How to Recover Reality. Neo-Romantic Irony in Post-Postmodern American Fiction

Even though transcendentalism never ceased to be present in American culture, during the first decade of the twenty-first century, the gaze of artists and theorists turned to the ideas of the American Renaissance with a hope that had no place during the reign of postmodern irony. With this in mind, the purpose of this article is to discern the adequacy of Emerson’s philosophy for the recovery of realism through the transcendence of language and a new use of Romantic irony. The previous analysis will take us to the New Sincerity movement. The writers of the generation that followed in the wake of David Foster Wallace’s acted as a bridge between the postmodern and the post-postmodern narrative of the beginning of the new millennium. These young writers based their fiction on a critique of institutionalized irony in order to pave the way for the new post 9/11 novel.

Planet Earth Strikes Back: Landscapes of Toxicity in Latin American Fiction

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.

The problematic of identity-memory in the Cuban-American fiction of Cristina García and Achy Obejas

Cuban-American authors Cristina García and Achy Obejas denote in their fictional works concerns regarding the fragmented memory of second-generation Cuban-American immigrants. Owing to the turbulent political origin of this exiled community, the characters of these works have identity conflicts related to the difficulty of accessing the historical memory of their ancestors’ land and community. However, as the narratives progress, the source of these conflicts proves to be the nationalist approach to identification which they end up challenging by relating themselves to history, memory, and identity in alternative postnational ways. The protagonists of these works, thus, contest traditional postulates in the study of memory like those of Maurice Halbwachs, who believed that the historical memory of a nation had an important role in determining the individual’s identity.

History, Mythology, and 20th Century Latin American Fiction

The history of the Americas from the colonial period is marked by a large influx of persons from Europe and Africa. Fiction in 20th Century Latin America is marked by ties to the Chronicles and the history of human melding in the Americas, with a natural flow of social and religious syncretism that shapes the unique literary aesthetics of its literatures as may be witnessed in representative authors of genuine merit from different regions of Latin America.

Te “Concept – Image − Motive” Triad in Arab-American Fiction Literature

Arab-American multicultural, or cross-cultural, literature related to different time periods is closely examined in the article. Tese writings are part of borderline literature due to the fact that the central theme in them is the theme of dual (transitional) identity. Te author provides a defnition of “liminality”, which is necessary when considering the phenomena of bilingualism and biculturalism. Te relevance of the study is due to the growing interest in emigrant literature as a source of meanings scattered in the text, contributing to the understanding of the social and cultural context. Te motive, image and the concept are singled out in the works of Arab-American literature to decode hidden meanings. Te results of the analysis of the main motives, taken in diachrony, are presented, and their similarities and differences are revealed. Te fact that the same motives, for example, the motives of nature and music, are found in completely different works, speaks of their semantic, cultural and literary signifcance. Te novelty of the research is seen in the combination of linguo-literary and linguo-stylistic methods in the analysis of linguistic material, which helps to identify psychological, cultural and social aspects in the Arab-American fction discourse.