Eliseo Vivas once said, “I would not for a minute pretend solidarity with men who do not realize that one of the essential marks of decency today is to be ashamed of being a man of the twentieth century.” He had no desire to turn the clock back; he was simply advocating that rather than...

Zulfikar Chose was born in Pakistan, grew up in British India, emigrated to England in 1952, and since 1969 has taught in the English department of the University of Texas. He is married to a Brazilian and has enough knowledge of South America to write novels set there. This is his 10th novel. He has...

Why is it that America has noticed the “Boom” in Latin American fiction but has ignored Latin American philosophy? One obvious reason lies in the unavailability of translated texts. While novelists have energetically and strategically combined efforts to publish translations of their works in the United States, nothing of the sort has happened in Latin...

Six of this book’s 10 essays were presented at a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of Irving Babbitt’s death. Held in Washington, DC, at The Catholic University of America in November 1983, the conference brought together scholars of various disciplines to address the general subject of “Irving Babbitt: Fifty Years Later.” Although some people might...

Malcolm Bradbury describes Peter Handke as “unmistakably one of the best writers we have in that selfdiscovering tendency in contemporary writing we have chosen to call postmodernism.” And, true enough, Handke is eminently skillful at what he sets out to do. Poet and playwright as well as novelist, he is concerned above all with exploring...

The situation is familiar to any student of socialist revolutions: The revolution is over, and the political apparatus has become authoritarian and alienated from its popular base. The lives of real people become less important than the economic programs and ideological causes of a growing bureaucracy. Then come suspicion, repression, overzealous police vigilance, persecution of...

“Livin’ is like pourin’ water out of a tumbler into a dang Coca-Cola bottle. If’n you skeered you cain’t do it, you cain’t. If’n you say to yoreself, ‘By dang, I can do it!’ then, by dang, you won’t slosh a drop.” This sample of dialogue conveys something of the tone, language, and philosophy of...

Jacques Derrida has in recent years made himself one of the most influential figures in literary criticism on American college campuses. The movement he has inspired, alternately known as “deconstruction” or “poststructuralism,” asserts that all language is metaphorical and that there is nothing outside the literary text. Following Derrida’s lead, Joseph G. Kronick challenges the...

This is the kind of novel that inspires slick reviewers and writers of publisher’s blurbs to new outrages in inflated but tacky description: “lusty,” “brawling,” “pulsing with ambition,” “passion and greed,” “an epic saga.” The story begins in Mexico in 1927, with flashbacks going back to the turn of the century, and ends in 1982....

Winner of France’s Renaudot Prize, this autobiographical Bildungsroman is a first-person narrative of a young man from a Belgian village who begins as a seminarian and ends as a disillusioned anarchist. Under the direction of his widowed mother and the village priest, he enters the seminary in Louvain, where his study of the changing values...

This collection, announces Franz Rottensteiner in his introduction, gives us none of the traditional “high” fantasy of heroic quests in imaginary lands, filled with magic and sorcery and pitting good against evil. Such fantasy, Rottensteiner argues, can provide little insight into modern society or the human mind because it is rooted in past worlds divorced...

The title alludes to Whitman’s Democratic Vistas, and David Marc, a professor of American Civilization at Brown University, begins, ends, and sprinkles the middle of this study with quotations from Whitman. The preface announces “a Whitmanian faith in the ability of the individual consciousness to mingle with a collective cultural conscious ness.” And part of...

The Light From the East by Lee Congdon   Martin Jay: Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept From Lukacs to Habermas; University of California Press; Berkeley, CA.   Like the exponents of Critical Theory, the subjects of his first book, Martin Jay considers himself to be an “extraterritorial” outsider. Professor of history at...