Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria

Roberto González Echevarría

Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literatures Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria

Covering the entire history of Latin American short fiction, from the Colonial period to the present, an annotated anthology of fifty-three stories includes selections from internationally known authors as well as those little known to English-speakers. UP.

The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories

Fernando de Rojas

Celestina

Dāstānha-yi kūtah Amrīkāyī Lātīn

The novel Don Quixote, written in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, is widely considered to be one of the greatest fictional works in the entire canon of Western literature. At once farcical and deeply philosophical, Cervantes’ novel and its characters have become integrated into the cultures of the Western Hemisphere, influencing language and modern thought while inspiring art and artists such as Richard Strauss and Pablo Picasso. Based on Professor Roberto González Echevarría’s popular open course at Yale University, this essential guide to the enduring Spanish classic facilitates a close reading of Don Quixote in the artistic and historical context of renaissance and baroque Spain while exploring why Cervantes’ masterwork is still widely read and relevant today. González Echevarría addresses the novel’s major themes and demonstrates how the story of an aging, deluded would-be knight-errant embodies that most modern of predicaments: the individual’s dissatisfaction with the world in which he lives, and his struggle to make that world mesh with his desires.

Cervantes' "Don Quixote"

Myth and Archive offers a new theory about the origin and evolution of the Latin American narrative, and about the emergence of the modern novel. Instead of following the traditional categories set up by literary history, Professor González Echevarría explores the relationship of the narrative to the language of authority: the law in the colonial period, science in the nineteenth century, and anthropology in the twentieth century. The book contains readings of major works in the tradition such as Garcilaso el Inca's Comentarios reales, Sarmiento's Facundo, Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos, and García Marquez's Cien años de soledad.

A Theory of Latin American Narrative

Myth and Archive

A luminous history of Cuba’s most dynamic and defining rituals and the ever-improvisational character of Cuban culture In the Cuban town of Sagua la Grande, a young Roberto González Echevarría peers out the window of his family home on the morning of the Nochebuena fiesta as preparations begin for the slaughter of a feast day pig. The author recalls “watching them at a distance, though thinking, fearing, that once I grew older I would have to participate in the whole event.” Now an acclaimed scholar of Latin American literature, González Echevarría returns to the rituals that defined his young life in Cuban Fiestas. Drawing from art, literature, film, and even the national sport of baseball, he vividly reveals the fiesta as a dynamic force of both destruction and renewal in the life of a people. Roberto González Echevarría masterfully exposes the distinctive elements of the fiesta cubana that give depth and coherence to more than two centuries of Cuban cultural life. Reaching back to nineteenth-century traditions of Cuban art and literature, and augmenting them, in the twentieth, with the arts of narrative, the esthetic performances of sport and entertainment in nightclubs, on the baseball diamond, and in movie theaters, Cuban Fiestas renders the lilting strains of the fiesta and drum beats of the passage of time as keys to understanding the dynamic quality of Cuban culture. González Echevarría’s explorations are also illuminated by autobiographical vignettes that unveil the ever-shifting impact of the fiesta on the author’s own story of exile and return.

Cuban Fiestas

Essays examine works by Barnet, Cabrera Infante, Carpentier, Cortazar, Fuentes, Gallegos, Garcia Marquez, Roa Bastos, and Rodo

Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature

The Voice of the Masters

Partiendo de una meditación sobre la aeronave espacial Voyager 1, que detectó sonidos provenientes de lo más remoto y profundo del espacio estelar, este libro pondera el impacto de la revolución copernicana en la literatura española del Siglo de Oro, particularmente en las obras de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Calderón de la Barca y sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. El título deriva del agujereado techo de la venta de Juan Palomeque en el "Quijote", a través del cual se pueden ver las estrellas. Es una especie de risible observatorio, igual a los que se improvisaban en catedrales y otros edificios altos. ¿Cómo se refleja la sensación de infinito que provoca un universo heliocéntrico en las obras mayores de nuestra lengua? En gran medida mediante el recurso a la improvisación, que es la respuesta a la ausencia de límites, de forma, del nuevo universo en que todavía vivimos. Infinito e improvisación suministran, además, las inestables bases de la ironía y el perspectivismo. El estrellado establo propone una nueva manera de leer la literatura del Siglo de Oro.

El estrellado establo: infinito e improvisación en el Siglo de Oro

The consolidation of law and the development of legal writing during Spain's Golden Age not only helped that country become a modern state but also affected its great literature. In this fascinating book, Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria explores the works of Cervantes, showing how his representations of love were inspired by examples of human deviance and desire culled from legal discourse.

