Latin American Readings for a Cultural Age: Latin American Readings for a Cultural Age / Edition 1

by E. Santi

Overview

Gathered in one volume are seven of the best essays written in the last fifteen years or so by the eminent Latin Americanist Enrico Mario Santí. The essays cover a wide range of topics in Latin American poetry, narrative, film, and intellectual history and also explore Spanish Peninsular subject-matter: the Spanish Generation of 98's response to Spain's loss of Cuba in the Spanish-American War of 1898. The essays are introduced by a long text in which the author develops a bracing critique of some dominant trends in current critical practice, and spells out an alternative methodology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781403970466
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	02/01/2006
Series:	New Directions in Latino American Cultures
Edition description:	2006
Pages:	277
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.03(d)

About the Author

ENRICO MARIO SANTI is William T. Bryan Professor of Hispanic Studies and the University of Kentucky, USA. He serves on editorial boards of a dozen scholarly journals, among them Hispanic Review, the flagship of the field, and on the Research Council of the Center for a Free Cuba, a Washington, D.C. think tank. His research has been supported over the years by fellowships from The Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, as well as the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Table of Contents

Introduction Poetry and the Cold War: Pablo Neruda's "Canto General" This Land of Prophets: Walt Whitman in Spanish America Sor Juana, Octavio Paz and Poetics of Restitution Through the Grapevine: Rulfo, Garro and National Allegory 98: Narcissism and Melancholy After the Revolution: Strawberry and Chocolate, or the Politics of Reconciliation Fernando Ortiz: Counterpoint and Transculturation Appendix 1: Latinamericanism Appendix 2: The Neruda Whitmaniana

Editorial Reviews

"Ciphers of History, Professor Enrico Mario Santí's superb new book, will be a landmark for twenty-first century Latin American studies. With sophistication and rhetorical flair, Prof. Santí questions the underpinnings of contemporary cultural studies, dismantling the presumed empathy for the Other as a lack of attention to context. Probing the process of restitution throughout Latin American cultural history, each one of the chapters opens an interpretive key to a hidden archive, era, or national epic. The most powerful is, without a doubt, '98: Narcissism and Melancholy,' which nakedly reveals the after-effects of Spain's colonial heritage, even in post-1959 Cuba. With its innovative claim to understand local knowledge, Ciphers of History reshuffles the paradigm of 'Latinamericanism' while providing new ground for the discipline."--Adriana Méndez Rodenas, The University of Iowa

"Enrico Mario Santí's Ciphers of History: Latin American Readings for a Cultural Age is an eye opener for all specialists and students of Cultural Studies as well as of Latin American and Hispanic literatures. His provocative and broadly framed readings of foundational texts and interrogations of major voices such as Pablo Neruda, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo and Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz, both enrich us with a constructive challenge to contemporary academic discourse and brilliantly resurrect for us the notion of cultures as vital and specific phenomena."--Suzanne J. Levine, University of California, Santa Barbara

"A set of polemical essays written against the grain of dominant disciplinary views about Latin America in Cultural Studies. A plea for recreative memory nurtured in the reading of particular acts of literature. Santí hangs zeroes on Foucault as he ciphers meanings into life in the spirit of Derrida and the living flesh of Borges and Sor Juana."--Eduardo González, The Johns Hopkins University

From the Publisher