Angles on Otherness in Post-Franco Spain
Subtitle: The Fiction of Cristina Fernandez Cubas
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: December 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 254
ISBN-13: 9780838754863
Subjects: Novels, other prose & writers: 16th to 18th centuries; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; Spanish; Literature: Classics; USA; European - Spanish & Portuguese; American - Hispanic American; 1945-; Criticism and interpretation; Difference (Psychology) in lit; Difference (Psychology) in literature; Fernandez Cubas, Cristina,; Fernâandez Cubas, Cristina,
Description: "Cristina Fernandez Cubas has been acclaimed as one of the key writers who express the exploration of identity in democratic Spain. Her first collection of short stories, Mi hermana Elba, was hailed by critics and writers alike as the initiator of a renaissance in Spanish short fiction. She has since established herself as a master of the genre and applied her talents to the novel and theater as well.".

"This study explores the reconstruction of identity in the context of post-totalitarian Spain and, more widely, of postmodern Western culture. On the levels of individual, family, regional, national, and international identity, Fernandez Cubas's characters experience quintessentially postmodern crises of subjectivity with their search for cohesion in the midst of disjunction. How do we define who we are? How do we develop our identities in contention with or collusion with other people?

Inevitably, the issue of identity condenses to the unsettling paradox of sameness and difference, two opposing poles that Fernandez Cubas inverts, subverts, and subsumes to show that they both repel and dwell in each other. As a result, the very borders that subjects depend upon to define their subjectivity also delineate the subjectivity of their others, both similarly and oppositionally.

In the end, it is precisely the difference and repetition imbued in oppositionality that establish, destabilize, and re-define the identity to the subject who is open to different angles on otherness."--BOOK JACKET.