ABSTRACT

Critical theory meets Latin American fiction in this bold and challenging analysis of literature and literary criticism through post-structuralist analysis. Focusing on Latin American literary and critical production from the 1890s to the 1990s, Bernard McGuirk highlights the confrontation between theory, politics and literature.
The range of literatures discussed is extensive, including writings from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru. The symptomatic differences between and within cultures are illuminated by analysis of texts by such authors as:
César Vallejo
Jorges Luis Borges
Rubén Darío
Pablo Neruda
Julio Cortázar
João Guimarães Rosa
Susana Thénon
Carlos Fuentes
Bernard McGuirk holds the Chair of Romance Literatures and Literary Theory at the University of Nottingham. He is currently President of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland.

chapter |20 pages

Fore-word

locating inequality Post-, trans-, intra-

chapter |9 pages

Pre-

Sewing up meaning: a liberal humanist closure of Pablo Neruda's ‘Oh vastness of pines’

chapter |22 pages

Eurocentrism and the male gaze in Brazil

Other place, other plays: the ploy of alterity in Blaise Cendrars' South Americans

chapter |17 pages

On the meta-history of literature

‘I know …’, ‘I seek …’, ‘I know not..’: modernismo, modernidad and the poetics of discontinuity

chapter |26 pages

Reading, misreading and the resistance to modernity

On misprision and intertextuality: from Rubén Darío to César Vallejo

chapter |26 pages

Poetry, pedagogy and untranslatability

On écriture and oralité in two poems of César Vallejo's Trilce

chapter |18 pages

Beyond structural influence

Borges and the purloined detective: 'tecs, lies and video-hype

chapter |17 pages

On the semi(er)otics of alterity

Beyond Lacanian limits: Julio Cortázar's ‘The Other Heaven’

chapter |18 pages

Mirror × scissors

Reflections on cuts from Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra

chapter |11 pages

Subjectivity, history, ideology

Relocating the Self: ‘Borges and I’

chapter |22 pages

Z/Z

On midrash and écriture féminine in Jorge Luis Borges' ‘Emma Zunz’

chapter |26 pages

Post-

Back to the suture: on the unseamliness of patriarchal discourse in Susana Thénor's Ova completa