Jose Lezama Lima S Joyful Vision

José Lezama Lima's Joyful Vision

Cuba’s José Lezama Lima became the most controversial figure in the flowering of the Latin American novel with the 1966 publication of Paradiso. Hailed as a seminal writer of breathtaking originality by Julio Cortázar, Octavio Paz, and Mario Vargas Llosa, Lezama was also attacked by the Castro regime and others for his stylistic obscurity, erotic descriptions, and violation of literary norms. Indeed, his experimental fiction, written on the very boundaries of the novelistic genre, resists classification. José Lezama Lima’s Joyful Vision, a much-needed critical study of Paradiso, Oppiano Licario, and Lezama’s essays, is thus an exploration in reading, one that highlights and preserves the essential and persistent contradictions in Lezama’s theory and practice of literature. Gustavo Pellón focuses his study on Lezama’s search for equilibrium, clarifying such oppositions in Lezama’s writings as the mystical quest for illumination through obscurity, the calculated cultivation of naïveté, the Proust-like fascination with yet ultimate condemnation of homosexuality, and a modernist (even postmodernist) narrative style that conveys a mystical (essentially medieval) worldview. Above all, Pellón shares his wonder at Lezama who, in an age of pessimism, maintained his joyful vision of art and existence.

José Lezama Lima's Joyful Vision

Secondary Moderns

"Secondary Moderns examines Lezama Lima's analyses of Latin American history and culture. The study begins by carefully demonstrating how Lezama breaks with the modern Latin American intellectual tradition that has explored the question of Latin American in terms of an "identity politics," and moves on to a close reading of the theories of aesthetics, representation, resistance, criticism, death, religion, and ethics that Lezama puts forth via his notion of the "American expression." The work concludes by analyzing Lezama's "politics of affirmation" by scrutinizing his writings on Cuba and the Cuban Revolution." "Secondary Moderns represents a thorough analysis of Lezama's cultural project, Latin American twentieth-century thought, and the complex intersection of Latin American studies and the post-Heideggerian philosophical tradition. Refuting labels that have too hastily been attached to Lezama's difficult works - those works have been dubbed "elitist" or "transcendentalist" - the text strives to establish Lezama as one of the great thinkers of historicity in the modern age. For while many critics have suggested that Latin American modernity is born via a reading and rewriting of Western discourses, Lezama's "American expression" is the site where this theory is most radically put into practice. The practice, moreover, permits one to understand not only Latin American cultural theory, but Western thought itself; indeed, Lezama's aberrant reading of the West, by its very aberrant character, reveals aspects of the Western tradition never before explored."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved