De Soledad Research Articles

The Arachne Myth in Oral and Written Literature

In his paper, "The Arachne Myth in Oral and Written Literature," José Manuel Pedrosa explores the folktale about a person who prides himself being the most intelligent individual and whom the gods punish with a metamorphosis into spider. Pedrosa discusses similar myths in existence in modern oral traditions and in literary works such as the Bible, Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Quran, and García Márquez's masterpiece Cien años de soledad. The universality of the myth is underlined by the existence of a folktale registered among the Bubi people of Equatorial Guinea. Not known about it until the twentieth century, the oral transmission or survival of this tale proves of extraordinary importance and the reason why the Bubi text may be considered a rare record and a true jewel capable of providing valuable information about the folk myths and basic beliefs that have inspired many geniuses of Western literature.

The Twentieth Century Spanish-American Novel (review)

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 243 propósito de convertir a los anglicanos a la fe católica. Su misión, según su autobiografÃ-a, es llegar a ser mártir de la fe y sacrificar su vida por Cristo. Cruz propone que se deben interpretar sus intenciones como impulsadas no por su pasión religiosa, sino por su deseo, como mujer, de alcanzar la subjetividad que le ha negado la jerarquÃ-a dominante. En su totalidad, el libro cumple con su propósito de poner en manos del lector, de forma práctica y asequible, una variada selección de temas acerca de las mujeres de la familia Mendoza. Es una publicación de interés por su riqueza informativa y por la novedad de datos presentados. Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain es, sin duda, un valioso texto complementario a cursos del Siglo de Oro y como libro de consulta para estudiosos de la época. Alfonso J. GarcÃ-a Osuna The City University of New York, Kingsborough. The Twentieth Century Spanish-American Novel University of Texas Press, 2003 By Raymond Leslie Williams The Twentieth Century Spanish-American Novel, by Leslie Williams, is an extensive study of the literature of this period. In the first section, dedicated to the period classified as modernismo, Williams observes how novelists of this time tended to be more concerned with political circumstances than with the aesthetics of fiction. According to him, exceptions to this rule were Mariano Azuela in Mexico and Manuel Gálvez in Argentina. In the second chapter of this section he reviews various works, including Azuelas Los de abajo and Gálvez's El mal metafÃ-sico. Part two deals with the criollista and vanguardia novels of the '20s and '30s. While the criollistas celebrated local and regional values, the writers of the vanguardia began experimenting with European avant-garde aesthetics, such as the use of interior monologues. But as the author notes, the novels of the vanguardia occupied a limited space and were met with criticism, while some criollista novels enjoyed great success. The criollista classics discussed in the next section are La vorágine by José Eustasio Rivera, Don Segundo Sombra by Ricardo Guiraleds, and Las memorias de Mamá Blanca by Teresa de la Parra, all canonical works. Williams also dedicates a chapter to various works of the vanguardia that were either ignored or rejected by the predominant criollista literary culture of the time. The next section deals with the 1940s and 1950s. It begins with a discussion of how during this period modernist writing began to flourish, due in large part to the influence of Borges. Novelists such as Miguel Õ ngel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel GarcÃ-a Márquez and others began to deal with the problem of identity through such modernist narrative strategies as transcendent regionalism and oral culture, or magic realism, setting the stage for the Boom ofthe 1960s. Williams includes analyses of El Señor Presidente, by Asturias, Al filo del agua by AgustÃ-n Yáñez, Adán Buenosayres by Leopoldo Maréchal, Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo and La región más transparente by Carlos Fuentes. As in other parts of this book, in the section dealing with the Boom, Williams does a good job of giving credit to less-known writers ofthe period without lessening the importance of the more famous. In addition to Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, GarcÃ-a Márquez, and Cortázar, he also mentions writers such as José Donoso, Clarice Lispector, and many others. He also talks ofthe importance of certain works in the transition to postmodern fiction, such as Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Tres Tristes Tigres, Fuentes's Zona sagrada and Cambio de piel, and others. He includes analyses of Fuentes's La muerte de Artemio Cruz, Cortázar's Rayuela, Vargas Llosa's La casa verde, and Márquez's Cien años de soledad. In keeping with his theme of inclusion, Williams also dedicates a chapter to the analysis of lesserknow modernist works of the period. In his discussion ofthe Post-Boom period of the 1970s and 1980s, Williams mentions the novel of dictator, exile, and history. He also talks ofthe...

