The Noé Jitrik Reader

Selected Essays on Latin American Literature

Noe Jitrik, Daniel Balderston, Susan E. Benner

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780822335450, 9780822335337
• eBook ISBN: 9780822386636
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Argentine scholar Noé Jitrik has long been one of the foremost literary critics in Latin America, noted not only for his groundbreaking scholarship but also for his wit. This volume is the first to make available in English a selection of his most influential writings. These sparkling translations of essays first published between 1969 and the late 1990s reveal the extraordinary scope of Jitrik's work, his sharp insights into the interrelations between history and literature, and his keen awareness of the specificities of Latin American literature and its relationship to European writing. Together they signal the variety of critical approaches and vocabularies Jitrik has embraced over the course of his long career, including French structuralist thought, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and Marxism.

The Noé Jitrik Reader showcases Jitrik's reflections on marginality and the canon, exile and return, lack and excess, autobiography, Argentine nationalism, the state of literary criticism, the avant-garde, and the so-called Boom in Latin American literature. Among the writers whose work he analyzes in the essays collected here are Jorge Luis Borges, Esteban Echeverría, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José Martí, César Vallejo, José Bianco, Juan Carlos Onetti, José María Arguedas, Julio Cortázar, and Augusto Roa Bastos. The Noé Jitrik Reader offers English-language readers a unique opportunity to appreciate the rigor and thoughtfulness of one of Latin America's most informed and persuasive literary critics.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Editor’s Preface: Suspending Belief
• Complex Feelings about Borges
• Between Being and Becoming: Identity, Latinity, Discourse
• Form and Signification in Esteban Echeverría’s‘‘The Slaughter House’’
• Canon and Margin in Latin American Literature
• From History to Writing: Symmetrical and Asymmetrical Tendenciesin the Latin American Historical Novel
• Notes on the Latin American Avant-garde: Working Papers
• Beneath the Sign of the Baroque
• The Rise and Fall of Argentine Nationalism
• Autobiography, Biography, Narrative:Sarmiento and the Origins of Argentine Literature
• Autobiography, Memoir, Diary
• Martí in the Latin American Library
• The Riches of Poverty Revisited
• Lack and Excess in José Bianco’s Shadow Play
• The Suffering Narrator
• Arguedas: Reflections and Approaches
• Notes on the ‘‘Holy Place’’ and ‘‘Otherness’’ in Cortázar’s Bestiary
• I, the Supreme as Historical Novel
• Thirty Years Later
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index