The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City

The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City PDF Author: Jean FRANCO
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674037170
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Get Book Here

Book Description
The cultural Cold War in Latin America was waged as a war of values--artistic freedom versus communitarianism, Western values versus national cultures, the autonomy of art versus a commitment to liberation struggles--and at a time when the prestige of literature had never been higher. The projects of the historic avant-garde were revitalized by an anti-capitalist ethos and envisaged as the opposite of the republican state. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City charts the conflicting universals of this period, the clash between avant-garde and political vanguard. This was also a twilight of literature at the threshold of the great cultural revolution of the seventies and eighties, a revolution to which the Cold War indirectly contributed. In the eighties, civil war and military rule, together with the rapid development of mass culture and communication empires, changed the political and cultural map. A long-awaited work by an eminent Latin Americanist widely read throughout the world, this book will prove indispensable to anyone hoping to understand Latin American literature and society. Jean Franco guides the reader across minefields of cultural debate and histories of highly polarized struggle. Focusing on literary texts by Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Roa Bastos, and Juan Carlos Onetti, conducting us through this contested history with the authority of an eyewitness, Franco gives us an engaging overview as involving as it is moving.

The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City

The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City PDF Author: Jean FRANCO
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674037170
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Get Book Here

Book Description
The cultural Cold War in Latin America was waged as a war of values--artistic freedom versus communitarianism, Western values versus national cultures, the autonomy of art versus a commitment to liberation struggles--and at a time when the prestige of literature had never been higher. The projects of the historic avant-garde were revitalized by an anti-capitalist ethos and envisaged as the opposite of the republican state. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City charts the conflicting universals of this period, the clash between avant-garde and political vanguard. This was also a twilight of literature at the threshold of the great cultural revolution of the seventies and eighties, a revolution to which the Cold War indirectly contributed. In the eighties, civil war and military rule, together with the rapid development of mass culture and communication empires, changed the political and cultural map. A long-awaited work by an eminent Latin Americanist widely read throughout the world, this book will prove indispensable to anyone hoping to understand Latin American literature and society. Jean Franco guides the reader across minefields of cultural debate and histories of highly polarized struggle. Focusing on literary texts by Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Roa Bastos, and Juan Carlos Onetti, conducting us through this contested history with the authority of an eyewitness, Franco gives us an engaging overview as involving as it is moving.

Nightmares of the Lettered City

Nightmares of the Lettered City PDF Author: Juan Pablo Dabove
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822973197
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Get Book Here

Book Description
Nightmares of the Lettered City presents an original study of the popular theme of banditry in works of literature, essays, poetry, and drama, and banditry's pivotal role during the conceptualization and formation of the Latin American nation-state. Juan Pablo Dabove examines writings over a broad time period, from the early nineteenth century to the 1920s, and while Nightmares of the Lettered City focuses on four crucial countries (Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela), it is the first book to address the depiction of banditry in Latin America as a whole. The work offers close reading of Facundo, Do–a Barbara, Os Sert›es, and Martin Fierro, among other works, illuminating the ever-changing and often contradictory political agendas of the literary elite in their portrayals of the forms of peasant insurgency labeled "banditry."Banditry has haunted the Latin American literary imagination. As a cultural trope, banditry has always been an uneasy compromise between desire and anxiety (a "nightmare"), and Dabove isolates three main representational strategies. He analyzes the bandit as radical other, a figure through which the elites depicted the threats posed to them by various sectors outside the lettered city. Further, he considers the bandit as a trope used in elite internecine struggles. In this case, rural insurgency was a means to legitimize or refute an opposing sector or faction within the lettered city. Finally, Dabove shows how, in certain cases, the bandit was used as an image of the nonstate violence that the nation state has to suppress as a historical force and simultaneously exalt as a memory in order to achieve cultural coherence and actual sovereignty. As Dabove convincingly demonstrates, the elite's construction of the bandit is essential to our understanding of the development of the Latin American nation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Unfolding the City

Unfolding the City PDF Author: Anne Lambright
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452909245
Category : Cities and towns in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Get Book Here