Decolonization and Demystification: One Hundred Years of Solitude and Nationhood

This essay aims to explore how the interconnected issues of nationhood and national identity are treated in Gabriel García Márquez's novel Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude). Through a discussion of the two basic yet complex themes of reality and history set against the exclusive backdrop of Colombian history, it is also intended to show how the author reinscribes the myth of nationhood by decentering what Jean-François Lyotard terms the metanarratives of the West, while simultaneously demystifying the monolithic concept of national identity in this work.

Del director

Del director Ijust returned from an exceptionally enjoyable conference, a Symposium held at Indiana University under the leadership ofJuan Carlos Conde to celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of the publication ofthe Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea. Most know the pleasant - but all too infrequent - experience of attending an academic event where all the papers are solid and the informal exchanges rich and enlightening . It occurred to me that there's an informal index that helps flag such a gathering: how many offprints are swapped from one presenter to the next. I came home the happy recipient of over a dozen excellent studies recently published by the panelists who helped commemorate this milestone in the history of Spain's second most important literary work. Those whojust finished reading the preceding sentence probably thought my last affirmation unremarkable: Celestina in its definitive 2 1-act form is commonly hailed, both inside academic circles and among the educated public in every Spanish-speaking country, as second only to Cervantes's Don Quijote in literary glory. But this school year I have endured a long semester of challenges from my undergraduates who want to know precisely who decided that ranking was true. It's certainly not that they are ill disposed to the Tragicomedia (although few have actually read it at this point); the problem is one of canonicity and the negotiation of cultural capital that canons imply. At my university we recently abandoned our traditional undergraduate program blandly labeled as "Spanish" with its routine surveys of "Spanish Literature I and II" and single-author, single-genre courses in favor of a completely rethought cadre of offerings in a newly rebaptized Program in Hispanic Studies. I am impressed with the new ventures my colleagues have created under rubrics like "Landscapes of Spain: Real Places, Imagined Spaces", "Knights, Witches, Savages: Introduction to Early Modern Spanish Culture", and (I confess ) my own "Love and Prostitution in Medieval Spain" where I regularly teaching Celestina. The faculty in Hispanic Studies recognized from the outset that these thematically organized courses would not easily subsume any number of major works to which our students deserved an introduction, literary landmarks like Cien años de soledad, La regenta and Don Quijote. So we invented a non-repeatable course called "Masterworks and Issues of Canon Formation". My naively trusting colleagues asked me to launch the series with a reading of the Libro de buen amor, which most ofus would probably agree shares top honors in medieval Spanish literature with Celestina and the Poema de mio Cid. That's what I told my students in "Masterworks". And again they asked with an entirely reasonable insistence how we academic guardians of the canon came up with that short list. Many of this journal's readers who teach in the United States still bear the scars of our recent "canon wars" that still flare up in persistent skirmishes between political and cultural opponents who claim the Western canon as their battlefield. The sniping over curriculum, research funding in the arts and humanities, political correctness, multiculturalism, and more are in part a byproduct of an uneasy conscience over America's generally unrepentant national self-obsessiveness and our often smug presumption that we are the center of the universe. The sharpest hostilities seem to be a smokescreen for political forces in our conservative right wing who perceive any indication of going soft on the Western canon as a spineless concession to valueless - not to mention Godless - liberalism. I would hesitate to invite canon-thumpers like William J. Bennett (former Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration and also past Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in one of its more reactionary phases) to share our discussion in a recent issue of this journal on "Return to Queer Iberia". Bennett, E.D. Hirsch, Allan Bloom and other defenders of a static canon would actually insist that we who teach the great literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance should be on the front lines of resisting trendy approaches and non-canonical texts. But the Tragicomedia would make an odd bulwark against liberal excess or wrongheadedness. Yes, scholars have entertained a prolonged debate on the work's...

