Formal Matters in Contemporary Latino Poetry


Book Description

Today's Latino poetry scene is incredibly vibrant. With original interviews, this is the first meditation on the thematic features of such poetry. Looking at how Julia Alvarez, Rhina Espaillat, Rafael Campo, and C. Dale Young use structures such as meter, rhyme, and line break, this study identifies a poetics of formalist Latino poetry.




Latino/a Literature in the Classroom


Book Description

In one of the most rapidly growing areas of literary study, this volume provides the first comprehensive guide to teaching Latino/a literature in all variety of learning environments. Essays by internationally renowned scholars offer an array of approaches and methods to the teaching of the novel, short story, plays, poetry, autobiography, testimonial, comic book, children and young adult literature, film, performance art, and multi-media digital texts, among others. The essays provide conceptual vocabularies and tools to help teachers design courses that pay attention to: Issues of form across a range of storytelling media Issues of content such as theme and character Issues of historical periods, linguistic communities, and regions Issues of institutional classroom settings The volume innovatively adds to and complicates the broader humanities curriculum by offering new possibilities for pedagogical practice.




The Routledge Concise History of Latino/a Literature


Book Description

The Routledge Concise History of Latino/a Literature presents the first comprehensive overview of these popular, experimental and diverse literary cultures. Frederick Luis Aldama traces a historical path through Latino/a literature, examining both the historical and political contexts of the works, as well as their authors and the readership. He also provides an enlightening analysis of: the differing sub-groups of Latino/a literature, including Mexican American, Cuban American, Puerto Rican American, Dominican American, and Central and South American émigré authors established and emerging literary trends such as the postmodern, historical, chica-lit storytelling formats and the graphic novel key literary themes, including gender and sexuality, feminist and queer voices, and migration and borderlands. The author’s methodology and interpretation of a wealth of information will put this rich and diverse area of literary culture into a new light for scholars. The book’s student-friendly features such as a glossary, guide to further reading, explanatory text boxes and chapter summaries, make this the ideal text for anyone approaching the area for the first time.




The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry


Book Description

The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry provides historical context on the evolution of the Latin American poetic tradition from the sixteenth century to the present day. It is organized into three parts. Part I provides a comprehensive, chronological survey of Latin American poetry and includes separate chapters on Colonial poetry, Romanticism/modernism, the avant-garde, conversational poetry, and contemporary poetry. Part II contains six succinct essays on the major figures Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Gabriela Mistral, César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and Octavio Paz. Part III analyses specific and distinctive trends within the poetic canon, including women's, LGBT, Quechua, Afro-Hispanic, Latino/a and New Media poetry. This Companion also contains a guide to further reading as well as an essay on the best English translations of Latin American poetry. It will be a key resource for students and instructors of Latin American literature and poetry.




The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry


Book Description

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to studying the diversity of American poetry in the twenty-first century.




Prose Poetry


Book Description

An engaging and authoritative introduction to an increasingly important and popular literary genre Prose Poetry is the first book of its kind—an engaging and authoritative introduction to the history, development, and features of English-language prose poetry, an increasingly important and popular literary form that is still too little understood and appreciated. Poets and scholars Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton introduce prose poetry’s key characteristics, chart its evolution from the nineteenth century to the present, and discuss many historical and contemporary prose poems that both demonstrate their great diversity around the Anglophone world and show why they represent some of today’s most inventive writing. A prose poem looks like prose but reads like poetry: it lacks the line breaks of other poetic forms but employs poetic techniques, such as internal rhyme, repetition, and compression. Prose Poetry explains how this form opens new spaces for writers to create riveting works that reshape the resources of prose while redefining the poetic. Discussing prose poetry’ s precursors, including William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, and prose poets such as Charles Simic, Russell Edson, Lydia Davis, and Claudia Rankine, the book pays equal attention to male and female prose poets, documenting women’s essential but frequently unacknowledged contributions to the genre. Revealing how prose poetry tests boundaries and challenges conventions to open up new imaginative vistas, this is an essential book for all readers, students, teachers, and writers of prose poetry.




