Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Writing (New Directions in Latino American Cultures) - Hardcover

Gustavo Perez Firmat

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 140396288X ISBN 13: 9781403962881

Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003

Synopsis

"Before it becomes a political, social, or even linguistic issue, bilingualism is a private affair, intimate theater." So writes Gustavo Pérez Firmat in this ground-breaking study of the interweaving of life and languages in a group of bilingual Spanish, Spanish-American and Latino writers. Unravelling the "tongue ties" of such diverse figures as the American philosopher George Santayana, the emigré Spanish poet Pedro Salinas, Spanish American novelists Guillermo Cabrera Infante and María Luisa Bombal, and Latino memoirists Richard Rodriguez and Sandra Cisneros, Pérez Firmat argues that their careers are shaped by a linguistic family romance that involves negotiating between the competing claims and attractions of Spanish and English.
"Before it becomes a political, social, or even linguistic issue, bilingualism is a private affair, intimate theater." So writes Gustavo Pérez Firmat in this ground-breaking study of the interweaving of life and languages in a group of bilingual Spanish, Spanish-American and Latino writers. Unravelling the "tongue ties" of such diverse figures as the American philosopher George Santayana, the emigré Spanish poet Pedro Salinas, Spanish American novelists Guillermo Cabrera Infante and María Luisa Bombal, and Latino memoirists Richard Rodriguez and Sandra Cisneros, Pérez Firmat argues that their careers are shaped by a linguistic family romance that involves negotiating between the competing claims and attractions of Spanish and English.

About this title

About the Author:

Gustavo Pérez Firmat is the David Feinson Professor of Humanities at Columbia University. His books of cultural and literary criticism include The Cuban Condition (1989), Life on the Hyphen (1994), and Cincuenta Lecciones de Exilio y deSexilio (2000).

Review:

"Gustavo Pérez Firmat is the most original, innovative, and scandalous critic of Spanish-
language literature writing today. His wit is his method. In this book he delves into his own bilingual anxieties by studying those of others. Tongue Ties will become a classic."--Roberto González Echevarría, Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literatures, Yale University, author of The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball

"Ever original, ever scintillating, and ever consistent, Pérez Firmat yet again serves up a book that is urbane, playful, probing, and substantive. [This] exuberant text promises the reader
as good a time as the author had in writing it."--John W. Kronik, Cornell University

"Gustavo Pérez Firmat is always a joy to read. Turning to Tongue Ties: Logo-eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Writing, I expected to be enlightened and entertained. I was not in the least disappointed. But exceeding even his usual brilliance, in Tongue Ties we find Pérez Firmat at his most virtuoso self, bringing together Spanish, Spanish-American, and US Latino novelists, poets, and memoirists in a heteroglossic investigation of the bilingual, multilingual, and polylingual intricacy of tongues. A meditation on the psychic life and erotic power of our mother tongues, Tongue Ties is a marvelous guide to the unloosening vernaculars of our day."--Ramon Saldivar, Stanford University
-- Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 140396288X
• ISBN 13: 9781403962881
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 195