(this was an awesome touch on a ton of "modern" writers, as you can see from the list of comps writers covered. definitely worth the read.)
Chapter 11: Modern Fiction
Comps writers mentioned:
-
María
Luisa Bombal, La última niebla (pg.
311-312)
-
Jorge
Luis Borges, Ficciones (pg. 313-316)
-
Miguel
Angel Asturias, El Señor Presidente
(pg. 318-319)
-
Alejo
Carpentier, El reino de este mundo
(pg. 320-321)
-
José
María Arguedas, Los ríos profundos
(pg. 322-323)
-
Juan
Rulfo, Pedro Páramo (pg. 323-325)
-
Carlos
Fuentes, La muerte de Artemio Cruz (pg.
326-328)
-
Octavio
Paz, El laberinto de la soledad (pg.
326)
-
Gabriel
García Márquez, Cien años de soledad
(pg. 329-331)
-
Mario
Vargas Llosa, La tía Julia y el
escribidor (pg. 333-335)
-
Julio
Cortázar (pg. 336-338)
-
Severo
Sarduy, De donde son los cantantes
(pg. 339)
-
Manuel
Puig, El beso de la mujer araña (pg.
340-341)
-
Isabel
Allende, La casa de los espíritus
(pg. 342)
-
Rosario
Ferré, Maldito amor (pg. 343)
-
Luisa
Valenzuela, Cambio de armas (pg.
343-344)
-
Elena
Poniatowska, Hasta no verte Jesus mío
(pg. 344)
General notes:
Introduction
-
Conviction
of writers of the early 1960’s (Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, García Márquez,
etc.) that literature was a privileged activity (308)
-
In the 1960’s, revolutionary Cuba embodied the
aspirations of many Latin American intellectuals (308)
-
Shared belief up to 1967 that a major social
upheaval would occur in Latin America and that literature would be a force for
change (309)
o
Many writers participated in guerrilla movements
-
During the 1960’s-1970’s the continent was
transformed from a primarily peasant and rural culture to an urban one (309)
-
“cultural imperialism” – new urban culture in
form of telenovelas, photonovelas, and comic books (309)
-
Continued quest for national identity – no longer
just by male writers, but also females (310)
Breaking with realism
-
The 1920’s were years of revolutionary hope and
euphoria in Latin America (311)
-
The 1930’s was a period of reaction,
retrenchment, war, and economic crisis for most of Latin America, except Mexico
(311)
-
Novelists turned away from socialist realism in
the 1930’s as revolutionary hopes failed and euphoria faded (311)
-
Realism and naturalism have produced very few
good novels in Spanish America (311)
-
Writers felt overwhelming need to analyze their
own societies and national identities (311)
-
María Luisa Bombal
o
Chile, 1910-1980
o
La última
niebla, 1947
o
Combination of psychological subtlety and
fantasy
o
Explores the fantasy life of women who are excluded
from public life but who find fulfillment in dream and imagination (311)
Fictions and social
imaginaries
-
Jorge Luis Borges
o
Argentina, 1899-1986
o
Cultivated and distinguished family (313)
o
Contributed to several avant-garde magazines
(313)
o
Wrote poetry, essays, and short stories (313)
o
“What Borges describes is both fantastic and
possible… [stories have] a weird air of probability” (314)
o
“presents
his characters in a hypothetical situation which is analogous to the intellectual
problems that men and women have set themselves” (314)
o
“One common theme of Borges’s stories is that of
a man caught in a trap which he himself unwittingly constructed. Believing himself
to act freely, he is, in fact, constructing a cage in which he will be
imprisoned” (314)
o
“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (315)
§
Playfully examines authorship
§
“Menard is a man whose ambition in the twentieth
century is to write Don Quixote,
reproducing Cervantes’s exact words. This ambition corresponds to the literary
critic who tries to reproduce the authorial intention. But the story also casts
an ironic light on originality and pastiche.” (315)
o
Importance of imagination (315)
o
“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” – objects from an
imaginary planet appear in our world and reverse human assumptions as to the
nature of reality” (315)
o
Borges was the first Latin American writer to
gain an international reputation (315)
o
Influence on writers of the “boom” generation –
his tone of skepticism (315-316)
The Real is Marvelous
-
In his prologue to El reino de este mundo (1943), Alejo Carpentier asked the question,
“What is the whole history of America but a chronicle of the “real maravilloso?”
