BiblioVault - Books about Fuentes, Carlos

After the Nation

Postnational Satire in the Works of Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon

Pedro García-Caro Foreword by Jean Franco

Northwestern University Press, 2014

After the Nation proposes a series of groundbreaking new approaches to novels, essays, and short stories by Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon within the framework of a hemispheric American studies. García-Caro offers a pioneering comparativist approach to the contemporary American and Mexican literary canons and their underlying nationalist encodement through the study of a wide range of texts by Pynchon and Fuentes which question and historicize in different ways the processes of national definition and myth-making deployed in the drawing of literary borders. After the Nation looks at these literary narratives as postnational satires that aim to unravel and denounce the combined hegemonic processes of modernity and nationalism while they start to contemplate the ensuing postnational constellations. These are texts that playfully challenge the temporal and spatial designs of national themes while they point to and debase “holy” borders, international borders as well as the internal lines where narratives of nation are embodied and consecrated.

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Carlos Fuentes

A Critical View

Edited by Robert Brody and Charles Rossman

University of Texas Press, 1982

Carlos Fuentes is a master of modern world literature. With the translation of his major works into English and other languages, his reputation has surpassed the boundaries of his native Mexico and of Hispanic literature and has become international. Now each new novel stimulates popular and scholarly reviews in periodicals from Mexico City and Buenos Aires to Paris and New York.

Carlos Fuentes: A Critical View is the first full-scale examination in English of this major writer's work. The range and diversity of this critical view are remarkable and reflect similar characteristics in the creative work of Carlos Fuentes, a man of formidable intellectual energy and curiosity.

The whole of Fuentes' work is encompassed by Luis Leal as he explores history and myth in the writer's narrative. Insightful new views of single works are provided by other well-known scholars, such as Roberto González Echevarría, writing on Fuentes' extraordinary Terra Nostra, and Margaret Sayers Peden, exploring Distant Relations, for which she served as authorized translator. Here too are fresh approaches to Fuentes' other novels, among them Where the Air Is Clear, Aura, and The Hydra Head, as well as an examination by John Brushwood of the writer's short fiction and a look by Merlin Forster at Fuentes the playwright. Lanin Gyurko reaches outside Fuentes' canon for his fascinating study of the influence of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane on The Death of Artemio Cruz. Manuel Durán and George Wing consider Fuentes in his role as critic of both literature and art.

Carlos Fuentes: A Critical View has been prepared with the writer's many English-speaking readers in mind. Quotations are most frequently from standard, readily available English translations of Fuentes' works. A valuable chronology of the writer's life rounds off the volume.

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Elena Poniatowska

An Intimate Biography

Michael K. Schuessler; Foreword by Carlos Fuentes

University of Arizona Press, 2007

Descended from the last king of Poland, born in France, educated at a British grade school in Mexico and a Catholic high school in the United States, Hélène Elizabeth Louise Amelie Paula Dolores Poniatowska Amor—otherwise known as Elena—is a passionate, socially conscious writer who is widely known in Mexico and who deserves to be better known everywhere else.

With his subject’s complete cooperation (she granted him access to fifty years of personal files), Michael Schuessler provides the first critical biography of Poniatowska’s life and work. She is perhaps best known outside of Mexico as the author of Massacre in Mexico (La noche de Tlatelolco) and Here’s to You, Jesusa! (Hasta no verte, Jesús mío). But her body of published books is vast, beginning with the 1954 publication of Lilus Kikus, a collection of short stories. And she is still writing today.

Schuessler, who befriended Poniatowska more than fifteen years ago, is a knowledgeable guide to her engrossing life and equally engaging work. As befits her, his portrait is itself a literary collage, a “living kaleidoscope” that is constantly shifting to include a multiplicity of voices—those of fellow writers, literary critics, her nanny, her mother, and the writer herself—easily accessible to general readers and essential to scholars.

Available in English for the first time, this insightful book includes 40 photographs and drawings and an annotated bibliography of Poniatowska’s works—those that have already been translated into English and those awaiting translation.

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Fuentes, Terra Nostra, and the Reconfiguration of Latin American Culture

Michael Abeyta

University of Missouri Press, 2006

Widely acknowledged as Carlos Fuentes’s most ambitious novel, Terra Nostra is a paradigm-shifting work that has generated a virtual cottage industry of scholarly analysis. Michael Abeyta has now taken a new approach to this celebrated novel by considering how giving a gift is like telling a story.

Grounding his study on the work of Derrida and Bataille, Abeyta focuses on the theme of the gift in Terra Nostra, analyzing how gift giving, excess, expenditure, sacrifice, and exchange give shape to the novel. The question of giving leads him into contemplations of such parallel issues as money and exchange economies, the gift’s role in art and narration, and the Baroque in Latin American culture—an elaborate set of arguments that puts Fuentes’s understanding of Latin American culture in a surprising new light.

Blending literary theory with economic anthropology, philosophy, and Latin American studies, Abeyta analyzes the deconstructive functions of rhetorical figures and tropes in Terra Nostra to show how the novel’s revival of Baroque style integrates European and Nahuatl figural strategies. In the process, he reveals the novel’s relevance to current discussions about the relationship between art and the question of the gift. He then goes on to examine Fuentes’s Baroque in relation to Terra Nostra’s reconfiguration of Latin American cultural history.

Abeyta’s study opens new windows on this difficult work as he grapples intelligently with the sometimes dizzying conceptual dances that Fuentes performs. He shows how Fuentes’s rereading of Latin American history confronted important changes during the initial encounter between Europe and the Americas, which coincided with the spread of the European market and the shift from a gift to an exchange economy—from a culture in which economic relations were based on sacrifices, tributes, or gifts to one in which market forces predominated. He also engages in the recent scholarly debate on the potlatch and its implications in New World culture.

As Abeyta reveals, underlying Fuentes’s treatment of the gift is a deep questioning of utopian thought and its impact throughout Latin America’s history. His insights help define Terra Nostra’s place in current discussions in literary theory about art, economy, and the question of the gift, and this work stands to be hailed as one of the most perceptive readings of the novel yet to appear.

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The Writings of Carlos Fuentes

By Raymond Leslie Williams

University of Texas Press, 1996

Smitten by the modernity of Cervantes and Borges at an early age, Carlos Fuentes has written extensively on the cultures of the Americas and elsewhere. His work includes over a dozen novels, among them The Death of Artemio Cruz, Christopher Unborn, The Old Gringo, and Terra Nostra, several volumes of short stories, numerous essays on literary, cultural, and political topics, and some theater.

In this book, Raymond Leslie Williams traces the themes of history, culture, and identity in Fuentes' work, particularly in his complex, major novel Terra Nostra. He opens with a biography of Fuentes that links his works to his intellectual life. The heart of the study is Williams' extensive reading of the novel Terra Nostra, in which Fuentes explores the presence of Spanish culture and history in Latin America. Williams concludes with a look at how Fuentes' other fiction relates to Terra Nostra, including Fuentes' own division of his work into fourteen cycles that he calls "La Edad del Tiempo," and with an interview in which Fuentes discusses his concept of this cyclical division.

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