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   Book Info

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Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in Oscar Zeta Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie  
Author: Frederick Luis Aldama
ISBN: 0292705166
Format: Handover
Publish Date: June, 2005
 
     
     
   Book Review

Book Description
"In this exciting new book, Frederick Luis Aldama has done an outstanding job of remapping 'magical realism.'" --Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of Afro-American Studies, Harvard University Magical realism has become almost synonymous with Latin American fiction, but this way of representing the layered and often contradictory reality of the topsy-turvy, late-capitalist, globalizing world finds equally vivid expression in U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial literature and film. Writers and filmmakers such as Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie have made brilliant use of magical realism to articulate the trauma of dislocation and the legacies of colonialism that people of color experience in the postcolonial, multiethnic world. This book seeks to redeem and refine the theory of magical realism in U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial literature and film. Frederick Aldama engages in theoretically sophisticated readings of Ana Castillo's So Far from God, Oscar "Zeta" Acosta's Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor's Last Sigh, Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, and Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi's Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Coining the term "magicorealism" to characterize these works, Aldama not only creates a postethnic critical methodology for enlarging the contact zone between the genres of novel, film, and autobiography, but also shatters the interpretive lens that traditionally confuses the transcription of the real world, where truth and falsity apply, with narrative modes governed by other criteria.




Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in Oscar Zeta Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Magical realism has become almost synonymous with Latin American fiction, but this way of representing the layered and often contradictory reality of the topsy-turvy, late-capitalist, globalizing world finds equally vivid expression in U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial literature and film. Writers and filmmakers such as Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie have made brilliant use of magical realism to articulate the trauma of dislocation and the legacies of colonialism that people of color experience in the postcolonial, multiethnic world.

This book seeks to redeem and refine the theory of magical realism in U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial literature and film. Frederick Aldama engages in theoretically sophisticated readings of Ana Castillo's So Far from God, Oscar "Zeta" Acosta's Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor's Last Sigh, Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, and Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi's Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Coining the term "magicorealism" to characterize these works, Aldama not only creates a postethnic critical methodology for enlarging the contact zone between the genres of novel, film, and autobiography, but also shatters the interpretive lens that traditionally confuses the transcription of the real world, where truth and falsity apply, with narrative modes governed by other criteria.

SYNOPSIS

Magical realism has long been associated with Latin American literature and film. Aldama (University of Colorado, Boulder) examines its connections to other cultures as well. In five chapters, plus an introductory discussion of terminology and a coda, he emphasizes the need for precision in distinguishing between aesthetics and ontology while analyzing the films of Dash and Kureishi, the novels of Rushdie, and the Chicano/a narratives of Acosta and Castillo. Aldama posits the importance of storytelling techniques: parody, mimesis-as-play, rebellion, self-reflexivity, and the subaltern voice of the trickster/picaro. Citing such authors as Cervantes and Garcia Marquez as models, he stresses the need for imaginative writers and artists to question the effects of globalizatoin and consumptoin in the modern world. Joining a literature that includes Aldama's edited volume Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works (2003) and related studes by such critics as Seymour Menton and Edward Said, this thought-provoking analysis should inspire further inquiry and discussion. Summing up: Recommended-all libaries serving upper-division undergraduates and above. Essential-researchers in the fields of comparative literature and film.

     



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