The Monstered Self: Narratives of Death and Performance in Latin American FictionDuke University Press, 1992 - Počet stran: 275 Viewing stories and novels from an ethnographic perspective, Eduardo González here explores the relationship between myth, ritual, and death in writings by Borges, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, and Roa Bastos. He then weaves this analysis into a larger cultural fabric composed of the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Joyce, Benjamin, H. G. Wells, Kafka, Poe, and others. What interests González is the signature of authorial selfhood in narrative and performance, which he finds willfully and temptingly disfigured in the works he examines: horrific and erotic, subservient and tyrannical, charismatic and repellent. Searching out the personal image and plot, González uncovers two fundamental types of narrative: one that strips character of moral choice; and another in which characters' choices deprive them of personal autonomy and hold them in ritual bondage to a group. Thus The Monstered Self becomes a study of the conflict between individual autonomy and the stereotypes of solidarity. Written in a characteristically allusive, elliptical style, and drawing on psychoanalysis, religion, mythology, and comparative literature, The Monstered Self is in itself a remarkable performance, one that will engage readers in anthropology, psychology, and cultural history as well as those specifically interested in Latin American narrative. |
Další vydání - Zobrazit všechny
Běžně se vyskytující výrazy a sousloví
actual already animals appears assumption aura become begins Benjamin body Borges Borges's brings brother called character child classic comes death effect elements emerges essay event existence experience expression eyes face fact fantasy father feelings female fiction figure follows force given gives Guaraní hand head human implies incest includes individual inference inside instance invisible involved killed living looks magic matter means memory mind mother mourning myth narrative narrator nature never notion novel object offers once pain passage past performance perhaps play plot political presence reader reading reality reference reflect remains represents resemble ritual role scene seems seen sense shape single sister social sort story storyteller Supreme Supreme's symbolic things tion traditional turns voice writing young
Oblíbené pasáže
Strana 133 - Like Niobe, all tears; why she, even she, — O God ! a beast, that wants discourse of reason, Would have mourn'd longer, — married with my uncle, My father's brother, but no more like my father Than I to Hercules...
Strana 42 - And he will be a wild man ; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him ; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.
Strana 16 - Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling.
Strana 138 - O God ! I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
Strana 11 - To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose "sense of the universal equality of things" has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.
Strana 18 - Camerado, this is no book, Who touches this touches a man, (Is it night? are we here together alone?) It is I you hold and who holds you, I spring from the pages into your arms— decease calls me forth.
Strana 15 - Just as a sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life comes to an end - unfolding the views of himself under which he has encountered himself without being aware of it - suddenly in his expressions and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him.
Strana 23 - When at last the crowd made way for Kemp to stand erect, there lay, naked and pitiful on the ground, the bruised and broken body of a young man about thirty. His hair and beard were white,— not grey with age, but white with the whiteness of albinism, and his eyes were like garnets. His hands were clenched, his eyes wide open, and his expression was one of anger and dismay. "Cover his face!" said a man. "For Gawd's sake, cover that face!
Strana 13 - And bore him to a chapel nigh the field, A broken chancel with a broken cross, That stood on a dark strait of barren land : On one side lay the...
Strana 24 - They massacred their hostages, as well as their captives : two hundred young maidens were tortured with exquisite and unrelenting rage ; their bodies were torn asunder by wild horses, or their bones were crushed under the weight of rolling waggons ; and their unburied limbs were abandoned on the public roads as a prey to dogs and vultures.