Literature
Uruguayan literature has a long and eventful history.
It wasn't until the nineteenth century that Montevideo was able to fully establish itself as the capital of an independent nation, followed by the beginning of the Uruguayan literature. At first, it clearly shared common characteristics with the European literature but it had a more nationalist vision as it was interested to represent what was happening at the time.
Romanticism gets to Uruguay with Esteban Echeverria and other Argentine writers that were escaping from the regime in Argentina and decide to settle in Colonia and Montevideo. Romantic poetry was characterized by having social and political overtones; this movement spread until the twentieth century and had over sixty-five writers who worked over poetry, fiction and drama.
The Generation of 900
Around 1900 comes up the first Literary generation that has great significance within and outside the country. Its members are still considered great exponents of poetry, short fiction and drama, with an outstanding influence of Modernism. The generation maintains large effect beyond the death of its authors and half a century later is retaken by the Generation of 45'.
By mid-century arises "Generation of 45" or "Critical Generation", a group of prominent Uruguayan authors, mostly writers of various genres (though it also included musicians and painters) that emerged artistically from 1945 to 1950. Its members were part of a social, political and cultural phenomenon which had a decisive influence on contemporary Uruguayan intellectual identity. The literature becomes intimate, shows anguish and disappointment, reflecting the universal philosophy and literary trends of te moment. The Generation of 45 made contributions to the Uruguayan culture: it introduced a culture of rigor and solvency in judgment; raised the levels of aesthetical requirements, it attacked ingenuity and conformism. Among its famous members is Mario Benedetti.
The 60's is fraught with social upheavals preceding the coup of 1973 and reflect the state of dissatisfaction with which people lived. Student protests, union strikes, university strikes, and the strong presence of the Liberation Movement Tupamaros are some of the milestones that characterize these years. Literature does not escape these processes, instead it becomes more committed, not only with Uruguay but with an ideology that embraces all Latin America, acquiring a more political and social tone, especially in poetry and theater that turns to a literature of protest. Many authors must go to exile or were imprisoned during the dictatorship of Juan Maria Bordaberry. Dictatorship Civil-Military of the 70's and half of the 80's is a momentous court to Uruguayan Literature, as many authors are banned or exiled, but nevertheless encourages many young people to stand against the regime and develop new discursive voices.
Reference
Wikipedia. (2016, April 9). Literatura de Uruguay retrieved from https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literatura_de_Uruguay
About Uruguay
Uruguay was founded by the Portuguese explorers who also founded Brazil. However, soon after, Buenos Aires—based Spaniards attempted to extend their control to include the area; after Napoleon conquered Spain, they were able to do so with the support he provided. No sooner did Uruguay free itself from Spain's control than it fell under siege from Brazil. It wasn't until the middle of the nineteenth century that Montevideo was able to fully establish itself as the capital of an independent nation.
But the mid-twentieth century was not as kind to Uruguay; for the last fifty years or so, Uruguay's economy has been in a slow decline and its politics have been very unstable. As the economy slipped in the 1950's, fro example, it generated a Communist reaction, the Tupamaros, which, in turn, prompted a heavy-handed military response. The result of this difficult time was, in part, the militarization of of the nation, and many Uruguayans today are only now recovering economically adn searching for a way back to a more effective democracy.
Located entirely within a temperate zone, Uruguay has a climate that is relatively mild and rarely uniform nationwide. Seasonal variations are pronounced, but extremes in temperature are rare. Uruguay is the second smallest sovereign nation in South America, the landscape features mostly rolling plains and low hill ranges with a fertile costal lowland. A dense fluvial network covers the country, consisting of four river basins and nearly 95% of Uruguay's electricity comes from renewable energy.
Reference
Foster, D. (2002). The Global Etiquette Guide to Mexico and Latin America. (pp. 192-196). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Wikipedia. (2016, May 23). Uruguay retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguay
Websites
- Mario BendettiMario Benedetti: Writer in the Vanguard of South America's Literary Boom in the Second Half of the 20th Century
Mario Benedetti
Mario Orlando Hamlet Ardi Benedetti was born in 1920 in Paso de los Toros, Uruguay, but his family moved to Montevideo when he was only four and that's when he started loving that city. Benedetti had a very hard adolescence, at age 14 he had to leave school to work on a house car parts, then as a stenographer, clerk, journalist, translator and later a public officer. That early contact with the working life allowed him to get to know "the gray world of the offices of Montevideo". With Poemas de Oficina (Office Poems, 1956) Benedetti impact on the development of Uruguayan poetry, introducing thematics that until that moment where considered "non-poetic". From tha moment on, the popularity and diffusion of his work started.
