Cuba and the Fall

by Gonzalez, Eduardo

• ISBN13: 9780813929828
• ISBN10: 0813929822
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-07-01
• Publisher: Univ of Virginia Pr

Summary

The literature of Cuba, argues Eduardo González in this new book, takes on quite different features depending on whether one is looking at it from "the inside" or from "the outside," a view that in turn is shaped by official political culture and the authors it sanctions or by those authors and artists who exist outside state policies and cultural politics. González approaches this issue by way of two twentieth-century writers who are central to the canon of gay homoerotic expression and sensibility in Cuban culture: José Lezama Lima (1910--1976) and Reinaldo Arenas (1943--1990). Drawing on the plots and characters in their works, González develops both a story line and a moral tale, revolving around the Christian belief in the fall from grace and the possibility of redemption, that bring the writers into a unique and revealing interaction with one another.The work of Lezama Lima and Arenas is compared with that of fellow Cuban author Virgilio Piñera (1912--1979) and, in a wider context, with the non-Cuban writers John Milton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, John Ruskin, and James Joyce to show how their themes get replicated in González's selected Cuban fiction. Also woven into this interaction are two contemporary films -- The Devil's Backbone (2004) and Pan's Labyrinth (2007) -- whose moral and political themes enhance the ethical values and conflicts of the literary texts. Referring to this eclectic gathering of texts, González charts a cultural course in which Cuba moves beyond the Caribbean and into a latitude uncharted by common words, beyond the tyranny of place.

Author Biography

Eduardo Gonzlez, Professor of Latin American Literature and Cinema at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Cuba and the Tempest: Literature and Cinema in the Time of Diaspora and The Monstered Self: Narratives of Death and Performance in Latin American Fiction.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xv
Abbreviations	p. xvii
Introduction: Personal Character, Authorship, and the Incidental Caribbean	p. 1
Castle Dismal: Reinaldo Arenas as Boy and Girl
A House in the Woods	p. 23
Pan's Labyrinth	p. 48
Lady in the Hot Seat	p. 71
A House of Sand	p. 93
The A-Frame Agony	p. 114
The Lord's Envy: Lezama Lima as Satan Knows Best
Son of Gorgo	p. 139
Mother Nero, Uncle Orpheus, and the Unborn	p. 165
Paradiso as a Five-Star Inferno	p. 187
Planet Cuba up in the Clouds
Gargling the Tribe	p. 213
Babel Hustle and Flow	p. 226
Discordance	p. 244
Notes	p. 267
Bibliography	p. 277
Index	p. 287
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.