Writing and violence have been inextricably linked in Spanish America from the Conquest onward. Spanish authorities used written edicts, laws, permits, regulations, logbooks, and account books to control indigenous peoples whose cultures were predominantly oral, giving rise to a mingled awe and mistrust of the power of the written word that persists in Spanish American culture to the present day. In this masterful study, Anibal Gonzalez traces and describes how Spanish American writers have reflected ethically in their works about writing's relation to violence and about their own relation to writing.Using an approach that owes much to the recent 'turn to ethics' in deconstruction and to the works of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, he examines selected short stories and novels by major Spanish American authors from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries: Manuel Gutierrez Najera, Manuel Zeno Gandia, Teresa de la Parra, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Julio Cortazar. He shows how these authors frequently display an attitude he calls 'graphophobia', an intense awareness of the potential dangers of the written word.
Anibal Gonzalez is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Spanish at Pennsylvania State University.
- ISBN10 0292728395
- ISBN13 9780292728394
- Publish Date 1 January 2002
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 13 July 2009
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Texas Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 192
- Language English