Writing Paris
Urban Topographies of Desire in Contemporary Latin American Fiction
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8953146 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Persephone Braham (0000-0002-3449-012X, corresponding author), Marcy Schwartz (0009-0006-8641-087X), Marcy E Schwartz |
| Year | 2002 |
| Volume | 70 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 302-302 |
| Publication date | 2002-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Hispanic Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0018-2176 • E-ISSN: 1553-0639 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3246929 |
| OpenAlex | W2095643427 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
Writing Paris: Urban Topographies of Desire in Contemporary Latin American Fiction. By Marcy E. Schwartz. Albany: State U of New York P, 1999. xiii + 182 pp. While this first book by Rutgers University professor Marcy Schwartz has much to recommend it, it is also an object lesson in the pitfalls of academic publishing. Schwartz's topic is a rich one with a substantial presence in Latin American letters: Paris as a bohemian Mecca, yearned-for destination of the lettered American pilgrim, and constantly mutable literary construct. She focuses on two Argentinean writers (Julio Cortazar, arguably as much a Parisian as a porteno, and Luisa Futoransky, also an adoptive Parisian) and two Peruvian writers (Manuel Scorza and Alfredo Bryce Echenique). Schwartz makes some good points, but you can't help feeling that careful editing would have produced a document that was half as long and twice as coherent. Unfortunately, many academic presses leave this up to the author, always the person least qualified to edit her own work. In this case, the resulting text is laden with redundancies, vague or syntactically unsound statements, and imprecise or incorrect usage (e.g. illiciting for eliciting). Schwartz's arguments (which are quite interesting) are obscured by constructions like material substance of this example demonstrates the physicality of language that manifests in cultural objects, and Cortazar's Parisian maps circumscribe displaced Latin Americans who come to terms with their own transcultural identification in the heart of France's defeated empire. Loosely construed literary jargon weighs down her prose: what exactly are architectural tropes of erotic interstitiality? Quotes dangle and assertions such as Like the elusive clients of whoring predators [??], words in these stories resist enclosure in strict paradigms and, like the postcolonial subject, seek refuge in the interstice collapse into unintelligibility. Despite these shortcomings, Schwartz's book is worth reading. The introduction sets up her central point: that the idealized Paris that appears in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Latin American writing suffers a radical transformation starting with the regional novel and continuing to the present. Paris the center of revolutionary activity has become a bastion of bourgeois, capitalist, and imperial interests, and Paris the source of inspiration, aesthetic legitimization and sexual freedom has become a decadent cesspool plagued by racism, libertinism and class warfare. Above all, Paris reflects evolving Latin American attitudes about its relationship to modern European practices and ideologies: capitalism, Marxism, liberalism and especially cultural imperialism. Schwartz could have strengthened her argument here by considering European Marxist thinkers like Gramsci, Adorno and Benjamin, as well as the influence of Spenglerian thought on major Latin American writers like Alejo Carpentier, in whose work Paris also looms large
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Latin Americans · Linguistics · Literature · Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism · Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American Literature Studies · Philosophy
| Citations per year | 0.25 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2002 - 2021 (20) |
| Highly cited | No |