Lecture by Efrain Kristal: 'Interamerican Intersections'
Interamerican Intersections: Captivity, Incest, and Historical Re-creation in the Literature of the Americas"
Professor Kristal holds a BA in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley, a Maîtrise in Philosophy from the University of Rouen, and a Ph.D. in Spanish literature from ý. He was a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Berlin, and he studied literary theory at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. His numerous academic publications include The Andes Viewed from the City: Literary and Political Discourse on the Indian in Peru (1987), Temptation of the Word: The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa (1998), Invisible Work: Borges and Translation (2002), and The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel (2005). His recent articles in New Left Review examine the concept of “world literature” from a Latin American vantage point.
Abstract:
In this talk Professor Kristal will propose an approach to the comparative study of the literatures of North and South America. The idea is to recognize cultural and literary differences while underscoring distinctive themes and commonalities that result from specific historical or cultural circumstances. These commonalities suggest the value of defining a corpus that can meaningfully be described as a “literature of the Americas.” The idea is not to argue that the literatures of North and South American are one and the same, but rather that the historical and cultural circumstances of the New World give rise to some common literary motifs.