The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City : : Latin America in the Cold War / / Jean Franco.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter HUP eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013 (Canada)
• VerfasserIn: Franco, Jean,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2022]; ©2002
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Convergences: Inventories of the Present
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (352 p.)

The cultural Cold War in Latin America was waged as a war of values--artistic freedom versus communitarianism, Western values versus national cultures, the autonomy of art versus a commitment to liberation struggles--and at a time when the prestige of literature had never been higher. The projects of the historic avant-garde were revitalized by an anti-capitalist ethos and envisaged as the opposite of the republican state. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City charts the conflicting universals of this period, the clash between avant-garde and political vanguard. This was also a twilight of literature at the threshold of the great cultural revolution of the seventies and eighties, a revolution to which the Cold War indirectly contributed. In the eighties, civil war and military rule, together with the rapid development of mass culture and communication empires, changed the political and cultural map. A long-awaited work by an eminent Latin Americanist widely read throughout the world, this book will prove indispensable to anyone hoping to understand Latin American literature and society. Jean Franco guides the reader across minefields of cultural debate and histories of highly polarized struggle. Focusing on literary texts by García Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Roa Bastos, and Juan Carlos Onetti, conducting us through this contested history with the authority of an eyewitness, Franco gives us an engaging overview as involving as it is moving.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- I. Conflicting Universals -- 1. Killing Them Softly: The ColdWar and Culture -- 2. Communist Manifestos -- 3. Liberated Territories -- II. Peripheral Fantasies -- 4. Antistates -- 5. The Black Angel of Lost Time -- 6. The Magic of Alterity -- III. A Cultural Revolution -- 7. Cultural Revolutions: Trouble in the City -- 8. The Seduction of Margins -- 9. Bodies in Distress: Narratives of Globalization -- 10. Obstinate Memory: Tainted History -- 11. Inside the Empire -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index