The Reptant Eagle

2015-01-12
The Reptant Eagle
Author: Roberto Cantú
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2015-01-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1443874124
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Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012) was the most prominent novelist in contemporary Mexico and, until his recent death, one of the leading voices in Latin America’s Boom generation. He received the most prestigious awards and prizes in the world, including the Latin Civilization Award (presented by the Presidents of Brazil, Mexico, and France), the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, and the Prince of Asturias Award. During his fecund and accomplished life as a writer, literary theorist, and political analyst, Fuentes turned his attention to the major conflicts of the twentieth century – from the Second World War and the Cuban Revolution, to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the war in Vietnam, and the post-revolutionary crisis of the one-party rule in Mexico – and attended to their political and international importance in his novels, short fiction, and essays. Known for his experimentation in narrative techniques, and for novels and essays written in a global range that illuminate the conflicts of our times, Fuentes’s writings have been rightfully translated into most of the world’s languages. His literary work continues to spur and provoke the interest of a global readership on diverse civilizations and eras, from Imperial Spain and post-revolutionary France, to Ancient and Modern Mexico, the United States, and Latin America. The Reptant Eagle: Essays on Carlos Fuentes and the Art of the Novel includes nineteen essays and one full introduction written exclusively for this volume by renowned Fuentes scholars from Asia, Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Collected into five parts, the essays integrate wide-ranging methods and innovative readings of The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Aura (1962), Terra Nostra (1975) and, among other novels, Distant Relations (1980); they analyze the visual arts in Fuentes’s novels (Diego Rivera’s murals and world film); chart and comment on the translations of Fuentes’s narratives into Japanese and Romanian; and propose comprehensive readings of The Buried Mirror (1992) and Personas (2012), Fuentes’s posthumous book of essays. Beyond their comprehensive and interdisciplinary scope, the book’s essays trace Fuentes’s conscious resolve to contribute to the art of the novel and to its uninterrupted tradition, from Cervantes and Rabelais to Thomas Mann and Alejo Carpentier, and from the Boom generation to Latin America’s “Boomerang” group of younger writers. This book will be of importance to literary critics, teachers, students, and readers interested in Carlos Fuentes’s world-embracing literary work.

Mexican Mural Art

2020-11-24
Mexican Mural Art
Author: Roberto Cantú
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2020-11-24
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1527562751
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This volume collects the work of prominent art critics, art historians, and literary critics who study the art, lives, and times of the leading Mexican muralists José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera and, among other artists, David Alfaro Siqueiros. Written exclusively for this book in English or in Spanish, and with a full-length introduction (in English), the selected essays respond to a surging interest in Mexican mural art, bringing forth new interpretations and perspectives from the standpoint of the 21st century. The volume’s innovative and varied critical approaches will be of interest to a wide readership, including professors and students of Mexican muralism, as well as the speculative reader, public libraries, and art galleries around the world.

Homecoming Trails in Mexican American Cultural History

2021-04-16
Homecoming Trails in Mexican American Cultural History
Author: Roberto Cantú
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2021-04-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1527568644
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This volume brings together a number of critical essays on three selected topics: biography, nationhood, and globalism. Written exclusively for this book by specialists from Mexico, Germany, and the United States, the essays propose a reexamination of Mexican American cultural history from a twenty-first century standpoint, written in English and approached from different analytical models and critical methods, but free of theoretical jargon. The essays range from biographies and memoirs by leading Chicano historians and studies of globalism during the rule of Imperial Spain (1492-1898), to the modern rise and global influence of the United States, particularly in Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean. Also included are critical studies of novels by Chicano, Latin American, and Caribbean writers who narrate and represent the dominant role played by the United States both within the nation itself and in the Caribbean, thus illustrating the historical parallels and relations that bind Latinos and Americans of Mexican descent. This book will be of importance to literary historians, literary critics, teachers, students, and readers interested in stimulating and unconventional studies of Mexican American cultural history from a global perspective.

