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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Creation And (Re)Presentation Of Historical Discourse In Isle Of Passion By Laura Restrepo, Daniela Melis
Creation And (Re)Presentation Of Historical Discourse In Isle Of Passion By Laura Restrepo, Daniela Melis
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Published in Colombia in 1989, but neglected until the author’s later distinction, Laura Restrepo’s first novel, Isle of Passion, focuses on historical facts, as well as on the issues that arise when the impact of events is articulated in official discourse. This study—drawing from Walter Mignolo’s idea of decolonial theory—explores how Restrepo’s attempt to rewrite history following “an-other logic, an-other language, an-other thinking” contributes to the decolonization of knowledge, being, community interests, and cultural heritage. The novel’s plot centers on a minor event in international history: the territorial dispute over the island of Clipperton, which was encountered by an …
Borders Of The Self In Alfredo Véa's The Silver Cloud Café , Roberto Cantú
Borders Of The Self In Alfredo Véa's The Silver Cloud Café , Roberto Cantú
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
I am proposing an analysis of a novel by Alfredo Véra, Jr., The Silver Cloud Café (1996). As the author of a narrative trilogy that includes La Maravilla (1993), and Gods Go Begging (1999), Véa has produced, in The Silver Cloud Café, a novel that is central to the trilogy's interpretation. In my analysis, I discuss how Véa's novels question borders of the self—understood as ethnic or racial—through notions of a personal education (in La Maravilla, Alberto's; in The Silver Cloud Café, Zeferino's) in which characters count on the pedagogical guidance of Yaqui shamans, manongs from the …
Maria Vargas Llosa's El Hablador As A Discourse Of Conquest , José Castro Urioste
Maria Vargas Llosa's El Hablador As A Discourse Of Conquest , José Castro Urioste
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In this article I study how Mario Vargas Llosa's El hablador proposes to deconstruct indigenist narrative and promotes the assimilation of Indian cultures under the model of modernity. In this sense, the novel El hablador is written as a discourse of conquest in which the construction of the self—through the evocation of various oppositions—represents an allegory of modern nation. I begin my article with the analysis of the notion of discourse of conquest, as well as one of its most reiterated images of power, the "civilization-barbarism" dichotomy. I follow this with an analysis of the oppositions through which the representation …
Literary Invention And Critical Fashion: Missing The Boat In The Sea Of Lentils, Elzbieta Sklodowska
Literary Invention And Critical Fashion: Missing The Boat In The Sea Of Lentils, Elzbieta Sklodowska
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In pursuing the relation of Sea of Lentils (1979) to the Spanish American literary canon, I argue that while Benítez-Rojo's novel did not fall into the category of the already canonized—and therefore was spared a parricidal gesture of the Post-Boom writers—neither did it belong amidst the previously marginalized texts. I suggest that Sea of Lentils concentrates its internal critique of language and representation around the process of remembering in a manner that is radically at odds not only with the "traditional" historical novel, but with the official voice of the ascendant testimonio as well. Moreover, the notion of memory as …
Ideology And Structure In Giardinelli's Santo Oficio De La Memoria, Gustavo Pellón
Ideology And Structure In Giardinelli's Santo Oficio De La Memoria, Gustavo Pellón
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The article studies the most recent novel by Argentine novelist Mempo Giardinelli from the point of view of its polyphonic structure. Santo Oficio is compared to one of its models, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and the respective modern and postmodern aesthetics ofboth novels are discussed. Giardinelli's approach in this ambitious novel is contrasted with that of major authors of the Latin American Boom. A family tree of the Domeniconelle family, the protagonists of Santo Oficio, is included.
Numa And The Nature Of The Fantastic In The Fiction Of Juan Benet, David K. Herzberger
Numa And The Nature Of The Fantastic In The Fiction Of Juan Benet, David K. Herzberger
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Perhaps the most rewarding critical approach to the novels of Juan Benet is one that encompasses the irrational and seeks to reveal the mysterious— one that can be closely identified with the notion of the fantastic. The view of the fantastic developed in the present study is based on a synthetic modification of the precepts of Todorov and Rabkin, and places emphasis on the hesitation of the reader when confronted with a diametric reversal of the laws of the text. Both the literary theory and prose fiction of Benet can be closely linked to the fantastic: the former through Benet's …