The Global Paradigm in Fourth-Wave Ibero-American Criticism on James Joyce (Introduction to TransLatin Joyce) (original) (raw)
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Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 2016
Author(s): Soto Van der Plas, Christina | Abstract: Price, Brian L., Cesar A. Salgado and John Pedro Schwartz, eds. TransLatin Joyce. Global Transmissions in Ibero-American Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print. 260 pp.
The first part of this article focuses on Borges’s and Bolaño’s formative years as writers, a period during which both openly and self-consciously endorse a Joycean aesthetic: Borges with his pioneering 1925 review of Ulysses and historic Spanish translation of ‘Penelope’, and Bolaño with his lavishly entitled debut novel, Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce (1984; Advice from a Disciple of Morrison to a Joyce Fanatic), which offers a contemporary, hardboiled version of Joyce, where literature communes with the world of drugs, alcohol, sex, and rock and roll. It is also significant that their respective involvements with Joyce’s work was preceded in both cases by an effervescent avant-gardist period: Borges played a pivotal role in the founding and consolidation of the Spanish avant-garde movement Ultraísmo, while Bolaño has been hailed as the founder of Infrarrealismo, a neo-avant-garde minor poetic movement dubbed as ‘dadá a la mexicana’. The second part of the article arguea that as Borges and Bolaño gradually shift from the youthful tone of their early writings to the fictional canonicity of their later prose, their respective attitudes towards Joyce develop accordingly. Borges showcases his aesthetic of brevity as the antithetical response to Joyce’s epic legacy. Bolaño, on the contrary, adopts Joyce’s accretive method of composition resulting in the creation of his two multi-plotted, multilingual, and multi-voiced gargantuan masterpieces, Los detectives salvajes (1998; The Savage Detectives) and 2666, which can be read as protracted late twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American analogues of Ulysses.
Comparative Literature Studies, 2019
This book makes ambitious claims for the privileged place of translation in modernist studies. As in Rogers's equally provocative first book, Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History (Oxford UP, 2012), the subject here is the literary relation between Spain and the English-speaking world. Two major figures from Spain, Miguel de Unamuno and Juan Ram on Jim enez, were strongly drawn to US literature. Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and Langston Hughes were heavily invested in Spanish literature and culture. Whereas Hemingway thought of himself as a Spanish writer born in the wrong country, Unamuno claimed that he thought in English and translated his thoughts into Spanish. This reciprocal interchange allows Rogers to treat Hispanism in the US and Americanism on the Iberian Peninsula as parallel and complementary phenomena. The central contention of the book is that "[t]he global movements that have come to be gathered by the sign 'modernism' and its cognates were built substantively on engagements with two evolving fields-Hispanism and American studies-that were creating bodies of knowledge and were finding prevalent purchase in the early twentieth century" (3). Modernism in the global sense surely has multiple points of origin. Incomparable Empires supplies ample evidence for the vitality of Spanish-American literary relations, but do these interesting but sporadic contacts provide the substance on which the movement itself is founded? Is this a valid conclusion even for the modernism of Spain and the United States? Unamuno and Jim enez are major figures, but Spanish modernism comes into its full flowering in the twenties, with Federico Garc ıa Lorca's generation. In this respect, the approach to Spanish literature through the anglocentric lens of "modernism" distorts it, since in Spanish literary history the same phenomenon often goes by the name of "vanguardia." Rogers himself points out that "Anglophone scholars of modernism have become increasingly aware that the term so intelligible and familiar to them for decades has had little purchase in other languages" (136). Modernism is certainly familiar enough, but it is still a hotly contested concept even in the Anglosphere. It is telling that there is no entry for topics like "avantgarde" or "surrealism" in the index to this book, and that there are more chapters on American writers than on Spanish ones. It is difficult, in any case, to discern Rogers's view of Spanish modernism as a whole, given his small sample size. Jos e Ortega y Gasset, who figured prominently in the definition of Spanish modernism in the previous book, Modernism and the New Spain, is mentioned only once in Incomparable Empires, and Rogers seems oddly uninterested in reconciling the conclusions of these two parallel projects: perhaps modesty prevents him from citing his own work. If we define Spanish modernism through a few writers who happened to be interested in the literature of the US, then the image of Spanish modernism that emerges will inevitably be distorted through an Anglophone lens. A parallel problem occurs in the chapters devoted to US writers: if we choose to define US modernism through its Hispanophile elements, then these elements will loom larger than they might otherwise, simply because of the confirmation bias in the choice of writers. Hemingway is a canonical writer with a strong attachment to Spain-though his knowledge of Spanish literature seems rather limited. On the other hand, Dos Passos is the object of study here not because he is a major modernist in other respects but because of a similar interest in Spain. Pound's Hispanism is more substantial than I would have given him credit for before reading this book but should be seen in the wider context of his studies of other
2016
It is in the nature of comparative studies to undertake the task not only of finding the similarities or differences between two or more cultural products, but also of constantly redefining the nature of the relationships that bind them together. It can be said that a true comparative study manages to trace a constellation, that is to say, it projects a series of hypothetical links between various elements and thus reshapes the space and orientation of the whole field. What is at stake, then, is the demarcation of the space of a series of fictional connections projected onto the sky of what are seemingly isolated elements. The result is a network of images that function as a compass to orient, in this case, the wanderings of critical thought. The collection of essays TransLatin Joyce. Global Transmissions in Ibero-American Literature is a comparative study of literature in this sense-it shapes and retraces the complex set of relations between James Joyce's work and the literary ...