Email me at jmayhew at ku dot edu
"The very existence of poetry should make us laugh. What is it all about? What is it for?"
--Kenneth Koch
“El subtítulo ‘Modelo para armar’ podría llevar a creer que las
diferentes partes del relato, separadas por blancos, se proponen como piezas permutables.”
Páginas
▼
8 jul 2011
Cortázar
As an undergraduate i read all the Cortázar I could. Los premios, a strange novel about a group of people who win, as a prize, a trip on a ship on which strange things happen. All the brilliant short stories, like "Continuidad de los parques" and "La casa tomada." Rayuela, of course. I am not particularly interested now in Cortázar, but he defined a certain moment in my own development as a reader. I don't know if I could ever go back and be a really interested reader, but it strikes me that someone could go back to this body of work and do something interesting with it.
Have you seen "Vendredi soir" (2002), by Claire Denis? It's a French take on "Autopista al Sur", about a woman caught in a traffic jam in Paris on, of course, a Friday night, and a stranger she picked up. I highly suggest it. Here is the link to the movie in Amazon:
ResponderEliminarhttp://www.amazon.com/Friday-Night-Val%C3%A9rie-Lemercier/dp/B0000C23D1/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1310133954&sr=8-7
Thanks for these recommendations. I read a book of his stories in translation, and was powerfully impressed by the prose -- but the theme of doubling/mirroring characters was repeated compulsively.
ResponderEliminarI'll see the movie. I taught Rayuela recently and it was an interesting experience -- I hadn't read it in a long time. It seemed really, really dated and I came to the conclusion that the fun way to teach it, now, would be as the ONE book read in a term. You'd read it and the intertexts, and get fascinated. I discovered that S. Colas at Michigan had actually taught such a course and had a website for it. I'm not interested in him enough to make him a research subject but I did write a couple of short stories as a result of teaching that class. Cortazar always seems to do that for me and it is always broadening somehow.
ResponderEliminarI had the same experience with Rayuela. When I taught it it seemed very dated and the grad students were not enthralled with it or with C's misogyny.
ResponderEliminar@Spanishprof, I haven't gotten hold of the movie yet but none of the (few) reviews I've looked at mention Cortazar as a source ... warum nicht, ich frage mir.
ResponderEliminar@Z: By her biography, I know that when she began as a filmmaker, she did short films based on Cortazar's short stories. So I don't know if htere is a specific acknowledgement of the story in the movie, but it certainly was an influence.
ResponderEliminarSorry, besides English and Spanish, I only read French and Portuguese. I forgot my German.
I've seen it now, gorgeous. I had lost track of her, and I didn't know the Cortazar connection.
ResponderEliminar