The author, one of the most influential Latin Americanists in the US, has published a number of books, but none display the importance of her work in literary criticism, cultural studies and marxist and feminist theory as successfully as this collection o
In Cruel Modernity, Jean Franco examines the conditions under which extreme cruelty became the instrument of armies, governments, rebels, and rogue groups in Latin America. She seeks to understand how extreme cruelty came to be practiced in many parts of the continent over the last eighty years and how its causes differ from the conditions that brought about the Holocaust, which is generally the atrocity against which the horror of others is measured. In Latin America, torturers and the perpetrators of atrocity were not only trained in cruelty but often provided their own rationales for engaging in it. When "draining the sea" to eliminate the support for rebel groups gave license to eliminate entire families, the rape, torture, and slaughter of women dramatized festering misogyny and long-standing racial discrimination accounted for high death tolls in Peru and Guatemala. In the drug wars, cruelty has become routine as tortured bodies serve as messages directed to rival gangs. Franco draws on human-rights documents, memoirs, testimonials, novels, and films, as well as photographs and art works, to explore not only cruel acts but the discriminatory thinking that made them possible, their long-term effects, the precariousness of memory, and the pathos of survival.
Where is the common ground for feminist theory and Latin American culture? Jean Franco explores Mexican women's struggle for interpretive power in relation to the Catholic religion, the nation, and post-modern society; and examines the writings of women who wrote under the shadow of recognized male writers, as well as the works of more marginal figures. In this original and skillfully written book Franco demonstrates the many feminisms that emerge in apparently rigid and adverse situations, and provides the foundation for a more comprehensive, less ethnocentric feminst theory.
The cultural Cold War in Latin America was waged as a war of values--artistic freedom versus communitarianism, Western values versus national cultures, the autonomy of art versus a commitment to liberation struggles--and at a time when the prestige of literature had never been higher. The projects of the historic avant-garde were revitalized by an anti-capitalist ethos and envisaged as the opposite of the republican state. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City charts the conflicting universals of this period, the clash between avant-garde and political vanguard. This was also a twilight of literature at the threshold of the great cultural revolution of the seventies and eighties, a revolution to which the Cold War indirectly contributed. In the eighties, civil war and military rule, together with the rapid development of mass culture and communication empires, changed the political and cultural map. A long-awaited work by an eminent Latin Americanist widely read throughout the world, this book will prove indispensable to anyone hoping to understand Latin American literature and society. Jean Franco guides the reader across minefields of cultural debate and histories of highly polarized struggle. Focusing on literary texts by Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Roa Bastos, and Juan Carlos Onetti, conducting us through this contested history with the authority of an eyewitness, Franco gives us an engaging overview as involving as it is moving.
A sibling of interwar Europe's other fascist regimes, Franco's Spain survived them all, growing to a feeble old age in an era of liberal democracy. This book looks beyond the mythology surrounding the origins of Franco's dictatorship to provide a critical overview of the regime as a whole. All phases of this history are covered: the dictatorship's emergence out of a bloody uprising against a democratic government; the "high period" of Francoism with all its poverty, hunger, and fear, as followed by a complex time of change and economic growth; and the final demise of Franco's reign amid open opposition and internal defections. Indeed, economic and social issue are as much a part this story as politics, and international relations find their place in Franco's Spain alongside purely domestic issues. The study also peers beyond the grave in its examination of the transition to democracy after Franco's death in 1975.
This is the first full-length study in English of the Peruvian poet, César Vallejo (1892-1938). Franco explores limitations on the poet's freedom of speech, and goes on to explore Vallejo's later poetry, which gestures towards the tentative nature of humanity and civilisation that gives the poetry its abiding relevance.
This 1976 book was the first full-length study in English of the poetry of the Peruvian César Vallejo (1892-1938). A major poet, who approached the problem of revolutionary aesthetics in a manner radically different from that of his contemporaries, Vallejo was comparatively little known outside the Spanish-speaking world. This neglect is attributable to the difficulty of a poetry which deliberately resists interpretation and assimilation into the established order of things. Professor Franco's book is therefore an exploration of the problems of poetic production. In the opening biographical chapter, she shows the kind of social constraints which limited what the poet could say, which led him in Trilce (1922) to write a hermetic poetry using euphemism, pun and indirection. She goes on to explore Vallejo's later poetry, which was shaped by the Spanish Civil War and gestures towards the tentative nature of humanity and civilisation that gives the poetry its abiding relevance.
Why does everything sound better if it's said in French? That fascination is at the heart of The Story of French, the first history of one of the most beautiful languages in the world that was, at one time, the pre-eminent language of literature, science and diplomacy. In a captivating narrative that spans the ages, from Charlemagne to Cirque du Soleil, Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow unravel the mysteries of a language that has maintained its global influence despite the rise of English. As in any good story, The Story of French has spectacular failures, unexpected successes and bears traces of some of history's greatest figures: the tenacity of William the Conqueror, the staunchness of Cardinal Richelieu, and the endurance of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Through this colorful history, Nadeau and Barlow illustrate how French acquired its own peculiar culture, revealing how the culture of the language spread among francophones the world over and yet remains curiously centered in Paris. In fact, French is not only thriving—it still has a surprisingly strong influence on other languages. As lively as it is fascinating, The Story of French challenges long held assumptions about French and shows why it is still the world's other global language.
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