Piedra de Sol

Piedra de Sol
Author: Octavio Paz
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 70
Release: 1991
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780811211956

Nobel laureate Octavio Paz's premier long poem "Sunstone" is now a handsome illustrated paperbook. Presented here in a new translation with the Spanish texts en face, this is the 1957 poem that helped established Paz as a major international figure. Includes beautiful illustrations from an 18th-century treatise on the Mexican calendar.

Toward Octavio Paz

Toward Octavio Paz
Author: John M. Fein
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2021-10-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813186145

The undisputed intellectual leadership of Octavio Paz, not only in Mexico but throughout Spanish America, rests on achievements in the essay and in poetry. In the field of the essay, he is the author of more than twenty-five books on subjects whose diversity—esthetics, politics, surrealist art, the Mexican character, cultural anthropology, and Eastern philosophy, to cite only a few—is dazzling. In poetry, his creativity has increased in vigor over more than fifty years as he has explored the numerous possibilities open to Hispanic poets from many different sources. The bridge that joins the halves of his writing is a concern for language in general and for the poetic process in particular. Toward Octavio Paz defines this process of creation through a close examination of the books that represent the summit of the poet's development, three long poems and three collections. It is intended for readers of varied poetic experience who are approaching Paz's work for the first time. By studying the relationship of the parts of the poem, particularly structure and theme, Fein traces the poet's growth through approaches to the reader, each embodied in a separate work. From the divided circularity of Piedra de sol through the intensification of the subject of Salamandra, the multiple meanings of Blanco, the polarities of Ladera este, and the literary solipsism of Pasado en claro, to the silences of Vuelta, Paz has shaped his audience's responses to his work through suggestion rather than control. The result is not only a new poetry but a new receptivity.

The Writing in the Stars

The Writing in the Stars
Author: Rodney Williamson
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2007-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0802090842

Born in Mexico City in 1914, writer, poet, and diplomat Octavio Paz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990, eight years before his death in 1998. The Writing in the Stars explores Paz's life and ideas by establishing a dialogue between the structure and recurring images of his major poems and the ideas of Carl Jung. Although other literary critics have pointed to Jungian concepts in Paz, a comprehensive study on the subject has yet to be undertaken. Rodney Williamson takes up this challenge, adopting a Jungian perspective to explore successive phases of Paz's poetry. Williamson illustrates how archetypal images infuse Paz's early poetry and his surrealist period and shows how the circular structure of Paz's longer poems, such as 'Piedra de sol' and 'Blanco,' are based on the Eastern sacred circle or mandala, a major archetype of psychic wholeness in Jung. He argues that a grasp of the psychological importance of Jung's archetypes is essential to understanding the various syntheses of creative truth and existence sought by Paz at different defining moments of his career as a poet. The Writing in the Stars will prove fascinating to anyone interested in Latin-American literature, Jungian psychology, or critical theory.

Aguila O Sol?

Aguila O Sol?
Author: Octavio Paz
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 136
Release: 1976
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9780811206235

A bilingual edition of the short prose poetry written by Mexico's most distinguished living poet in 1949-50.

The Willow and the Spiral

The Willow and the Spiral
Author: Roberto Cantú
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2014-01-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1443855936

Octavio Paz (México, 1914–1998) was one of the foremost poets and essayists of the twentieth century. Read in translations into many of the world’s languages, Paz received numerous awards and prizes during his lifetime, participated in major artistic and political movements of the twentieth century, served as Mexico’s ambassador in India (1962–1968), and was the editor of Plural and Vuelta, two literary journals of prominent influence in Mexico, Latin America, and Spain. In 1990 Paz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. This book of essays is a commemoration of Octavio Paz on the first centenary of his birth, a celebration undertaken with Paz’s distinguishing legacy: criticism, internationally inclusive, and open to differing viewpoints. The Willow and the Spiral: Essays on Octavio Paz and the Poetic Imagination contains studies in English and in Spanish by top-ranking Paz scholars from various continents and wide-ranging literary traditions, as well as by an emerging generation of critics who approach the work of Octavio Paz from diverse and recent theoretical methods. Specially written for this volume, the fourteen essays are in-depth studies of Paz’s poetry and essays in relation to art, eroticism, literary history, politics, the art of translation, and to Paz’s life-long reflections on world cultures and civilizations as represented by China, France, India, Japan, the United States and, among others, Mesoamerica. The essays range from new critical analyses of Piedra de sol (Sunstone) and Blanco, to studies of Renga, the haiku tradition and, among other topics, Marcel Duchamp and the literary Avant-Garde. This book will be of importance to Paz scholars, teachers, students, and the general reader interested in Octavio Paz and in topics related to artistic, literary, and cultural movements that shaped the twentieth century and that continue to inspire and steer artists and writers in the twenty-first century.

