BiblioVault - Books about Spanish American Literature

Body of Writing

Figuring Desire in Spanish American Literature

René Prieto

Duke University Press, 2000

Body of Writing focuses on the traces that an author’s “body” leaves on a work of fiction. Drawing on the work of six important Spanish American writers of the twentieth century, René Prieto examines narratives that reflect—in differing yet ultimately complementary ways—the imprint of the author’s body, thereby disclosing insights about power, aggression, transgression, and eroticism.

Healthy, invalid, lustful, and confined bodies—as portrayed by Julio Cortázar, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Gabriel García Márquez, Severo Sarduy, Rosario Castellanos, and Tununa Mercado—become evidence for Roland Barthes’s contention that works of fiction are “anagrams of the body.” Claiming that an author’s intentions can be uncovered by analyzing “the topography of a text,” Prieto pays particular attention not to the actions or plots of these writers’ fiction but rather to their settings and characterizations. In the belief that bodily traces left on the page reveal the motivating force behind a writer’s creative act, he explores such fictional themes as camouflage, deterioration, defilement, entrapment, and subordination. Along the way, Prieto reaches unexpected conclusions regarding topics that include the relationship of the female body to power, male and female transgressive impulses, and the connection between aggression, the idealization of women, and anal eroticism in men.

This study of how authors’ longings and fears become embodied in literature will interest students and scholars of literary and psychoanalytic criticism, gender studies, and twentieth-century and Latin American literature.

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Modernismo, Modernity and the Development of Spanish American Literature

By Cathy L. Jrade

University of Texas Press, 1998

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book

Modernismo arose in Spanish American literature as a confrontation with and a response to modernizing forces that were transforming Spanish American society in the later nineteenth century. In this book, Cathy L. Jrade undertakes a full exploration of the modernista project and shows how it provided a foundation for trends and movements that have continued to shape literary production in Spanish America throughout the twentieth century.

Jrade opens with a systematic consideration of the development of modernismo and then proceeds with detailed analyses of works-poetry, narrative, and essays-that typified and altered the movement's course. In this way, she situates the writing of key authors, such as Rubén Darío, José Martí, and Leopoldo Lugones, within the overall modernista project and traces modernismo's influence on subsequent generations of writers.

Jrade's analysis reclaims the power of the visionary stance taken by these creative intellectuals. She firmly abolishes any lingering tendency to associate modernismo with affectation and effete elegance, revealing instead how the modernistas' new literary language expressed their profound political and epistemological concerns.

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The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature

Lesley Wylie

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024

The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature examines the defining role of plants in cultural expression across Latin America, particularly in literature. From the colonial georgic to Pablo Neruda’s Canto general, Lesley Wylie’s close study of botanical imagery demonstrates the fundamental role of the natural world and the relationship between people and plants in the region. Plants are also central to literary forms originating in the Americas, such as the New World Baroque, described by Alejo Carpentier as “nacido de árboles.” The book establishes how vegetal imaginaries are key to Spanish American attempts to renovate European forms and traditions as well as to the reconfiguration of the relationship between humans and nonhumans. Such a reconfiguration, which persistently draws on indigenous animist ontologies to blur the boundaries between people and plants, anticipates much contemporary ecological thinking about our responsibility towards nonhuman nature and shows how environmental thinking by way of plants has a long history in Latin American literature.

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