Dr. Patricia Novillo-Corvalán, Author at INVERSE JOURNAL

Dr. Patricia Novillo-Corvalán

From Academia.edu: "My research interests are wide-ranging, and include comparative and world literature, medical humanities, translation studies, modernism, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century Spanish and Latin American literature. I have written extensively on cross-cultural encounters between writers worldwide, including a monograph on Borges and Joyce, and articles on Gustave Flaubert, Julio Cortázar, Samuel Beckett, Derek Walcott, Roberto Bolaño, Manuel Puig, and Marina Carr. I am interested in how literary artefacts travel across temporal, geographical, and cultural frontiers, particularly in the wake of Walter Benjamin’s notion of the ‘afterlife’ of a text, which may be read as a larger metaphor for the circulation, survival, and resurrection of texts through the centuries. This transcultural approach has also enabled me to study the ways in which canonical writers such as Homer, Dante, Cervantes, and Shakespeare are continually reborn in the work of nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century writers." All contents reproduced here via Creative Commons 4.0 License

Rereading Cortázar’s Hopscotch through Joyce’s Ulysses by Dr. Patricia Novillo-Corvalán

March 23, 2019 | Academia

Introduction: “In 1968 a distinguished group of writers, critics, and translators organised a symposium in post-revolutionary Cuba in an attempt to assess the colossal impact that Julio Cortázar’s groundbreaking novel Rayuela (1963) (Hopscotch; 1966) had had in the Latin American literary arena.1 If the rationale behind the forum was to underline the uniqueness and innovativeness of a work that had shaken the foundations of Latin American literature, then the speakers soon realised that Cortázar’s masterpiece could only be approached, ironically, from the perspective of an even greater revolutionary work, James Joyce’s Ulysses. While Cortázar’s Hopscotch remained at the heart of the literary debate, the haunting figure of Joyce became a ubiquitous and inescapable ghostly presence that materialised, time and again, in the eloquent and dazzling performances of the speakers. The comparison of Hopscotch with Modernism’s most revered monument laid the ground for a vigorous debate that would have a long-lasting effect on ensuing critical insights of Hopscotch.2 How, then, was the phantom of Joyce summoned in a symposium in Havana dedicated to pay tribute to the path-breaking novel of an Argentine author?”