Literary Transnationalism(s)

2018-10-16
Literary Transnationalism(s)
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2018-10-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004370862
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Goethe in 1827 famously claimed that national literatures did not mean very much anymore, and that the epoch of world literature was at hand. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, in the so-called "transnational turn" in literary studies, interest in world literature, and in how texts move beyond national or linguistic boundaries, has peaked. The authors of the 18 articles making up Literary Transnationalism(s) reflect on how literary texts move between cultures via translation, adaptation, and intertextual referencing, thus entering the field of world literature. The texts and subjects treated range from Caribbean, American, and Latin American literature to European migrant literatures, from the uses of pseudo-translations to the organizing principles of world histories of literature, from the dissemination of knowledge in the middle ages to circulation of literary journals and series in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contributors include, amongst others, Jean Bessière, Johan Callens, Reindert Dhondt, César Domínguez, Erica Durante, Ottmar Ette, Kathleen Gyssels, Reine Meylaerts, and Djelal Kadir. Authors discussed comprise, amongst others, Carlos Fuentes, Ernest Hemingway, Edouard Glissant.

A Scholiast’s Quill

2019-02-14
A Scholiast’s Quill
Author: Roberto Cantú
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2019-02-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 152752843X
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Alfonso Reyes (1889-1959) was the embodiment of the Latin American poet, essayist, and literary theorist during the first half of the twentieth century. With an astonishing intellectual curiosity and capacity for work, he thought and wrote about every important topic and major intellectual current that defined his beleaguered times. This collection recovers Reyes’ legacy from the standpoint of the twenty-first century, with essays written exclusively for this book by scholars from Colombia, Croatia, Cuba, France, Mexico, and the United States. They analyze Reyes’ poetry and essays from contrasting theoretical approaches and innovative readings of his major poetic works; his philosophical correspondence with leading European and Mexican writers; modernism in the Anglo-American and Latin American essay tradition; and, among other topics of interest, the idea of America and cosmopolitanism in his essays. The volume includes a full-length introduction, an interview with Latin American poet and essayist Octavio Armand, and English translations of Armand’s poems. The study is of significant value to scholars, teachers, students, and the general reader interested in a seminal writer who shaped the writing of poetry and the essay in Latin American letters during the first half of the twentieth century.

Equestrian Rebels

2016-05-11
Equestrian Rebels
Author: Roberto Cantú
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2016-05-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1443893218
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Mariano Azuela (Mexico, 1873–1952) was a medical doctor by profession, recipient of Mexico’s Premio Nacional de Literatura (1949), a distinguished member of El Colegio Nacional and, by mid-century, one of Mexico’s leading novelists and literary critics. The author of novels, novellas, plays, biographies, and literary criticism, Azuela served as field doctor under Francisco Villa during the Mexican Revolution and, after Villa’s military defeats in 1915, published Los de abajo (The Underdogs, 1915) while in exile in El Paso, Texas. This book of essays commemorates the first centenary of Los de abajo, and traces its impact on twentieth-century autobiographies, memoirs and, more specifically, on the Novel of the Mexican Revolution. Equestrian Rebels: Critical Perspectives on Mariano Azuela and the Novel of the Mexican Revolution includes a full-length introduction and nineteen essays by leading international scholars who study Azuela and other novelists of the Mexican Revolution – such as Martín Luis Guzmán, Nellie Campobello and, among others, José Rubén Romero – from current, yet contrasting and innovative theoretical perspectives. Especially written for this volume, these critical essays are grouped into five sections that separately probe and analyze Azuela’s realism and contemporary affinities with photography; Azuela’s literary criticism; centennial studies on Los de abajo; critical approaches to other novels by Azuela; three independent analyses of Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho (1931); and a concluding section on literary representations of Mexican colonialism and revolution in the narratives of Juan Rulfo (El llano en llamas), Carlos Fuentes (Gringo viejo), and David Toscana (El último lector). This book will be of importance to scholars, teachers, students, and the general reader interested in topics related to the literary, cultural, and political forces and conflicts that led to the transformation of Mexico into a modern nation.

