City Fictions: Language, Body, and Spanish American Urban Space

by Amanda Holmes

Using concepts from urban and cultural studies, City Fictions examines the representation of the city in the works of five important late-twentieth-century Spanish American authors, Octavio Paz, Julio Cortazar, Christina Peri Rossi, Diamela Eltit, and Carlos Monsavais. While each of these authors is influenced at least partially by a specific Spanish American city, be it Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, or Santiago, the element that brings them together is the way in which the city is fictionalized in their work: they all equate both language and the body with urban space. In these metaphors, language breaks down and the body disintegrates, creating a disturbing picture of violent decline. The poetry of Paz associates the urban surroundings with dissolving sentences and desensitized, fingertips; for Cortazar, characters walking through cities are seen as both creating and unraveling written texts;

212 pages, Hardcover

First published February 28, 2007

About the author

Amanda Holmes was born in England, educated at Emerson College and received her MFA in Fiction from George Mason University. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Rattapallax, Phoebe, So To Speak, QWF, The Christian Science Monitor, Sunday Express and on the Ether Reads app for download to iPhone. She has edited art listings for 'Goings On About Town' at The New Yorker and written reviews for The Washington Independent Review of Books. She and her husband have lived in New York, Caracas, Buenos Aires, Moscow, Brussels, Rome, and Falls Church, Virginia. They have a daughter and two sons. She blogs at www.irrelevanceofhope.blogspot.com.