Secondary source, Reviews of Books About Gabriel García Márquez
Publication Date:
2003
Published:
Las Vegas, NV : University of Nevada
Location:
Library, University of Illinois
Notes:
"By redefining social or economic "classes" as cultures, or as Raymond Williams explains, groups that share a "structure of feeling," the dissertation defines power in accordance with the shared values, beliefs, attitudes, and practices defined by the culture of persistence and the culture of wealth. With culturally determined definitions of power in place, the dissertation argues for a broader understanding of female power as the power is accessed and wielded by female characters in the writings of Willa Cather, Gabriel García Márquez, and Dorothy Allison. Engaging the strategies of feminist geographies employed, critics including Doreen Massey, Gillian Rose, and the Women and Geography Study Group, the dissertation analyzes the methods by which female characters negotiate successes or failures in accessing and wielding power."
Secondary source, Reviews of Books About Gabriel García Márquez
Publication Date:
2003
Published:
Twin Cities, MN : University of Minnesota
Location:
Library, University of Illinois
Notes:
"This dissertation studies eight Spanish-American writers (Isabel Allende, Miguel Angel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, José Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Joáo Guimaráes Rosa, Gabriel García Márquez, and Juan Rulfo) and two French Caribbean writers (Maryse Condé and Simone Schwarz-Bart) and explores the use in their works of "magic realism" as an allegory of the colonial experience. Beginning in Chapter One with the work of Alejo Carpentier,... I have attempted to illustrate that the novel studies the trauma of colonialism and its enduring effects. Chapter Two examines the history and describes the elements that make up magic realism, illustrating its varied aspects with examples from the works of the authors cited above. Chapter Three deals with the history and description of allegory and shows how its characteristics mirror those of magic realism. Chapter Four studies the work of the two French Caribbean authors and explores the limits of allegory as seen in the work of Simone Schwarz-Bart. The conclusion makes use of a novel by New Zealand author, Janet Frame, to illustrate the fact that magic realism is found, not only in so-called "post-colonial" countries, but in the work of First World authors, where the effects of oppression are evident in the lives of the "colonizers" as well."
Secondary source, Reviews of Books About Gabriel García Márquez
Publication Date:
2003
Published:
New York, NY : New York University
Location:
Library, University of Illinois
Notes:
"The purpose of this study is to explore the intersection of literature and illness in order to demonstrate that disease metaphor is an effective tope for Latin American authors seeking to represent topics that have been culturally and historically pathologized in both national society and/or literature. It analyzes the way the rhetoric of the somatic for pathological was used at the end of the 19th century. It also traces the development of this rhetoric into the following century. The dissertation begins with an overview of general literary theory dealing with diseases and representation focusing on Susan Sontag, Julia Epstein, and Sander Gilman. It offers a linguistic perspective on the functioning of metaphor as well. By bringing the ideas of medical historian Charles Rosenberg to bear on this linguistic discussion the author defines the notion of the frame and framing. Frames can be understood as parallel to the concept of the artist's convention- constructs that inform the perception of disease as both a biological event and a social occurrence. Tuberculosis, cholera, and sexually transmitted diseases (AIDS in particular) are the illnesses central to this study. The Latin American writers Abraham Valdelomar, Manuel Puig, Gabriel García Márquez, and Reinaldo Arenas employ metaphors with these diseases in order to engage specific socio-historic material via frames."
Secondary source, Reviews of Books About Gabriel García Márquez
Publication Date:
2003
Published:
Toronto, Canada : University of Toronto
Location:
Library, University of Illinois
Notes:
"This study explores the representation of women in contemporary magic realist texts from Latin America, English Canada, and Quebec. From a feminist standpoint, it examines how men and women writers represent women characters in texts that allegorically use supernatural power to denaturalize social power. Intracultural and intercultural considerations of these New World texts reveal shared approaches, both positive and negative, to women's identities and roles. In the more progressive works - Isabel Allende's La casa de los espíritus, Jack Hodgin's The Invention of the World, Anne Hérbert's Les fous de Bassan, and Michel Tremblay's La grosse femme d" à côté est enceinte- women characters use naturalized supernaturalism (defined as the casual presence of the supernatural in the natural world) to affirm feminine subjectivity and freedom. The assumption of mythic forms or an engagement with the occult can give a female character mobility, spiritual freedom, and pleasure. But the power figuratively expressed through the supernatural is denied women in Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad, Sheila Watson's The Double Hook, Anne Hérbert's "L"ange de Dominique," and Jack Ferron's L"amélanchier.
Secondary source, Reviews of Books About Gabriel García Márquez
Publication Date:
2003
Published:
Long Beach, CA : California State University
Location:
Library, University of Illinois
Notes:
"The purpose of this study is to examine the image of the dictator in literature of Latin America. The dictator, as he is depicted in the works of Alejo Carpentier, Augusto Roa Bastos, and Gabriel García Márquez, is a central archetypal icon who embodies the tragic history of anti-democratic rule in the Latin American republics. The dictator, however, also personifies the complexities and contradictions that come with military rule. The three authors seek to examine the dynamics of dictatorial power, but they also explore deeper psychological, aesthetic, historical, and philosophical problems surrounding the novel of the dictator."
Secondary source, Reviews of Books About Gabriel García Márquez
Publication Date:
2003
Published:
Miami, FL : University of Miami
Location:
Library, University of Illinois
Notes:
"In this study I explore how three texts from the Colombian Caribbean challenge the notion of a consolidated nation-state and its rhetoric of complete mestizaje, late into the 20th century. With Cien años de soledad by Gabriel García Márquez as the backdrop of my analysis, I unveil the treatment of race, myth, and history respectively in the three novels and how violence shapes the meanings of these categories. The first chapter focuses on Chambacú, corral de negros (1967) by Manuel Zapata Olivella. In this chapter, I define this novel as a depository of the memory of slavery in Colombia that asserts an African heritage in the Northern Coast. At the aesthetic level, I discuss Zapata Olivella's use of social realist narrative style to articulate the identity and history of Afro-Colombians. The second chapter examines Alvaro Cepeda Samudio's La casa grande (1962) to explore the strategies he employs to recover and revise the events of the Massacre of the Banana Workers in 1928. In my reading, the massacre emerges as the first wound that causes the disarticulation of the consolidation process of the modern Colombian nation-state. The last chapter centers on Los Pañamanes (1979) by Fanny Buitrago. I define the legend of the Spanish Man, the foundational legend of the island and the text's organizing element, as a myth of origins that delineates the novel's space as a product of violence and penetration. I establish the use of myth as anti-myth to separate and divide, and to mark the difference that separates the insular space and the continental nation-state. In my conclusion, I return to Cien años de soledad to explore how processes of reception and canonization in the symbolic market are "produced" following strategies derived from the failed encounter between cultural modernism and social modernization."