The End of Erendira's Prostitution

Ends are ends only when they are not negative but frankly transfigure the events in which they are immanent. (Frank Kermode 175) HE criticism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' works usually accomplishes the difficult task of considering both his formal innovations and his criticisms of Latin American society and politics, but in the secondary literature on La increible y triste de candida y de su abuela desalmada (1972), the magical, fairy-tale elements have been analyzed much more thoroughly than its main theme of oppressive child prostitution. For example, Joel Hancock discusses Erendira and the Brothers Grimm (1978); Barbara B. Aponte examines el rito de initiation (1983); Marta Morello-- Frosch analyzes the funci6n de lo fantAstico (1984-85); Efren Ortiz gives the story una lectura mitica (1980); Antonio Benitez Rojo calls la Bella Durn-dente de Garcia (1987); Roberto Reis writes that the estructura de Poder is questioned through the use of the fantastic (1980); Jasbir Jain calls it Reversal of a Fairy Tale (1987) and Mario Vargas Llosa places his comments on within a chapter titled the Hegemonia de lo imaginario in his 1971 biography of Garcia Marquez, Historic de un deicidio. The social problem that La increible historic addresses deserves a more frontal treatment. (I will use this short form of the story title to distinguish it from the film, for which I will use the character's name within quotation marks: Erendira). Overlooked in comparison to genre and myth, the story's social themes and realist strategies reveal Garcia Marquez' early interest in criticizing aspects of women's oppression. In this article I first remind readers of the Colombian author's insistence on the autobiographical origins of the Erendira-Abuela pair, and then discuss prostitution in several other texts by him. Finally I seek to explain the controversial ending of La increible historia by highlighting its faithfulness to its genesis and analyzing where the fiction diverges both from those origins and from literary norms. My contention is that Erendira!s prostitution is comparable to the massacre of the banana workers in Cien anos de soledad in that they are narrathemes based on real events which are treated by the fictions as unreal. In Cien anos, the historical massacre is represented, but then the sole survivor cannot find anyone to believe his testimony. All deny his tale and declare him mad. Hyperbole and improbability weight the evidence in the fiction in favor of the massive coverup, the Big Lie in which a massacre on such a scale never could have happened. Yet history has witnessed such an event. Similarly, the nature of Erendira's slavery is couched in the language of fable and fairy tale, giving the appearance of fictionality, of its impossibility or untruth in any literal sense. Hyperbole and improbability have led to reader incredulity. Yet Erendira!s barbaric treatment by her grandmother and the huge number of men who have paid-sex with her in fact could happen and does happen in reality. According to published interviews with the author, La increible historic is based on an experience when, as a sixteen-year-old, Garcia Marquez saw an eleven-year-old girl working as a prostitute. She was accompanied by a woman whom he presumed to be a relative. At a decisive moment in the fictional story, the text similarly anchors itself in the reporters look, in personal testimony, rather than the omniscient authority of a storyteller. The episode with the bordello prostitutes is witnessed by a first-person, participant narrator who enters the text on the page before (126), interrupting the third-person omniscient narration. Like Garcia Marquez' newspaper account of seeing the young prostitute abused by a relative, this unnamed participant narrator is a young man. In this segment, a group of sex workers from the local brothel are angry because has attracted all their customers to wait in lines at her tent. …

Rural Revolt in Mexico: U.S. Intervention and the Domain of Subaltern PoliticsClose Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American RelationsThe Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930-1945

Rural Revolt in Mexico: U.S. Intervention and the Domain of Subaltern PoliticsClose Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American RelationsThe Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930-1945

Artists, Aesthetics, and Family Politics in Donoso's El obsceno pâjaro de la noche and James's The Golden Bowl

Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is noforce; that it is notgenteel comedy even; that itflowers andfructifies on the contrary out ofthe profoundest tragic depths ofthe essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance ofeveryone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubduedforest where the wolfhowls and the obscene bird of night chatters. Henry James, Sr., writing to his sons Henry and William I. The Chilean noveUst, Jose Donoso (1924-1997), was a member ofLatin America's Boom generation. These authors, including JuUo Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, came to the attention of the world Uterary community during the 1960s because ofthe sheer virtuosity oftheir narrative techniques. Many great works were produced in only a few years: Cortazar's Rayuela (1963), Fuentes' La muerta deArtemio Cruz (1962), Garcia Marquez's Cien anos de soledad (1967), Vargas Llosa's La casa verde (1965), and Donoso's El obscenopajaro de la noche (1970). The Boom authors rejected the realistic and naturaUstic schools (costumbrismo, criollismo) that dominated Latin American literature in the first halfofthe twentieth century, and embraced, instead, the high modernists ofEurope and the United States. Donoso shared his feUow Boom authors' love of William Faulkner, Joyce, Virginia Woolfand Marcel Proust, but he also discovered their immediate precursor, Henry James, when he came to the United States in 1954 on a Guggenheim Fellowship to study at Princeton. He foundthe above quote, which serves as the epigraph ofEl obscenopajaro, whue poring through Leon Edel with a comb (personal interview). The final, referential Une ofthe epigraph orients the novel within a largerintertextual field, tangentiaUyidentifying HenryJames, Jr. as one of Donoso's literary fathers; Donoso confirmed the influence of mi querido James in his interview with Emir Rodriguez Monegal upon publication ofthe novel. When Sharon MagnareUi interprets the epigraph, she initiaUy notes its formal quaUties, the weU-wrought balance between the unsubdued forest as represented by Mudito and Peta Ponce and the genteel comedy [. . J as evidenced in Jeronimo and Ines (Baroque 90). But then, speaking ofour wolfand bird, she tUts her interpretation: But, perhaps even more importantly, the epigraph underlines, as does the entire text, the noisiness ofthese two animals. The wolfhowls and the bird chatters, but no mention is made oftheir ability to communicate anything via the howling and chattering. All they produce are sounds, commun

Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community

Reviewed by: Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community Eduardo González Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds., Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. 592 pp. A rather accurate though perhaps short-sighted view of magical realism sees it being born as a publishing event with Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967), achieving formulaic success in the ersatz storytellingness of Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus (1982), and becoming the distinctive Latin American or Latino style of exportable sentimentality and sexy feminism in novels like Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate (1989) and Oscar Hijuelos’s The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien (1993). Another far more encompassing perspective regards magical realism as an international mode of representation in which social realities are punctured, their routines altered, and their terrors and cruelties exposed in a spirit of excess that seems driven by the same dark energies of domination it wants destroyed. According to this wider and obviously more interesting view, the style operates in resistance to forms of rationality and domination linked to the disenchantment of the world, in Max Weber’s influential label. Thus, from Pynchon’s Vineland to Rushdie’s Shame, and, with English as direct or translated lingua franca, from Suskind to Kundera to Fuentes to Graham Swift and many others, late-modern magicians of the real may seem homelessly at home almost everywhere fiction might still be read for serious kicks. In adhering in their own random and imaginative ways to the second or global view of magical realism, the editors have organized their wide-ranging materials (consisting of 23 articles and essays) into four categories: “Foundations,” “Theory,” “History,” and “Community.” Under “Foundations” they include Franz Roh’s 1925 essay where the term was first used to [End Page 999] designate a turn to realism in painting in the wake of German Expressionism, and also an essay by Irene Guenther on art during the Weimar Republic and the aesthetics of “New Objectivity.” The German section is followed by a Latin American sequence of sorts, beginning with two of Alejo Carpentier’s key 1940s and 1960s novomundista essays, on the “Marvelous Real” and “Baroque” styles in the New World, and Angel Flores’s (1955) and Luis Leal’s (1967) academic pieces in which the attempt was made to situate and define “realismo mágico” as the predominant break-through fictional mode to come out of Latin America. The section ends with substantial essays by Amaryll Chanady and Scott Simpkins marked by theoretical and critical concerns attuned to current interests in postcolonial and postmodern polemics. In the next sections under “Theory” and “History” one finds little of either that is truly useful, but a great deal to agree and disagree with concerning readings of individual novels and poems by Günter Grass, Toni Morrison, J.M. Coetzee, Derek Walcott and other elite international and U.S. writers. Here the anthology resembles Noah’s flood rather than his Ark, a messy quality that may disturb and frustrate disciplinary expectations of neatness and closure. Scheherazade becomes (in Wendy Faris’s breezy programmatic essay) a bit like the Muse of Comparative Literature, less a talking princess on death call than a mountain deity with a brood of prematurely postmodern children all capable of winning the Nobel Prize. The final section under “Community” seeks to establish a distinctive national, if not regional, climate for magical realism in the likes of William Kennedy, John Cheever, William Goyen, Kenzaburo Oe, Abe Kobo, and the Maghrebians Tahar Ben Jelloun and Abdelkebir Khatibi. Any of the articles in this section might have been found under “History” or even “Theory,” as the boundaries separating each section remain porous and seem made to be breached. For just as Borges located a library in Babel, by the casual rules of this anthology, he might as well have opened a bookstore. Page-turning globe-trotters, arm-chair intertextualists, aging post-Gutenberg punksters, survivalists, as Borges himself was, in the art of reading rather than the craft of Literature, the authors gathered here matter far less than the writers they have domesticated and trained in their...

