JOSE MARIO DE VEGA as Social Energizer (original) (raw)
What is the role of the reader in the narrative of a novel? Can a book initiate the reader into a process of becoming a 'new person' through the act of reading? In this paper, I aim to demonstrate that the novels Rayuela / Hopscotch (1963) and Libro de Manuel / A Manual for Manuel (1973), by Argentine author Julio Cortázar, pursue an ontological search which requires the reader's active participation. In both of these novels, I argue, Cortázar attempts to establish a bridge, or dialogue, with the reader in order to invent together a new understanding of the human being and create a reality in which the individual and the collective are recognized and enhanced. As Cortázar expresses in Rayuela, he wants the reader to be a "cómplice, un camarada de camino" / "an accomplice … a travelling companion" (R401/H397). 1 Using a playful and inventive writing style, Cortázar's fiction stimulates and requests an active act of reading.
2017
At the intersection of the autobiographical, the historical, and the fictional, Laura Alcoba's Manèges (2007) [La casa de los Conejos/The Rabbit House (2008)], Héctor Abad Faciolince's Traiciones de la memoria (2009), and Albertina Carri's Los rubios (2003) deal with contemporary quandaries in the aftermath of the Latin American regimes of the seventies and eighties. They make a sideways approach to protracted, polarized discussions on issues surrounding recent history and politics of memory-including present-ramifications that impact concrete governmental policies. The critical reception of Abad, Alcoba, and Carri shows signs of an analogous turn toward polarization. I argue that such turn is unwarranted, for these works challenge our interpretive practices precisely by appeal to rhetorical strategies and innovative uses of textual performativity that preclude settling on any one reading, thus eroding the basis of any "strong," polarized view. Shifts from direct report to free indirect discourse in three-person dialogue scenes, for instance, prevent us from matching utterances and speakers. In the absence of textual markers to justify one matching over others, favoring and settling on any one of them involves forcing the text into an arbitrary interpretive framework. Thus, we violate the formal structure of these texts and foreclose a more nuanced assessment demanded by the very texts: if we can't make justified matchings, we are limited but urged to increase the projection of tentative matchings. Since each set of speaker-utterance attributions yields different scenarios, the upshot is a palette of varied interpretations of the events, actions, and characters of the same dialogue scene. This "centrifugal" move-into the text-is complemented by a "centripetal" analogue that sends readers outside the text, into the "real world," in search of "missing pieces" whose necessity is hinted at by the texts themselves. This requirement to restitute what is missing and unsaid also tends to go unnoticed-or ignored. Such blindness, which leads to misreading and exerting violence on texts, also plagues interpretive approaches to sociopolitical phenomena, whether their focus be current events, recent history, or memory-related issues. If sound, this assessment calls for a deep revision of our interpretive practices. iii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Gustavo Llarull was born in La Plata (Buenos Aires), Argentina., where he completed a licenciatura in philosophy at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP). While working towards this degree, he held part-time, mostly freelance jobs, gradually focusing on, and gaining experience in journalistic writing and research (esp. social and political issues, and cultural commentary), and the twin areas of translation and interpretation (Spanish/English). He applied for a teaching post at the UNLP, and taught introductory courses in philosophy. In 2002, a University of California fellowship allowed him to travel to the U.S. in order to join the graduate program in philosophy at UC-Riverside (Ph.D., 2007). He focused on the cluster-areas of agency theory, ethics, critical theory, and narrative conceptions of identity. He did further graduate work at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (English Department-MFA Program), before coming to Cornell. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, my endless gratitude to Debbie Castillo, whose contagious enthusiasm, intellectual rigor, creativity, and generosity-palpable in her feedback; transparent in her conversation-make her the best mentor and Chair one could ever hope for. I'm aware these words may confirm or even enhance a reputation that has already reached mythical proportions. It's probably not a good idea to conflate, or contribute to conflate, myth and reality; but in some rare cases, when one is so close to the other, I don't think much harm can come of it. By chance, during my first semester at Cornell, I took a class with Gerard Aching. Soon I realized it was chance of the Mallarmé kind-could it have been any better? His deep, detailed commentary on your work; his warm, encouraging rigor-a refusal to stop when you've reached a comfortable spot-always conveyed with a