Cuba and the Tempest: Literature and Cinema in the Time of Diaspora

Capa
Univ of North Carolina Press, 08/12/2006 - 264 páginas
In a unique analysis of Cuban literature inside and outside the country's borders, Eduardo Gonzalez looks closely at the work of three of the most important contemporary Cuban authors to write in the post-1959 diaspora: Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1929-2005), who left Cuba for good in 1965 and established himself in London; Antonio Benitez-Rojo (1931-2005), who settled in the United States; and Leonardo Padura Fuentes (b. 1955), who still lives and writes in Cuba.

Through the positive experiences of exile and wandering that appear in their work, these three writers exhibit what Gonzalez calls "Romantic authorship," a deep connection to the Romantic spirit of irony and complex sublimity crafted in literature by Lord Byron, Thomas De Quincey, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In Gonzalez's view, a writer becomes a belated Romantic by dint of exile adopted creatively with comic or tragic irony. Gonzalez weaves into his analysis related cinematic elements of myth, folktale, and the grotesque that appear in the work of filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock and Pedro Almodovar. Placing the three Cuban writers in conversation with artists and thinkers from British and American literature, anthropology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and cinema, Gonzalez ultimately provides a space in which Cuba and its literature, inside and outside its borders, are deprovincialized.

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Páginas seleccionadas

Índice

Life after Cuba
1
THE STAR HUSBAND
7
NO WEDDING WITHOUT FUNERAL
53
CUBAN AFTERLIVES
151
Notes
209
Bibliography
225
Index
235
Direitos de autor

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Palavras e frases frequentes

Passagens conhecidas

Página 148 - I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen; man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.
Página 19 - Tis the voice of the Lobster: I heard him declare 'You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.' As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes. When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark, And will talk in contemptuous tones of the shark; But, when the tide rises and sharks are around, His voice has a timid and tremulous sound." "That's different from what I used to say when I was a child,
Página 151 - A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet's hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called "historical materialism
Página 19 - Will you walk a little faster?" said a whiting to a snail, "There's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my tail. See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance! They are waiting on the shingle — will you come and join the dance? Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?
Página 120 - ... facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority.
Página 167 - To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.
Página 151 - The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet's hand by means of strings.
Página 56 - Hippotas' son, beloved by the immortal gods, on a floating island, the whole enclosed by a rampart of bronze, not to be broken, and the sheer of the cliff runs upward to it; and twelve children were born to him in his palace, six of them daughters, and six sons in the pride of their youth, so he bestowed his daughters on his sons, to be their consorts. And evermore, beside their dear father and gracious mother...
Página 20 - I passed by his garden and marked, with one eye, How the Owl and the Panther were sharing a pie: The Panther took pie-crust, and gravy, and meat, While the Owl had the dish as its share of the treat. When the pie was all finished, the Owl, as a boon, Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon: While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl, And concluded the banquet by — " "What is the use of repeating all that stuff?

Referências a este livro

Cuban Studies 38, Volume 38
Louis A. Pérez, Jr.
Pré-visualização indisponível - 2008

Acerca do autor (2006)

Eduardo Gonzalez teaches literature and cinema at The Johns Hopkins University. He is author of three other books, including The Monstered Self: Narratives of Death and Performance in Latin American Fiction.

Informação bibliográfica