Diana Pérez García




Diana Pérez García got her Ph.D. from University College Dublin on "History, Apocalypse, and Utopia in the Work of James Joyce, Gabriel García Márquez, and William Faulkner" under Declan Kiberd's supervision. She has published articles on James Joyce, Daniel Defoe, and Gabriel García Márquez. She currently teaches in the English Department in Saint Patrick's College Drumcondra in Dublin.


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ABSTRACT
"Whoever anywhere will read this written words?" James Joyce and Latin Amerian fiction"

My paper will outline Joyce's adoption as a model in the process that climaxed in the Latin American Renaissance of the 1960s and 70s. This process of adoption situates Joyce at the crux of the dichotomy that the conference proposes, presenting the readers with a Joyce that is simultaneously marginal (whose appeal derives from his masterful engagement with his "peripheral" native culture and the attending unresolved questions of identity and autonomy) and central (as an arch-modernist Anglophone writer whose work gave an impetus towards a movement away from regional/Spanish models towards the ambitious "total novels" published in the 60s and 70s). Central to the peculiar "accent" of this adoption is Jorge Luis Borges's role as mediator, which ensured a very different reception to that enabled by Joyce's Anglophone masters of ceremonies, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The mediating role played by Borges (and others like Cuban writer Lezama Lima) stresses Joyce's own marginal position vis a vis the Anglophone tradition and naturalises his avant-gardism as an example of the Baroque (which is suggested as the native aesthetics of Latin American culture). The fictions published in the 60s and 70s in Latin America (which would also turn a "marginal" culture into a "central" phenomenon), despite having been divided following rural/urban lines, can be described as Joycean in essence, as exemplified in the two most representative of this divide: the Daedalian struggle against history as nightmare has a clear correlative in García Márquez's take on the epic form, "One Hundred Years of Solitude", whereas in Julio Cortázar's "Hopscotch", we encounter the best known exponent of the polyphonic metropolitan novel, whose dilettante protagonist embarks in an antropophanic quest that echoes the Joycean epiphany.