Heterogeneity of Being: On Octavio Paz's Poetics of Similitude

by Marco Luis Dorfsman

Overview

One hundred years after his birth, Nobel laureate Octavio Paz is considered one of the most important thinkers of Mexican identity, one of the most influential Mexican poets, and one of the main representatives of a national cosmopolitanism. Most readings of his work, whether critical or laudatory, operate within these parameters. Through a careful analysis of Latin Americanist discourses on identity and difference, Heterogeneity of Being goes beyond the standard interpretations of Octavio Paz as a thinker of national identity and proposes a radical rethinking of the rift and the bond between literature and philosophy. It puts forth the key concept of “dif/herencia”—a difference, a wound, an inheritance, a burden and a dispossession—and reads it through the notion of similitude in order to show that Paz’s “tradition of rupture” properly displays a continuity between self and other, identity and difference, time and space. The work of Octavio Paz yields invaluable insights for the fields of literary theory, cultural studies, history of science, and art history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780761865247
Publisher:	University Press of America
Publication date:	01/26/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	137
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Marco Luis Dorfsman is associate professor of Spanish and humanities at the University of New Hampshire. He has taught comparative literature and translation at various liberal arts colleges and universities in Mexico, Spain, and the United States.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Turns and Returns, Vueltas y Vueltas
Chapter 2: The Inheritance of the Labyrinth
Chapter 3: From the Subject to the Negative and Back: Paz’s Mexicans
Chapter 4: The Ancient Quarrel between History and Poetry

1. The Lyric, Identity, and Modernity
2. History, Difference, and Temporality

Chapter 5: Heads or Tails

1. Heads: Identity or Difference
2. Tails: Poetry, Hybridity, Thought

Chapter 6: Sun Stone: Circling Back to the Threshold
1. First Turn
2. Return on the Way to a Conclusion: The Threshold of Saying
Chapter 7: On the Field of Representation
Index

Editorial Reviews

Marco Dorfsman, offers unprecedented readings of Labyrinth of Solitude, The Bow and the Lyre, Sunstone, and other works and presents one of the first sustained theoretical analyses of the Mexican difference. He extends Paz’s dialogue with crucial philosophical and political trends of his period, reading him alongside figures such as Heidegger, Lyotard, and Derrida, and contributes to an elaboration of a poetics of temporality and inheritance.

Brett Levinson

By rigorously examining the subtle interplay between culture, literature, and philosophy, Dorfsman puts forth an innovative and provocative interpretation of Octavio Paz’s contributions to understanding the Mexican twentieth century.. .. Dorfsman also discloses in Paz the glimmer of a new mode of thinking that can only be called post-literary.

Patrick Dove