Literatura y Cultura (English)

The formation, organization, and accessibility of archives and libraries are critical for the production of historical narratives. They contain the materials with which historians and others reconstruct past events. Archives and libraries, however, not only help produce history, but also have a history of their own. From the early colonial projects to the formation of nation states in Latin America, archives and libraries had been at the center of power struggles and conflicting ideas over patrimony and document preservation that demand historical scrutiny. Much of their collections have been lost on account of accidents or sheer negligence, but there are also cases of recovery and reconstruction that have opened new windows to the past. The essays in this volume explore several fascinating cases of destruction and recovery of archives and libraries and illuminate the ways in which those episodes help shape the writing of historical narratives and the making of collective memories.

A collection of sixty commented poems of contemporary Chilean poet David Rosenmann-Taub, David Rosenmann-Taub: Poems and Commentaries continues Kenneth Gorfkle's exposition of the Chilean poet's work in English. Except for the poet's explanations in his own books Quince and Glosa, these commentaries are unique in illuminating the poet's work. Of the many topics that the poems treat, consciousness in all its aspects is the poet's primary concern. It comprises a full half of the poems in the book and reverberates in other poems as well.

Caught between the well-worn grooves the Boom and the Gen-X have left on the Latin American literary canon, the writing intellectuals that comprise what the Generation of '72 have not enjoyed the same editorial acclaim or philological framing as the literary cohorts that bookend them. In sociopolitical terms, they neither fed into the Cold War-inflected literary prizes that sustained the Boom nor the surge in cultural capital in Latin American cities from which the writers associated with the Crack and McOndo have tended to write. This book seeks to approach the Generation of '72 from the perspective of cosmopolitanism and global citizenship, a theoretical framework that lends a fresh and critical architecture to the unique experiences and formal responses of a group of intellectuals that wrote alongside globalization's first wave.

David Rosenmann-Taub: Poems and Commentaries breaks with conventional norms. Until now, nobody has undertaken a commented anthology of the poems of Rosenmann-Taub except for the poet himself. In addition, although the Chilean poet has been publishing for seventy years, a broad understanding of his thematic preoccupations is still lacking. After formulating interpretative strategies to understand the poems, Kenneth Gorfkle developed his own approach to the expression and communication of that understanding: glosses that paraphrase the poems and thus express the totality of their substance. His selection of poems that illustrate the poet's concerns give the reader a broad general vision of Rosenmann-Taub's thought, as well. Comprised of forty-four poems, each with its own gloss, the book is a tour de force for enthusiasts of Rosenmann-Taub's work, academics dedicated to poetry at all levels, and poetry lovers in general. This revised edition represents a reformulation and refinement of the concepts of the commentaries in the first edition.