Rethinking Juan Rulfo S Creative World

Though primarily known for his haunting, enigmatic novel Pedro Páramo and the unrelenting depictions of the failures of post-revolutionary Mexico in his short story collection, El Llano en llamas, Juan Rulfo also worked as scriptwriter on various collaborative film projects and his powerful interventions in the area of documentary photography ensure that he continues to inspire interest worldwide. Bringing together some of the most significant names in Rulfian scholarship, this anthology engages with the complexity and diversity of Rulfo’s cultural production. The essays in the collection bring the Rulfian texts into dialogues with other cultural traditions and techniques including the Japanese Noh or "mask" plays and modernist experimentation in the Irish language. They also deploy diverse theoretical frameworks that range from Roland Barthes’ work on studium and punctum in photography to Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on space and spatiality and the postmodern insights of Jean Baudrillard on the nature of the simulacrum and the hyperreal. In this way, innovative approaches are brought to bear on the Rulfian texts as a way of illuminating the rich tensions and anxieties they evoke about Mexico, about history, about art and about the human condition.

Mexican Literature as World Literature is a landmark collection that, for the first time, studies the major interventions of Mexican literature of all genres in world literary circuits from the 16th century forward. This collection features a range of essays in dialogue with major theorists and critics of the concept of world literature. Authors show how the arrival of Spanish conquerors and priests, the work of enlightenment naturalists, the rise of Mexican academies, the culture of the Mexican Revolution, and Mexican neoliberalism have played major roles in the formation of world literary structures. The book features major scholars in Mexican literary studies engaging in the ways in which modernism, counterculture, and extinction have been essential to Mexico's world literary pursuit, as well as studies of the work of some of Mexico's most important authors: Sor Juana, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, and Juan Rulfo, among others. These essays expand and enrich the understanding of Mexican literature as world literature, showing the many significant ways in which Mexico has been a center for world literary circuits.

This comparative literature study explores how writers from across Ireland and Latin America have, both in parallel and in concert, deployed symbolic representations of the dead in their various anti-colonial projects. In contrast to the ghosts and revenants that haunt English and Anglo-American letters—where they are largely either monstrous horrors or illusory frauds—the dead in these Irish/Latinx archives can serve as potential allies, repositories of historical grievances, recorders of silenced voices, and disruptors of neocolonial discourse.

Francisco de Quevedo (Madrid, 1580-1645) was well known for his rich and dynamic style, achieved through an ingenious and complex manipulation of language. Yet he was also a consistent and systematic thinker, with moral philosophy, broadly understood, lying at the core of his numerous and varied works. Quevedo lived in an age of transition, with the Humanist tradition on the wane, and his writing expresses the characteristic uncertainty of a moment of cultural transition. In this book Alfonso Rey surveys Quevedo's ideas in such diverse fields as ethics, politics, religion and literature, ideas which hitherto have received little attention. New information is also provided towards a reconstruction of the cultural evolution of Europe in the years prior to the Enlightenment, and thus the scope of the book extends beyond that of Spanish literature.

With their emphasis on freedom and engagement, European existentialisms offered Latin Americans transformative frameworks for thinking and writing about their own locales. In taking up these frameworks, Latin Americans endowed them with a distinctive ethos, a turn towards questions of identity and ethics. Stephanie Merrim situates major literary and philosophical works—by the existentialist Grupo Hiperión, Rosario Castellanos, Octavio Paz, José Revueltas, Juan Rulfo, and Rodolfo Usigli—within this dynamic context. Collectively, their writings manifest an existentialist ethos attuned to the matters most alive and pressing in their specific situations—matters linked to gender, Indigeneity, the Mexican Revolution, and post-Revolution politics. That each of these writers orchestrates a unique center of gravity renders Mexican existentialist literature an always shifting, always passionate adventure. A Latin American Existentialist Ethos takes readers on this adventure, conveying the passions of its subjects lucidly and vibrantly. It is at once a detailed portrait of twentieth-century Mexican existentialism and an expansive look at Latin American literary existentialism in relation—and opposition—to its European counterparts.

During the 1980s, the urban youth movement known as la movida transformed the Spanish cultural landscape, particularly in the country's capital, Madrid. After a four-decade long dictatorship, artists and thinkers sought to make the most of their newly found freedoms. The vibrancy, optimism and aesthetic heterogeneity of the period are best captured in contemporary ephemera - in the fanzines and magazines that provided movida participants with an immediate and largely unmediated outlet for their creative experiments. Among them, monthly arts magazine La Luna de Madrid is arguably the most iconic, and its preoccupation with urban space, identity, and postmodernity suggests that la movida was indeed more than 'just a teardrop in the rain', as some of its critics have suggested.

How did men become the stars of the Mexican intellectual scene? Dude Lit examines the tricks of the trade and reveals that sometimes literary genius rests on privileges that men extend one another and that women permit. The makings of the “best” writers have to do with superficial aspects, like conformist wardrobes and unsmiling expressions, and more complex techniques, such as friendship networks, prizewinners who become judges, dropouts who become teachers, and the key tactic of being allowed to shift roles from rule maker (the civilizado) to rule breaker (the bárbaro). Certain writing habits also predict success, with the “high and hard” category reserved for men’s writing and even film directing. In both film and literature, critically respected artwork by men tends to rely on obscenity interpreted as originality, negative topics viewed as serious, and coolly inarticulate narratives about bullying understood as maximum literary achievement. To build the case regarding “rebellion as conformity,” Dude Lit contemplates a wide set of examples while always returning to three figures, each born some two decades apart from the immediate predecessor: Juan Rulfo (with Pedro Páramo), José Emilio Pacheco (with Las batallas en el desierto), and Guillermo Fadanelli (with Mis mujeres muertas, as well as the range of his publications). Why do we believe Mexican men are competent performers of the role of intellectual? Dude Lit answers this question through a creative intersection of sources. Drawing on interviews, archival materials, and critical readings, this provocative book changes the conversation on literature and gendered performance.

In this volume, scholars from a wide range of fields within the humanities explore the links between space and place and their relation to cultural expression. This collection shows that a focus on the spatial can help elucidate important facets of symbolic expression and cultural production, whether it be literature, music, dance, films, or art.