Charles Rossman

Alan Warren Friedman

An Issue Devoted to the Work of Mario Vargas Llosa

A Collection of Critical Essays

Mario Vargas Llosa

Unlike many recent Joyce studies, De-familiarizing Readings eschews the theoretical and ideological and instead plants itself on firmer ground. Its eight outstanding Joyce scholars share a love of the stuff of texts, contexts, and intertexts: data and dates, food and clothing, letters and journals, literary allusions, and other quotidian desiderata. Their inductive approaches - whether to Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses, or Finnegans Wake - are thoroughly researched, argued with meticulous, even nit-picking, precision, and offer the pleasurable reading experience of forensic analysis. And in the end they provide the satisfaction of reaching persuasive conclusions that seem both striking and inevitable.

Essays from the Austin Joyce Conference

De-familiarizing Readings

Robert Brody

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.

A Critical View

Carlos Fuentes

Dina Sherzer

Up to now, Samuel Beckett has been considered largely as a commentator on the human condition and on the angst of our time, and as a novelist and a playwright who undermines and manipulates the metaphysical assumptions and conventions that underlie language and representation. This book offers a new perspective. The contributors, all outstanding Beckett scholars, emphasize three significant aspects of Beckett's career that have been acknowledged but given insufficient consideration. Beckett is a translator, an experimenter with form and expression in two languages simultaneously; Beckett is a multimedia creator who has worked with several kinetic, verbal, and visual possibilities and resources; Beckett has inspired experimentation and creativity in others. Thus, translation is viewed in this book not as a secondary production, but rather as a dynamic process that involves adaptations, interpretations, transformations, and transpositions, all activities requiring strategies and techniques for transcoding on the part of the translator. The scholars represented in this book examine both what is translated and how it is translated, with the result that a new set of questions about Beckett's works is raised, and the answers point to further avenues of research.

Beckett Translating/translating Beckett

The Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa has been acclaimed throughout the literary world as one of Latin America's finest writers, yet until recently little has been written about his work in English. While his work has the subject of an increasing flow of critical commentary in Spanish and his major novels have been translated into English, this is the first full-scale critical treatment of Vargas Llosa published in the English language. These articles by a number of established writers and critics appraise Vargas Llosa's individual novels as well as the body of his work. The Time of the Hero, The Green House, Conversation in The Cathedral, and Pantaleón y las visitadoras are examined in order of publication, A second group of more general essays ranges across Vargas Llosa's work and explores pervasive themes and concerns. Two pieces by José Miguel Oviedo serve as a coda. In a bilingual interview, Oviedo and Vargas Llosa discuss Vargas Llosa's novel La tía Julia y el escribidor. Oviedo concludes with a critical discussion of that novel. A Vargas Llosa chronology compiled by the editors is also included. Most of these essays originally appeared in 1977 as a special issue of Texas Studies in Literature and Language. The concluding essay by Oviedo was prepared especially for this edition.

Charles Rossman

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