Love and the Law in Cervantes

The novel Don Quixote, written in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, is widely considered to be one of the greatest fictional works in the entire canon of Western literature. At once farcical and deeply philosophical, Cervantes' novel and its characters have become integrated into the cultures of the Western Hemisphere, influencing language and modern thought while inspiring art and artists such as Richard Strauss and Pablo Picasso. Based on Professor Roberto González Echevarría's popular open course at Yale University, this essential guide to the enduring Spanish classic facilitates a close reading of Don Quixote in the artistic and historical context of renaissance and baroque Spain while exploring why Cervantes' masterwork is still widely read and relevant today. González Echevarría addresses the novel's major themes and demonstrates how the story of an aging, deluded would-be knight-errant embodies that most modern of predicaments: the individual's dissatisfaction with the world in which he lives, and his struggle to make that world mesh with his desires.

This casebook gathers a collection of ambitious essays about both parts of the novel (1605 and 1615) and also provides a general introduction and a bibliography. The essays range from Ramón Menéndez Pidal's seminal study of how Cervantes dealt with chivalric literature to Erich Auerbachs polemical study of Don Quixote as essentially a comic book by studying its mixture of styles, and include Leo Spitzer's masterful probe into the essential ambiguity of the novel through minute linguistic analysis of Cervantes prose. The book includes pieces by other major Cervantes scholars, such as Manuel Durán and Edward C. Riley, as well as younger scholars like Georgina Dopico-Black. All these essays ultimately seek to discover that which is peculiarly Cervantean in Don Quixote and why it is considered to be the first modern novel.

A Casebook

Cervantes' Don Quixote

Ten essays, written between 1970 and 1991, deal with modernity in the Hispanic literary tradition, and the Baroque as the expression of the modern. Examines specific works, authors, and movements from the beginning of the modern period in 1499, to experimental work in the middle 1970s. The excerpts are in Spanish and English. Paper edition (unseen), $17.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literatures

Celestina's Brood

Discusses the theory of the origin and evolution of the Latin American narrative and the emergence of the modern novel.

Alejo Carpentier was one of the greatest Latin American novelists of the twentieth century, as well as a musicologist, journalist, cultural promoter, and diplomat. His fictional world issues from an encyclopedic knowledge of the history, art, music, and literature of Latin America and Europe. Carpentier’s novels and stories are the enabling discourse of today’s Latin American narrative, and his interpretation of Latin American history has been among the most influential. Carpentier was the first to provide a comprehensive view of Caribbean history that centered on the contribution of Africans, above and beyond the differences created by European cultures and languages. Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home, first published in 1977 and updated for this edition, covers the life and works of the great Cuban novelist, offering a new perspective on the relationship between the two. González Echevarría offers detailed readings of the works La música en Cuba, The Kingdom of This World, The Lost Steps, and Explosion in a Cathedral. In a new concluding chapter, he takes up Carpentier’s last years, his relationship with the Cuban revolutionary regime, and his last two novels, El arpa y la sombra and La consagración de la primavera, in which Carpentier reviewed his life and career.

The Pilgrim at Home

Alejo Carpentier

By one of the most original and learned critical voices in Hispanic studies— a timely and ambitious study of authority as theme and authority as authorial strategy in modern Latin American literature. An ideology is implicit in modern Latin American literature, argues Roberto González Echevarría, through which both the literature itself and criticism of it define what Latin American literature is and how it ought to be read. In the works themselves this ideology is constantly subjected to a radical critique, and that critique renders the ideology productive and in a sense is what constitutes the work. In literary criticism, however, too frequently the ideology merely serves as support for an authoritative discourse that seriously misrepresents Latin American literature. In The Voice of the Masters, González Echevarría attempts to uncover the workings of modern Latin American literature by creating a dialogue of texts, a dynamic whole whose parts are seven illuminating essays on seminal texts in the tradition. As he says, "To have written a sustained, expository book ... would have led me to make the same kind of critical error that I attribute to most criticism of Latin American literature.... I would have naively assumed an authoritative voice while attempting a critique of precisely that critical gesture." Instead, major works by Barnet, Cabrera Infante, Carpentier, Cortázar, Fuentes, Gallegos, García Márquez, Roa Bastos, and Rodó are the object of a set of independent deconstructive (and reconstructive) readings. Writing in the tradition of Derrida and de Man, González Echevarría brings to these readings both the penetrative brilliance of the French master and a profound understanding of historical and cultural context. His insightful annotation of Cabrera Infante's "Meta-End," the full text of which is presented at the close of the study, clearly demonstrates these qualities and exemplifies his particular approach to the text.

Roberto González Echevarría

About

Books

Join the club