Passionate Fictions was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
"Clarice Lispector is the premiere Latin American woman prose writer of this century," Suzanne Ruta noted in the New York Times Book Review, "but because she is a woman and a Brazilian, she has remained virtually unknown in the United States." Passionate Fictions provides American readers with a critical introduction to this remarkable writer and offers those who already know Lispector's fiction a deeper understanding of its complex workings.
Focusing on post-Franco Spanish fiction from 1975 to 1989, Robert C. Spires applies the concepts of episteme and discursive field to the ways in which language from multiple sources determines how reality is defined at a given moment and how it influences ideas, attitudes, and feelings. Spires identifies bonds connecting disparate academic disciplines and sociopolitical events by exploring how the world of fiction serves as a register of the nonfictional world.
In 1989 the Soviet bloc, along with other totalitarian regimes in South America and Africa, disappeared from the global geopolitical map. Spain set the precedent for this decentralizing revolution when, in 1975, its longtime dictator, Francisco Franco, died; democratic elections followed two years later. This study records an epistemic shift away from logocentric and totalizing approaches to reality by analyzing the links between the novelistic strategies used by Spanish writers from 1975 to 1989 and recent international events and theoretical trends in science, mathematics, communication studies, and art. Highlighting worldwide processes of fragmentation, decentralization, and pluralism, Spires foregrounds ways in which literary and scientific approaches to and concepts of reality coincide, with fiction serving as one more register of how reality is conceived at a particular point in time.
Post-Totalitarian Spanish Fiction makes a major contribution in the field of Spanish literature and will enhance the esteem that contemporary Spanish literature is beginning to achieve internationally. In addition, this "epistemocritical" project will serve as a model for literary critics who wish to accommodate the increasingly popular approach labeled "cultural studies" without surrendering the primacy of the literary text.
Symbol and psyche are twin concepts in contemporary symbological studies, where the symbol is considered to be a "statement" by the psyche. The psyche is a manifold of conscious and unconscious contents, and the symbol is their mediator. Because Lorca's dramatic characters are psychic entities made up of both conscious and unconscious elements, they unfold, grow, and meet their fate in a dense realm of shifting symbols.
In Psyche and Symbol in the Theater of Federico García Lorca, Rupert Allen analyzes symbologically three dramatic works of Lorca. He has found Perlimplín to be a good deal more complex in both psyche and symbol than it has been admitted to be. Yerma involves psychological complications that have not been considered in the light of modern critical analysis, and the symbolic reaches ofBlood Wedding have until this book remained largely unexplored.
Lorca was no stranger to the "agony of creation," and this struggle sometimes appears symbolically in the form of his dramatic characters. Both Yerma and Blood Wedding reflect specific problems underlying the creative act, for they are "translations" into the realm of sexuality of the creative turmoil experienced by Lorca the poet. Perlimplín portrays the paradoxical suicide as a self-murder born out of the futile attempt to create not a poem, but a self.
Previous criticism of these three plays has been dominated by critical assumptions that are transcended by Lorca's own twentieth-century mentality. Allen's analysis provides a new view of Lorca as a dramatist and presents new material to students of symbology.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press