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- Creator:
- Cantu, Roberto
- Description:
- This essay engages two questions: first, it is a response to current attempts to make sense of various literary traditions in an era associated with postmodernity and globalization. I argue for a global but period-specific approach to the study of literary history. Secondly, this essay applies the period-specific theoretical model to the study of one poem: Octavio Paz’s Blanco (1967), known for its global reach and complex structure, but often read as solely focused on India’s ancient past, thus antiquarian and with no relation to our present era. On the contrary, I argue that Blanco can only make sense in the history of conflicts between the East and the West, better known to Paz as the Cold War, a global conflict that involved the former U.S.S.R. and the United States. The multiple and therefore confusing meanings of “East” and “West” best define, I would argue, the need to understand the history of its various connotations from Herodotus and the Crusades, to the Cold War and the current conflicts between the West and the (Islamic) East. Thus, any attempt to define globalization and postmodernity as an age in which all cultural differences and Otherness find their happy resolution can only be read as part of the marketing system of globalization itself, and not as a serious attempt to make sense of literary history at a transnational or global level.
- Resource Type:
- Article
- Campus Tesim:
- Pomona
- Creator:
- Nieto, Margarita
- Description:
- In 1949, while living in Paris, Mexican poet-essayist Octavio Paz wrote his first major work, The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), a hermeneutical text of self-examination based on observing the everyday phenomena of Mexican life while in search of “the other.” Two years later, he had a glimpse of “the other” in India to which he returned in 1962. In Light of India (1995) narrates how India became Paz’s “one and the other.” The writing of these works reveals an intellectual consciousness of the relationships between Heidegger and Asian thought, offhandedly revealed in 1991, in which Paz uses a quote by Heidegger of a Buddhist saying, “the Other, Share” basic to both these thinkers in their search for “the other.” Paz’s initial major work of 1950 and the final work on India in 1995 are read as face-to-face reflections of the One and the Other.
- Resource Type:
- Article
- Campus Tesim:
- Pomona