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Exploring the work of six notable authors, this text reveals characteristic themes, images and stylistic devices that make contemporary Chicana writing a vibrant and innovative part of a burgeoning Latina creativity.
A coherent and systematic overview of Chicano literature. All the major aspects of Chicano literature are treated: the themes and myths of Chicano literary expression, the dramatic principles of its theater, the literary recuperation of its history, Chicano bilingualism and code switching, and much more.
The nature of ethnic identity has been a major issue in the Mexican American community for decades now. Historia: The Literary Making of Chicana and Chicano History makes a superb contribution to the multidisciplinary exploration of ways Mexican Americans have chosen to present their past through both "factual" and "fictional" narratives. Whereas history has offered frameworks for interpreting generational changes in the understanding of identity, literature has been particularly rich in exploring themes of power and domination and of intragroup complexities, Louis Gerard Mendoza argues in this innovative look at historical and imaginative literatures and their role in the formation of ethnic identity. Focusing on late twentieth-century literature and history by American writers of Mexican descent, Mendoza examines how style, purpose, and context function to facilitate or constrain the understanding of the past. By juxtaposing the literary and the historical, he provides new insight on culture, agency, and experience. Mendoza accepts as his starting point the generational model posited by historian Mario García, then contrasts for each "generation" the nuances and contradictions offered by one or more Chicana/o creative writers. Other historians whose works are centrally considered include Juan Gomez-Quiñones, Rodolfo Alvarez, Ricardo Romo, David Montejano, and Carlos Muñoz, while the literary writers featured include Jovita González, Alejandro Morales, Sara Estela Ramírez, Teresa Paloma Acosta, Oscar Zeta Acosta, and Américo Paredes. Mendoza argues that history is the narrative battleground upon which literature is based--the writing and rewriting of Chicano history thus becomes an important subtext of Chicana/o literature. However, he contends that most Chicana/o historical narratives are integrated uncritically into literary analysis to establish background, resulting in the invocation of the histories as representations of the "real." Libraries, Borderlands scholars, and those interested in the broad issues of cultural studies will want to own Mendoza's innovative book, which instead of insisting on the strict separation of the two genres of history and literature, seeks ways to integrate them through the new critical analysis.
Adding nuance to a global debate, esteemed scholars from Europe and North and Latin America portray the attempts in Chicano literature to provide answers to the environmental crisis. Diverse ecocritical perspectives add new meaning to the novels, short stories, drama, poetry, films, and documentaries analyzed in this timely and engaged collection.
RetroSpace is a collection of the seminal articles of the noted critic Bruce-Novoa on the history and theory of Chicano literature.
Threshold Time provides an introductory survey of the cultural, social and political history of Mexican American and Chicano literature, as well as new in-depth analyses of a selection of works that between them span a hundred years of this particular branch of American literature. The book begins its explorations of the “passage of crisis” with Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don, continues with Americo Paredes’ George Washington Gómez, Tomás Rivera’s ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, and ends with Helena María Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus and Benjamin Alire Sáenz’ Carry Me Like Water. In order to do justice to the idiosyncrasies of the individual texts and the complexities they embrace, the analyses refer to a number of other texts belonging to the tradition, and draw on a wide range of theoretical approaches. The final chapter of Threshold Time brings the various readings together in a discussion circumscribed by the negotiations of a temporality that is strongly aligned with a sense of memory peculiar to the history of the Chicano presence in the United States of America.
Seminar paper from the year 1998 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2 (B), University of Aberdeen (English Department), course: Chicano Fiction, language: English, abstract: In this essay, I will address the question of Chicano identity by investigating two very different texts, that both deal with a quest for identity in a Mexican-American context: Tomás Rivera’s ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him and Richard Rodriguez’ Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. I will first discuss the contextual differences between the two works. Then I will consider the definitions of identity upon which the texts are based. Going deeper into the works themselves, I will finally discuss along which lines the two quests for identity develop. In conclusion, I will connect my investigations to the question of whether Chicano identity is unified or fragmented. Both Tomás Rivera’s ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him and Richard Rodriguez’ Hunger of Memory are about an individual searching for his identity. In both works, the protagonist is a Mexican-American or ‘Chicano’. However, the differences between the two books are huge. The generic difference is most obvious: Rivera’s work is a fictional narrative, which Héctor Calderón termed ‘novel-as-tales’.1 Rodriguez, referring to his book, speaks of ‘[e]ssays impersonating an autobiography’ (p. 7). This entails that the subject searching for identity is, in Rodriguez’ case, the author himself, or rather his literary image. In Rivera’s case, the subject is purely fictional, although some critics have identified this literary subject with the author.