subtle, disarming sense of humor; all this strengthens your work tremendously; but much more important is the way in which it enhances and broadens your outlook. And not just in an intellectual sense. In time, you come to realize that every exchange with Gerard is an exercise in phronesis. I don't know how Debra does it, but there's a way, among her many ways, in which-it's like a magic trick-she mentions something; you blink, and you're on board; you just know it; you're enthused, and you do it. And I doubt I would've dared take Cathy Caruth's seminar on Milton otherwise. It was Paradise. Milton's Earth-shattering line-breaks, Hanna Arendt, Cathy's recent work on Latin American theater will be apparent on many of the following pages, even if the reader may become aware of them… belatedly. Sometime before my A exam, Edmundo Paz-Soldán suggested that I revisit Castellanos Moya's Insensatez (2004). I had been introduced to Moya's novel by Edmundo himself, two v years earlier, in a seminar, and, of course, it had caused a deep impression on me. Rereading is a joy and a discovery and a necessity, for reasons that we all know. So, while I had no objections to his suggestion, there was something intriguing about its timing. Evidently, he had seen something I hadn't seen yet. For I was not expecting Castellanos Moya to reshape the way I was seeing my ongoing work. No radical changes were brought about as a result of that discovery. It is in the realm of what I didn't do, rather than in what I did, where the influence of Edmundo's perceptive suggestion would be palpable. (I'll skip, for the sake of maintaining a sanitized version of the events, my initial bout of insensatez during which I wanted to include that novel, as well as El asco, in my dissertation). 1 I don't mean to be fashionably self-deprecating. But I am convinced that learning with Debbie, Cathy, Gerard, and Edmundo included a crucial skill: becoming aware that literature is, among other things, un laborioso avance a través de la propia estupidez [a laborious progression through one's own stupidity]-Rodolfo Walsh dixit-; and that the best thing to do about it is not to take oneself too seriously; to laugh, try to learn, and keep moving on. 1 So, the absence, and not the presence, of Insensatez will (not) be noticeable in the pages that follow. Yet, if there is a single momentary merit or felicitous passage in them, it will be in no small part due to that something that needed to be absent, which Edmundo knew Moya would be able to make me see. This is too subtle, too important, and too badly written to make any sense. With my excuses to the reader, I must say I will be satisfied if these words make Edmundo remember that intervention. And to round up the cryptic section of these notes, I'll mention the Sunday workshops, the risks of irse de mambo, and the New Voices colloquia-all hermetic endeavors that deserve a dissertation of their own. Information about the latter, however, is available in a few clicks. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Rereading, Re-turning and the Quest of the Political
Synthesis: an Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies
The crossings between literary theory and criticism, cultural critique, and philosophical thought assumed radically new guises in the wake of poststructuralist discourses in the 1960s. Against the backdrop of the shift of emphasis from the value attached to works and authors to the singularities and multiplicities of readings and readers, the categories of text, language and narrative came to be seen as the structures and processes through which culture, history, and society-the contingent world of the praxis of life even-are mediated. Text and reading soon became malleable categories with which to approach any one form and area of cultural production and historical experience.
2013
When I aim to learn about a civil war or a revolution in a part of the world I know little about, my first impulse is to find a novel. Only afterwards do I compile a professional bibliography. In the language of this volume, I initially bypass the mode of worlding constituted by social science and by Western IR. Instead, I turn first to the transgressive worlding of fiction. How might this make sense even for a professional academic? Reading a novel and reading a professional article call for different dispositions. We are suspicious, alert and guarded when reading a scientific account. In contrast, while reading a literary narrative our "guard" is down. What raises our guard?
The Significant Message of His Literary Discourse
2016
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s literary discourse actually portrays the destructive domination of colonial and imperialistic powers and civil wars that led to a series of insecurities and poverty in the community. In fact, whatever he has presented in his works is related to the realities of the continent that have been portrayed in his fictional world. In his works, every single line is a reference to a certain critical point in the history of Latin American continent and provides a magnifying glass for the reader to clearly conceptualize them. His works also represent the contemporary events that are frequently happening in the society.