Rethinking Juan Rulfo's Creative World - 9781909662599

Though primarily known for his haunting, enigmatic novel Pedro Paramo and the unrelenting depictions of the failures of post-revolutionary Mexico in his short story collection, El Llano en llamas, Juan Rulfo also worked as script-writer on various collaborative film projects and his powerful interventions in the area of documentary photography ensure that he continues to inspire interest worldwide. Bringing together some of the most significant names in Rulfian scholarship, this anthology engages with the complexity and diversity of Rulfo's cultural production. The essays in the collection bring the Rulfian texts into dialogues with other cultural traditions and techniques including the Japanese Noh or ‘mask' plays and modernist experimentation in the Irish language. They also deploy diverse theoretical frameworks that range from Roland Barthes' work on studium and punctum in photography to Henri Lefebvre's ideas on space and spatiality and the postmodern insights of Jean Baudrillard on the nature of the simulacrum and the hyperreal. In this way, innovative approaches are brought to bear on the Rulfian texts as a way of illuminating the rich tensions and anxieties they evoke about Mexico, about history, about art and about the human condition.Dylan Brennan is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Mexican Studies, University College Cork. Nuala Finnegan is Professor in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at University College Cork where she is Director of the Centre for Mexican Studies.