Mexican Philosophy in the 20th Century

2017
Mexican Philosophy in the 20th Century
Author: Carlos Alberto Sánchez
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2017
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190601299
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Sánchez and Sanchez have selected, edited, translated, and introduced some of the most influential texts in Mexican philosophy, which constitute a unique and robust tradition that will challenge and complicate traditional conceptions of philosophy. The texts collected here are organized chronologically and represent a period of Mexican thought and culture that emerged from the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and which culminated in la filosofía de lo mexicano (the philosophy of Mexicanness). Though the selections reflect on a variety of philosophical questions, collectively they represent a growing tendency to take seriously the question of Mexican national identity as a philosophical question--especially given the complexities of Mexico's indigenous and European ancestries, a history of colonialism, and a growing dependency on foreign money and culture. More than an attempt to describe the national character, however, the texts gathered here represent an optimistic period in Mexican philosophy that aimed to affirm Mexican culture and philosophy as a valuable, if not urgent, contribution to universal culture.

Writing Revolution in Latin America

2019-09-15
Writing Revolution in Latin America
Author: Juan E. De Castro
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2019-09-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0826522602
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In the politically volatile period from the 1960s through the end of the twentieth century, Latin American authors were in direct dialogue with the violent realities of their time and place. Writing Revolution in Latin America is a chronological study of the way revolution and revolutionary thinking is depicted in the fiction composed from the eye of the storm. From Mexico to Chile, the gradual ideological evolution from a revolutionary to a neoliberal mainstream was a consequence of, on the one hand, the political hardening of the Cuban Revolution beginning in the late 1960s, and, on the other, the repression, dictatorships, and economic crises of the 1970s and beyond. Not only was socialist revolution far from the utopia many believed, but the notion that guerrilla uprisings would lead to an easy socialism proved to be unfounded. Similarly, the repressive Pinochet dictatorship in Chile led to unfathomable tragedy and social mutation. This double-edged phenomenon of revolutionary disillusionment became highly personal for Latin American authors inside and outside Castro's and Pinochet's dominion. Revolution was more than a foreign affair, it was the stuff of everyday life and, therefore, of fiction. Juan De Castro's expansive study begins ahead of the century with José Martí in Cuba and continues through the likes of Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, Gabriel García Márquez in Colombia, and Roberto Bolaño in Mexico (by way of Chile). The various, often contradictory ways the authors convey this precarious historical moment speaks in equal measure to the social circumstances into which these authors were thrust and to the fundamental differences in the ways they themselves witnessed history.

The Forked Juniper

2016-11-23
The Forked Juniper
Author: Roberto Cantú
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2016-11-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0806156201
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Widely acclaimed as the founder of Chicano literature, Rudolfo Anaya is one of America’s most compelling and prolific authors. A recipient of a National Humanities Medal and best known for his debut novel, Bless Me, Ultima, his writings span multiple genres, from novels and essays to plays, poems, and children’s stories. Despite his prominence, critical studies of Anaya’s writings have appeared almost solely in journals, and the last book-length collection of essays on his work is now more than twenty-five years old. The Forked Juniper remedies this gap by offering new critical evaluations of Anaya’s ever-evolving artistry. Edited by distinguished Chicano studies scholar Roberto Cantú, The Forked Juniper presents thirteen essays written by U.S., Mexican, and German critics and academics. The essayists employ a range of critical methods in their analyses of such major works as Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Jalamanta: A Message from the Desert (1996), and the Sonny Baca narrative quartet (1995–2005). Through the lens of cultural studies, the essayists also discuss intriguing themes in Anaya’s writings, such as witchcraft in colonial New Mexico, the reconceptualization of Aztlán, and the aesthetics of the New World Baroque. The volume concludes with an interview with renowned filmmaker David Ellis, who produced the 2014 film Rudolfo Anaya: The Magic of Words. The symbol of the forked juniper tree—venerated as an emblem of healing and peace in some spiritual traditions and a compelling image in Bless Me, Ultima—is open to multiple interpretations. It echoes the manifold meanings the contributors to this volume reveal in Anaya’s boundlessly imaginative literature. The Forked Juniper illuminates both the artistry of Anaya’s writings and the culture, history, and diverse religious traditions of his beloved Nuevo Mexico. It is an essential reference for any reader seeking greater understanding of Anaya’s world-embracing work.