Decolonizing Modernism: James Joyce and the Development of Spanish American Fiction

ISBN-13: 9781906540463 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 162 str.

Jose Luis Venegas

Opis

James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) has been recognized as a central model for the Spanish American 'New Narrative'. Joyce's linguistic and technical influence became the unequivocal sign that literature in Spanish America had definitively abandoned narrow regionalist concerns and entered a global literary canon. In this bold and wide-ranging study, Jose Luis Venegas rethinks this evolutionary conception of literary history by focusing on the connection between cultural specificity and literary innovation. He argues that the intertextual dialogue between James Joyce and prominent authors such as Argentines Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Mexican Fernando del Paso, reveals the anti-colonial value of modernist form. Venegas explores the historical similarities between Joyce's Ireland during the 1920s and Spanish America between the 1940s and 70s to challenge depoliticized interpretations of modernist aesthetics and propose unsuspected connections between formal experimentation and the cultural transformations demanded by decolonizing societies."

Spis treści

Introduction: The Place of Modernism in Spanish America 1. Dissociations of Sensibility: Cultural Decolonization and Joyce's Reception in Spanish America 2. The Limits of Parody: Allusion and Cosmopolitanism in Jorge Luis Borges 3. Double Consciousness and Counter-Myth in Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela 4. Local Interests: The Aesthetics of the Joycean Novel in Spanish America 5. Conclusion: Literary History Otherwise

O autorze

Jose Luis Venegas