"As a narrative device, irony in the Latin American novel has been treated before in a rather fragmented, non-systematic way. It needed a cohesive study based on close textual examination of several major novels. Professor Tittler has done just that and done it well. This book is the best and most comprehensive study of the ironic mode that we have."-Myron I. Lichtblau, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Syracuse University In this book Jonathan Tittler explores some of the many possibilities that the concept of irony holds for literary criticism. Identifying irony as a characteristic property of Spanish-American fiction, Tittler offers close readings of seven important novels: Carlos Fuentes' The Death of Artemio Cruz, Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo, Manuel Puig's Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Three Trapped Tigers, Mario Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Julio Cortazar's A Manual for Manuel, and Isaac Goldemberg's The Fragmented Life of Don Jacobo Lerner. Tittler begins with a comprehensive review of existing theories of irony, in all of which the concept of narrative distance plays a major role. Next he proposes his own innovative model for critical reading made up of two basic forms of irony, which he terms "static" and "kinetic." He then applies the model systematically to his readings of the texts-four in the static mode, and three in the kinetic, linguistically self-conscious mode. Tittler concludes by reflecting on the relationship between irony and the novel, asserting that in the light of actual events in Spanish America, the novels themselves, and the critical discourse in which they are evoked, may be regarded as ironic phenomena.

"Due to its scope and perspective this work has a relevance that extends far beyond the conventional bounds of literary studies. Concerned as it is with issues of historical understanding, culture, and politics, it has implications for the literary histories of Spanish America and the United States, as well as for the fields of inter-American and cultural studies, literary theory, and historiography."--BOOK JACKET.

After the Nation proposes a series of groundbreaking new approaches to novels, essays, and short stories by Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon within the framework of a hemispheric American studies. García-Caro offers a pioneering comparativist approach to the contemporary American and Mexican literary canons and their underlying nationalist encodement through the study of a wide range of texts by Pynchon and Fuentes which question and historicize in different ways the processes of national definition and myth-making deployed in the drawing of literary borders. After the Nation looks at these literary narratives as postnational satires that aim to unravel and denounce the combined hegemonic processes of modernity and nationalism while they start to contemplate the ensuing postnational constellations. These are texts that playfully challenge the temporal and spatial designs of national themes while they point to and debase “holy” borders, international borders as well as the internal lines where narratives of nation are embodied and consecrated. !--StartFragment--

Rebecca Biron breaks new ground in this study of masculinity, violence, and the strategic construction of collective political identities in twentieth-century Latin American fiction. By engaging current sociological, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories, Murder and Masculinity analyzes the cliche of proving virility through violence against women. Biron develops her argument through close readings of five works: Jorge Luis Borges's "La intrusa," Armonia Somer's "El despojo," Clarice Lispector's A Maca no Escuro, Manuel Puig's The Buenos Aires Affair, and Reinaldo Arenas's El Asalto. Although men murdering women is often interpreted as nothing more than machista misogyny, Biron argues that the five narratives addressed in this book show that healed masculinities are essential to the achievement of cultural identity and political autonomy in Latin America. The introduction to this study deftly situates Biron's work in relation to previous theoretical arguments on the social and political dimensions of Latin American writing. The five subsequent chapters offer superb analyses of the individual texts. Like their male protagonists who experiment with the psychological and legal extremes of gender division, these narratives risk nonconformity to the laws of genre in their quest for liberation from violent social and literary conventions. In combining elements of detective stories, crime narratives, psychological case studies, and magical or grotesque realism, they offer metafictional commentary on a network of discourses that confuses images of masculinity, national identity, and political autonomy in postcolonial Latin America.

The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thereby attempting to divide up its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, social, cultural, discursive, variational, or interactional angles, this 9th volume focuses on what pragmatics is good for – beyond the very discipline of pragmatics as such. The chapters in the volume thus address the importance of taking a pragmatic perspective on traditional fields of applied linguistics (contrastive and error analysis, translation), and they address the core of pragmatics as the study of language use (with phenomena ranging from irony and emphasis to literacy and mass media, and with approaches to the function of language like rhetoric, stylistics, corpus analysis, and general semantics). The volume contains chapters not only on the spoken and written modes of communication, but also on signed language pragmatics and on computer-mediated communication. The impact and usefulness of taking a pragmatic perspective on language for a deeper understanding of clinical and rehabilitation practices has recently received ever more focus; in this volume, aspects of this direction of research are dealt with in the chapter on clinical pragmatics. In most of the chapters in the volume, ethics has a core role to play, not only in issues of authenticity in general in relation to research on language use, but also in issues that have a direct influence on the (linguistic) culture and society we live in, irrespective of whether we are part of a (linguistic) majority or a minority, or a minority within a minority: language policy and language planning, language ecology, and language in relation to legal matters. In all of these fields, we see the importance of research within pragmatics as a discipline dealing with how language influences our everyday lives. All in all, the volume presents different perspectives on how research in pragmatics not only can be put to practice, but how pragmatics is used as a tool to gain a better understanding of the world we live in.

