: Lanin A. Gyurko
: Lifting the Obsidian Mask: The Artistic Vision of Carlos Fuentes
: Digitalia
: 9781882528486
: 1
: CHF 67.80
:
: Kunst, Literatur
: English
: 446
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: PDF

This volume is the only study to encompass all of Fuentes’ writings, including short stories, novels, theatre and essays, from his earliest short stories of the mythic and fantastic, Los días enmascarados, to his unique and enigmatic autobiographical dictionary En esto creo (2002), and his most significant narrative in the twenty-first century, La Silla delÁguila (2003). 

Designed for the students of Latin American Literature as a comprehensive guidebook, for enthusiasts of Comparative Literature and Ethnic Studies, and specialists in Latin American Literature, Lifting the Obsidian Mask provides a highly readable, illuminating and invaluable exploration of Fuentes’ complex and uncompromising, paradoxical, and fascinating art.
CHAPTER I THE FOUNDING OF THE LATIN AMERICAN NOVEL OF THE BOOM: LA REGION MAS TRANSPARENTE (p. 7)

Fuentes`s first novel, La region mas transparente (Where the Air is Clear, 1958) is a seminal work, one that marks a turning point, both in Mexican literature and in Latin American literature as a whole. In this epic and mythic work, one that combines a focus on the Mexico of the 1950s with constant flashbacks to the ancient Aztec past, Fuentes inaugurates the novela totalizante, the all-encompassing novel in Latin America, which was to become the hallmark of the Boom authors.

Although novelists such as Mariano Azuela had written several works focusing on post-Revolutionary Mexico City and emphasizing the betrayal of revolutionary ideals, including the work Las tribulaciones de una familia decente (The Trials of a Respectable Family, 1918) and Nueva burguesia (The New Middle Class, 1941) and in other novels such as La Malhora (The Evil One, 1923) and La Luciernaga (The Firefly, 1932) and had experimented with language, style, and stream of consciousness, Fuentes was the first in Mexican literature to combine"committed" literature with narrative experimentation, and a multitemporal vision with fragmented narrative perspectives and bold experiments in time, space and language.

In La region mas transparente, which, characteristic of Fuentes, is both traditional and experimental, he not only fuses the novel of the Mexican Revolution pioneered by Azuela with the novel of Post-Revolutionary Mexico City, but, drawing inspiration from D. H. Lawrence`s The Plumed Serpent (1926), Fuentes constantly moves between twentieth-century commercial and industrial Mexico and an evocation of the ancient Aztec capital of Mexico-Tenochtitlan.

This archeological past, one replete with gods and goddesses to whom blood sacrifices were rendered by the ancient priests, was literally to become a fascinating part of Mexico`s present in 1978, when the huge stone disc of the goddess of the moon Coyolxauqui was unearthed and the ancient Aztec pyramid the Templo Mayor, on the site where the Zocalo and the National Cathedral stand today, was excavated.

This is the same sacrificial center envisioned twenty years earlier by the demiurge Ixca Cienfuegos in La region mas transparente. Thus Fuentes in the middle of the twentieth century restores to the novel its prophetic, visionary function that it acquired in the nineteenth century European novel. And not only anthropologically but politically as well, La region mas transparente can be interpreted as a vatic work.

In its emphasis on the bloodlust that runs like a hidden but torrential current underneath the superficial prosperity and glamour of the Mexican Jet Set so stingingly caricatured by Fuentes for their snobbishness and frivolity and dissipation, it adumbrates the atmosphere of pentup frustration and the brutal repression of the student protesters in 1968 by the granaderos—the massacre of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco, that so outraged Fuentes and Octavio Paz and that is treated extensively in Paz`s Posdata (Critique of the Pyramid, 1971) and in Fuentes`s first drama, Todos los gatos sonpardos (In the Night All Cats Are Gray, 1968), as well as in his collection of essays, Tiempo mexicano (Mexican Time, 1970).
CONTENTS8
CHRONOLOGY10
INTRODUCTION: FUENTES'S ARTISTIC VISION—MEXICO AS HISTORY, MYTH, AND DREAM14
CHAPTER I: THE FOUNDING OF THE LATIN AMERICAN NOVEL OF THE BOOM: LA REGIÓN MÁS TRANSPARENTE20
CHAPTER II: A MEXICAN BILDUNGSROMAN: LAS BUENAS CONCIENCIAS40
CHAPTER III: THE REVOLUTION OF 1910 AND ITS AFTERMATH: LA MUERTE DE ARTEMIO CRUZ61
CHAPTER IV: AURA: SELF, DOUBLE, AND THE SUPERNATURAL79
CHAPTER V: MORALITY AND DOUBLE STANDARDS: CANTAR DE CIEGOS91
CHAPTER VI: THE QUEST FOR REDEMPTION AND THE EQUIVOCAL NARRATOR: CAMBIO DE PIEL108
CHAPTER VII: THE CINEMATIC NOVEL OF MARÍA FÉLIX: ZONA SAGRADA128
CHAPTER VIII: FROM MOCTEZUMA II TO NONOALCO IN 1968: TODOS LOS GATOS SON PARDOS152
CHAPTER IX: CUMPLEAÑOS: THE MYTH AND DEMYTHIFICATION OF JORGE LUIS BORGES173
CHAPTER X: TERRA NOSTRA: THE NOVELA TOTALIZANTE OF THREE WORLDS208
CHAPTER XI: THE QUEST FOR AN AUTONOMOUS INDIVIDUAL AND NATIONAL IDENTITY: LA CABEZA DE LA HIDRA226
CHAPTER XII: NEW WORLD, OLD WORLD, AND THE SUPERNATURAL: UNA FAMILIA LEJANA244
CHAPTER XIII: THE DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF THE CINEMATIC SUPERSTAR: ORQUÍDEAS A LA LUZ DE LA LUNA261
CHAPTER XIV: AMBROSE BIERCE AND PANCHO VILLA: GRINGO VIEJO278
CHAPTER XV: POSTMODERN FUENTES: INDETERMINACY AND THE PAST AS FUTURE: CRISTÓBAL NONATO295
CHAPTER XVI: LATIN AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE NEW HISTORICAL NOVEL: LA CAMPAÑA322
CHAPTER XVII: EROS AND THANATOS: DIANA O LA CAZADORA SOLITARIA344
CHAPTER XVIII: CROSSING PHYSICAL, METAPHYSICAL AND LINGUISTIC FRONTIERS: LA FRONTERA DE CRISTAL364
CHAPTER XIX: THE FEMINIST RESPONSE TO ARTEMIO CRUZ: LOS AÑOS CON LAURA DÍAZ392
CHAPTER XX: FROM THE METAPHYSICAL TO THE BARBARIC: INSTINTO DE INEZ416
CONCLUSION: BENEATH THE OBSIDIAN MASK: A VISION OF OPENNESS434
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY437