The Spaces Of Latin American Literature

This collection of essays studies the depiction of contemporary urban space in twenty-first century Latin American fiction. The contributors to this volume seek to understand the characteristics that make the representation of the postmodern city in a Latin American context unique. The chapters focus on cities from a wide variety of countries in the region, highlighting the cultural and political effects of neoliberalism and globalization in the contemporary urban scene. Twenty-first century authors share an interest for images of ruins and dystopian landscapes and their view of the damaging effects of the global market in Latin America tends to be pessimistic. As the book demonstrates, however, utopian elements or “spaces of hope” can also be found in these narrations, which suggest the possibility of transforming a capitalist-dominated living space.

The Spaces of Latin American Literature: Tradition, Globalization, and Cultural Production examines how Latin American writers, artists, and intellectuals have negotiated their relationship with Western culture from the colony to the present. De Castro looks at writers and intellectual polemics that serve as markers of the region's cultural evolution. Among the writers and artists studied are Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Rubén Darío, Jorge Luis Borges, Caetano Veloso, and Alberto Fuguet. This book proposes an analysis of the region's literature rooted in its specific cultural, political, and economic locations.

Silviano Santiago has been a pioneer in the development of concepts crucial to the discourse of contemporary critical and cultural theory, especially postcolonial theory. The notions of “hybridity” and “the space in-between” have been so completely absorbed into current theory that few scholars even realize these terms began with Santiago. He was the first to introduce poststructuralist thought to Brazil—via his publication of the Glossario de Derrida and his role as a prominent teacher. The Space In-Between translates many of his seminal essays into English for the first time and, in the process, introduces the thought of one of Brazil’s foremost critics and theorists of the late twentieth century. Santiago’s work creates a theoretical field that transcends both the study of a specific national literature and the traditional perspectives of comparative literature. He examines the pedagogical and modernizing mission of Western voyagers from the conquistadors to the present. He deconstructs the ideas of “original” and “copy,” unpacking their implications for the notions of so-called dominant and dominated cultures. Santiago also confronts questions of cultural dependency and analyzes the problems involved in the imposition of an alien European history, the cultural displacements experienced by the Indians through their religious conversion, and the hierarchical suppression of native and Afro-Brazilian values. Elegantly written and translated, The Space In-Between will provide insights and perspectives that will interest cultural and literary theorists, postcolonial scholars, and other students of contemporary culture.

Latin American Literature at the Millennium: Local Lives, Global Spaces analyzes literary constructions of locality from the early 1990s to the mid 2010s. In this astute study, Raynor reads work by Roberto Bolaño, Valeria Luiselli, Luiz Ruffato, Bernardo Carvalho, João Gilberto Noll, and Wilson Bueno to reveal representations of the human experience that unsettle conventionally understood links between locality and geographical place. The book raises vital considerations for understanding the region’s transition into the twenty-first century, and for evaluating Latin American authors’ representations of everyday place and modes of belonging.

The volume asks how the literatures of the Americas and the Caribbean present multiple or internally differentiated spaces and how these are distinguished or traversed by different temporalities. The historical and (post)colonial experiences of these areas turns them into especially fertile ground for the exploration of the connections between landscape/geography and historical/temporal palimpsests as well as the specificities of literary form. The contributions are dedicated to individual, yet conceptually interconnected studies of staggered, multiple, non-simultaneous temporalities in modern and contemporary literature. The volume adopts a comparative perspective throughout and intends to foster the dialogue between the study of Latin/American and Caribbean literatures—in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English. Therefore, the individual essays are not grouped according to geographical or linguistic areas, but follow a trajectory from spatiotemporal constellations of the 19th century to ruined/catastrophic landscapes and the geopoetic inscriptions of time in regions. The essays should appeal to all readers interested in World Literature, Hemispheric Studies as well as temporal approaches to space and geography.

This volume examines Latin American literature in the context of a complimentary audiovisual culture dominated by mass media such as photography, film, and the Internet. The articles gathered here, all of them published for the first time, critically assess Latin American media theories (Garcia Canclini et al.), pointing out their strengths and shortcomings; show how literary works have been able to sustain their visibility in a highly competitive media ecology, accommodating to pop and mass culture while at the same time reaffirming the authority of the literary intellectual. Overall, the book's foregrounding of the impact of mass media on Latin American literature opens the critical debate on an increasingly essential subject.

Rosman persuasively demonstrates how they explore ways of being in common - the communal relation - when the notion of a common being - a totalized conception of community - is shown to be untenable. In doing so she incorporates and looks beyond her predecessors theoretical resources to urgent contemporary preoccupations with how to imagine identity in a "post-national" moment."--Jacket.

This book takes the case of Gregory Rabassa, translator into English of such canonical novels as Garc'a MOrquez's Cien a-os de soledad and CortOzar's Rayuela. In the chapters, the author historicizes the translator's practice by investigating Rabassa's ideas about translation and his own practice, the relationship between Rabassa and 'his' authors, and the circulation and reception of Rabassa's translations, especially of the works of the so-called Latin American Boom. By critically engaging Rabassa as a translating subject, this book affirms the translator's active role in shaping literary traditions and in producing texts and knowledge. Rabassa emerges as an active subject in the inter-American literary exchange, an agent bound to history and to the forces involved in the production of culture.