Book Description
The city is not only built of towers of steel and glass; it is a product of culture. It plays an especially important role in Latin America, where urban areas hold a near-monopoly on resources and are home to an expanding population. The essays in this collection assert that women's views of the city are unique and revealing. For the first time, Unfolding the City addresses issues of gender and the urban in literature--particularly lesser-known works of literature--written by Latin American women from Mexico City, Santiago, and Buenos Aires. The contributors propose new mappings of urban space; interpret race and class dynamics; and describe Latin American urban centers in the context of globalization. Contributors: Debra A. Castillo, Cornell U; Sandra Messinger Cypess, U of Maryl∧ Guillermo Irizarry, U of Massachusetts, Amherst; Naomi Lindstrom, U of Texas, Austin; Jacqueline Loss, U of Connecticut; Dorothy E. Mosby, Mount Holyoke Colle≥ Angel Rivera, Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Lidia Santos, Yale U; Marcy Schwartz, Rutgers U; Daniel Noemi Voionmaa, U of Michigan; Gareth Williams, U of Michigan. Anne Lambright is associate professor of modern languages and literature at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Elisabeth Guerrero is associate professor of Spanish at Bucknell University.

Revolutionary Subjects

Revolutionary Subjects PDF Author: Jamie H. Trnka
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110376555
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Get Book Here

Book Description
Revolutionary Subjects explores the literary and cultural significance of Cold War solidarities and offers insight into a substantial and under-analyzed body of German literature concerned with Latin American thought and action. It shows how literary interest in Latin America was vital for understanding oppositional agency and engaged literature in East and West Germany, where authors developed aesthetic solidarities that anticipated conceptual reorganizations of the world connoted by the transnational or the global. Through a combination of close readings, contextual analysis, and careful theoretical work, Revolutionary Subjects traces the historicity and contingency of aesthetic practices, as well as the geocultural grounds against which they unfolded, in case studies of Volker Braun, F.C. Delius, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Heiner Müller. The book’s cultural and comparative approach offers an antidote to imprecise engagements with the transnational, historicizing critical impulses that accompany the production of disciplinary boundaries. It paves the way for more reflexive debate on the content and method of German Studies as part of a broader landscape of world literature, comparative literature and Latin American Studies.

Diversity in Disney Films

Diversity in Disney Films PDF Author: Johnson Cheu
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476600090
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Get Book Here

Book Description
Although its early films featured racial caricatures and exclusively Caucasian heroines, Disney has, in recent years, become more multicultural in its filmic fare and its image. From Aladdin and Pocahontas to the Asian American boy Russell in Up, from the first African American princess in The Princess and the Frog to "Spanish-mode" Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story 3, Disney films have come to both mirror and influence our increasingly diverse society. This essay collection gathers recent scholarship on representations of diversity in Disney and Disney/Pixar films, not only exploring race and gender, but also drawing on perspectives from newer areas of study, particularly sexuality/queer studies, critical whiteness studies, masculinity studies and disability studies. Covering a wide array of films, from Disney's early days and "Golden Age" to the Eisner era and current fare, these essays highlight the social impact and cultural significance of the entertainment giant. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas

Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas PDF Author: Jairo Moreno
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022682568X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 375

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Sounding Latin America studies popular music making by immigrants from Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean in the United States. It focuses on the points of contact and divergence in music making that result from competing values informed by how modernity is experienced across the Americas: the relation of language to letters; cosmopolitanism; racial categories and adjacent traditions and notions of the past; citizenship and migrancy; globalization and belonging. First study of the intra-hemispheric, linked but divergent relations of "Latin" music to the US and Latin America Proposes a comparative method for understanding the relations of immigrants to minority groups in the US with music making as the center Book places aurality ("intersensory, affective, cognitive, discursive, material, perceptual, and rhetorical network") as central operation in the constitution of "music.""--

Representing the Barrios

Representing the Barrios PDF Author: Rebecca Jarman
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822989719
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Get Book Here

