scholarly journals “UNEXPECTED ALTERNATION OF REALITY”: MAGICAL REALISM IN PAINTING AND LITERATURE

Author(s):  
Danijela Kostadinović

The term magical realism was coined by the German art historian Franz Roh in his essay After expressionism: Magical Realism: Problems of the newest European painting (1925), and it initially referred to a new view of the real-world painting in Germany in the 1920s. It originated as a response to Impressionism, Expressionism, and Surrealism. Magical realism painters realistically depicted objects and beings in detail, while magic and mystery were highlighted by creating illusions and through a change in perspective. Venezuelan writer Arturo Uslar-Pietri used the term magical realism to describe a specific type of short story in which the view of man as a mystery surrounded by realistic data dominates. Soon enough, this term started to be used to describe Latin American literature in general primarily thanks to an article written by Angelo Flores: Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction. The so-called Latin American Boom started in the 1960s when the elements of the magical realism narrative could also be found in the prose of writers coming from countries outside the South American continent. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to examine the magical realism phenomenon and its main characteristics with regard to painting in the first half of the 20th century, as well as to Latin American literature since the mid-20th century, and to show that art movements can be transferred from one art to another, that they can transform and change their basic concept.

Author(s):  
Javier Padilla ◽  
Fernando Fonseca Pacheco

Roberto Arlt was an Argentine novelist, playwright, journalist, travel writer, and short-story writer. Recognized in recent decades as a foundational figure of modern literature in Argentina and Latin America, during his lifetime he was regarded as an outsider among writers. Arlt began to acquire a prominent status in Latin American literature in the 1960s, thanks to several young writers and critics who noted a significant precedent in his confrontational prose, as well as for his transgressive treatment of the power dynamics and cultural issues associated with the rise of modern urban societies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 056-064
Author(s):  
María Belén Riveiro ◽  

This essay poses a question about the identity of Latin American literature in the 21st century. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Latin America Boom received recognition both locally and internationally, becoming the dominant means of defining Latin American literature up to the present. This essay explores new ways to understand this notion of Latin America in the literary scene. The case of the Argentine writer César Aira is relevant for analyzing alternative publishing circuits that connect various points of the region. These publishing houses foster a defiant way of establishing the value of literature.


Author(s):  
Sara Carini

The aim of this study is to describe the work of Italo Calvino as a lecturer of Hispano-American writers for Einaudi during the 1970s. Through specific case studies of editorial mediation taken by the archive documents of Einaudi we will outline the principles used by Calvino to assure the edition of Hispano-American works. That will help us to include Calvino’s activity into the field of Latin American literature reception and editorial mediation studies in Italy during the second half of the 20th century.


2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-74
Author(s):  
Arnoldas Stramskas

Abstract This article provides a broad overview of social, economic, and cultural politics in Latin America, especially concentrating on what became known as the Latin American literary “boom” in the 1960s and 1970s, and the region’s political context - colonial past, neocolonial/neoliberal present, the role of intellectuals within the state and cultural affairs. The second part focuses on Roberto Bolaño - the writer who put Latin American literature on the world map which has not been seen since the boom years - and his novel The Savage Detectives. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that literature not only shares common elements and possible intentions with social and political critique, but that it can also be an effective form of social and political criticism. In such a case, Bolaño’s work may be read not as inferior fictional account but as a complex, intersectional investigation of socioeconomic as well as ontological condition in Latin America that other modes of inquiry may overlook.


2018 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 466-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roanne L. Kantor

AbstractThis article seeks to explain the recent popularity of South Asian Anglophone literature (beginning in 1981 and peaking between 1998 and 2008) in light of the boom in Latin American literature of the 1960s. It argues that the phenomenon of regional literary “booms” shares features across both eras, and that a unified theory of booms is increasingly important to understanding the way contemporary literature circulates around the globe. Scholarship about both eras has tended to coalesce around three types of boom-driving agents: “creators,” “contexts,” and “curators.” Within that broader agreement, however, scholarship about the South Asian boom has tended to overemphasize the political symbolism of recent South Asian Anglophone literature and its global popularity, while under-emphasizing the political realities that create the conditions under which that literature became popular. This line of criticism has come at the expense of attention to literature’s other dimensions as a cultural object, as well as contextual explanations of popularity involving the role of governments, demographics, and market flows. The more diverse scholarship on the Latin American boom offers a corrective with insights for both the future of South Asian Anglophone literature and the field of World Literature.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence

This chapter offers a periodization of the literatures of the Americas from the late nineteenth century through the postwar period. After acknowledging the emergence of a brief “transamerican literary imagination” forged in the early nineteenth century, I chart the gradual breakdown of this shared literary imagination in the second half of the nineteenth century and the concomitant rise of two distinct modes of literary production in the hemisphere: the US literature of experience and the Latin American literature of the reader. I track the emergence of these systems: in the United States, through the mid-nineteenth-century “American Renaissance,” the late nineteenth-century “age of realism,” the interwar “modernist” period, and the “postmodern” era of the second half of the century; in Latin America, through the modernismo of the turn of the twentieth century, the vanguardia movement of the 1920s and early 1930s, and the boom decades of the 1960s and 1970s.