In Carlos Fuentes, Mexico, and Modernity, Maarten van Delden argues that there is a fundamental paradox at the heart of Fuentes's vision of Mexico and in his role as novelist and critic in putting forth that vision. This paradox hinges on the tension between national identity and modernity. A significant internal conflict emerges in Fuentes's work from his attempt to stake out two different positions for himself, as experimental novelist and as politically engaged and responsible intellectual. Drawing from the fiction, literary essays, and political journalism, van Delden places these tensions in Fuentes's work in relation to the larger debates about modernity and postmodernity in Latin America. He concludes that Fuentes is fundamentally a modernist writer, in spite of the fact that he occasionally gravitates toward the postmodernist position in literature and politics. Van Delden's thorough command of the subject matter, his innovative and sometimes iconoclastic conclusions, and his clear and engaging writing style make this study more than just an interpretation of Fuentes's work. Carlos Fuentes, Mexico, and Modernity offers nothing less than a comprehensive analysis of Fuentes's work. Carlos Fuentes, Mexico, and Modernity offers nothing less than a comprehensive analysis of Fuentes's intellectual development in the context of modern Mexican political and cultural life.

This book traces the history of an engaging character, a writer, who acts as the narrator and protagonist of three of Vargas Llosa's novels. In La tía Julia y el escribidor he recalls his apprenticeship, in Historia de Mayta he reflects upon the practice of his craft, and in El hablador he ponders the significance of his vocation. That this fictional character closely resembles his flesh-and-blood creator only adds to his allure. Because the three novels in question have such strong structural and thematic links, it proves quite helpful to conceive of them as a trilogy. Indeed, the connections are so pronounced that a significant synergistic effect results from considering the three together. It is this effect that this volume brings light as it analyzes how each novel functions as a separate entity, how these entities are integrated into a greater whole, and how this whole fits into the wider picture of the Peruvian author's long and prolific literary career. As students and scholars alike will find, thinking in terms of a trilogy greatly enhances our understanding and appreciation of Vargas Llosa's rich narrative.

This major bibliographic work reflects the significant interest in Latin American literature as a creative force in the world today. Rela who has provided Latin American bibliography with many ground-breaking contributions, has created a single, comprehensive reference work for serious scholarship on Latin American literature with sources through 1986. Among the criteria used to determine which authors and works would be included are originality, critical appraisal, and the interest the work held for professors, researchers, and students. The works are divided into general sections; each section is broken down by country and by genre (poetry, prose fiction, drama, essay) and annotations are provided for many works. The book concludes with an author index.

The Latin American Literary Boom was marked by complex novels steeped in magical realism and questions of nationalism, often with themes of surreal violence. In recent years, however, those revolutionary projects of the sixties and seventies have given way to quite a different narrative vision and ideology. Dubbed the new sentimentalism, this trend is now keenly elucidated in Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel. Offering a rich account of the rise of this new mode, as well as its political and cultural implications, Aníbal González delivers a close reading of novels by Miguel Barnet, Elena Poniatowska, Isabel Allende, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Gabriel García Márquez, Antonio Skármeta, Luis Rafael Sánchez, and others. González proposes that new sentimental novels are inspired principally by a desire to heal the division, rancor, and fear produced by decades of social and political upheaval. Valuing pop culture above the avant-garde, such works also tend to celebrate agape—the love of one's neighbor—while denouncing the negative effects of passion (eros). Illuminating these and other aspects of post-Boom prose, Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel takes a fresh look at contemporary works.

Now available in paperback for the first time, Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century is both a comprehensive reference resource and a springboard for further study. This volume: examines canonical Jewish writers, less well-known authors of Yiddish and Hebrew, and emerging Israeli writers includes entries on figures as diverse as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Woody Allen contains introductory essays on Jewish-American writing, Holocaust literature and memoirs, Yiddish writing, and Anglo-Jewish literature provides a chronology of twentieth-century Jewish writers. Compiled by expert contributors, this book contains over 330 entries on individual authors, each consisting of a biography, a list of selected publications, a scholarly essay on their work and suggestions for further reading.