Book Description
Against a backdrop of rapid urbanization and the growth of a global economy powered by carbon, Rebecca Jarman argues that in Venezuela, urban poverty has become one of the most important resources in national culture and statecraft. Attracting the attentions of writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians from within and beyond the limits of Caracas, the barrios are fetishized in the cultural domain as sites of rampant sex, crime, revolution, disease, and violence. The appeal of the urban poor in entertainment is replicated in the policies of autocratic leaders who, operating within an extractivist matrix that prizes the acquisition of land and capital, have sought to expand their reach into these densely populated territories. Sometimes yielding to commodification, the barrios also have resisted exploitation by exceeding the terms of their representation in hegemonic culture and politics. Whether troubling the narratives that profit from poverty or undermining class-based stereotypes with experimental aesthetics, the barrio as a shifting set of coordinates consistently evades appropriations of disenfranchisement. Mapping the recurrent tensions, anxieties, conflicts, aspirations, and blind spots that characterize depictions of the barrios, Rebecca Jarman elaborates a dynamic cultural analysis of the history of poverty in the Venezuelan capital.

A Short History of Revolutionary Cuba

A Short History of Revolutionary Cuba PDF Author: Antoni Kapcia
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786726416
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book Here

Book Description
Few island nations have stirred the soul like Cuba. From Hemingway's intoxicating Havana to Ry Cooder's Buena Vista Social Club, outsiders have persistently been fascinated by Cuba for its music (jazz to rumba), its rich literature, its art and dance (danzón to mambo) and perhaps above all for its bold experiment of a socialist revolution in action. Antoni Kapcia shows how the thaw in relations between Cuba and the USA now makes a fresh appraisal of the country and its modern history essential. He authoritatively explores the 'essence' of the Cuban revolution, revealing it to be a maverick phenomenon tied not so much to socialism or Communism for their own sakes but instead to an idealistic vision of postcolonial nationalism. Reassessing the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the author examines the central personalities: not just the famous trio of Che Guevara, Fidel and Raúl Castro in shaping the ideas of the revolution but, still further back, the visionary ideology of José Martí. Kapcia's book reflects on the future of the revolution as aúl nd his government began to cede power to a new generation.

A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture

A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture PDF Author: Sara Castro-Klaren
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118492145
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 723

Get Book Here

Book Description
A COMPANION TO LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE “The work contains a wealth of information that must surely provide the basic material for a number of study modules. It should find a place on the library shelves of all institutions where Latin American studies form part of the curriculum.” Reference Review “In short, this is a fascinating panoply that goes from a reevaluation of pre-Columbian America to an intriguing consideration of recent developments in the debate on the modem and postmodern. Summing Up: Recommended.” CHOICE A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture reflects the changes that have taken place in cultural theory and literary criticism since the latter part of the twentieth century. Written by more than thirty experts in cultural theory, literary history, and literary criticism, this authoritative and up-to-date reference places major authors in the complex cultural and historical contexts that have compelled their distinctive fiction, essays, and poetry. This allows the reader to more accurately interpret the esteemed but demanding literature of authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, Octavio Paz, and Diamela Eltit. Key authors whose work has defined a period, or defied borders, as in the cases of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, César Vallejo, and Gabriel García Márquez, are also discussed in historical and theoretical context. Additional essays engage the reader with in-depth discussions of forms and genres, and discussions of architecture, music, and film This text provides the historical background to help the reader understand the people and culture that have defined Latin American literature and its reception. Each chapter also includes short selected bibliographic guides and recommendations for further reading.

Cold War Literature

Cold War Literature PDF Author: Andrew Hammond
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134272545
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Cold War was the longest conflict in a century defined by the scale and brutality of its conflicts. In the battle between the democratic West and the communist East there was barely a year in which the West was not organising, fighting or financing some foreign war. It was an engagement that resulted – in Korea, Guatemala, Nicaragua and elsewhere – in some twenty million dead. This collection of essays analyses the literary response to the coups, insurgencies and invasions that took place around the globe, and explores the various thematic and stylistic trends that Cold War hostilities engendered in world writing. Drawing together scholars of various cultural backgrounds, the volume focuses upon such themes as representation, nationalism, political resistance, globalisation and ideological scepticism. Eschewing the typical focus in Cold War scholarship on Western authors and genres, there is an emphasis on the literary voices that emerged from what are often considered the ‘peripheral’ regions of Cold War geo-politics. Ranging in focus from American postmodernism to Vietnamese poetry, from Cuban autobiography to Maoist theatre, and from African fiction to Soviet propaganda, this book will be of real interest to all those working in twentieth-century literary studies, cultural studies, history and politics.