Through a tropics of light: An introduction to and translation of Eduardo Garcia Aguilar's "Bulevar de los Heroes".
Item
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Title
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Through a tropics of light: An introduction to and translation of Eduardo Garcia Aguilar's "Bulevar de los Heroes".
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Identifier
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AAI9130354
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identifier
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9130354
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Creator
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Miskowiec, Jay Anthony.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Gregory Rabassa
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Date
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1991
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Comparative | Literature, Latin American | Biography
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Abstract
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This dissertation is the introduction to and translation of Bulevar de los Heroes (1985), the second novel of the Colombian-Mexican writer, Eduardo Garcia Aguilar. The introduction first provides a brief biography of Garcia Aguilar. In addition to being a novelist, he has worked as a journalist throughout Latin America, covering subjects from armed struggles to papal visits. This career informs the style of Bulevar de los Heroes in what may be called a "reportorial" narrative, a seemingly distanced and objective presentation of characters and events. This demythologizing attitude is compared with the literature of "magic realism," the dominant trend of modern Latin American literature, in which an improbable aspect within reality is objectively presented or the rational and irrational are joined or juxtaposed. But this movement or genre is not viewed as simply a contemporary aesthetic phenomenon. The roots of magic realism are traced to the very first texts of the Americas, including the diaries of Christopher Columbus and the histories written by early missionaries. The discovery and invention of new worlds and the necessity of developing a new language with which to describe them becomes a common thematic in a certain tradition of Latin American literature. As modern writers and critics such as Alejo Carpentier and Carlos Fuentes have illustrated, magic realism is a "terminology of transculturation." Indigenous texts, such as Aztec and Mayan codices, are compared with the Spanish. This historical and cultural foundation is described in terms of the discursive formation--a network of statements that share a well-defined field of objects and alphabet of concepts. A revolutionary and religious theme, stemming from the conflict between colonizer and colonized, is further examined in Bulevar de los Heroes. As with the early conquistadors, the ultimate power becomes that of being able to name the world and the things in it. Following the introduction is the translation, Boulevard of Heroes, corrected and approved by Garcia Aguilar.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
