Conferencias, Volume 14

Alejo Carpentier

Siglo XXI, 1991 - Fiction - 388 pages

A lo largo de la obra de Alejo Carpentier se formula toda una teoría de lo que ha de ser la novela latinoamericana en la actual etapa de su evolución, y al mismo tiempo se realiza una novelística que en todo responde a esa formulación teórica.

Contents

• Section 1: 5
• Section 2: 7
• Section 3: 11
• Section 4: 138
• Section 5: 235
• Section 6: 243
• Section 7: 272
• Section 8: 282
• Section 9: 290
• Section 10: 315
• Section 11: 327
• Section 12: 342
• Section 13: 352
• Section 14: 361

Popular passages

Page 31 - Un perro andaluz es una película muy interesante, de un valor histórico extraordinario, de un valor extraordinario también en el surrealismo, pero a mi juicio muy inferior, por cuanto incurre en algunos lugares comunes de tipo netamente surrealista, a esa obra extraordinaria, realizada por Buñuel más adelante que fue La edad de oro. En La edad de oro, si ustedes piensan en el encadenamiento de las imágenes, en el encadenamiento absurdo pero no tan absurdo de las imágenes, verán aplicado a...‎

Page 23 - Automatismo psíquico mediante el cual se propone expresar, sea verbalmente o por escrito, sea de cualquier otra manera, el funcionamiento real del pensamiento. Dictado del pensamiento en ausencia de todo control ejercido por la razón, fuera de toda preocupación estética o moral.‎

About the author

Alejo Carpentier was director of Cuba's National Press, which published many millions of volumes in an ambitious program, and for some years was Cuba's ambassador to France. A composer and musicologist, he consciously applied the principles of musical composition in much of his work. Imprisoned for political activity in 1928, he escaped with the aid of Robert Desnos, a French surrealist poet, to Paris, where he joined the literary circle of surrealists Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara, and Paul Eluard. According to Carpentier surrealism influenced his style and helped him to see "aspects of American life he had not previously seen, in their telluric, epic, and poetic contexts." Carpentier articulated a theory of marvelous reality, "lo real maravilloso," with an almost surrealistic sense of the relationship among unrelated, or antithetical, elements, often from distinct ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The Lost Steps (1953) takes the form of a diary of a Cuban musician and intellectual who seeks escape from civilization during his trip to a remote Amazon village in search of native musical instruments. The short stories "The Road to Santiago," "Journey to the Seed," and "Similar to Night," present time as subjective rather than historical, and capable of remarkable personal variations. In his novel The Pursuit, printed in The War of Time (1958), whose title is an allusion to a line from Lope de Vega defining a man as "a soldier in the war of time, presents time similarly. "The Kingdom of This World (1949) deals with the period of Henri Christophe and the slave revolts in Haiti. Its circular structure presents the inevitable recurrence of tyranny and the need for eternal struggle against it. Reasons of State (1976), is another notable addition to the gallery of Latin American fictional portraits of dictators. It uses Carpentier's love for baroque style and parody to raise complex questions about the nature of revolution.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Conferencias, Volume 14; Volume 14 of Conferencias / Conferences; La creación literaria; Volume 14 of Obras completas de Alejo Carpentier; Volume 14 of Obras completas: Volumen 14
• Author: Alejo Carpentier
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Siglo XXI, 1991
• ISBN: 9682316480, 9789682316487
• Length: 388 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / General; Juvenile Nonfiction / Language Arts / Composition & Creative Writing; Literary Criticism / Caribbean & Latin American