Pubis Angelical

The Latin American novelist Manuel Puig is perhaps best known for his novel Kiss of the Spider Woman. The Necessary Dream provides an introduction to and interpretation of his seven novels written from 1968 to 1982. While each novel is given a separate chapter, the homogenious thread of attitudes and themes which touch on psychology, feminism, Argentine politics and popular culture, is clearly displayed. Contents: Introduction; 'La Vie est ailleurs': ^R La traiciÛn de Rita Hayworth (1968); 'The Rules of the Game': Boquitas pintadas (1969); 'The Divided Self': The Buenos Aires Affair (1973); 'The Kiss of Death': El beso de la mujer aran?ía (1976); 'Only Make-Believe': Pubis angelical (1979); 'Les Liaisons dangereuses': MaldiciÛn eterna a quien lea estas p-ginas (1980); 'Life's a Dream': Sangre de amor correspondido (1982); Notes; Bibliography; Index

The recent fiction of Spanish America has been widely acclaimed for its experimental and revolutionary qualities. In Reclaiming the Author, Lucille Kerr studies the sources of power of this newly emergent literature in her detailed examination of the critical concept of "the author." Kerr considers how Spanish American narratives raise questions about authorial identity and activity through the different figures of the author they propose. These author-figures, she maintains, both complement and contradict notions of authority that exist outside of the world of fiction. By focusing on works by well-known Spanish American authors--Cortazar, Donoso, Fuentes, Poniatowska, Puig, and Vargas Llosa--Kerr shows how the Spanish Americans have formed a radical poetics of the author. Her readings demonstrate how exemplary Spanish American texts, such as Rayuela, Terra nostra, and El hablador, call into question the author as a unitary or uniform, and therefore unproblematical, figure. Individually and together, Kerr's readings reclaim "the author" as a complex critical concept encompassing diverse, conflicting, even competitive roles.

With such figures as Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel ngel Asturias and Gabriel Garc a M rquez (both the latter Nobel Prizewinners) Spanish American fiction is now unquestionably an integral part of the mainstream of Western literature. This book draws on the most recent research in describing the origins and development of narrative in Spanish America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tracing the pattern from Romanticism and Realism, through Modernismo, Naturalism and Regionalism to the Boom and beyond. It shows how, while seldom moving completely away from satire, social criticism and protest, Spanish American fiction has evolved through successive phases in which both the conceptions of the writer's task and presumptions about narrative and reality have undergone radical alterations. DONALD SHAW holds the Brown Forman Chair of Spanish American literature in the University of Virginia.

In this artful fusion of espionage thriller and science fiction, Manuel Puig tells one story shared by three women - an actress in the 1930s, living in her husband's fairy-tale castle; a young woman in Mexico City in the 1970s, convalescing in a hospital; and a futuristic cyborg sex slave, occupying an artificial landscape. In the haunting and mysterious language for which he is renowned, Puig explores the links between these women, as well as the links between genders and generations.

Décio Torres Cruz approaches connections between literature and cinema partly through issues of gender and identity, and partly through issues of reality and representation. In doing so, he looks at the various ways in which people have thought of the so-called cinematic novel, tracing the development of that genre concept not only in the French ciné-roman and film scenarios but also in novels from the United States, England, France, and Latin America. The main tendency he identifies is the blending of the cinematic novel with pop literature, through allusions to Pop Art and other postmodern cultural trends. His prime exhibits are a number of novels by the Argentinian writer Manuel Puig: Betrayed by Rita Hayworth; Heartbreak Tango; The Buenos Aires Affair; Kiss of the Spider Woman; and Pubis angelical. Bringing in suggestive sociocultural and psychoanalytical considerations, Cruz shows how, in Puig’s hands, the cinematic novel resulted in a pop collage of different texts, films, discourses, and narrative devices which fused reality and imagination into dream and desire.

Long acclaimed by Latin American critics, the Argentine novelist Manuel Puig became best known in this country for his novel Kiss of the Spider Woman. While Puig's seven novels are available in translation, an immense body of criticism and many of his most important interviews remain inaccessible to the non-Spanish reader. Written especially for the English-speaking audience, this study analyzes aspects of Puig's novels, summarizing the most important criticism in Spanish, and offers a biographical sketch of the man, making available for the first time in English selections from the most informative interviews. Readings of each of Puig's novels combined with Lavers's overview of the criticism in Spanish provide new insights into one of the most original and profound bodies of fiction of any current writer.