Rethinking Juan Rulfo's Creative World: Prose, Photography, Film

Nuala Finnegan, Dylan Brennan

Routledge, May 5, 2016 - Foreign Language Study - 232 pages

Though primarily known for his haunting, enigmatic novel Pedro Páramo and the unrelenting depictions of the failures of post-revolutionary Mexico in his short story collection, El Llano en llamas, Juan Rulfo also worked as scriptwriter on various collaborative film projects and his powerful interventions in the area of documentary photography ensure that he continues to inspire interest worldwide. Bringing together some of the most significant names in Rulfian scholarship, this anthology engages with the complexity and diversity of Rulfo’s cultural production. The essays in the collection bring the Rulfian texts into dialogues with other cultural traditions and techniques including the Japanese Noh or "mask" plays and modernist experimentation in the Irish language. They also deploy diverse theoretical frameworks that range from Roland Barthes’ work on studium and punctum in photography to Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on space and spatiality and the postmodern insights of Jean Baudrillard on the nature of the simulacrum and the hyperreal. In this way, innovative approaches are brought to bear on the Rulfian texts as a way of illuminating the rich tensions and anxieties they evoke about Mexico, about history, about art and about the human condition.

Contents

• Introduction: 1
• Searching for Juan Rulfo in Emilio Fernández: 9
• Juan Rulfo Writer and Photographer: 32
• 3 A Journey through Juan Rulfos Photography: 51
• 4 Patterns of Place and Space in the Work of Juan Rulfo: 66
• 5 Studium and Punctum in Juan Rulfos Puerta del Cementerio de Janitzio: 82
• Yeats Rulfo and the Noh Play: 102
• As Photographed by Juan Rulfo: 123
• 8 Voice Authority and the Destruction of Community in Cré na Cille The Dirty Dust by Máirtín ó Cadhain and Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo: 162
• 9 The Reception of Juan Rulfos El gallo de oro and its Cinematic Adaptations: 186
• Bibliography: 202
• Index: 213

About the author

Dylan Brennan completed his PhD in the Centre for Mexican Studies, University College Cork.

Nuala Finnegan is Professor in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at University College Cork where she is Director of the Centre for Mexican Studies.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Rethinking Juan Rulfo's Creative World: Prose, Photography, Film
• Editors: Nuala Finnegan, Dylan Brennan
• Publisher: Routledge, 2016
• ISBN: 1317196066, 9781317196068
• Length: 232 pages
• Subjects: Foreign Language Study / General; Language Arts & Disciplines / General