Original Subjects explores the interweaving of the child-hero and the fortunes of a nation as these are portrayed in a wide selection of novels and national narratives in the French and English traditions. Ala Alryyes examines how these works deploy similar metaphors and signifying narratives in which a homeless child is central.
Taking up such disparate writers and novelists as Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Defoe, Richardson, Diderot, Scott, Stendhal, Balzac, and Disraeli, as well as Homer, St. Augustine, and Hannah Arendt, this book argues that the generational parent–child dynamic is key to understanding the structure of novels, the theory of the state, and the events of history.
From reviews of the Spanish edition:
"...among the best works that Mexican fiction has produced."
—Héctor Gally, Sábado
"With homely features, but with a body so shapely and exciting that it sets men (priests included) aflame throughout the novel, with an incandescent voluptuousness and delightful amorality (surely explosive in the conservative Mexican society of her time and place) ...Otilia Rauda could be the protagonist of a Greek tragedy or of a soap opera made of improbable happenings and as many turns of fate as there are chapters used to tell the story of her life."
—Jorge Ruffinelli, Punto y Aparte
Winner of Mexico's prestigious Xavier Villaurrutia prize in 1986, Otilia Rauda is here translated into English for the first time as Otilia's Body. Widely considered Sergio Galindo's best work, the novel dramatizes a sexually liberated woman's obsession with an outlaw lover, played against the backdrop of Mexican history from 1910 to 1940. A fine example of "intimist" fiction, Otilia's Body is noteworthy for its penetratingly described characters who transcend time and place to become universally recognizable.
What would happen if a feminist Jewish wit and scholar invaded David Lodge’s territory? Marleen S. Barr, herself a pioneer in the feminist criticism of science fiction, provides a giddily entertaining answer in this feisty novel. Oy Pioneer! follows professor Sondra Lear as she makes her inimitable way through a world of learning—at times fantastic, at times all too familiar, often hilarious, and always compulsively interesting.
As if Mel Brooks and Erica Jong had joined forces to recreate Sex and the City for the intellectual set, the story is a heady mix of Jewish humor, feminist insight, and academic satire. Lear is a tenured radical and a wildly ambitious intellectual, but is subject nonetheless to the husband-hunting imperatives of her Jewish mother. Her adventures expand narrative parameters according to Barr’s term "genre fission."
Mixing elements of science fiction, fantasy, ethnic comedy, satire, and authentic experience of academic life, Oy Pioneer! is uncommonly fun—a Jewish feminist scholar’s imaginative text boldly going where no academic satire has gone before—and bringing readers along for an exhilarating ride.
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