Robo Sacer


Book Description

Robo Sacer engages the digital humanities, critical race theory, border studies, biopolitical theory, and necropolitical theory to interrogate how technology has been used to oppress people of Mexican descent—both within Mexico and in the United States—since the advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. As the book argues, robo-sacer identity emerges as transnational flows of bodies, capital, and technology become an institutionalized state of exception that relegates people from marginalized communities to the periphery. And yet the same technology can be utilized by the oppressed in the service of resistance. The texts studied here represent speculative stories about this technological empowerment. These texts theorize different means of techno-resistance to key realities that have emerged within Mexican and Chicano/a/x communities under the rise and reign of neoliberalism. The first three chapters deal with dehumanization, the trafficking of death, and unbalanced access to technology. The final two chapters deal with the major forms of violence—feminicide and drug-related violence—that have grown exponentially in Mexico with the rise of neoliberalism. These stories theorize the role of technology both in oppressing and in providing the subaltern with necessary tools for resistance. Robo Sacer builds on the previous studies of Sayak Valencia, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Guy Emerson, Achille Mbembe, and of course Giorgio Agamben, but it differentiates itself from them through its theorization on how technology—and particularly cyborg subjectivity—can amend the reigning biopolitical and necropolitical structures of power in potentially liberatory ways. Robo Sacer shows how the cyborg can denaturalize constructs of zoē by providing an outlet through which the oppressed can tell their stories, thus imbuing the oppressed with the power to combat imperialist forces.




Latinos and Narrative Media


Book Description

This is the first book to explore the multitude of narrative media forms created by and that feature Latinos in the twenty-first century - a radically different cultural landscape to earlier epochs. The essays present a fresh take informed by the explosion of Latino demographics and its divergent cultural tastes.




The Once and Future Muse


Book Description

The Once and Future Muse presents the first major study of the life and work of Dominican-born bilingual American poet and translator Rhina P. Espaillat (b. 1932). Beginning with her literary celebrity as the youngest poet ever inducted into the Poetry Society of America, it traces her relative obscurity after 1952 when she married and took on family and employment responsibilities, to her triumphant return to the poetry spotlight decades later when she reclaimed her former prestige with a series of award-winning poetry collections. The authors define Espaillat's place in American letters with attention to her formalist aesthetics, Hispanic Caribbean immigrant background, poetic community building, bilingual ethos, and domestically minded woman-of-color feminism. Addressing the temporality of her oeuvre—her publishing before and after the splitting of American literature into distinct ethnic segments—this work also highlights the demands that the social transformations of the 1960s placed on literary artists, critics, and readers alike.




Forms of Dictatorship


Book Description

An intra-ethnic study of Latina/o fiction written in the United States from the early 1990s to the present, Forms of Dictatorship examines novels that depict the historical reality of dictatorship and exploit dictatorship as a literary trope. This literature constitutes a new sub-genre of Latina/o fiction, which the author calls the Latina/o dictatorship novel. The book illuminates Latina/os' central contributions to the literary history of the dictatorship novel by analyzing how Latina/o writers with national origin roots in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America imaginatively represent authoritarianism. The novels collectively generate what Harford Vargas terms a "Latina/o counter-dictatorial imaginary" that positions authoritarianism on a continuum of domination alongside imperialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, neoliberalism, and border militarization. Focusing on novels by writers such as Junot D az, H ctor Tobar, Cristina Garc a, Salvador Plascencia, and Francisco Goldman, the book reveals how Latina/o dictatorship novels foreground more ubiquitous modes of oppression to indict Latin American dictatorships, U.S. imperialism, and structural discrimination in the U.S., as well as repressive hierarchies of power in general. Harford Vargas simultaneously utilizes formalist analysis to investigate how Latina/o writers mobilize the genre of the novel and formal techniques such as footnotes, focalization, emplotment, and metafiction to depict dictatorial structures and relations. In building on narrative theories of character, plot, temporality, and perspective, Harford Vargas explores how the Latina/o dictatorship novel stages power dynamics. Forms of Dictatorship thus queries the relationship between different forms of power and the power of narrative form --- that is, between various instantiations of repressive power structures and the ways in which different narrative structures can reproduce and resist repressive power.