"Borges and the Kabbalah" and Other Essays on His Fiction and Poetry, and: Gabriel García Márquez and the Powers of Fiction, and: Lives on the Line: The Testimony of Contemporary Latin American Authors (review)

1989 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 314-316
Author(s):  
Lance Olsen
PMLA ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 99 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
David William Foster

Latin American fiction has historically been characterized by its testimony on sociopolitical issues, and the contemporary novel offers important examples of the documentary narrative. Indeed, Latin American authors appear to have made richer—and earlier—use of documentary narrative than have more commonly cited American writers. Through an examination of five representative narratives, by Rodolfo Walsh (Argentina), Elena Poniatowska (Mexico), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Hernán Valdés (Chile), and Miguel Barnet (Cuba), this study examines such major features of Latin American documentary narrative as complementary and contrapuntal juxtaposition, irony, authorial editing and commentary, foreshadowing and echoing of events, and disjunctive interplay between various levels of the text.


2021 ◽  
pp. xxiv-12
Author(s):  
Gene H. Bell-Villada ◽  
Ignacio López-Calvo

The publication in 1967 of his masterpiece Cien años de soledad, followed by the English-language translation in 1970, changed García Márquez’s personal and professional life forever and was arguably the main reason for his winning the 1982 Nobel Prize. Other masterworks would follow, notably The Autumn of the Patriarch, an experimental narrative about an aging Caribbean dictator that is also infused by magical realism while leaving behind the Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Also passed in review here are his short-story collections, his later novels of romantic love, and the highly praised novellas No One Writes to the Colonel and Chronicle of a Death Foretold. García Márquez’s literary success is placed within the context of the Cuban Revolution, the Latin American Boom, and the growing recognition received by previous Latin American authors (Cortázar, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa). In ensuing articles, García Márquez is examined via a broad array of perspectives, several of them unavoidable: biography, magical realism, and alchemy; local roots and world influence (especially in the Global South and Asia, as well as Spain); and issues of ethnicity, gender, myth, ecology, musical genres, left-wing politics, and anti-imperialism. Readings of individual works conclude our survey. Throughout these thirty-two essays, virtually all of García Márquez’s mature works—long and short, early and late, fictional, nonfictional, and even filmic—are expertly and subtly teased out for the benefit of his many devoted readers worldwide.


2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesc Galera

In the uneasy context of the Francoist regime, some authors tried to alleviate the difficult cultural situation through creation and translation. This is the case of Avel·lí Artís-Gener, commonly known as Tísner, a Catalan writer who was exiled to Mexico for more than twenty years. Translation from Spanish into Catalan played a major role in Tísner’s efforts to keep Catalan culture alive, and this article presents the major translation initiatives in this language combination throughout the twentieth century in order to provide enough context to give Artís-Gener’s endeavours their real weight. In Mexico, he wrote his most famous novel, Paraules d’Opoton el Vell (‘Words of Opoton the elder’), which describes the imagined ‘discovery’ of Europe by the Aztecs and creates a bond between the fate of the Nahuatl and the Catalan people under the yoke of Spanish imperialism. In 1992 Artís-Gener decided that the novel had to be retranslated into Spanish and undertook that task himself. In addition, Tísner translated major Latin American authors from Spanish into Catalan, an experience that gave him the chance to regain control of the language imposed by the Francoist regime and use it as a form of relief from the political oppression.


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-216
Author(s):  
Megan DeVirgilis

The Gothic short form in Latin America has yet to receive focused scholarly attention. Yet, despite no early Gothic novel tradition to speak of, the Gothic mode emerged in poetry and short fiction, representing particular anxieties and colonial/postcolonial realities specific to the region owing in part to a significant increase in periodicals. Focusing on two case studies – Clemente Palma's ‘La granja blanca’ (Peru, 1904) and Horacio Quiroga's ‘El almohadón de plumas’ (Uruguay, 1917) – this article will explore how Latin American authors classified as modern, modernista, and criollista were experimenting with Gothic forms, adapting the design of the traditional Gothic novel to intensify its effect and reach a wider readership. Demonstrating a particular influence of Poe, a unity of effect is created, one that suggests that the home is a place of horrors, not comfort, and the uniquely horrifying settings and plot ultimately challenge established moral codes and literary tendencies.


REVISTA PLURI ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 91
Author(s):  
Yvone Dias Avelino

Este artigo formula algumas reflexões sobre a associação da história com a literatura. Estabelecemos alguns nexos com trabalhos literários de autores latino-americanos do século XX. Nas páginas desses romances latino-americanos desfilam os expoentes de toda uma estrutura de dominação: políticos, velhos aristocratas, oportunistas recém-chegados, fazendeiros truculentos, funcionários públicos subservientes, advogados venais, representantes do capitalismo local, dominados e dominantes. Mostram-nos os vários escritores latino-americanos as ditaduras na sua insanidade grotesca, as repressões cruentas que fazem emergir os movimentos sociais populares. Estão presentes as turbulências do real e imaginário, utilitário e mágico, da dúvida e perplexidade, memória e esperança, do esquecimento e da desesperança, do espelho e labirinto.Palavras-chave: História, Literatura, Espelho, Labirinto, América Latina.AbstractThis article proposes some reflections about the association between history and literature. We have established some links with literary works written by Latin American authors of the twentieth century. In the pages of these Latin American novels the exponents of a whole structure of domination are paraded: politicians, old aristocrats, opportunist newcomers, truculent farmers, subservient civil servants, venal lawyers, representatives of local capitalism, dominated and dominant ones. The various Latin American writers show us dictatorships in their grotesque insanity, the bloody repressions that allow popular social movements to emerge. They outline the turbulences of the real and imaginary, utilitarian and magical, doubt and perplexity, memory and hope, forgetfulness and hopelessness, mirror and labyrinth.Keywords: History, Literature, Mirror, Labyrinth, Latin America.


Author(s):  
Marcelo NEDER CERQUEIRA

Upon leaving his post as director of the Mariano Moreno National Library in Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis Borges appointed a clerk to package and identify the ownership of the works in his personal collection, with a number of them remaining in the institution and classified as an official donation made by the writer. This text examines the works belonging to the personal collection and listed in the Borges, libros y lecturas [Borges, books, and readings] catalogue. The complete process for identifying all of the books took place almost 40 years later, by means of the research behind the publication of Borges, libros y lecturas in 2010. The following text focuses on the care Borges took in framing his work and with his author’s legacy, even including countless jokes and enigmas meticulously woven into his biographical fiction. We depart from the idea that it would not be absurd to suppose that the collection donated by the author to the library does not so much constitute an act that was purely casual, contingent, and spontaneous, but rather a conscious move strangely planned by the author and in which he was invested. The inclusion of Latin American authors in Modernism and Romanticism and their appropriations of culturalist epistemological innovations by means of their Catholicism are examined by means of the aesthetic-expressive method, in which we outline paths to clinical observation with the observer’s participation.


2021 ◽  
pp. 231-245
Author(s):  
Heba El Attar

In 2014, newspapers across the Spanish-speaking world covered how the international press paid tribute to García Márquez. Particular attention was given to the extensive eulogies in the Arab press. A special homage was paid to the author’s memory in Saudi Arabia, where the Third South American-Arab Countries Summit was being held at the time. This was not Naguib Mahfuz; this was García Márquez. How was it possible for a Latin American author to become that popular across the Arab world? How was it possible for his novels to be referenced naturally in popular Arab films such as The Embassy in the Building (2005)? Was all this simply due to the fact that in postindependence Latin America, particularly since the 1940s, there has been a growing de-orientalist discourse? Or did García Márquez craft a particular dialogue with the internal and external Arabs? With all this in mind, and by drawing on Latin American (de)orientalism in the works of Kushigian, Nagy-Zekmi, and Tyutina, among others, this article analyzes the dimensions and implications of García Márquez’s depiction of the internal Arab (immigrant in Latin America) in some of his novels as well as his dialogue with the external Arab (the Arab world) in some of his press articles.


PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 698-701
Author(s):  
Anadeli Bencomo

Carlos Fuentes, like many other writers of the Boom, discussed his peers' unprecedented renovation of Latin American narrative forms—specifically, the novel (e.g., Donoso; Vargas Llosa). In La nueva novela hispanoamericana (1969; “The New Spanish American Novel”), Fuentes reviews the most influential novels of the 1960s after presenting some of the founders of the literary modernity that preceded the Boom: Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Miguel Angel Asturias, and Alejo Carpentier. Fuentes focuses on the Boom's protagonists—Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, and Julio Cortázar—to highlight his ideas about the groundbreaking contributions of these novels.


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