-
The mythic became the structuring principle of
the novel (318)
-
Lots of dictators in the period – Machado in
Cuba, General Trujillo in the Domincan Republic, and Ubico in Guatemala. “Magic,
dream, and myth became instruments for exploring the political unconscious of authoritarianism”
(318)
-
Miguel Angel
Asturias
o
Guatemala, 1899-1974
o
Grew up during Estrada Cabrera’s dictatorship,
which fell in 1921
o
El Señor Presidente
(1946)
§
Introduces us into the nightmare world of dictatorship
§
Summary –
pg. 319
§
Strict political system is undermined only by
love
§
Prose reproduces nightmare world, through
repetition and dream sequences
-
Alejo Carpentier
o
Cuba, 1904-1980
o
Started literary career in 1920’s writing poems
on Afro-Cuban themes (320)
o El reino de este mundo (1943)
§
Set in Haiti during the period of the French
Revolution
§
Summary –
pg. 320
§
Explores the problem of implanting European
abstract systems on the hybrid and multicultural societies of the New World
(321)
-
José María Arguedas, Los ríos
profundos
o
Based on his own childhood experiences when he
was often left by his father, a lawyer, to fend for himself in Andean villages
or in the home of hostile relatives. Arguedas mythified his own early life.
(322)
o
Evokes the metaphorical possibilities of the
Quechua language (322)
o
Summary –
pg. 322
-
“A common trait shared by Arguedas, Asturias,
and the Mexican writer, Juan Rulfo, is their exploration of mestizaje. Indeed,
Asturias and Arguedas felt that a mestizo culture liberated from the hierarchy
that had subordinated the indigenous to the Hispanic, represented the most
viable option for Latin America. Although Rulfo was also interested in
mestizaje, his style of writing has little in common with these other writers
for he prefers a spare, unadorned style that deliberately shies away from
emotionally loaded words.” (323-324)
-
Juan Rulfo
o
Mexico
o
Spare, unadorned writing style (324)
o
“His stories concentrate on behavior rather than
psychological states and all his writing is characterized by black humor and
irony” (324)
o
El llano
en llamas (1953)
§
Distanced and sardonic view of
post-Revolutionary Mexico (324)
§
“The Revolution itself is described… as a
festival of macho brotherhood, treachery, and gratuitous violence that has left
a permanent scar on the country. The feminine in these stories articulates the
qualities of survival, love, and common sense which have been destroyed by
machismo.” (324)
o
Pedro Páramo
(1955)
§
Rulfo’s only novel, a masterpiece (324)
§
Summary –
pg. 324
§
Uncanny, eerie quality of the text (324)
§
Theme of solitude (324-325)
§
Rulfo “uses peasant ‘irrationalism’ to
illuminate the rationalism of the state” (325)
The New Novel: Nation
and Revolution
-
The Latin American new novel is seen as emergent
in the 1960’s, but this is only an approximate date (325)
-
In the 1960’s there was a new youthful public, many
of them first generation University students, who demanded a literature that
reflected the concerns of their generation (325)
-
Novelists
who emerged in early 1960’s: Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario
Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, Augusto Roa Bastos, Guillermo Cabrera Infante,
José Donoso (326)
o
They had one aim in common: challenge their
readers and make them re-examine the stereotypes of earlier literature
-
Carlos Fuentes
o
Mexico, 1928-present
o
Brought up and educated in several countries including
the United States (326)
o
La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962)
§
Fuentes’ third and best-known novel (327)
§
“productively deploys innovative technique to
subvert the positivistic national allegory” (327)
§
Summary –
pg. 327
-
Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la
soledad (1959)
o
Essays exposed the flaws in the Mexican character
that stood in the way of national development (326)
o
Influenced Fuentes, as well as several other
writers (326)
-
Gabriel García
Márquez
o
Columbia, 1928-present
o
The author who is the most read and most
influential both inside and outside Latin America, besides Borges (328)
o
Journalist and novelist
o
Cien años de soledad
(1967)
§
Marked García Márquez’s emergence as a major
figure in Latin American literature (329)
§
Story of the rise and fall of the community of
Macondo and of the Buendía family (329)
§
Summary –
pg. 329-330
§
Theme of inappropriate sexual relations, incest
and age differences (329-330)
§
Conveys the wonder and strangeness of a continent,
evoking the marvelous and fabulous world of its early chroniclers (330)
§
Not simply a national allegory; has also been
read as a novel on literary creation, and as a reworking of Oedipal relations (330)
§
Gap between “private” inner life and public
action, which divides the characters (331)
o
Theme of solitude (329)
§
Isolation/solitude in various forms
o
Focuses on period of development of the nation
sate, from Independence to the 1930’s (329)
