Literary Criticism / General

Total 27 results found.

The Hernandez Brothers

The Hernandez Brothers

Love, Rockets, and Alternative Comics

A critical examination of the work of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Mexican-American brothers whose graphic novels are highly influential The brothers started in the alt-comics scene, where their ‘Love and Rockets’ series gained prominence. Their depictions of latinidad and sexuality push against the edicts of mainstream Anglophone culture, but they also defy many Latino perceptions of life, politics, and self-representation.

Appropriating Theory

Appropriating Theory

Angel Rama's Critical Work

Angel Rama (1926-1983) is a major figure in Latin American literary and cultural studies, but little has been published on his critical work. Gonzalez focuses on Rama’s response to and appropriation of European critics like Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Georg Lukacs. He argues that Rama realized the inapplicability of many of their theories and descriptions of cultural modernization to Latin America, and reworked them to produce his own discourse that challenged prevailing notions of social and cultural modernization.

Anti-Literature

Anti-Literature

The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina

Anti-Literature articulates a rethinking of what is meant today by “literature.” Examining key Latin American forms of experimental writing from the 1920s to the present, Shellhorse reveals literature’s power as a site for radical reflection and reaction to contemporary political and cultural conditions.

Comics and Memory in Latin America

Comics and Memory in Latin America

This volume presents new perspectives on how comics on and from Latin America both view and express memory formation on major historical events and processes. The contributors, from a variety of disciplines including literary theory, cultural studies, and history, explore topics including national identity construction, narratives of resistance to colonialism and imperialism, the construction of revolutionary traditions, and the legacies of authoritarianism and political violence.

Bandit Narratives in Latin America

Bandit Narratives in Latin America

From Villa to Chávez

Dabove shows how the bandit trope was used in fictional and non-fictional narratives by writers and political leaders, from the Mexican Revolution to the present. By examining cases from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, from Pancho Villa’s autobiography to Hugo Chavez’s appropriation of his “outlaw” grandfather, Dabove reveals how bandits function as a symbol to expose the dilemmas or aspirations of cultural and political practices, including literature as a social practice and as an ethical experience.

Bridges, Borders, and Breaks

Bridges, Borders, and Breaks

History, Narrative, and Nation in Twenty-First-Century Chicana/o Literary Criticism

This volume reassesses the field of Chicana/o literary studies in light of the rise of Latina/o studies, the recovery of a large body of early literature by Mexican Americans, and the “transnational turn” in American studies. The chapters reveal how “Chicano” defines a literary critical sensibility as well as a political one, and show how this view can yield new insights about the status of Mexican Americans, the legacies of colonialism, and the ongoing prospects for social justice.

After Human Rights

After Human Rights

Literature, Visual Arts, and Film in Latin America, 1990-2010

Rosenberg explores Latin American artistic production concerned with the possibility of justice after the establishment, rise, and ebb of the human rights narrative around the turn of the last century. He grounds his study in discussions of literature, film, and visual art (novels of political refoundations, fictions of truth and reconciliation, visual arts based on cases of disappearance, films about police violence, artistic collaborations with police forces, and judicial documentaries). In doing so, he provides a highly original examination of the paradoxical demands on current artistic works to produce both capital value and foster human dignity.

Chica Lit

Chica Lit

Popular Latina Fiction and Americanization in the Twenty-First Century

Winner, 2016 ALA-Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Hedrick illuminates how discourses of Americanization, ethnicity, gender, class, and commodification shape the genre of “chica lit,” popular fiction written by Latina authors with Latina characters. Looking at chica lit’s market-driven representations of difference, poverty, and Americanization, Hedrick shows how this writing functions within the larger arena of struggles over popular representation of Latinas and Chicanas.

Literate Zeal

Literate Zeal

Gender and the Making of a New Yorker Ethos

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.

Rethinking Community from Peru

Rethinking Community from Peru

The Political Philosophy of José María Arguedas

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.

A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism

A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism

The Soviet Age and Beyond

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.

The Sacrificed Body

The Sacrificed Body

Balkan Community Building and the Fear of Freedom

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.

Narrating Narcos

Narrating Narcos

Culiacán and Medellín

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.

Speculative Fictions

Speculative Fictions

Chilean Culture, Economics, and the Neoliberal Transition

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.

Illness as Narrative

Illness as Narrative

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.

Total 27 results found.