'Before it becomes a political, social, or even linguistic issue, bilingualism is a private affair, intimate theater'. So writes 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, 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.

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Reviews

' Gustavo Perez Firmat is the most original, innovative, and scandalous critics of Spanish-langauge literature writing today. His wit is his method.' - Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, Yale University, USA

About the author

GUSTAVO PEREZ FIRMAT is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese languages at Columbia University. He is the author of Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano's Coming of Age in America (Anchor, 1996) and editor of Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? (Duke University Press, 1990).

Bibliographic Information

Book Title: Tongue Ties
Book Subtitle: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature
Authors: Gustavo Pérez Firmat
Series Title: New Directions in Latino American Cultures
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980922
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan New York
eBook Packages: Palgrave Language & Linguistics Collection, Education (R0)
Copyright Information: Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Nature America Inc. 2003
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-52717-5Published: 20 November 2003
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4039-8092-2Published: 16 October 2003
Series ISSN: 1554-4028
Series E-ISSN: 2634-520X
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 195
Topics: North American Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Latin American Culture, Literary Theory, Cultural Theory

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Table of contents (9 chapters)

Front Matter

Back Matter

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