José Lezama Lima's Joyful Vision : : A Study of Paradiso and Other Prose Works / / Gustavo Pellón.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Texas Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Pellón, Gustavo,
• Place / Publishing House: Austin : : University of Texas Press, , [2021]; ©1989
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Series: Texas Pan American Series
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (168 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on Translations -- 1. Introduction: Beyond the Aesthetics of Realism -- 2. The Aesthetics of Excess: The Novel as Fibroma -- 3. The Ethics of Androgyny: A Sexual Parable -- 4. Culture as Nature: An American Practice of Reading and Writing -- 5. Textual Epiphany: A Return to Bibliomancy -- 6. Conclusion: The Henri Rousseau of the Latin American Boom -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index