Las Armas Secretas

Provocative reappraisal of the portrayal of women in Julio Cortázar's short stories.

The work of the twentieth-century Argentine writer Cortazar is analyzed by Standish (foreign languages and literature, East Carolina U., Greenville), who writes with the assurance of his long familiarity with the author's work. Of the eight chapters, the first is devoted to Cortazar's life, the remainder to his writing, which is divided chronologically and by genre. Cortazar's own writing on literature and his controversial political identity each merit separate chapters. c. Book News Inc.

"The great Argentinian writer Julio Cortazar (1914-84) was immersed in one of the most vibrant and revolutionary intellectual scenes of the last century, the Paris of the 1950s and 60s. Yet his often highly cerebral work has never received the close philosophical attention it deserves. Moran's book fills this critical lacuna. Rather than indiscriminately applying 'theory' to Cortazar, it aims to show that his work both engages with and often foreshadows many of the problems which were to become central to so-called poststructuralist philosophy and poetics. This study demonstrates that Cortazar remains enduringly, problematically modern."

Arising from the philosophical conviction that our sense of space plays a direct role in our apprehension and construction of reality (both factual and fictional), this book investigates how conceptions of postmodern space have transformed the history of the impossible in literature. Deeply influenced by the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, there has been an unprecedented rise in the number of fantastic texts in which the impossible is bound to space — space not as scene of action but as impossible element performing a fantastic transgression within the storyworld. This book conceptualizes and contextualizes this postmodern, fantastic use of space that disrupts the reader’s comfortable notion of space as objective reality in favor of the concept of space as socially mediated, constructed, and conventional. In an illustration of the transnational nature of this phenomenon, García analyzes a varied corpus of the Fantastic in the past four decades from different cultures and languages, merging literary analysis with classical questions of space related to the fields of philosophy, urban studies, and anthropology. Texts include authors such as Julio Cortázar (Argentina), John Barth (USA), J.G. Ballard (UK), Jacques Sternberg (Belgium), Fernando Iwasaki (Perú), Juan José Millás (Spain,) and Éric Faye (France). This book contributes to Literary Theory and Comparative Literature in the areas of the Fantastic, narratology, and Geocriticism and informs the continuing interdisciplinary debate on how human beings make sense of space.

"There are also separate sections on the modernistas and postmodernismo, avant-garde poetry in the twentieth century, and the Boom novel. A final chapter is dedicated to an analysis of some recent developments within the Spanish-American literary canon, such as the post-Boom novel, with a separate section on women writers, 'testimonio', Latino literature, the gay/lesbian novel, and Afro-Hispanic literature."--BOOK JACKET.

Una investigación exhaustiva sobre las revolucionarias armas nazis que les llevaron a perfeccionar los reactores militares e incluso a desarrollar los primeros platillos volantes.La historia de las armas nazis es una de las historias más apasionantes de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Fruto de investigaciones que hasta ese momento nadie había podido siquiera imaginar, el armamento nazi supuso un avance de décadas en tecnología militar, tal fue así que sus logros armamentísticos fueron utilizados, por ambos bandos, en la posterior Guerra Fría. Incluso ahora, muchos de los artilugios que proyectaron o desarrollaron sirven de inspiración o de materia de estudio a los científicos. Armas secretas de Hitler nos presenta una relación de las armas nazis deteniéndose en las investigaciones que preceden a los avances y en las cuestiones administrativas que, posteriormente, evitaron en el inicio de la guerra su uso y su producción en masa. José Miguel Romaña nos presenta el fruto de veinte años de investigación, basada en documentos desclasificados nazis, rusos y estadounidenses. Divide la obra en tres partes fundamentales: 'Los aviones más avanzados', 'Minas, misiles y bombas guiadas' y 'Submarinos revolucionarios, naves discoidales y armas mágicas', indicándonos de ese modo en qué sectores se centraron las investigaciones de los ingenieros alemanes. El curso de la guerra hubiera sido otro de haber permitido el Führer el desarrollo de los hallazgos de los científicos nazis: desarrollaron los primeros aviones supersónicos, los misiles tierra-aire y aire-aire, submarinos nucleares de gran velocidad y prestaciones, cohetes tripulados, cañones sónicos, bombas endotérmicas, bolas de fuego dirigidas, y las sorprendentes naves discoidales, auténticos platillos volantes, ocultados tanto por nazis como por aliados.