o
Constant tone of nostalgia and melancholy (330)
-
Mario Vargas Llosa
o
Peru, 1936-present
o
La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977)
§
Somewhat lighter than his other fiction
o
Often weaves autobiography with fiction. Feeling
of the need to “justify his own position as a writer mediating between several
cultures whilst realizing the precarious nature of this mediation.” (335)
-
“Despite the
innovatory techniques and the fresh insights into their national cultures, the
sexual politics of writers of this period tended to remain within the
stereotyped representation of women” (336)
-
Julio Cortázar
o
Argentina, 1914-1984
o
Writing is international rather than national
(336)
o
Like other members of the avant-garde, he tended
to see women as the epitome of the passive, automatized reader (336)
o
Experimental writer
o
Concern with conventions and transgression, and
also with community (336)
o
He was established as the “guru of the younger
generation” (337)
o
His most famous novel – Rayuela – had interesting format, could choose various ways to read
it (337)
o
Consistently perpetuates gender stereotypes
(338)
o
Use of irony (338)
-
Severo Sarduy
o
Cuba, 1937-1993
o
Lived in exile; left Cuba after revolution to
live in France (339)
o
De donde son los cantantes (1967) – complex intertwining
of Cuban ethnic identities that culminates in a chapter “The entry of Christ
into Havana” which figures as a carnivalesque version of Castro’s famous
victory (339)
o
Fascination with masquerade and constructed
identities (339)
-
Movement away from the novel as national
allegory, but still interest in some kind of national identity (339)
-
“popular music provides a common language in
Latin America” (339)
-
Manuel Puig
o
Argentina, 1932-1990
o
Novels draw on popular culture
o El beso de la mujer araña (1976)
§ His best-known work
§
Most overtly political work, “referring
specifically to the early stages of the ‘dirty war’ between the Argentine state
and the guerrilla movement” (340)
§
Concern with sexual politics, “particularly the constitution
of homosexuality within the predominantly masculinist and patriarchal state
culture” (340)
§
Summary –
pg. 340-341
Women Writers:
National allegory or family romance
-
“quest for identity was generally depicted as a
male quest in which women were identified with territory or obstacles, with
prostitution or domesticity” (341)
-
“writers tended to repudiate the notion that
there was some identifiable form of women’s writing” (341)
-
“advent of feminism has brought a number of changes
to the literary institution” (341)
o
Rediscovery of forms of writing by women (for
example: the autobiographies of nuns in colonial period – this is stuff we learned about with Rosa)
o
Re-evaluation of women writers of the nineteenth
century
-
Exploration of the “manner in which the notion
both of national identity and Modernism was constructed upon a subordination of
women which has led women writers to re-examine national identity and redefine
subjectivity” (341-342)
-
“The ‘boom’ of Latin American writing created a
public both inside and outside of Latin America for women’s writing” (342)
-
Isabel Allende
o
Chile, 1942-present
o
Rapidly published several best-selling novels
(342)
o La casa de los espíritus (1985)
§
Explores and to some extent subverts the
gendered separation of public and private
§
Inverts the national allegory mode by portraying
strong women protagonists
o
“tends to portray sexual and political violence…
within the heterosexual romance plot which resolves contradiction and class
stratification” (342)
Questioning the
sex-gender system
-
Rosario Ferré
o
Puerto Rico, 1942-present
o
Maldito amor
§
Stories are savage parodies of those versions of
Puerto Rican national identity that concealed racial difference and hybridity
(343)
§
In her stories, “women of different social
classes – high bourgeoisie and prostitute, a landowner’s widow and a mulatta
nurse – are often allied in a muted and underground rebellion against a system
that has separated good from bad women, white from black, pure from impure”
(343)
-
Women writers have turned to experimental
fiction; women writers now feel the need to revise and critique their master
narrative (343)
-
Luisa Valenzuela
o
Argentina, 1938-present
o
Her works explore “subjectivity marginalized by
the patriarchal narrative” (344)
o
Explores the conjunction of sado-masochism and
political repression (344)
-
Marginality is an obsession of many women
writers (344)
-
Elena Poniatowska
o
Mexico, 1932-present
o Hasta no verte Jesus mío (1969)
§ Very
brief summary – pg. 344
§
Fascination with vernacular Mexican and language
of ordinary people (344)
Globality and the
local
-
There has been a global sweep of some
contemporary literature, but there are still some writers who are far more
concerned with a national or even a local public, rather than an international
one (345)
No comments:
Post a Comment