contemporary forms. Samantha Lay examines the movements, moments and cycles of British social realist texts through a detailed consideration of practice, politics, form, style and content, using case studies of key texts including Listen to Britain, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Letter to Brezhnev, and Nil by Mouth. In discussing the work of many prominent realist filmmakers, the book considers the challenges for social realist film practice and production in Britain, now and in the future.
Degenerative Realism
Author: Christy Wampole
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2020-06-23
Total Pages: 195
ISBN-13: 0231546033
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA new strain of realism has emerged in France. The novels that embody it represent diverse fears—immigration and demographic change, radical Islam, feminism, new technologies, globalization, American capitalism, and the European Union—but these books, often best-sellers, share crucial affinities. In their dystopian visions, the collapse of France, Europe, and Western civilization is portrayed as all but certain and the literary mode of realism begins to break down. Above all, they depict a degenerative force whose effects on the nation and on reality itself can be felt. Examining key novels by Michel Houellebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder, Aurélien Bellanger, Yann Moix, and other French writers, Christy Wampole identifies and critiques this emergent tendency toward “degenerative realism.” She considers the ways these writers draw on social science, the New Journalism of the 1960s, political pamphlets, reportage, and social media to construct an atmosphere of disintegration and decline. Wampole maps how degenerative realist novels explore a world contaminated by conspiracy theories, mysticism, and misinformation, responding to the internet age’s confusion between fact and fiction with a lament for the loss of the real and an unrelenting emphasis on the role of the media in crafting reality. In a time of widespread populist anxieties over the perceived decline of the French nation, this book diagnoses the literary symptoms of today’s reactionary revival.
Beyond the Islands
Author: Alicia Yánez Cossío
Publisher: University of New Orleans Press
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781608010431
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBeyond the Island recreates the Galapagos Islands as a paradise poised between destruction and redemption, its inhabitants as varied as an Elizabethan pirate, an expert on the prickly pear, and a baker infatuated with a vanished baroness. By turns hilarious and troubling, Yanez Cossio's ultimately generous treatment of small town self-importance and personal ambition underscores the violence born of prejudice and intolerance and finally discovers an unexpected path to renewal.
Toward the Geopolitical Novel
Author: Caren Irr
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-12-17
Total Pages: 359
ISBN-13: 0231536313
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCaren Irr's survey of more than 125 novels outlines the dramatic resurgence of the American political novel in the twenty-first century. She explores the writings of Chris Abani, Susan Choi, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, Dave Eggers, Jeffrey Eugenides, Aleksandar Hemon, Hari Kunzru, Dinaw Mengestu, Norman Rush, Gary Shteyngart, and others as they rethink stories of migration, the Peace Corps, nationalism and neoliberalism, revolution, and the expatriate experience. Taken together, these innovations define a new literary form: the geopolitical novel. More cosmopolitan and socially critical than domestic realism, the geopolitical novel provides new ways of understanding crucial political concepts to meet the needs of a new century.
Perspectives on Contemporary Literature
Author: David Hershberg
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2014-07-15
Total Pages: 113
ISBN-13: 0813163013
DOWNLOAD EBOOKToday's music, painting, and film share with literature in the development of a new aesthetic, even as these other arts influence (and are influenced by) literary themes and structures. And at the same time the music and art of the past continue to re-echo in twentieth-century letters. The thirteen essays gathered here open a fine and varied view of the ways in which contemporary literature interacts with the other arts. Surrealism in French painting and literature, collage theory and the cutups of William Burroughs, texts of Butor as shaped by works of Duchamp—this volume offers a rich harvest of perceptive studies on these and other aspects of a fascinating topic.
The Americas [2 volumes]
Author: Kimberly J. Morse
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2022-08-23
Total Pages: 1437
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis two-volume encyclopedia profiles the contemporary culture and society of every country in the Americas, from Canada and the United States to the islands of the Caribbean and the many countries of Latin America. From delicacies to dances, this encyclopedia introduces readers to cultures and customs of all of the countries of the Americas, explaining what makes each country unique while also demonstrating what ties the cultures and peoples together. The Americas profiles the 40 nations and territories that make up North America, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America, including British, U.S., Dutch, and French territories. Each country profile takes an in-depth look at such contemporary topics as religion, lifestyle and leisure, cuisine, gender roles, dress, festivals, music, visual arts, and architecture, among many others, while also providing contextual information on history, politics, and economics. Readers will be able to draw cross-cultural comparisons, such as between gender roles in Mexico and those in Brazil. Coverage on every country in the region provides readers with a useful compendium of cultural information, ideal for anyone interested in geography, social studies, global studies, and anthropology.
