Angles on otherness in post-Franco Spain : the fiction of Cristina Fernández Cubas
"Cristina Fernandez Cubas has been acclaimed as one of the key writers who express the exploration of identity in democratic Spain. Her first collection of short stories, Mi hermana Elba, was hailed by critics and writers alike as the initiator of a renaissance in Spanish short fiction. She has since established herself as a master of the genre and applied her talents to the novel and theater as well." "This study explores the reconstruction of identity in the context of post-totalitarian Spain and, more widely, of postmodern Western culture. On the levels of individual, family, regional, national, and international identity, Fernandez Cubas's characters experience quintessentially postmodern crises of subjectivity with their search for cohesion in the midst of disjunction. How do we define who we are? How do we develop our identities in contention with or collusion with other people? Inevitably, the issue of identity condenses to the unsettling paradox of sameness and difference, two opposing poles that Fernandez Cubas inverts, subverts, and subsumes to show that they both repel and dwell in each other. As a result, the very borders that subjects depend upon to define their subjectivity also delineate the subjectivity of their others, both similarly and oppositionally. In the end, it is precisely the difference and repetition imbued in oppositionality that establish, destabilize, and re-define the identity to the subject who is open to different angles on otherness."--Jacket
Print Book, English, ©2002
Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg, PA, ©2002
Criticism, interpretation, etc
254 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780838754863, 0838754864
48083684
Introduction: Subjectivity and Difference in Post-Franco Spain
1. Looking Objectively at the Subject: The Spectacle of Power in Mi hermana Elba. "Lunula y Violeta" "La ventana del jardin" "Mi hermana Elba" "El provocador de imagenes"
2. Performing and Reforming Gender in Los altillos de Brumal. "El reloj de Bagdad" "En el hemisferio sur" "Los altillos de Brumal" "La noche de Jezabel"
3. Re-Citing and Re-Siting the Story of the Subject in El ano de Gracia and El columpio. El ano de Gracia. El columpio
4. The Space of Oppositional Subjectivity in Con Agatha en Estambul. "Mundo" "La mujer de verde" "El lugar" "Ausencia" "Con Agatha en Estambul"
5. Plotting Desire: The Visual Construction of the Subject in El angulo del horror. "Helicon" "El legado del abuelo" "El angulo del horror" "La Flor de Espana."