Papers by Jennifer French
Revista De Critica Literaria Latinoamericana, 2014
Modern Fiction Studies, 2006
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2019
This essay is intended to open new lines of inquiry in the work of one of Latin America's most im... more This essay is intended to open new lines of inquiry in the work of one of Latin America's most important writers, Augusto Roa Bastos (Paraguay, 1917-2005). To begin, I addressrespectfully, but explicitlythe inconsistencies in Roa Bastos's personal and professional record, a matter that has been something of an open secret among the Paraguayan intelligentsia for many years. Keeping this knowledge at bay, however necessary or expedient it may have been during the Stroessner dictatorship (1954-1989) and its aftermath, has prevented scholars from addressing what is arguably one of the most personal and pressing issues in Roa Bastos's work: his tireless efforts to intervene in Paraguay's cumulative history of trauma, which stretches back at least as far as the Triple Alliance War of 1864-1870. This article uses Melanie Klein's theories of mourning and projective identification to examine these efforts in two little-known poems from the 1940s and '50s: 'Nocturno paraguayo' and 'Cerro Cor a'.
Estudios Paraguayos, 2009
The Midwest Quarterly, Sep 22, 2008
THE NOMINEES FOR the 2004 National Book Award, announced in November of that year, created a smal... more THE NOMINEES FOR the 2004 National Book Award, announced in November of that year, created a small uproar in the hermetic world of book publishing because two established and critically acclaimed writers--Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth--had been passed over in favor of five comparative unknowns. As Caryn James pointed out in the New York Times, the five nominees, all women, all living in New York City, also shared "a short story aesthetic . . . built on compressed observations that easily veer into precious writers program language." The judges eventually gave the award to Lily Tuck's The News from Paraguay, a novel-in-fragments about the tragic affair between an Irishwoman named Eliza Alicia Lynch and Francisco Solano Lopez, the Paraguayan dictator who led his country through the catastrophic war of 1864-1870, in which some sixty percent of the country's population died. In Paraguay Tuck's work set off a controversy of a different order. Soon after the award was announced, the Minister of Tourism seized the opportunity to draw international attention to the tiny, landlocked country and invited Tuck for an official visit. When the plan became public, a citizen named Roberto Eaton wrote a series of letters to public officials criticizing the decision to welcome with open arms an author whose writing had insulted the country and its people. Newspapers and talk radio programs quickly picked up on Eaton's description of the novel as "disgusting, absolutely pornographic and a calumny," and others weighed in to criticize its "typical Eurocentric vision" of Latin American history. By the time the author arrived in early February, public hostility had risen to such a degree that she received threatening phone calls at her hotel and had to be escorted by armed bodyguards. As Tuck found out, most Paraguayans do not consider Francisco Solano Lopez the sex-crazed barbarian who appears in her book, but rather a national hero whose courage and personal sacrifice saved the country from being partitioned between Argentina and Brazil. That positive image of Solano Lopez is, in point of fact, exaggerated: it was part of the nationalist mythology initiated in the 1920s at a time of friction with neighboring Bolivia and then later maintained by the authoritarian regime of General Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989), which notoriously manipulated the country's tragic history for ideological purposes. In what follows, we do not intend to defend Francisco Solano Lopez, but rather to clear up the distorted history that appears in The News from Paraguay and to draw out the racist and colonialist mythology that orients Tuck's novel. It may seem petty or misguided to criticize a work of fiction for failing to conform to historical fact, when many a consecrated masterpiece subtly alters known events so as to better convey an author's interpretation. Tuck's novel presents a somewhat different situation, however, because part of the appeal of this book what sets it apart from the other award nominees, for example--is its ability to inform readers about the little-known history of the developing world. Its unsparingly grim subject matter gives The News from Paraguay a kind of moral authority, particularly when the narrative implicitly criticizes European characters who cannot remember which South American country has just been destroyed, or who fail to treat a child dying of malaria because they do not understand his language. But this is not Hotel Rwanda or even One Hundred Years of Solitude. The News from Paraguay may appeal to the better instincts of its North American readers, but as we will show, the novel fails to provide a compassionate or even objective representation of Paraguayan history and in the end offers only a set of facile and uninformed stereotypes. Tuck's novel, it is clear, actually tries to be fair to its principal character, the beautiful and accomplished Lynch, known as "Ella" in the novel. Given her glamour, her unconventional relationship to Lopez, and the enormity of the catastrophe she witnessed, "Madame" Lynch has over the years inspired an immense amount of admiration, opprobrium, and curiosity among Paraguayans and foreigners alike. …
... el tr?nsito de la antigua literatura naturalista y documental a la nueva novela diversificada... more ... el tr?nsito de la antigua literatura naturalista y documental a la nueva novela diversificada, cr?tica y ambigua."2 Julio Cort?zar had already ... Quiroga and Kipling with the phrase, "Kipling never ceased to be a sahib." But in order to consider the affinities between Quiroga and the ...
Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 2012
As evidence of the catastrophic effects of global climate change grows on an almost daily basis, ... more As evidence of the catastrophic effects of global climate change grows on an almost daily basis, there is perhaps some comfort to be found in the rising number of scholars who are turning to ecocriticism as an approach to Latin American literature. Some comfort and, more importantly, some hope, since one might choose to hear in the sound of so many voices crying out in the wilderness an indication that a transformation of ‘‘environmental values, perception, and will’’ (Buell 2005, vi) may soon be under way. Ushering in such a change is one of the shared goals of the ecocritical movement, which has recently been defined as ‘‘a study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment, usually considered from out of the current global environmental crisis and its revisionist challenge to given modes of thought and practice’’ (Clark 2011, xiii). If ecocriticism’s ecumenical spirit, inspired by its practitioners’ shared sense of urgency, is a welcome alternative to the polemics associated with the so-called ‘‘postcolonial debates’’ of the recent past, when Latin America’s marginality vis à vis the US academy and the politics of knowledge-production emerged as topics of particular concern (Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui, 2008), the turn to environmental criticism among 1. Having been a marginal movement within Latin American literary studies for more than a decade, ecocriticism was recently featured in an MLA panel and a number of booklength studies, including: Ecocrı́ticas: Literatura y medio ambiente, ed. Carmen Flys Junquera, José Manuel Marrero Henrı́quez, and Julia Barella Vigal (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2010); Adrian Kane, ed., The Natural World in Latin American Literatures: Ecocritical Essays on Twentieth-Century Writings (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2010).
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 2006
Hispanic Review, 2005
... Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (formerly the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture... more ... Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (formerly the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society); Risk Management; Regional Trends; Security Journal; ... United Kingdom National Statistics Collection: Society & Health, The; URBAN DESIGN International. Services. ...
Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2008
To blame or not to blame: is that the question? In the middle of the civil war that occupies the ... more To blame or not to blame: is that the question? In the middle of the civil war that occupies the third section of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (1994 [1904]), a militant revolutionary named Gamacho stands up and makes an impassioned speech in front of the crowd that has gathered in the streets of Sulaco: His opinion was that war should be declared at once against France, England, Germany, and the United States, who, by introducing railways, mining enterprises, colonization, and under such other shallow pretences aimed at robbing poor people of their lands, and with the help of these Goths and paralytics, the aristocrats would convert them into toiling and miserable slaves.
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Papers by Jennifer French