A conversation for SPAN 312 about Gabriel García Márquez’s most famous book, One Hundred Years of Solitude. With Gerald Martin and Jon Beasley-Murray.
One Hundred Years of Solitude II
It is perhaps because ultimately Macondo is so full of the ghosts of the motley cast of characters that have wandered through the book’s pages, that García Márquez can only put an end to it all by shouting “enough!” and bringing on a cataclysmic hurricane that tears the whole place down.
One Hundred Years of Solitude I
The book militantly refuses regimentation, but is aware that “proliferation” can also be a “plague,” even as it flirts with excess at every turn.
Pedro Páramo
Here, the signs and impact of the sovereign, the legacy of a bitter past, are everywhere to be seen. But he is haunted by murmurs, voices, that never entirely go away.
The Kingdom of This World
It is the fact that in Haiti—and the Americas more generally—two (or more) perspectives rub up against each other and clash, shattering the notion that they can harmoniously be contained within the same organic totality, that provokes the surprised awe and wonder that Carpentier reports experiencing, and attempts to recreate in this novel.
On Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths
A conversation for SPAN 312 about Jorge Luis Borges’s collection of translated stories and other short texts, Labyrinths. With Daniel Balderston and Jon Beasley-Murray.
Labyrinths
Borges exposes secret complicities, as when apparent oppositions hide more fundamental similarities. But he is also concerned with how novelty and change emerge from repetition, how real difference arises from the most minor of variations.
Madwomen
Mistral takes advantage of her status as representative, and the representational capacities of language, to make visible the traces of what otherwise escapes the official order of things.
On Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems
A conversation for SPAN 312 and RMST 202 about Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. With Brianne Orr-Alvarez and Jon Beasley-Murray.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
A great writer not only writes great work, but also, more fundamentally and importantly, changes our sense of what great work is, and even charts a new role for the writer in society.
Posthegemony 