Andrés Caicedo's "¡Que viva la música!": An Implicit Dialogue with the Modern and Postmodern

Andr?s Caicedo published his only novel, ?Que viva la m?sica!, in Bogot? in 1977, a period during which, as Raymond L. Williams points out, the shadow of Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez 's Macondo was becoming less of a burden to Colombian writers, and novelists such as Caicedo began to find non-Macondian directions for the Colombian (Novel 186). Their experimentation with postmodernism signalled a new attitude in novelistic technique. Just what postmodernism is or what constitutes a postmodern text, though, is not an easy question to answer. The difficulty of defining postmodernism as well as the inherent unpopularity of the term is indicated in the above quotes by Hutcheon and McHale. The problematic of defining the term does not mean, however, that it is not a useful one for defining a way of perceiving the world and writing about it. Both Hutcheon and McHale defend the use of the term and the movement itself. Hutcheon defends postmodernism from critics who have vilified it for being non-political. McHale in turn supports using postmodernist to describe a trend in fiction that reflects a of (3) with respect to modernist fiction?the same change that noted in regards to the Colombian novel. ?Que viva la m?sica! is a good example of postmodernism in both these aforementioned aspects, for it reflects the ideological side of a culture in crisis (Williams, D?cada 152), and its style differs greatly from the dominant modernist style represented by Garc?a M?rquez whose Cien a?os de soledad has been described as a pinnacle of the modern novel of Colombia and in Latin America (Williams, Novel 187). However, that a novel differs from some pre-established norm does not in itself mean that it is postmodern. To support the contention that ?Que viva la m?sica! is indeed postmodern, I propose to examine the novel using formal literary characteristics that have been associated with Latin

Home as Creation: The Influence of Early Childhood Experience in the Literary Creation of Gabriel García Márquez, Agustín Yáñez and Juan Rulfo

This study compares the influence of the childhood homes of three Latin American authors on the creation of the microcosms in which their masterworks, Cien anos de soledad, Al filo del agua and Pedro Paramo, are set. The origins of the names of the locations are analyzed. The importance of the physical geography of the authors' homelands is investigated as is the history of their countries, especially that part of history which has touched them personally. The influence of the people who surrounded them as children is observed and the magical, mystical qualities of the childhood experience are finally presented to complete the picture of how microcosms much broader and universally appealing than the authors' real surroundings, yet somehow inextricably bound to them, were created.

What's in a Name?: The Influence of Home in the Naming of the Microcosms of "Cien años de soledad, Al filo del agua", and "Pedro Páramo"

The names used to identify the towns which serve as the foundations for the literary universes created in Cien a?os de soledad, Al filo del agua, and Pedro P?ramo are extremely important to the understanding of these microcosms, and all stem from sources close to Home. The three authors choose to name (or in the case of Y??ez, not to name) the towns they describe using completely different criteria, but each one successfully extends the borders of his microcosm by carefully selecting the symbol used to represent the place. Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez's Macondo, Agust?n Y??ez's town of women dressed in black, and Juan Rulfo's C?mala are respectively identified with a banana plantation, the author's region of origin, and an extant city in the region of the author's birth. All the identifiers strengthen the authors' ties with home, family, and patria, and all include symbolic or mythological connotations. The naming of the microcosm is a primary part of its creation, for as with the first objects Jos? Arcadio Buendia's band of exiles find in Macondo, the thing must be labelled before one can begin to define it. Garc?a M?rquez, Y??ez, and Rulfo labelled their worlds judiciously, and even through this preliminary identification the readers begin to sense the completeness and universality of each microcosm.

