Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory

Science Fusion in Contemporary Mexican Literature

Bucknell University Press

Science Fusion in Contemporary Mexican Literature examines how Mexican authors use scientific knowledge and conceptual analogues to address issues in biopolitics, historiography, metaphysics, ethics, and ecological crisis in the age of the Anthropocene. By blending science and literature, these works reposition the human and offer fresh perspectives to address present-day sociocultural and environmental issues.

More info

Nature Fantasies

Decolonization and Biopolitics in Latin America

By Gabriel Horowitz

Bucknell University Press

Nature Fantasies is a work of literary criticism and theory that presents and critiques a current of Latin American thought characterized by a desire to return to nature. It considers how nature fantasies involved in the decolonization and the formation of the Latin American nation state have turned into an engine of the state’s undoing.

More info

The Aesthetic Border

Colombian Literature in the Face of Globalization

By Brantley Nicholson

Bucknell University Press

This groundbreaking study examines how modern Colombian literature—from Gabriel García Márquez to Juan Gabriel Vásquez—reflects one of the world’s most tumultuous entrances into globalization. While these literary icons, one canonical, the other emergent, bookend Colombia’s fall and rise on the world stage, the period between the two was inordinately violent, spanning the Colombian urban novel’s evolution into narco-literature.

More info

White Light

The Poetry of Alberto Blanco

By Ronald J. Friis

Bucknell University Press

White Light: The Poetry of Alberto Blanco explores the interplay of complementary images and concepts in A la luz de siempre, the Mexican writer and visual artist's vast trilogy of poems from 1979-2018. By focusing on listening and seeing, Blanco's highly interdisciplinary poetry transforms his inspirations into the inspiration of his readers.

More info

Latin American Literature at the Millennium

Local Lives, Global Spaces

By Cecily Raynor

Bucknell University Press

Latin American Literature at the Millennium studies canonical and peripheral literary texts that complicate links between locality and geographical place, revealing new configurations of the local. It explores the region’s transition into the twenty-first century and evaluates Latin American authors’ reconciliation of conflicting forces in their construction of everyday places and modes of belonging.

More info

Exemplary Violence

Rewriting History in Colonial Colombia

By Alberto Villate-Isaza

Bucknell University Press

Exemplary Violence explores the violent colonial history of the New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia and Venezuela) by examining three seventeenth-century historical accounts—Pedro Simón’s Noticias historiales, Juan Rodríguez Freile’s El carnero, and Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita’s Historia general—each of which reveals the colonizer’s reliance on the threat of violence to sustain order.

More info

Transpoetic Exchange

Haroldo de Campos, Octavio Paz, and Other Multiversal Dialogues

Edited by Marília Librandi, Jamille Pinheiro Dias, and Tom Winterbottom

Bucknell University Press

Transpoetic Exchange illuminates the poetic interactions between Octavio Paz (1914-1998) and Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003) from three perspectives--comparative, theoretical, and performative. The poem Blanco by Octavio Paz, written when he was Ambassador to India in 1966, and Haroldo de Campos’ translation (or what he calls a “transcreation”) of that poem, published as Transblanco in 1986, as well as Campos’ Galáxias, written from 1963 to 1976, are the main axes around which the book is organized.

Paz and Campos, one from Mexico and the other from Brazil, were central figures in the literary history of the second half of the 20th century, in Latin America and beyond. Both poets signal the direction of poetry as that of translation, understood as the embodiment of otherness and of a poetic tradition that every new poem brings back as a Babel re-enacted.

This volume is a print corollary to and expansion of an international colloquium and poetic performance held at Stanford University in January 2010 and it offers a discussion of the role of poetry and translation from a global perspective. The collection holds great value for those interested in all aspects of literary translation and it enriches the ongoing debates on language, modernity, translation and the nature of the poetic object.

More info

Transpoetic Exchange

Haroldo de Campos, Octavio Paz, and Other Multiversal Dialogues

Edited by Marília Librandi, Jamille Pinheiro Dias, and Tom Winterbottom

Bucknell University Press

Transpoetic Exchange illuminates the poetic interactions between Octavio Paz (1914-1998) and Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003) from three perspectives--comparative, theoretical, and performative. The poem Blanco by Octavio Paz, written when he was Ambassador to India in 1966, and Haroldo de Campos’ translation (or what he calls a “transcreation”) of that poem, published as Transblanco in 1986, as well as Campos’ Galáxias, written from 1963 to 1976, are the main axes around which the book is organized.

Paz and Campos, one from Mexico and the other from Brazil, were central figures in the literary history of the second half of the 20th century, in Latin America and beyond. Both poets signal the direction of poetry as that of translation, understood as the embodiment of otherness and of a poetic tradition that every new poem brings back as a Babel re-enacted.

This volume is a print corollary to and expansion of an international colloquium and poetic performance held at Stanford University in January 2010 and it offers a discussion of the role of poetry and translation from a global perspective. The collection holds great value for those interested in all aspects of literary translation and it enriches the ongoing debates on language, modernity, translation and the nature of the poetic object.

More info

Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building

National Sentiments, Transnational Realities, 1897-1940

By Naida García-Crespo

Bucknell University Press

Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building focuses on the processes of Puerto Rican national identity formation as seen through the historical development of cinema on the island between 1897 and 1940. Anchoring her work in archival sources in film technology, economy, and education, Garcia-Crespo argues that Puerto Rico’s position as a stateless nation allows for a fresh understanding of national cinema based on perceptions of productive cultural contributions rather than on citizenship or state structures.

More info

Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory

Language, Imitation, Art, and Verisimilitude in the Last Six Novels

By Earl E. Fitz

Bucknell University Press

This book makes the argument that Machado de Assis, widely hailed as one of Brazil’s greatest writers, was also a major theoretician of the modern novel form. Steeped in great works of Western literature and an imaginative reader of French Symbolist poetry, Machado creates a “new narrative,” one that will presage the groundbreaking theories of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure by showing how even the language of narrative cannot escape being elusive and ambiguous in terms of meaning.

More info

Beyond Human

Vital Materialisms in the Andean Avant-Gardes

By Tara Daly

Bucknell University Press

By presenting fresh readings of canonical authors like César Vallejo, José María Arguedas, and Magda Portal and through analysis of newer artist-activists like Julieta Paredes, Mujeres Creando Comunidad, and Alejandra Dorado, Daly argues that avant-gardes complicate questions of agency and contribute to theoretical discussions on vital materialisms.

More info