To his intense work of writer and journalist, he joined an active political participation. In 1971 he was one of the founders of the Movement of Independence, that later integrated with the Frente Amplio. But this political career was soon frustrated by the anti-democratic force that was rising. In 1973 a military coup occurs, and Benedetti is obligated to leave the country for political reasons and is exiled in Buenos Aires. After living outside Uruguay for various years and publishing international-acclaimed novels, poems and theater plays, he returns to Montevideo where he died at 88 years of age.
Only in the Meantime and Office Poems by ISBN: 9780924047329Publication Date: 2006This first ever bilingual edition of "Only in the Meantime & Office Poems" introduces Mario Benedetti’s poetry to the English-speaking audience. Opening as reflections of everyday life in Montevideo, the poetry blossoms into an art which speaks to all people from all walks of life. Benedetti’s extraordinary handling of irony and simplicity alongside his poetry’s unmistakable rhythm make him one of the most brilliant observers of 20th century life.
Pedro and the Captain by ISBN: 9780932274724Publication Date: 2009A gripping dialogue between a torturer and his victim, Pedro and the Captain takes place in an interrogation room, where lives are deconstructed by the violent hand of the terrorist state. Torture, the awesome force that mediates the action, never appears directly on the scene; likewise, the repressive state is never named. Benedetti captures the essence of this dehumanizing practice without assigning it precise location or time, which speaks to the universality of the abomination.
The Truce by ISBN: 9780141396859Publication Date: 1995Forty-nine, with a kind face, no serious ailments (apart from varicose veins on his ankles), a good salary and three moody children, widowed accountant Martín Santomé is about to retire. He assumes he'll take up gardening, or the guitar, or whatever retired people do. What he least expects is to fall passionately in love with his shy young employee Laura Avellaneda. As they embark upon an affair, happy and irresponsible, Martín begins to feel the weight of his quiet existence lift - until, out of nowhere, their joy is cut short.
The intimate, heartbreaking diary of an ordinary man who is reborn when he falls in love one final time, this beloved Latin American novel has been translated into twenty languages and sold millions of copies worldwide.
Reference
Image retrieved from Google Images https://trotajueves.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/mariobenedettip.jpg
Oustanding Authors
Juan Carlos Onetti was an Uruguayan Novelist credited with being one of the most important Latin American writers of the 20th century and a vital forebear to the Magic Realism of the 'Latin American Boom'. He is remembered not only as a pioneering writer, but as one of the continent's many political exiles, as he was forced to flee Uruguay in the mid-1970s.
Image retrieved from Google Images http://turismoenuruguay.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/onetti.jpg
The Culture Trip. (n.d.) The Private World of Juan Carlos Onetti retrieved from http://theculturetrip.com/south-america/uruguay/articles/the-private-world-of-juan-carlos-onetti/
Horacio Quiroga experienced a life that surpassed in morbidity and horror many of the inventions of his fevered mind. As a young man, he suffered his father's accidental death and the suicide of his beloved stepfather. As a teenager, he shot and accidentally killed one of his closest friends. Seemingly cursed in love, he lost his first wife to suicide by poison. In the end, Quiroga himself downed cyanide to end his own life when he learned he was suffering from an incurable cancer. In life Quiroga was obsessed with death, a legacy of the violence he had experienced. His stories are infused with death, too, but they span a wide range of short fiction genres: jungle tale, Gothic horror story, morality tale, psychological study.
Amazon. (n.d). The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories (Texas Pan American Series) retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/Decapitated-Chicken-Other-Stories-American/dp/0292715412?ie=UTF8&keywords=horacio%20quiroga%20english&qid=1464454133&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1
Image retrieved from Google Images http://www.biografiasyvidas.com/biografia/q/fotos/quiroga_horacio_2.jpg
Cristina Peri Rossi (born November 12, 1941) is an Uruguayan novelist, poet, and author of short stories. Considered a leading light of the post-1960s period of prominence of the Latin-American novel, she has written more than 37 works. As a liberal intellectual who was exiled in Spain during the military dictatorship which terrorized Uruguay in the 1970's, Peri Rossi experienced first-hand the alienating and dehumanization received by dictators as struggles against patriarchal power within the nuclear family are juxtaposed to rebellion against paternalistic authoritarian control. She also explores how language and power relations impose a socially constructed identity. Her critique of structures of power links political oppression to psychosexual repression. In her works, Peri Rossi succeeds in creating a whirlwind of despair and self-discovery, impelling us to assess our own individual beliefs and so avoid being entrapped by those who hold power over us. By inviting the reader to see modern society through the eyes of her characters, Peri Rossi uses the technique of defamiliarisation to produce biting satires of today's world.
