Stavans Unbound

Stavans Unbound
Author: Bridget Kevane
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2019-08-27
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 164469235X

Twenty-five years ago, Ilan Stavans published his first book, Imagining Columbus: The Literary Voyage (1993). Since then, Stavans has become a polarizing figure, dismissed and praised in equal measure, a commanding if contested intellectual whose work as a cultural critic has been influential in the fields of Latino and Jewish studies, politics, immigration, religion, language, and identity. He can be credited for bringing attention to Jewish Latin America and issues like Spanglish, he has been instrumental in shaping a certain view of Latino Studies in universities across the United States as well abroad, he has anthologized much of Latino and Latin American Jewish literature and he has engaged in contemporary pop culture via the graphic novel. He was the host of a PBS show called Conversations with Ilan Stavans, and has had his fiction adapted into the stage and the big screen. The man, as one critic stated, clearly has energy to burn and it does not appear to be abating. This collection celebrates twenty-five years of Stavans’s work with essays that describe the good and the bad, the inspired and the pedestrian, the worthwhile and the questionable.

Latinx Literature Unbound

Latinx Literature Unbound
Author: Ralph E. Rodriguez
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2018-05-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0823279251

Since the 1990s, there has been unparalleled growth in the literary output from an ever more diverse group of Latinx writers. Extant criticism, however, has yet to catch up with the diversity of writers we label Latinx and the range of themes about which they write. Little sustained scholarly attention has been paid, moreover, to the very category under which we group this literature. Latinx Literature Unbound, thus, begins with a fundamental question “What does it mean to label a work of literature or an entire corpus of literature Latinx?” From this question others emerge: What does Latinx allow or predispose us to see, and what does it preclude us from seeing? If the grouping—which brings together a heterogeneous collection of people under a seemingly homogeneous label—tells us something meaningful, is there a poetics we can develop that would facilitate our analysis of this literature? In answering these questions, Latinx Literature Unbound frees Latinx literature from taken-for-granted critical assumptions about identity and theme. It argues that there may be more salubrious taxonomies than Latinx for organizing and analyzing this literature. Privileging the act of reading as a temporal, meaning-making event, Ralph E. Rodriguez argues that genre may be a more durable category for analyzing this literature and suggests new ways we might proceed with future studies of the writing we have come to identify as Latinx.

McOndo Revisited

McOndo Revisited
Author: Thomas Nulley-Valdés
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2023-07-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1666903051

The first book-length analysis of the controversial Pan-Hispanic short story anthology “McOndo” (1996) draws on World Literature scholarship to take a step toward reclaiming the anthology’s artistic intentions and considering its generation-defining legacy in Latin American literary history.

Yiddish Lives On

Yiddish Lives On
Author: Rebecca Margolis
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2023-03-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0228015510

The language of a thousand years of European Jewish civilization that was decimated in the Nazi Holocaust, Yiddish has emerged as a vehicle for young people to engage with their heritage and identity. Although widely considered an endangered language, Yiddish has evolved as a site for creative renewal in the Jewish world and beyond in addition to being used daily within Hasidic communities. Yiddish Lives On explores the continuity of the language in the hands of a diverse group of native, heritage, and new speakers. The book tells stories of communities in Canada and abroad that have resisted the decline of Yiddish over a period of seventy years, spotlighting strategies that facilitate continuity through family transmission, theatre, activism, publishing, song, cinema, and other new media. Rebecca Margolis uses a multidisciplinary approach that draws on methodologies from history, sociolinguistics, ethnography, digital humanities, and screen studies to examine the ways in which engagement with Yiddish has evolved across multiple planes. Investigating the products of an abiding dedication to cultural continuity among successive generations, Yiddish Lives On offers innovative approaches to the preservation, promotion, and revitalization of minority, heritage, and lesser-taught languages.

