Literature Class, Berkeley 1980
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
A master class from the exhilarating writer Julio Cortázar
“I want you to know that I’m not a critic or theorist, which means that in my work I look for solutions as problems arise.” So begins the first of eight classes that the great Argentine writer Julio Cortázar delivered at UC Berkeley in 1980. These “classes” are as much reflections on Cortázar’s own writing career as they are about literature and the historical moment in which he lived. Covering such topics as “the writer’s path” (“while my aesthetic world view made me admire writers like Borges, I was able to open my eyes to the language of street slang, lunfardo…”) and “the fantastic” (“unbeknownst to me, the fantastic had become as acceptable, as possible and real, as the fact of eating soup at eight o’clock in the evening”), Literature Class provides the warm and personal experience of sitting in a room with the great author. As Joaquin Marco stated in El Cultural, “exploring this course is to dive into Cortázar designing his own creations.… Essential for anyone reading or studying Cortázar, cronopio or not!”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Between October and November 1980, the late Argentine novelist Cort zar taught eight classes at UC Berkeley. Available for the first time in English through Silver's agile translation, Cort zar's sometimes stimulating and sometimes pedantic lectures cover topics that include literature s relationship to politics and music and the differences between realistic and fantastic fiction. In the first and most thought-provoking lecture, written in 1980, Cort zar begins by admitting that he has "always written without really knowing why" before listing stages he's passed through as a writer: aesthetic, metaphysical, and historical (the last of which he still finds himself in). He's less engaging in the lectures that discuss time and fate and attempt to define literary realism. He perfunctorily concludes that the difference between realism and fantasy is that the former places a greater emphasis on plotting and plausibility. Cort zar breezily tells one class that he began Hopscotch, perhaps his best-known novel, without a "precise literary architecture" but instead as a kind of "approximation" that "little by little found its form." Though students' questions from each class are included, these transcripts nevertheless lack the vitality of spoken exchanges and will most appeal to confirmed Cort zar fans.
