Octavio Paz

Ilan Stavans's vast and subtle knowledge deftly emerges in this engrossing collection of essays. Fascinated by the idea of Western civilization as a sequence of innumerable misinterpretations and misrepresentations, a magisterial Tower of Babel where everybody communicates at once in a different tongue, these nineteen pieces cover a broad range of personal and philosophical topics with the unifying theme being the crossroads where politics and the imagination meet. An essay on linguistics and culture discusses the shaping of Latin America's collective identity as a result of a translation loss. Peru's modern history is approached as a bloody battle between enlightenment and darkness, as personified by the archetypal clash between novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and the leader of Shining Path, Abimael Guzman. In his critiques of Octavio Paz and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Stavans reflects on the dichotomy between pen and sword in the Hispanic world and wonders why we are so mesmerized by magic realism, a literary style that poses as unsettling while remaining thoroughly conventional at heart. In "Letter to a German Friend", Stavans returns to his fate as a Jew in the Southern Hemisphere, and in "The First Book", he connects his passion for literature to his initiation into Jewishness. Finally, in the brilliant meditation on Columbus's afterlife, he reflects on the many ways in which we reinvent ourselves in order to make sense of the chaotic world that surrounds us.

Jean Franco's work as a path-breaking theorist, cultural critic, & scholar has helped to define Latin American studies over the last three decades. In the process, Franco has played a crucial role in developing cultural studies in both the English- & Spanish-speaking worlds. Critical Passions is the first volume to gather a wide-ranging selection of Franco's influential essays. A key participant in the major debates in Latin American studies-beginning with the "boom" period of the 1960s & continuing through debates on ideology & discourse, Marxism, mass culture, & postmodernism-Franco is recognized for her feminist critique of Latin American writing. While her principal books are all readily available, Franco's several dozen articles are dispersed in a variety of periodicals in Latin America, Europe, & the United States. Although many of these essays are considered pioneering & classic, they have never before been collected in a single work. In this volume, Mary Louise Pratt & Kathleen Newman have organized the essays into four interrelated sections: feminism & the critique of authoritarianism, mass & popular culture, Latin American literature from the "boom" onward, & the cultural history of Mexico. As a group, these writings demonstrate Franco's ability to reflect on & judge with equal seriousness all spheres of expression, whether subway graffiti, a fashion manual, or an avant-garde haiku. A bona fide fan of popular & mass media, Franco never allows her critiques to dissolve into the puritanical or reductive; instead, she finds ways to present & debate complex theoretical questions in direct & accessible language. This volume will draw an extensive readership in Latin American, cultural, & women's studies.

It is commonly assumed that the United States and Latin America, culturally so different, move artistically to very different rhythms. Also common is the assumption that, with rare exception, the literary figures on one side of the global North/ South divide have had little interest in the work of their counterparts. With Mutual Impressions Ilan Stavans dispels these notions by showing how solid the bridges between writers and across borders have been -- at least since the early days of this century -- and how crucial they are likely to become as we enter the next millennium.

Divided into symmetrical halves -- South reading North and North reading South -- the book presents essays by leading novelists, poets, and other writers that focus on the work of another literary figure from across the divide. Borges, for example, finds in Hawthorne the perfect precursor to his own interest in allegories; Katherine Anne Porter examines Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi as a rascal whose picaresque views of life in The Itching Parrot served to launch the Latin American novel; Cortazar's study of the plots and style of Poe show an affinity that left an indelible mark on the Argentine's short fiction; Susan Sontag views Machado de Assis as the ultimate mirror, a proto-postmodernist.

With other essays by Thomas Pynchon, William H. Gass, John Updike, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, John Barth, Robert Coover, Pedro Henriquez Urena, Grace Paley, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Mark Strand, among others, Mutual Impressions offers a remarkable view of the connections that comprise a literary tradition of the Americas. It is a book that will surprise and enliven its readers as it informs and awakensin them a sense of wonder.

Though Luis Bunuel, one of the most important filmmakers of the twentieth century, spent his most productive years as a director in Mexico, film histories and criticism invariably pay little attention to his work during this period. The only English-language study of Bunuel's Mexican films, this book is the first to explore a significant but neglected area of this filmmaker's distinguished career and thus to fill a gap in our appreciation and understanding of both Bunuel's achievement and the history of Mexican film.

Ernesto Acevedo-Munoz considers Bunuel's Mexican films--made between 1947 and 1965--within the context of a national and nationalist film industry, comparing the filmmaker's employment of styles, genres, character types, themes, and techniques to those most characteristic of Mexican cinema. In this study Bunuel's films emerge as a link between the Classical Mexican cinema of the 1930s through the 1950s and the "new" Cinema of the 1960s, flourishing in a time of crisis for the national film industry and introducing some of the stylistic and conceptual changes that would revitalize Mexican cinema.

The Encyclopedia of Mexico: History, Society and Culture seeks to present an overview of the specific events and broad processes of Mexican history, society and culture from ancient civilizations to the present day.

This two-volume work consists of some 600 entries. A collaborative effort that has involved more than 350 leading scholars from a variety of different countries, the Encyclopedia of Mexico makes a wide range of scholarship available to all those interested in the history of Mexico.

The end of World War II led to increased interest in multicultural concerns and a flourishing of literary and artistic endeavors. It was also a time of decolonization and the emergence of new nations and cultures clamoring for recognition and respect. The political circumstances following World War II exposed many people to other cultures. This reference discusses the experiences of writers active since 1945 who were shaped by cultures other than their own.