(Download) "Grotesque Spectacles: The Janus Face of the State and Gender Variant Bodies in Reinaldo Arenas" by Chasqui ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Grotesque Spectacles: The Janus Face of the State and Gender Variant Bodies in Reinaldo Arenas
- Author : Chasqui
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 125 KB
Description
Landscape Painting The work of the late Cuban dissident writer Reinaldo Arenas can be conceptualized as a giant retablo that seeks to portray within its multidimensional space the panorama of the sexual and sociopolitical order under which he lived, struggled and wrote, that is, Castro's revolutionary Cuba of the 1960s and 1970s, until his flight in the Mariel boatlift in 1980. The author himself constantly emphasized the need to see his literary production as an organic whole, in spite of the perpetual revisions to each novel, short story or poem he was forced by circumstance to make within his lifetime. Arenas conceived a unity of five novels that he wrote and named the pentagonia, the fourth of which, El color del verano (1982) has the secondary title El nuevo jardin de las delicias named after the painting by Hieronymus Bosch, which itself is a multidimensional tableau. The other four novels, Celestino antes del alba (1967), El palacio de las blanquisimas mofetas (1980), Otra vez el mar (1982) and El asalto (1990) respectively, seek to suggest this continuity at an intertextual level; episodes recur or ate told with a different slant, names are recycled, characters resemble one another, titles are recouped and redistributed and, in frequently witty asides, direct metatextual reference is often made about the existence or composition of other parts of the writer's oeuvre. This self-referentiality implies a series of textual echoes, details given in relief. Importantly, the protagonists morph into one another; the implication is, following the narrative throughout the pentagonia, that we are following the evolution of its hero or antihero, his multilayered existence and split self which in no small part is caused by the contradictory reality of living under a regime with a paranoid personality complex.