Stavans Unbound: The Critic Between Two Canons

by Bridget Kevane (Editor)

Overview

Twenty-five years ago, Ilan Stavans published his first book, Imagining Columbus: The Literary Voyage (1993). Since then, Stavans has become a polarizing figure, dismissed and praised in equal measure, a commanding if contested intellectual whose work as a cultural critic has been influential in the fields of Latino and Jewish studies, politics, immigration, religion, language, and identity. He can be credited for bringing attention to Jewish Latin America and issues like Spanglish, he has been instrumental in shaping a certain view of Latino Studies in universities across the United States as well abroad, he has anthologized much of Latino and Latin American Jewish literature and he has engaged in contemporary pop culture via the graphic novel. He was the host of a PBS show called Conversations with Ilan Stavans, and has had his fiction adapted into the stage and the big screen. The man, as one critic stated, clearly has energy to burn and it does not appear to be abating. This collection celebrates twenty-five years of Stavans’s work with essays that describe the good and the bad, the inspired and the pedestrian, the worthwhile and the questionable.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644690062
Publisher:	Academic Studies Press
Publication date:	06/14/2019
Series:	The Lands and Ages of the Jewish People
Pages:	266
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

Bridget Kevane is a professor of Latin American & Latinx Studies. She has written four books on Latinx literature in America and is an author for general readership magazines such as Tablet, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Forward and others.

Table of Contents

Foreword
Frederick Aldama

Introduction
Bridget Kevane

Life as Role Play: Ilan Stavans, the Life(long) Writer
Isabel Durán

El Iluminado: Ilan Stavans and the Incongruity of the Antihero
Irina Troconis

Life, Death, and Apotheosis of Words: DIC·TION·AR·Y DAYS
Angelina Muñiz-Huberman (translated by Miriam Huberman)

Cave Paintings: Cervantes, Turbans, and Heresy
Diana de Armas Wilson

Freedom to Pursue the Impossible Dream: Ilan Stavans and Don Quixote
Iván Jaksić

Stavans Does Quixote
William Childers

Ilan Stavans, Tongue Snatcher
Steven G. Kellman

El español y el spanglish en la era de Trump
Silvia Betti

“A World Defined by mmigration”: Ambivalence, Translationality, and Mestizaje in Ilan Stavans
Ivonne M. García

Translation as a Way to Write the City
Regina Galasso

Returning Borrowed Words: Translation and Ilan Stavans’s Contribution to the English Language
Christopher Schafenacker

On Words Reclaimed and the Fate of Ladino
Devin E. Naar

Introductions: Ilan Stavans and the “Jewish Latin America” Series
Stephen A. Sadow

Ilan Stavans’s Anthologization of the Latino community in the United States
Thomas Nulley-Valdés

A Game of Mirrors: The Conversations of Ilan Stavans
Derek Xavier García

Ilan Stavans and the Mojarra Condition
Luis Loya García

Mexican Bandit or the Last Intellectual?: Ilan Stavans’s Notorious Raid on the Chicano Literary Canon
Carlos Flores

Poetry and Music: Interview with Ilan Stavans
Ian Campbell

SPACES OF THE BODY
Isaac Goldemberg

Crossing Borders: Ilan Stavans’s Adventures on Stage with Double Edge Theatre
Stacy Klein and Matthew Glassman

Broken Streets of My City
Ruth Behar

Epilogue: Seven Lies About Ilan Stavans
Jeremy Dauber

Notes on Contributors
Index