Bags of Bones: A Source for Cien anos de soledad

Several scholars have discussed possible sources for Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Cien afos de soledad, focusing on European and North American writers he might have read; strong cases have been made for Faulkner, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, and Defoe's Diary of the Plague Year. I One source which has not been mentioned, however, is Chateaubriand's Atala. This brief novel, one of the most popular Romantic texts, has been available, in Spanish translation, in dozens of editions from 1801 to the present; the first translation was probably done by Fray Servando Teresa de Mier. Either printed by itself or together with two other brief works by Chateaubriand, Rene' and El ultimo Abencerraje (Les aventures du dernier Abencerage), both almost as popular in the Spanish-speaking world, Atala was certainly readily available in Colombia in the first decades of the twentieth century.2 Chateaubriand's short novel, moreover, has had a special importance in Colombia; in the greatest Colombian novel before Cien afios de soledad, Jorge Isaacs' 1867 Marta, Atala is the favorite book of Efrain and Maria, and is prominently mentioned in the text.3 One of the first critics to write about Maria, Jose Maria Vergara y Vergara, emphasized the influence of Chateaubriand's novel, an influence that is particularly evident in the Nay and Sinar episode, and many editions of Marta after 1878 included Vergara y Vergara's article as a preface.4 It is impossible to believe that Garcia Marquez did not read Maria, and it seems very possible that the references in the text and in Vergara y Vergara's preface might have led him to read Chateaubriand's original. In Cien aios de soledad, Rebeca arrives in Macondo carrying talego de lona que hacia un permanente ruido de cloc cloc cloc, donde llevaba los huesos de sus padres.5 The remains of her parents present a problem, since aquel tiempo no habia cementerio en Macondo, pues hasta entonces no habia muerto nadie, . The Buendias therefore conservaron

Cien anos de soledad: The Novel as Myth and Archive

To most readers the Latin American novel must appear to be obsessed with Latin American history and myth.1 Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra (1976), for instance, retells much of sixteenth-century Spanish history, including the conquest of Mexico, while also incorporating pre-Columbian myths prophesying that momentous event. Alejo Carpentier's El siglo de las luces (1962) narrates Latin America's transition from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth, focusing on the impact of the French Revolution in the Caribbean. Carpentier also delves into Afro-Antillean lore to show how Blacks interpreted the changes brought about by these political upheavals. Mario Vargas Llosa's recent La guerra del fin del mundo (1980) tells again the history of Canudos, the rebellion of religious fanatics in the backlands of Brazil, which had already been the object of Euclydes da Cunha's classic Os Sertoes (1902). Vargas Llosa's ambitious work also examines in painstaking detail the recreation of a Christian mythology in the New World. The list of Latin American novels dealing with Latin American history and myth is very long indeed, and it includes the work of many lesser known, younger writers. Abel Posse's Daimon (1978) retells

Los señores presidentes y los guerrilleros: The New and the Old Guatemalan Novel (1976-1982)

In literary terms, the new novel did not emerge until 1976 in Guatemala, which represented a ten-to-fifteen-year lag behind most of the other Latin American countries. Since 1976, however, four Guatemalan novels have been published that merit consideration in the same rank with Hijo de hombre (1960), La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), Gestos (1963), Rayuela (1963), La casa verde (1966), Cien años de soledad (1967), and Tres tristes tigres (1967). The explanation for the earlier paucity of high-quality, structurally and linguistically experimental novels is simple. The blatant violation of human rights by the autocratic governments of Carlos Castillo Armas (1954-57) and his successors has led to the exodus of the best-known authors and the self-censorship or silence of others. In this political climate, the birth of a Guatemalan literary generation of 1954 was almost completely aborted. With the exception of some new works published abroad by Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899-1974) and Mario Monteforte Toledo (b. 1911), Guatemala's two most important twentieth-century novelists, the novels published between 1954 and 1975 were generally undistinguished, as is suggested by the annotated bibliography accompanying this essay.

Death and the Maiden: Demythologization of Virginity in Garcia Marquez's Cien anos de soledad

Etude du personnage d'Amaranta Buendia dans CAS de G. M. Rapport de ce personnage a la virginite, la mort et la solitude.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez on Literature, Himself, and His Work

Since the publication of the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude [Cien anos de soledad] in 1967, which immediately made its author a worldwide celebrity, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has had to answer an infinite number of questions and repeatedly tell how his books were written. For several years the Colombian writer eagerly responded to requests for interviews, as he once explained, not only out of a sense of professional solidarity with his fellow journalists but out of respect for the readers. And it is true that Garcia Marquez's attitude toward his readers is one of respect and gratitude. He is among those creative figures for whom the drive for self-expression is inseparable from the need constantly to sense a flow of readers' perceptions in response, the living warmth of human sympathy.

