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Carson mccullers biography cortazar

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Julio Cortázar

By: Ingrid Schorr
August 26, 2013

When he was nine years old, Argentine JULIO CORTÁZAR (1914–84) defied his mother and read Edgar Allan Poe. The experience made him a nervous wreck for three months and inspired him to be an author. Literature was Cortázar’s game, for which he rewrote the rules in the 155 nonlinear chapters of his 1963 novel Hopscotch. He wrote the book from the middle out, at the midpoint of his life, while working as a translator for UNESCO in Paris — a move triggered by his imprisonment in Argentina for protesting the Perón government. As military regimes intensified throughout Latin America, liberation and resistance, especially that of Sandinista Nicaragua, became the main themes of Cortázar’s fiction and essays. With the Russell War Tribunal, founded by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, he investigated human rights abuses in Latin America and donated royalties to Sandinistas and families of political prisoners. Critics complained that his writing became less supple; he countered that the baroque, though beloved in Latin Am

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Seducing the Male-Reader:
Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch and the Pleasure of Losing

Michael Hardin, University of Houston

As one of the seminal novels of the Latin American literary “boom,” Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963; translated into English as Hopscotch in 1966) has been analyzed and discussed from countless angles, yet most of these readings do not examine the novel beyond that tradition.[1] If we examine Hopscotch as part of a self-reflexive and ludic tradition which includes such works as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer,[2] we can see two reasons for the novel’s openness to readings: the first is the various orders in which the chapters can be read; the second is the continually changing relationship between the narrator and its readers. The openness of the text contributes to its seductiveness; the reader is drawn into the text through an erotics that focuses not on the primary sex organs, but on language. Through this shift, Cortázar provides us with an opportunity to

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Literary Theory and Criticism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROLon •

Carson McCullers’s (February 19, 1917 – September 29, 1967) fiction has a childlike directness, a disconcerting exposure of unconscious impulses in conjunction with realistic detail. She is like the candid child who announces that the emperor in his new clothes is really naked. She sees the truth, or at least a partial truth of the human psyche, then inflates or distorts that truth into a somewhat grotesque fable that is sometimes funny but always sad.

Such a tragicomic effect derives, apparently, from an unusual openness to subconscious direction, combined with conscious cultivation of a style that best exploits such material, weaving into it just enough objectively observed reality to achieve plausibility. McCullers herself explained the technique by which she achieved the fusion of objective reality with symbolic, psychic experience. In “The Russian Realists and Southern Literature,” first published in Decision, July, 1941 (now available in The Mortgaged Heart), she speaks of the charge of

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