Latin American Literature in Transition 1930–1980: Volume 4

Latin American Literature in Transition 1930–1980: Volume 4
Author: Amanda Holmes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 555
Release: 2022-12-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009188798

Latin American Literature in Transition 1930-1980 explores the literary landscape of the mid-twentieth-century and the texts that were produced during that period. It takes four core areas of thematic and conceptual focus – solidarity, aesthetics and innovation, war, revolution and dictatorship, metropolis and ruins – and employs them to explore the complexity, heterogeneity and hybridity of form, genre, subject matter and discipline that characterised literature from the period. In doing so, it uncovers the points of transition, connection, contradiction, and tension that shaped the work of many canonical and non-canonical authors. It illuminates the conversations between genres, literary movements, disciplines and modes of representation that underpin writing form this period. Lastly, by focusing on canon and beyond, the volume visibilizes the aesthetics, poetics, politics, and social projects of writing, incorporating established writers, but also writers whose work is yet to be examined in all its complexity.

Dancing on the Sun Stone

Dancing on the Sun Stone
Author: Marjorie Becker
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2024-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0826366309

Dancing on the Sun Stone is a uniquely transdisciplinary work that fuses modern Latin American history and literature to explore women’s lives and gendered politics in Mexico. In this important work, scholar Marjorie Becker focuses on the complex Mexican women of rural Michoacán who performed an illicit revolutionary dance and places it in dialogue with Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz’s signature poem, “Sun Stone”—allowing a new gendered history to emerge. Through this dialogue, the women reveal intimate and intellectual complexities of Mexican women’s gendered voices, their histories, and their intimate and public lives. The work further demonstrates the ways these women, in dialogue with Paz, transformed history itself. Becker’s multigenre work reconstructs Mexican history through the temporal experiences of crucial Michoacán females, experiences that culminate in their complex revolutionary dance, which itself emerges as a transformative revolutionary language.

Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art

Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art
Author: Joanna Page
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2021-04-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 178735976X

Projects that bring the ‘hard’ sciences into art are increasingly being exhibited in galleries and museums across the world. In a surge of publications on the subject, few focus on regions beyond Europe and the Anglophone world. Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art assembles a new corpus of art-science projects by Latin American artists, ranging from big-budget collaborations with NASA and MIT to homegrown experiments in artists’ kitchens. While they draw on recent scientific research, these art projects also ‘decolonize’ science. If increasing knowledge of the natural world has often gone hand-in-hand with our objectification and exploitation of it, the artists studied here emphasize the subjectivity and intelligence of other species, staging new forms of collaboration and co-creativity beyond the human. They design technologies that work with organic processes to promote the health of ecosystems, and seek alternatives to the logics of extractivism and monoculture farming that have caused extensive ecological damage in Latin America. They develop do-it-yourself, open-source, commons-based practices for sharing creative and intellectual property. They establish critical dialogues between Western science and indigenous thought, reconnecting a disembedded, abstracted form of knowledge with the cultural, social, spiritual, and ethical spheres of experience from which it has often been excluded. Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art interrogates how artistic practices may communicate, extend, supplement, and challenge scientific ideas. At the same time, it explores broader questions in the field of art, including the relationship between knowledge, care, and curation; nonhuman agency; art and utility; and changing approaches to participation. It also highlights important contributions by Latin American thinkers to themes of global significance, including the Anthropocene, climate change and environmental justice.

Octavio Paz and T. S. Eliot

Octavio Paz and T. S. Eliot
Author: Tom Boll
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2017-12-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351193937

"When the sixteen-year-old Octavio Paz (1914-1998) discovered The Waste Land in Spanish translation, it 'opened the doors of modern poetry'. The influence of T S Eliot would accompany Paz throughout his career, defining many of his key poems and pronouncements. Yet Paz's attitude towards his precursor was ambivalent. Boll's study is the first to trace the history of Paz's engagement with Eliot in Latin American and Spanish periodicals of the 1930s and 40s. It reveals the fault lines that run through the work of the dominant figure in recent Mexican letters. By positioning Eliot in a Latin American context, it also offers new perspectives on one of the capital figures of Anglo-American modernism."