Roberto González Echevarría: Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (1990–) [EN, ES]
Filed under book | Tags: · anthropology, archive, christianity, city, history, history of literature, latin america, law, literary theory, literature, myth, narrative, rhetoric, violence, writing
“This book offers a theory about the origin and evolution of the Latin American narrative, and about the emergence of the modern novel. It argues that the novel developed from the discourse of the law in the Spanish Empire during the sixteenth century, while many of the early historical documents concerning the New World assumed the same forms, furnished by the notarial arts. Thus, both the novel and these first Latin American narratives imitated the language of authority. The book explores how the same process is repeated in two key moments in the history of the Latin American narrative. In the nineteenth century, the model was the discourse of scientific travellers such as von Humboldt and Darwin, while in the twentieth century, the discourse of anthropology – the study of language and myth – has come to shape the narrative. Professor González Echevarría’s theoretical approach is drawn from a reading of Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos, and the book centres on major figures in the tradition such as Columbus, Garcilaso el Inca, Sarmiento, Gallegos, Borges and Garcia Marquez.”
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1990
ISBN 0521023998, 9780521023993
245 pages
Review (Terry J. Peavler, Latin American Research Review, c1990, EN)
Review (Margarita Zamora, Hispanic Review, 1992, EN)
Review (Adriana Gordillo, Fronteras de la historia, 2003, ES)
Publisher (EN)
WorldCat (EN)
WorldCat (ES)
Myth and Archive (PDF), PDF (English, 1990)
Mito y archivo: una teoría de la narrativa latinoamericana (Spanish, trans. Virginia Aguirre Muñoz, PDF, 77 MB, via Academia.edu)
L. D. Reynolds, N. G. Wilson: Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (1968/1991)
Filed under book | Tags: · antiquity, book, history, history of literature, literature, middle ages, print, publishing, renaissance, scholarship, textual criticism, transmission of texts, writing
“One of the remarkable facts about the history of Western culture is that we are still in a position to read large amounts of the literature produced in classical Greece and Rome despite the fact that for at least a millennium and a half all copies had to be produced by hand and were subject to the hazards of fire, flood, and war. This book explains how the texts survived and gives an account of the reasons why it was thought worthwhile to spend the necessary effort to preserve them for future generations.
In the second edition a section of notes was included, and a new chapter was added to deal with some aspects of scholarship since the Renaissance. In the third edition, the authors responded to the urgent need to take account of the very large number of discoveries in this rapidly advancing field of knowledge by substantially revising or enlarging certain sections.”
Publisher Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1968
Third edition, 1991
ISBN 0198721463, 9780198721468
352 pages
Review (of 2nd ed., E. Christian Kopff, The Classical Journal, 1976)
Review (M. Possanza, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 1991)
PDF (12 MB)
Comment (0)Maurice Blanchot: The Book to Come (1959‒) [EN, PT]
Filed under book | Tags: · book, literary theory, literature, philosophy, writing
“During the last half of the twentieth century in France, Maurice Blanchot was a key figure in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy. He developed early on a distinctive, limpid form of essay writing, and his essays, in form and substance, left their unmistakable imprint on the work of the most distinguished French theorists. The writings of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, for example, are hardly imaginable without Blanchot.
The Book to Come gathers together essays originally published in La Nouvelle Revue Française. Not a random collection of essays, this book is organized into four sections: “the secret of literature”; literature as exigence and as meaning; literature and the novel; and the future of writing and of the book. The authors discussed constitute a veritable repertoire: Rousseau, Proust, Artaud, Brach, Musil, James, Beckett, Bataille, Mallarmé, Joubert, and Claudel, among others.”
Originally published as Le livre à venir, Gallimard, Paris, 1959
English edition
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2002
Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series
ISBN 0804742235
267 pages
Review (Mark Cohen, 2004)
The Book to Come (English, trans. Charlotte Mandell, 2002, 15 MB)
O livro por vir (Portuguese, trans. Leyla Perrone-Moises, 2005, 7 MB)