Subterranean Space in Contemporary Mexico City Literature

Subterranean Space in Contemporary Mexico City Literature PDF Author: Liesbeth François
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030694569
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This book studies the role of subterranean spaces in literary works about Mexico City. It analyzes how underground spaces such as the subway, the sewage system, tunnels, crypts, and the subsoil itself relate to the whole of the city in a body of works published after 1985, the year of the deadliest earthquake in the capital’s history. The texts belong to the most important genres in urban literature (the novel, the short story, and the crónica) and demonstrate the crucial role played by the underground in contemporary imaginings of the megalopolis, as it condenses and confronts the tensions that run through them. This central idea is developed through four analytical chapters focusing on the political, ecological, historical, and aesthetic dimension of subterranean imaginaries.

Subterranean Space in Contemporary Mexico City Literature

Subterranean Space in Contemporary Mexico City Literature PDF Author: Liesbeth François
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030694569
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book

Book Description
This book studies the role of subterranean spaces in literary works about Mexico City. It analyzes how underground spaces such as the subway, the sewage system, tunnels, crypts, and the subsoil itself relate to the whole of the city in a body of works published after 1985, the year of the deadliest earthquake in the capital’s history. The texts belong to the most important genres in urban literature (the novel, the short story, and the crónica) and demonstrate the crucial role played by the underground in contemporary imaginings of the megalopolis, as it condenses and confronts the tensions that run through them. This central idea is developed through four analytical chapters focusing on the political, ecological, historical, and aesthetic dimension of subterranean imaginaries.

The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies

The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies PDF Author: Lieven Ameel
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000605620
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 630

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Book Description
Over the past decades, the growing interest in the study of literature of the city has led to the development of literary urban studies as a discipline in its own right. The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies provides a methodical overview of the fundamentals of this developing discipline and a detailed outline of new directions in the field. It consists of 33 newly commissioned chapters that provide an outline of contemporary literary urban studies. The Companion covers all of the main theoretical approaches as well as key literary genres, with case studies covering a range of different geographical, cultural, and historical settings. The final chapters provide a window into new debates in the field. The three focal issues are key concepts and genres of literary urban studies; a reassessment and critique of classical urban studies theories and the canon of literary capitals; and methods for the analysis of cities in literature. The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies provides the reader with practical insights into the methods and approaches that can be applied to the city in literature and serves as an important reference work for upper-level students and researchers working on city literature. Chapter 15 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com

Urban Spaces in Contemporary Latin American Literature

Urban Spaces in Contemporary Latin American Literature PDF Author: José Eduardo González
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319924389
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
This collection of essays studies the depiction of contemporary urban space in twenty-first century Latin American fiction. The contributors to this volume seek to understand the characteristics that make the representation of the postmodern city in a Latin American context unique. The chapters focus on cities from a wide variety of countries in the region, highlighting the cultural and political effects of neoliberalism and globalization in the contemporary urban scene. Twenty-first century authors share an interest for images of ruins and dystopian landscapes and their view of the damaging effects of the global market in Latin America tends to be pessimistic. As the book demonstrates, however, utopian elements or “spaces of hope” can also be found in these narrations, which suggest the possibility of transforming a capitalist-dominated living space.

Global Undergrounds

Global Undergrounds PDF Author: Carlos López Galviz
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780236115
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Rest your eyes long enough on the skylines of Delhi, Guangzhou, Jakarta—even Chicago or London—and you will see the same remarkable transformation, building after building going up with the breakneck speed of twenty-first-century urbanization. But there is something else just as transformative that you won’t see: sprawling networks of tunnels rooting these cities into the earth. Global Undergrounds offers a richly illustrated exploration of these subterranean spaces, charting their global reach and the profound—but often unseen—effects they have on human life. The authors shine their headlamps into an astonishing diversity of manmade underground environments, including subway systems, sewers, communications pipelines, storage facilities, and even shelters. There they find not only an extraordinary range of architectural approaches to underground construction but also a host of different cultural meanings. Underground places can evoke fear or hope; they can serve as sites of memory, places of work, or the hidden headquarters of resistance movements. They are places that can tell a city’s oldest stories or foresee its most distant futures. They are places—ultimately—of both incredible depth and breadth, crucial to all of us topside who work as urban planners, geographers, architects, engineers, or any of us who take subway trains or enjoy fresh water from a faucet. Indeed, as the authors demonstrate, the constant flux within urban undergrounds—the nonstop circulation of people, substances, and energy—serves all city dwellers in myriad ways, not just with the logistics of day-to-day life but as a crucial part of a city’s mythology.

Literary Transnationalism(s)

Literary Transnationalism(s) PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004370862
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Literary Transnationalism(s) offers a series of reflections on how literary texts move between cultures via translation, adaptation, and intertextual referencing, and enter the field of world literature.

Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America

Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America PDF Author: Mark Anderson
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498530966
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
Worldwide environmental crisis has become increasingly visible over the last few decades as the full scope of anthropogenic climate change manifests itself and large-scale natural resource extraction has expanded into formerly remote areas that seemed beyond the reach of industrialization. Scientists and popular culture alike have turned to the term "Anthropocene" to capture the global scale of environmental and even geological transformations that humans have carried out over the last two centuries. The chapters in Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America examine the dynamics and interplay between local cultures and the expansion of global capitalism in Latin America, emphasizing the role of art in bearing witness to and generating awareness of environmental and social crises, but also its possibilities for formulating solutions. They take particular care to draw out the ways in which local environmental crises in Latin American nations are witnessed and imagined as part of a global system, focusing on the problems of time, scale, and complexity as key terms in conceiving the dimensions of crisis. At the same time, they question the notion of the Anthropocene as a species-wide "human" historical project, making visible the coloniality of natural resource extraction in Latin America and its dire effects for local people, cultures, and environments. Taking an ecocritical approach to Latin American cultural production including literature, film, performance, and digital artwork, the chapters in this volume develop a notion of ecological crisis that captures not only its documentary sense in the representation of environmental destruction (the degradation of the oikos), but also the crisis in the modern worldview (logos) that the acknowledgment of crisis provokes. In this sense, crisis is also the promise of a turning point, of the possibilities for change. Latin American representations of ecological crisis thus create the conditions for projects that decolonize environments, developing new, sustainable ways of conceiving of and relating to our world or returning to old ones.

The Mexico City Reader

The Mexico City Reader PDF Author: Ruben Gallo
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299197131
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
Mexico City is one of Latin America’s cultural capitals, and one of the most vibrant urban spaces in the world. The Mexico City Reader is an anthology of "Cronicas"—short, hybrid texts that are part literary essay, part urban reportage—about life in the capital. This is not the "City of Palaces" of yesteryear, but the vibrant, chaotic, anarchic urban space of the1980s and 1990s—the city of garbage mafias, necrophiliac artists, and kitschy millionaires. Like the visitor wandering through the city streets, the reader will be constantly surprised by the visions encountered in this mosaic of writings—a textual space brimming with life and crowded with flâneurs, flirtatious students, Indian dancers, food vendors, fortune tellers, political activists, and peasant protesters. The essays included in this anthology were written by a panoply of writers, from well-known authors like Carlos Monsiváis and Jorge Ibagüengoitia to younger figures like Fabrizio Mejía Madrid and Juieta García González, all of whom are experienced practitioners of the city. The texts collected in this anthology are among the most striking examples of this concomitant "theory and practice" of Mexico City, that most delirious of megalopolises. “[An] exciting literary journey . . .”—Carolyn Malloy, Multicultural Review

Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture

Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture PDF Author: Justin D. Edwards
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317425774
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Tropical Gothic examines Gothic within a specific geographical area of ‘the South’ of the Americas. In so doing, we structure the book around geographical coordinates (from North to South) and move between various national traditions of the gothic (Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, etc) alongside regional manifestations of the Gothic (the US south and the Caribbean) as well as transnational movements of the Gothic within the Americas. The reflections on national traditions of the Gothic in this volume add to the critical body of literature on specific languages or particular nations, such as Scottish Gothic, American Gothic, Canadian Gothic, German Gothic, Kiwi Gothic, etc. This is significant because, while the Southern Gothic in the US has been thoroughly explored, there is a gap in the critical literature about the Gothic in the larger context of region of ‘the South’ in the Americas. This volume does not pretend to be a comprehensive examination of tropical Gothic in the Americas; rather, it pinpoints a variety of locations where this form of the Gothic emerges. In so doing, the transnational interventions of the Gothic in this book read the flows of Gothic forms across borders and geographical regions to tease out the complexities of Gothic cultural production within cultural and linguistic translations. Tropical Gothic includes, but is by no means limited to, a reflection on a region where European colonial powers fought intensively against indigenous populations and against each other for control of land and resources. In other cases, the vast populations of African slaves were transported, endowing these regions with a cultural inheritance that all the nations involved are still trying to comprehend. The volume reflects on how these histories influence the Gothic in this region.

Horizontal Vertigo

Horizontal Vertigo PDF Author: Juan Villoro
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1524748897
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
At once intimate and wide-ranging, and as enthralling, surprising, and vivid as the place itself, this is a uniquely eye-opening tour of one of the great metropolises of the world, and its largest Spanish-speaking city. Horizontal Vertigo: The title refers to the fear of ever-impending earthquakes that led Mexicans to build their capital city outward rather than upward. With the perspicacity of a keenly observant flaneur, Juan Villoro wanders through Mexico City seemingly without a plan, describing people, places, and things while brilliantly drawing connections among them. In so doing he reveals, in all its multitudinous glory, the vicissitudes and triumphs of the city ’s cultural, political, and social history: from indigenous antiquity to the Aztec period, from the Spanish conquest to Mexico City today—one of the world’s leading cultural and financial centers. In this deeply iconoclastic book, Villoro organizes his text around a recurring series of topics: “Living in the City,” “City Characters,” “Shocks,” “Crossings,” and “Ceremonies.” What he achieves, miraculously, is a stunning, intriguingly coherent meditation on Mexico City’s genius loci, its spirit of place.

DK Eyewitness Books: City

DK Eyewitness Books: City PDF Author: Philip Steele
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0756673771
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 74

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Book Description
Eyewitness City examines urban life in many of the world's most fascinating, fast-paced cities. It takes readers from the suburbs and shanty towns to the high-rise business districts, showing how cities grow and function. Also included is historical information, looking at the evolution of cities through the centuries.