Patriots without a Homeland

Patriots without a Homeland
Author: Jehuda Hartman
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
Total Pages: 510
Release: 2023-02-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

Patriots without a Homeland dissects an important underexplored theme in Hungarian Jewry: Modern Orthodoxy. This study clearly demonstrates that beginning from the late nineteenth century, a strong modernizing trend developed within Orthodoxy based on the adoption of Hungarian national identity alongside the preservation of tradition. Modern Orthodoxy was receptive to the Hungarian language, culture, and religion. However, the attempt to integrate failed. The book traces the journey of Hungarian Jews from Emancipation to the Holocaust and seeks to understand the reasons for the Jews’ complete trust in Hungarian integrity. For instance, why did they believe until the very last moment that the Holocaust would not affect them? How could they fail to notice the impending disaster? This is the story of a community that felt rooted in the land and contributed greatly to its well-being, but was eventually rejected: the story of patriots without a homeland.

America Unbound

America Unbound
Author: Antonio Barrenechea
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2016-11-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0826357598

This original contribution to hemispheric American literary studies comprises readings of three important novels from Mexico, Canada, and the United States: Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, Quebecois writer Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues, and Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. The encyclopedic novel has particular generic characteristics that serve these writers as a vehicle for the reincorporation of hemispheric histories. Starting with an examination of Moby-Dick as precursor, Barrenechea shows how this narrative genre allows Fuentes, Poulin, and Silko to reflect the interconnected world of today, as well as to dramatize indigenous and colonial values in their narratives. His close attention to written documents, visual representations, and oral traditions in these encyclopedic novels sheds light on their comparative cultural relations and the New World from pole to pole. This study amplifies the scope of “America” across cultures and languages, time and tradition.

Isaac Unbound

Isaac Unbound
Author: Lois Baer Barr
Publisher: Arizona State University, Center for Latin American Studies
Total Pages: 218
Release: 1995
Genre: History
ISBN:

Presenting in-depth, systematic study of patriarchy in novels of contemporary South American Jewish writers, the author considers the works of Ariel Dorfman (Chile), Isaac Goldemberg (Peru), Teresa Porzecanski (Uruguay), Moacyr Scliar (Brazil), and Gerardo Mario Goloboff, Alicia Steimberg, and Mario Szichman (Argentina). "Barr successfully melds the elements of Jewish tradition and Latin American literary models". -- Darrel B. Lockhart, author of Latin American Jewish Women's Issues

The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies

The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies
Author: Martin Goodman
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks Online
Total Pages: 1060
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780199280322

The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies reflects the current state of scholarship in the field as analyzed by an international team of experts in the different and varied areas represented within contemporary Jewish Studies. Unlike recent attempts to encapsulate the current state of Jewish Studies, the Oxford Handbook is more than a mere compendium of agreed facts; rather, it is an exhaustive survey of current interests and directions in the field.

Agni

Agni
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 506
Release: 2003
Genre: American literature
ISBN:

Writing Off the Hyphen

Writing Off the Hyphen
Author: Jose L. Torres-Padilla
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2011-12-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 029580016X

The sixteen essays in Writing Off the Hyphen approach the literature of the Puerto Rican diaspora from current theoretical positions, with provocative and insightful results. The authors analyze how the diasporic experience of Puerto Ricans is played out in the context of class, race, gender, and sexuality and how other themes emerging from postcolonialism and postmodernism come into play. Their critical work also demonstrates an understanding of how the process of migration and the relations between Puerto Rico and the United States complicate notions of cultural and national identity as writers confront their bilingual, bicultural, and transnational realities. The collection has considerable breadth and depth. It covers earlier, undertheorized writers such as Luisa Capetillo, Pedro Juan Labarthe, Bernardo Vega, Pura Belpré, Arturo Schomburg, and Graciany Miranda Archilla. Prominent writers such as Rosario Ferré and Judith Ortiz Cofer are discussed alongside often-neglected writers such as Honolulu-based Rodney Morales and gay writer Manuel Ramos Otero. The essays cover all the genres and demonstrate that current theoretical ideas and approaches create exciting opportunities and possibilities for the study of Puerto Rican diasporic literature.