Cien Anos De Soledad: History and the Novel

In this section Anna Marie Taylor presents an analysis of Gabriel Garcia Márquez' famous book, Cien años de soledad. Garcia Márquez is, without doubt, one of the best-known Colombians in the world today. Not only is he an artist of the highest order, he is a Colombian fully dedicated to revolutionary practice. His leadership in the campaign against the Chilean fascists has taken him around the world; in Colombia he was one of the founders of Alternativa, an independent Marxist magazine, and he is presently editor and a regular contributor. His popularity with the Colombian left has led many to speculate that he may become an electoral candidate for a broad left-coalition in the future. It should be noted, however, that Garcia Márquez has vehemently denied this speculation. Anna Marie Taylor, who teaches Spanish at the University of Chicago, has done more than the currently fashionable, if socially vacuous, textual "criticism." She places the novel in a socio-historical context, and evaluates its merits on grounds of social and political, as well as textual, coherence.

Education and the History of Knowledge in "Cien anos de soledad"

Education and the History of Knowledge in "Cien anos de soledad"

Reality and Myth in García Márquez' Cien años de soledad

REALITY AND MYTH IN GARCIA MÁRQUEZ' CIEN AÑOS DE SOLEDAD George R. McMurray George R. McMurray (B.A., Mexico City College; M.A., Ph.D., University of Nebraska), currently a professor of Spanish at Colorado State University, has served on the faculties of Washington State University and the University of Nevada and was the Secretary-Treasurer of the RMMLA in 1965. He has published several articles on the novel in such journals as the Modem Language Quarterly (University of Washington), Revista de la Universidad de México, and Hispania in which appears his most recent article titled, "Cambio de piel, an Existentialist Novel of Protest," Hispania, March, 1969. Among the most outstanding Latin American novelists writing today is Gabriel García Márquez. Bom in 1928 in Aracataca, Colombia, a small town in the Atlantic coastal region, this relatively young author studied law briefly in Bogotá, worked in Europe as a journalist for a short time during the 1950s, and subsequently lived in Venezuela, the United States, and Mexico. A political leftist at odds with conservative elements in his own country, he is presently residing in Barcelona. Before 1967 García Márquez' literary production included three novels: La hojarasca (1955), El coronel no tiene quién le escriba (1961), and La mala hora (1962), and one book of short stories entitled Los funerales de la mamá grande ( 1962). All these works, written in a terse, functional style leaving much to the reader's imagination, present fragments of life in the town of Macondo, a fictionalized Aracataca. In 1967 appeared García Márquez' fourth and most significant novel to date, Cien años de soledad, which, in contrast to his previous works, chronicles the entire history of Macondo in torrential, scintillating prose. However, the most notable aspect of his latest fictional endeavor and that providing the subject of this study, is its matter-of-fact fusion of Colombian and Latin American reality with regional myths which the author absorbed as a child from the tales of his grandparents. The plot centers on the lives of several generations of the Buendia family1 beginning with Macondo's founders, José Arcadio Buendia and his wife Ursula who, as cousins, live in fear of begetting a child with a cola de puerco, a legendary punishment for incest. Their descendants procreate prolifically for several generations through both legitimate and illegitimate unions before their vigor diminishes and the Buendia line comes to an end with a series of tragic and cataclysmic events. Macondo's turbulent history and the characters' intense struggles against a hostile environment constitute a vast synthesis of social, economic, and political evils which plague much of the continent and firmly anchor 1TlJe Buendia family tree is given in the appendix. 176RMMLA BulletinDecember 1969 the novel to Latin American reality. Founded toward the middle of the nineteenth century, Macondo experiences its first and only boom when an American company establishes a banana plantation nearby, imports gringo technicians, and employs local workers. The town's ephemeral prosperity terminates, however, with a series of labor difficulties after which the company closes down and moves out. The resulting economic stagnation hastens Macondo's disastrous physical and moral decay. The novel also presents a vivid and, generally speaking, a dismal picture of daily life in Macondo: the town's isolation from civilization; the ignorance, backwardness, and superstitions of its citizenry; its diversions, most frequently in the form of drunken carousals, passionate sexual encounters , cock fights, and carnivals brought in by roving bands of gypsies; its political upheaval and corruptions; and its decrepit, ineffectual Church. The striking difference in moral and social attitudes between the carefree inhabitants of the coastal region and the more conservative highlanders is brought out with the marriage of Aureliano Segundo (the great grandson of José Arcadio Buendia) and Fernanda, who is a member of a traditionbound , aristocratic family from the interior. The straitlaced Fernanda attempts to alter the daily patterns of life in the Buendia household to conform to those of her own upbringing. For instance, all doors and windows are closed to prevent contact with outsiders, especially foreigners, and meals are served in a formal manner on tables covered with...