Ronald Flores

Even though Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire (1962), often viewed as the masterpiece of emerging postmodern fiction (according to John Burt Foster Jr.), can be considered an innovative and disruptive discourse, it follows a tradition established by Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Modernity’s seminal fiction.

These two novels, standing in the opposite spectrum of the Modern Era, have many characteristics in common. It is the relationship between these two novels, that which will be briefly explored hereon.

In 1952, ten years before Pale Fire was published, Nabokov was asked to dedicate a series of lectures on Don Quixote at Harvard University; these lectures were later published as Lectures on Don Quixote, a book that Nabokovian scholars should re-examine, since it reveals as much of Cervantes’, as of Nabokov’s, aesthetics of the novel. (more…)

John Barth in his 1967 essay “The Literature of Exhaustion”, was arguably the first prominent U.S. American writer to acknowledge in his own creative process a resonance stemming from a South American, in this case Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1980).

Although that year Latin American literary tradition received world wide attention (Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias was the Nobel Laureate and Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was published), Barth’s essay bears especial importance since it provides a turn in the relationship between the literatures of the Americas.

The long debated “The Literature of Exhaustion” first appeared in the August issue of The Atlantic Monthly in 1967. That same month, Barth read –spoke- at Harvard University of some of his self-recorded fictions, part of Lost in the Funhouse, a work in progress at that time, which would appear a year later. David Morrell claims that at that moment, Barth wanted to write “something quite different, he explained: to compose several small pieces, what he called ‘fictions’” (80), after Giles Goat-Boy, a novel that took five years to write, published in 1966, which had left Barth “exhausted”. (more…)

Aproximación a las generaciones literarias en América Latina a fines del XX (versión corta del ensayo publicado originalmente en “La sonrisa irónica”, 2005).

El manifiesto vanguardista presentado como prólogo a la antología de cuentos “Se habla español: voces latinas en USA”, publicada por Alfaguara en el 2000, motiva esta reflexión tardía acerca de la más reciente generación de escritores latinoamericanos.

En la suerte de prólogo que presenta el libro, los compiladores Edmundo Paz Soldán y Alberto Fuguet advierten: “Una antología sobre los Estados Unidos, sí, pero en español. Articulada desde las entrañas mismas del monstruo –Martí dixit-, pero en una USA contemporánea, vista por escritores latinoamericanos (¿qué significa ser latinoamericano?) de la nueva generación (¿qué implica nueva generación?), todo esto escrito, por cierto, en el nuevo idioma del gigante: Spanish (14)”. (more…)

Emprende lo inevitable
(cualquier cosa que esto sea).
Abstente de atacar lo que no entiendes.
No rechaces en los demás lo que aborreces de ti mismo
(o al menos eso intenta)

El poder es imaginación.
(Todo principio llega a su fin).
Lenguaje que desemboca en el silencio,
epifanía efímera. Constante enigma,
forjarse a sí mismo, volverse anónimo e innecesario
aceptar que nada se sabe, adaptarse a las circunstancias,
diario paso del tiempo.

(more…)