Amazon. (n.d). Solitaire of Love retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/Solitaire-Love-Cristina-Peri-Rossi/dp/0822325403/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464453474&sr=1-1&keywords=cristina+peri+rossi
Image retrieved from Google Images http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/images/cristina-peri-rossi-1.png
Books
Body Snatcher by ISBN: 9780704327979Publication Date: 1992-10-27Junta Larsen, a Promethean pimp, attempts to "achieve two perfections--a perfect woman and a perfect bordello" in the sleepy South American outback town of Santa Maria. "This masterful novel ranks with the fictions of Puig, Cortazar and Marquez. His serpentine lyricism tempered by whiplash irony, Onetti is an elegist of the twentieth century."
The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories by ISBN: 9780292715417Publication Date: 1984Tales of horror, madness, and death, tales of fantasy and morality: these are the works of South American master storyteller Horacio Quiroga.
Solitaire of Love by ISBN: 9780822325406Publication Date: 2000To simply call Solitaire of Love a novel would not be doing it justice, both intencely passionate, and bitingly analytical, Cristina Peri Rossi delivers her cynical philosophy of love to the reader desguised as a love letter. Solitaire of love follows the obsessive relationship of an unnamed narrator and Aida, the woman he loves to the point of addiction and destruction. The entire book reads like a dream, containing surreal and meaningful details of life, along with the foggy illusions of sleep. Rossi, like a good psychoanalyst, breaks the book down to its most elemental meaning, decoding what is often encoded during simple day to day interactions. Peri Rossi deals with relationships, sex, and desire with an uncompromising certainty, revealing even the most mysterious of human emotions without ever loosing their beauty and mystery. Although Solitaire of Love is one of the most unabashedly lyrical of the author's books, it never stoops to being sentimental or cliched. It is certain to delight the reader who is in love as much as the reader who is out of love.
Appropriating Theory by ISBN: 9780822964889Publication Date: 2017-08-11Angel Rama (1926-1983) is a major figure in Latin American literary and cultural studies, but little has been published on his critical work. In this study, José Eduardo González focuses on Rama's response to and appropriation of European critics like Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Georg Lukács. González argues that Rama realized the inapplicability of many of their theories and descriptions of cultural modernization to Latin America, and thus reworked them to produce his own discourse that challenged prevailing notions of social and cultural modernization.
Borges's Poe by ISBN: 9780820349053Publication Date: 2016-03-15Edgar Allan Poe's image and import shifted during the twentieth century, and this shift is clearly connected to the work of three writers from the Río de la Plata region of South America--Uruguayan Horacio Quiroga and Argentines Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar. In Borges's Poe, Emron Esplin focuses on the second author in this trio and argues that Borges, through a sustained and complex literary relationship with Poe's works, served as the primary catalyst that changed Poe's image throughout Spanish America from a poet-prophet to a timeless fiction writer. Most scholarship that couples Poe and Borges focuses primarily on each writer's detective stories, refers only occasionally to their critical writings and the remainder of their fiction, and deemphasizes the cultural context in which Borges interprets Poe. In this book, Esplin explores Borges's and Poe's published works and several previously untapped archival resources to reveal an even more complex literary relationship between the two writers. Emphasizing the spatial and temporal context in which Borges interprets Poe--the Río de la Plata region from the 1920s through the 1980s--Borges's Poe underlines Poe's continual presence in Borges's literary corpus. More important, it demonstrates how Borges's literary criticism, his Poe translations, and his own fiction create a disparate Poe who serves as a precursor to Borges's own detective and fantastic stories and as an inspiration to the so-called Latin American Boom. Seen through this more expansive context, Borges's Poe shows that literary influence runs both ways since Poe's writings visibly affect Borges the poet, story writer, essayist, and thinker while Borges's analyses and translations of Poe's work and his responses to Poe's texts in his own fiction forever change how readers of Poe return to his literary corpus.
