City Fictions

Language, Body, and Spanish American Urban Space

Amanda Holmes

2007
212 pages
$47.50
ISBN 0-8387-5673-7
Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory

City Fictions examines the dominance of disturbing metaphors of language and the body for representing urban complexities in the late twentieth-century Spanish American literature. It traces these images in the works of five authors, examining the intricate ways in which unraveling syntax and fragmenting bodies communicate in urban experience of this era. Beginning with traditional genres as diverse as a poem, the short story, and the chronicle, this book reveals how Octavio Paz, Julio Cortázar, Cristina Peri Rossi, Diamela Eltit, and Carlos Monsiváis push through the restrictions of form to reflect the city in unconventional texts such as the gesture, graffiti, and the crowd.

About the author:

Amanda Holmes, Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at McGill University, and a member of the editorial board for the Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos. She has lectured and published extensively in twentieth-century Latin American literature on topics such as political violence and the city, autobiography and regional identity, and the urban uncanny in comparative perspectives.