“Alejo Carpentier and the Classical World”, a work by professor Inmaculada López Calahorro, is the new volume published by UGR Press in the collection Library of Humanities / Classical Studies, supervised by professors José Luis Calvo Martínez and Cristóbal González Román.
The book is a definite contribution to the study of the significant presence of the classics in Carpentier and a text on the work of the Cuban novelist.
According to Luisa Campuzano, author of the presentation of this volume, “the author not only intended to find the traces of the classics in quotes, references and allusions, and explain how they arrived to the texts, or why they were added to them, but she also aimed to unravel the presence of the Classical World in Alejo Carpentier’s thought, a much more complex task neglected by the previous critics; and, on the other hand, she aspired, from the beginning, to promote another reading possibility of Alejo Carpentier’s works from the Classic World, which lead her, for example, to perceive and demonstrate the transcendence of theatricality in Carpentier’s writing, a subject which has been dealt with in the last years, but from much less productive approaches”. Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier used to read two books a day and was a bibliophile, editor, a man of here and there, before and now letters, and expert in arts.
According to Luisa Campuzano, “Alejo Carpentier empties out his readings in his work by different means and with diverse purposes, more in his narrative than in his critic work; he remembers them, celebrates them or, to the contrary, argues about them, scrutinizes and judges them, sometimes through parody or irony. Inhabited by voices and images from different times and cultures, the novels and stories by this Cuban writer present a thick inter-textual architecture; and among them, the great amount of quotes, references and allusions to the Classical Antiquity is evident for the learned reader”.
The author of this book, Inmaculada López Calahorro, defended six years ago at the Universidad de Granada the doctoral thesis About the men’s task and other wonders. A reading of Alejo Carpentier from the Classical World, in which she dealt with the pleasant work of connecting the Cuban’s work with the Classical World.
“It was a pleasure for me to check that the classical elements were almost omnipresent in Alejo Carpentier’s work –says the author of the book. Secondly, it was even more satisfactory to connect these allusions to the Classical World with essential elements of Carpentier’s novelistic, in such a way that Epictetus, Homer or Virgil among others, were not just erudition resources, but had a clear significance in the whole of his work”.
Reference
Prof José Luis Calvo Martínez. Dpt of Greek and English Studies
Phone numbers. 958 243 659. E-mail. jcalvo@ugr.es
Prof. Cristóbal González Román. Dpt of Ancient History
Phone number. 958 243 681. E-mail. cgroman@ugr.es