2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 47
Author(s):  
Fatima Sabrina Rosa ◽  
Barbara Rosa

Resumo: Este ensaio tem por objetivo utilizar perspectivas discutidas em torno das teorias pós-modernas e pós-coloniais como aporte para estabelecer aproximações com a literatura latino-americana, especificamente, com a obra Crônica de uma morte anunciada, do colombiano Gabriel García Márquez. Essa proposta de aproximação surge da impressão causada pela obra no leitor, denotando traços do que poderia ser visto como uma perspectiva pós-moderna e pós-colonial sobre a história e sobre a própria escrita literária. Esses caminhos da questão “pós” podem ser percebidos em uma sensibilidade trágica, que alinha o texto aos debates pós-modernos, bem como na forma como o autor hibridiza a narrativa ao colocar na mesma “persona”, narrador, personagem e autor. As chamadas “histórias menores”, isto é, discussões acerca de temas importantes da crítica pós-colonial também estão presentes, em referências tangenciais à raça, territorialidade e gênero. Além dessas circunscrições mais visíveis sobre o “pós” na estrutura da crônica, este texto é uma tentativa de decodificar alguns símbolos utilizados pelo autor para ressignificar e deslocar certos pontos fixos da ficção e da história latino-americana.Palavras-chave: literatura latino-americana; trágico; pós-modernidade e pós-colonialidade.Abstract: This essay aims to use perspectives discussed on postmodern and postcolonial theories as a contribution to establish approximations with the Latin American literature, specifically with the Chronicle of a Death Foretold by the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez. This proposal of approximation arises from the impression that the García Márquez’ work provokes in the reader, denoting traces of what could be seen as a postmodern and postcolonial perspective on history and on literary writing itself. These paths of the “post” theory can be perceived in a tragic sensibility, which aligns the text to postmodern debates, as well as in the way the author hybridizes the narrative by placing the narrator, character and author in the same person. Also present in the book are the so-called “minor stories,” that is, discussions about the central postcolonial critique matters, such as issues about race, territoriality, and gender. In addition to these more visible circumscriptions about the “post” in the structure of the Chronicle, this text is an attempt to decode some symbols used by the author to resignify and dislocate certain fixed points of Latin American fiction and history.Keywords: Latin American literature; tragic; post-modernity and post-coloniality.


2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 65
Author(s):  
Leoné Astride Barzotto

Resumo: Este artigo tem a intenção de fazer um estudo da literatura latino-americana pela perspectiva pós-colonial como representação de uma dada realidade, para demonstrar que o conceito de “Pensamento Liminar” (MIGNOLO, 2003) é uma resposta potencial do Hemisfério Sul às novas investidas de domínio percebidas pela descrição do conceito de “Colonialidade do Poder” (QUIJANO, 2005), advindas do Hemisfério Norte. Neste contexto, analisarei ambos os conceitos e as estratégias pós-coloniais pertinentes à esta análise, adentrando o conto La mano en la tierra (2002), da escritora Josefina Plá, a fim de averiguar o papel da mulher local, neste caso Ursula, uma indígena Guarani paraguaia, e sua relevância na narrativa e nas questões de gênero que implicam parcela deste estudo.Palavras-chave: pensamento liminar; colonialidade do poder; pós-colonialismo; literatura latino-americana; gênero.Abstract: This paper aims to develop a study on the Latin American Literature through the post-colonial perspective as a representation of a certain reality, to demonstrate that the concept of “Border Thinking” (MIGNOLO, 2003) is a potential answer from the South Hemisphere towards the new control quests which are perceived through the concept of “Coloniality of Power” (QUIJANO, 2005), from the North Hemisphere. Within this context, I will analyze both concepts and also the post-colonial strategies that connect to it, investing in the short story La mano en la tierra (2002), written by Josefina Plá, to investigate the role of the local woman, in this case Ursula, a Guarani indigenous lady from Paraguay, and her relevance in the narrative as well as in the gender debate which implies part of this study.Keywords: border thinking; coloniality of power; post colonialism; Latin American literature; gender.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 022-033
Author(s):  
Leila Lehnen ◽  

This essay discusses how contemporary Latin American literature (Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia) employs the discourse of toxicity—condensed in the metaphor of bio-engineering and mutation—to process and interrogate what Jason Moore has called the “Capitolecene.” Moore proposes to understand the “accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the co-production of nature in dialectical unity.” This essay considers how the co-production of nature, impelled by greed (a recurring allegory of capitalism) goes terribly wrong by generating toxic biomes. As such, these texts function as ecocritical allegories of the Capitolecene (specifically in its iteration as biocapitalism) and its human and environmental consequences.


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