Languages, Cultures and Linguistics Research Collection

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Browsing Languages, Cultures and Linguistics Research Collection by Type "Other"

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  • Publication
    "El laberinto de la soledad" by Octavio Paz
    (The Literary Dictionary Company, 2016-04-30)
    Baker, Pascale 
    El laberinto de la soledad [The Labyrinth of Solitude] was first published in 1950 and is Mexican author Octavio Paz’s most acclaimed and commented upon work. The text has been described as a hybrid work (Stanton 2001: 210), eluding easy classification as it oscillates between epic essay, historical narrative, poetry and psycho-sociological rumination. Perhaps this can be largely explained by Laberinto’s broad scope touching on folklore, history, myth, politics and psychology. All of these disciplines are linked to the central subject of identity and what it meant to be Mexican in the post-Revolutionary era of the 1940s, when Paz was composing Laberinto. However, despite the experimental style and the author’s wish to deconstruct certain myths of national identity, Paz in his authoritative narration of Laberinto actually enshrined these myths as a definitive guide to Mexican identity.
      210
  • Publication
    "El Señor Presidente" by Miguel Ángel Asturias
    (Literary Dictionary Company, 2017-09-05)
    Baker, Pascale 
    El Señor Presidente [The President, 1946] is the Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias’ most well known and one of his most critically lauded works. Its importance in the Latin American literary canon was recognized when Asturias received the Novel Prize for Literature in 1967, the first Latin American novelist to do so. The text had a long genesis and development before it took its final form. It began life as two short stories in 1922, which were later combined in 1924 into one unpublished story entitled ‘Los mendigos políticos’ (Himelblau, 1973: 45). Asturias then departed for Europe, to London and then Paris where, at the Sorbonne, he was able to deepen his interest in Mayan culture which would culminate in his first acclaimed book of short stories, Leyendas de Guatemala (1930). He also became ‘immersed in the Parisian avant-garde, above all the Surrealist movement’, which undoubtedly impacted on his writing style in El Señor Presidente (Martin, 1990: 56).
      907
  • Publication
    Motorbike Murderers and Femmes Fatales: The Rise of the Female Assassin in Colombia
    (Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, 2016-06-04)
    Baker, Pascale 
    ;
    Jaramillo, Catalina 
    This article charts the rise in historical reality and cultural production of the female assassin in Colombia. Though Pablo Escobar has largely been assumed to be the most infamous and powerful narco in Colombia's drugs wars during the 1980s and early 90s, female narcos and bosses have always been evident, from Griselda Blanco, the 'Madrina de la cocaína' onwards. Furthermore, women in the Colombian drug trade have become a popular topic in the novels and  telenovelas about narco life that have proliferated in the country in the last twenty years. These women do not simply star as wives and girlfriends of the drugs lords but as leaders of cartels and criminal enterprises in their own right, reflecting both a desire within Colombia to understand the torrid years of the drugs wars and an actual rise in the Colombian news reports of cases of female assassins and gang members.
      259