The Self in the Narratives of José Donoso

The Self in the Narratives of José Donoso
Author: Mary Lusky Friedman
Publisher: Edwin Mellen Press
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2004
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

Jose Donoso (1924-1996), the most celebrated fiction writer Chile has produced, created over a span of some 50 years, a large and remarkably various body of work. His 10 novels, 9 novellas and 4 volumes of tales take up many of the social and political questions of his day. Although each work probes a different social issue, each contains as well Donoso's lifelong meditation on the nature of the self. Jose Donoso's Conjuring of the Self explores this central theme in Donoso's writings. This study explores in rigorous detail Jose Donoso's most important theme - the perils of establishing a self. Concentrating on the Chilean's late writings - The Garden Next Door, Curfew, Taratuta, Conjeturas sobre la memoria de mi tribu and Donde van a morir los elefantes, the author infers from these little studied narratives Donoso's idiosyncratic views about selfhood. Donoso, who conceived of individual identity as compact of social role and intrapsychic form, fuses his social vision with psychoanalysis.

Understanding José Donoso

Understanding José Donoso
Author: Sharon Magnarelli
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages: 214
Release: 1993
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780872498440

Chilean writer José Donoso is one of a handful of authors inevitably mentioned in relationship to the 'boom' in Spanish American literature during the 1960s and 1970s. His name is frequently linked with those of other Latin writers such as García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, Rulfo, and Cortázar. Like his contemporaries, Donoso blends the physical and the psychological in his fiction. The perceptions of his characters are constantly changing. For Donoso, 'reality' is a state of mind always subject to the imagination, and nothing is stable.

The Obscene Bird of Night

The Obscene Bird of Night
Author: José Donoso
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2003
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781567920468

This haunting jungle of a novel has been hailed as "a masterpiece" by Luis Bunuel and "one of the great novels not only of Spanish America, but of our time" by Carlos Fuentes. The story of the last member of the aristocratic Azcoitia family, a monstrous mutation protected from the knowledge of his deformity by being surrounded with other freaks as companions, The Obscene Bird of Night is a triumph of imaginative, visionary writing. Its luxuriance, fecundity, horror, and energy will not soon fade from the reader's mind -- Back cover

The Garden Next Door

The Garden Next Door
Author: José Donoso
Publisher:
Total Pages: 243
Release: 1994-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780802133687

A Chilean writer named Julio and his wife, Gloria, are at a low point in their lives. Constantly bickering, the pair are beset by worries about money, their writing, and their son (who may or may not be plying the oldest profession in Marrakesh). When Julio's boyhood best friend, now a famous artist, lends the couple his luxurious Madrid apartment for the summer, it is an escape for both - but in particular for Julio, who fantasizes about the garden next door and the erotic life of the lovely young aristocratic woman who inhabits it. But Julio's life - and career - unravel In Madrid: he is rebuffed by a famous literary agent, Nuria Monclus, who detests him and his novel; his son's friend from Marrakesh moves in and causes havoc; and Gloria begins to drink. In the face of pitiless adversity, Julio's talent inexorably begins to fade. The garden next door, however, is also Gloria, who has been doing some creating of her own. It is this twist that transforms Donoso's brilliant satire of the writer's life into something even greater: a carefully crafted and bitteily comic meditation on gardens, deceit, and the nature of a writer's muse.

A History of Chilean Literature

A History of Chilean Literature
Author: Ignacio López-Calvo
Publisher:
Total Pages: 683
Release: 2021-10-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108487378

This book covers the heterogeneity of Chilean literary production from the times of the Spanish conquest to the present. It shifts critical focus from national identity and issues to a more multifaceted transnational, hemispheric, and global approach. Its emphasis is on the paradigm transition from the purportedly homogeneous to the heterogeneous.

Little Bird

Little Bird
Author: Claudia Ulloa Donoso
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Total Pages: 133
Release: 2021-08-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1646050665

After moving from Peru north of the Arctic circle to begin graduate school, Claudia Ulloa Donoso began blogging about insomnia. Not hers, necessarily – the blog was never defined as fact or fiction. Her blog posts became the bones of Little Bird, short stories with a nod to fervent self-declaration of diary entries and the hallucinatory haze of sleeplessness. Blending narration and personal experience, the stories in Little Bird stretch reality, a sharp-shooting combination of George Saunders and Samanta Schweblin. Characters real and unreal, seductive, shape-changing, and baffling come together in smooth prose that, ultimately, defies fact and fiction.

Narratives of Mistranslation

Narratives of Mistranslation
Author: Denise Kripper
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 93
Release: 2023-01-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1000854493

This book offers unique insights into the role of the translator in today’s globalized world, exploring Latin American literature featuring translators and interpreters as protagonists in which prevailing understandings of the act of translation are challenged and upended. The volume looks to the fictional turn as a fruitful source of critical inquiry in translation studies, showcasing the potential for recent Latin American novels and short stories in Spanish to shed light on the complex dynamics and conditions under which translators perform their task. Kripper unpacks how the study of these works reveals translation not as an activity with communication as its end goal but rather as a mediating and mediated process shaped by the unique manipulations and motivations of translators and the historical and cultural contexts in which they work. In exploring the fictional representations of translators, the book also outlines pedagogical approaches and offers discussion questions for the implementation of translators’ narratives in translation, language, and literature courses. Narratives of Mistranslation will be of interest to scholars and educators in translation studies, especially those working in literary translation and translation pedagogy, Latin American literature, world literature, and Latin American studies.

José Donoso's House of Fiction

José Donoso's House of Fiction
Author: Flora María González Mandri
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1995
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780814325261

"This volume examines the multiple narrative perspectives Donoso presents and traces a transformation in Donoso's works from complex stage performance to political forum. Studying fiction as grotesque, mannered theater or as a transparent screen through which social and political concerns are scrutinized, Gonzalez Mandri illuminates another constant in Donoso's work: a weaving of feminine and masculine aspects of artistic voice as they incorporate the idioms of drama, radio, film, and television."--BOOK JACKET.

Malady and Genius

Malady and Genius
Author: Benigno Trigo
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2016-05-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1438461577

Analyzes the theme of self-sacrifice in Puerto Rican literature through psychoanalytic theory. Malady and Genius examines the recurring theme of self-sacrifice in Puerto Rican literature during the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Interpreting these scenes through the works of Frantz Fanon, Kelly Oliver, and Julia Kristeva, Benigno Trigo focuses on the context of colonialism and explains the meaning of this recurring theme as a mode of survival under a colonial condition that has lasted more than five hundred years in the oldest colony in the world. Trigo engages a number of works in Latino and Puerto Rican studies that have of late reconsidered the value of a psychoanalytic approach to texts and cultural material, and also different methodologies including post-colonial theory, cultural studies, and queer studies.