Description: This study examines the diversity of narrative strategies utilized by these authors to design their "written life," not only with respect to the future (that is, to history), but rather in terms of their own present, deliberately inserting themselves into their societies.
Brief description: SERGIO R. FRANCO is an associate professor of contemporary Latin American literature at Temple University. He holds a PhD from University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Franco's previous publications include A favor de la esfinge: la novelística de Jorge Eduardo Eielson, and In(ter)venciones del yo: Escritura y sujeto autobiográfico en la literatura hispanoamericana (1974-2002). He has published in several journals such as Revista Iberoamericana and Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana. Dr. Franco has also edited José María Arguedas: hacia una poética migrante. The 2017 Premio Iberoamericano Award Committee of the Latin American Studies Association awarded an honorable mention to Pliegues del yo: Cuatro estudios sobre escritura autobiográfica en Hispanoamérica, the Spanish version of this book.
Review Quotes:
"Meticulous yet provocative; original yet firmly and scrupulously grounded in a wide and impressive array of carefully selected bibliographical sources; challenging on each and every page; illuminating both about autobiographical writing in Latin America and about the complexities and processes of self-writing in general: Sergio R. Franco's new book is all of this and more. Its four studies can each stand alone yet progressively interlock, in a fascinating dialogue with one another, as the work unfurls. I have no doubt that any reader who folds herself carefully and attentively into this book will learn as much--both about autobiographical writing and about one's self--as I did." -- GERALD MARTIN, author of Gabriel García Márquez: A Life
"Sergio R. Franco's book advances with brilliance his project on Spanish American narratives of the self exploring the major manifestations of the genre. Latin American autobiographies and memoirs are thriving at the end of the twentieth century, nurtured by contemporary individualism, narcissism, photography, ekphrastic narrative, and procedural analogies. Exhaustiveness and a shrewd theoretical pluralism characterize the volume. Expansive and incisive, this book can and should reach general theoretical attention." -- RAÚL BUENO, Dartmouth College