Books

This book introduces to a larger audience the work of a group of Mexican writers whose work reflects the stimulus of the “boom” of the 1960s, especially in the experimental nueva novella.Duncan views the work of six writers in the context of more well known writers of the period (Ruflo, Fuentes, and Del Paso), and concludes with a chapter on other recent innovators in Mexican literature.

An intellectual tour de force from one of today’s leading critics of Latin American literature and culture, The Corpus Delicti [The Body of Crime] is a manual of crime, a compendium of crime tales, and an extended meditation on the role of crime in life.

By examining the interpretation of a wide variety of materials, such as works in translation and literary fiction, Pol Vandevelde presents a new approach to interpretation that reconciles the possibility of multiple interpretations with the need to consider an author’s intent.

Examines the canonical Latin American avant-garde texts of the 1920s and 1930s, with particular focus on Roberto Arlt and Mario de Andrade. The movement developed on its own terms, in polemic dialogue with European movements, critiquing modernity itself, and developed a geopolitical awareness that bridged postcolonial and postmodern culture and continues its influence today.

The book examines the complex and sophisticated efforts of American Indian writers and orators to constructively engage an often hostile and resistant white audience through language and other symbol systems.

Other South raises new questions about the scope and attitude of Faulkner’s project, positioning his work as an inherent critique of colonialism and emphasizing a more specific conceptualization of coloniality. Engaging with theorists from the former colonies, Aboul-Ela draws on an understanding of economics, social structures, and the colonial/neocolonial status of the Third World, and steps outside the preconceptions of current postcolonial studies to offer a view of our shared literary heritage.

This book exposes the paradox behind the myth of the indestructible Stalinist-era male. In her analysis of social-realist literature and cinema, Kaganovsky examines the recurring theme of the mutilated male body. She views this representation as a thinly veiled statement about the emasculated male condition during the Stalinist era. Kaganovsky provides an insightful reevaluation of classic works of the period, including the novels of Nikolai Ostrovskii (How Steel Was Tempered) and Boris Polevoi (A Story About a Real Man), and films such as Ivan Pyr’ev’s The Party Card, Eduard Pentslin’s The Fighter Pilots, and Mikhail Chiaureli’s The Fall of Berlin, among others. The symbolism of wounding in these works acts as a fissure in the facade of Stalinist cultural production through which we can view the consequences of historic and political trauma.

Legras views the factors that have both formed and stifled the integration of peripheral experiences into Latin American literature. He analyzes key works by novelists Juan Jose Saer (The Witness), Nellie Campobello (Cartucho), Roa Bastos (Son of Man), and Jose Maria Arguedas (The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below), among others, to provide a theoretical basis for understanding the plight of the author, the peripheral voice, and the confines of the literary medium.

While the illness narrative is now a staple of the publishing industry, the genre itself has posed a problem for literary studies. What is the role of criticism in relation to personal accounts of suffering? Can these narratives be judged on aesthetic grounds? Are they a collective expression of the lost intimacy of the patient-doctor relationship? Is their function thus instrumental—to elicit the reader’s empathy?

To answer these questions, Ann Jurecic turns to major works on pain and suffering by Susan Sontag, Elaine Scarry, and Eve Sedgwick and reads these alongside illness narratives by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Reynolds Price, and Anne Fadiman, among others. In the process, she defines the subgenres of risk and pain narratives and explores a range of critical responses guided, alternately, by narrative empathy, the hermeneutics of suspicion, and the practice of reparative reading.

Speculative Fictions views the Chilean neoliberal transition as reflected in cultural production from the postdictatorship era of the 1970s to the present. To Alessandro Fornazzari, the move to market capitalism effectively blurred the lines between economics and aesthetics, perhaps nowhere more evidently than in Chile. Through exemplary works of film, literature, the visual arts, testimonials, and cultural theory, Fornazzari reveals the influence of economics over nearly every aspect of culture and society. Citing Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Willy Thayer, Milton Friedman, and others, Fornazzari forms the theoretical basis for his neoliberal transitional discourse as a logical progression of capitalism.

A probing examination of the prominent role of narcotics trafficking in contemporary Latin American cultural production. In her study, Gabriela Polit Dueas juxtaposes two infamous narco regions, Culiacan, Mexico, and Medellin, Colombia, to demonstrate the powerful forces of violence, corruption, and avarice and their influence over locally based cultural texts.

Tatjana Aleksic examines the widespread use of the sacrificial metaphor in cultural texts and its importance to sustaining communal ideologies in the Balkan region. Aleksic further relates the theme to the sanctioning of ethnic cleansing, rape, and murder in the name of homogeneity and collective identity. She employs cultural theory, sociological analysis, and human rights studies to expose a historical narrative that is predominant regionally, if not globally.

This volume assembles the work of leading international scholars in a comprehensive history of Russian literary theory and criticism from 1917 to the post-Soviet age. By examining the dynamics of literary criticism and theory in three arenas—political, intellectual, and institutional—the authors capture the progression and structure of Russian literary criticism and its changing function and discourse. For the first time anywhere, this collection analyzes all of the important theorists and major critical movements during a tumultuous ideological period in Russian history, including developments in emigre literary theory and criticism.

Winner of the 2012 Efim Etkind Prize for the best book on Russian culture, awarded by the European University at St. Petersburg, Russia.

Peruvian novelist, poet, and anthropologist Jose Maria Arguedas (1911-1969) was a highly conflicted figure. As a mestizo, both European and Quechua blood ran through his veins and into his cosmology and writing. Arguedas’s Marxist influences and ethnographic work placed him in direct contact with the subalterns he would champion in his stories. His exposes of the conflicts between Indians and creoles, and workers and elites were severely criticized by his contemporaries. In Rethinking Community from Peru, Irina Alexandra Feldman examines the deep political connotations and current relevance of Arguedas’s fiction to the Andean region.

New in Paper

Janet Carey Eldred examines the rise of women magazine editors during the mid-twentieth century and reveals their unheralded role in creating a literary aesthetic for the American public.