Annotated Bibliography
1) Megged, Nahum, “Artificio y naturaleza en las obras de Miguel Angel Asturias”, Hispania, Vol. 59, No. 2 (May, 1976), pp. 319-328
In this article Megged examines the duality of nature and artifice in Asturias' work. She discusses the symbols (colour, objects, elements) that he uses to show the contrast between these opposing forces. She begins the article by detailing the three culture shocks that are at the heart of his writing: “1) The tragic encounter between the Indio and the Spanish 2) The tragic encounter between the Indio and the Ladino [and] 3) The tragic encounter between the Criollo and the North American”(319). She explains how these encounters are at the heart of mestizo culture and Asturias' writing. She then writes about the role of symbolism in his work and talks about the war between colours, specifically red and green: Green being all that is natural, hope, and red, being the fire that dis harmonizes nature. She describes how he uses fire as a foreign force that acts as a “cancer and mutational element” (320). The sacrificial fire, for Asturias, she writes, :is a symbol of all the tragic encounters on the continent from the fires of the village burning conquistadors to the new fires of progress”(320).
In the third and final portion of the article, she analyzes the duality of nature and artifice in his work and she goes into greater depth about the symbols that represent this duality. She begins by saying, “Guatemala and America are, for Asturias, country and continent of nature” (321). She writes about how his work embodies the “captivating totality of nature” (321) and how it doesn't just use nature as a backdrop for the drama. She explains how in his works, those who are most in harmony with nature are the protagonists and those who disrupt the balance of nature are the antagonists. She also explains how he merges a trinity of “God, nature and man into an organic union” (321). In her writing about the intersection of nature and civilization in his work, she discusses the pervasive theme of the erotic personification of nature in his novels. An example being in Viento Fuerte, in which he writes, “El tropico es el sexo de la tierra” (150).
This article is especially helpful for gaining a better understanding of how Asturias uses symbolism to depict the duality of nature and artifice.
2) Robert G. Mead, Jr., “Miguel Angel Asturias and the Nobel Prize”, Hispania, Vol. 51, No. 2 (May, 1968), pp. 326-331
This article, published shortly after Asturias won the Nobel Prize, serves largely to introduce the world of academia to Asturias. Mead states that Asturias has not been enjoying the “critical esteem which other writers worthy of the Nobel Prize might reasonably expect” (327). He laments at how some graduate students of Latin American literature have never heard of Asturias and how he is frequently “lumped together with other well-known regionalist” (326). To introduce Asturias, Mead provides a short bio and a brief synopsis of his major works. This article is most significant because of its ironic introduction of a famous man to an audience who at that point in time, hadn't been paying attention.
3) “El sujeto Híbrido” a subsection of the article by Arturo Arias “Quezalcóatl, la hibridización y la identidad indígina: Leyendas de Guatemala como laboratorio étnico. Cuentos y Leyendas. Ed. Critica. Coleción Archivos, 2000, pp. 625-660.
In this article subsection, Arturo Arias agues that Asturias converts his identity crisis into the “halmark of his narrative style” (1) and because of this identity crisis, he is able to write the legends of the guatemalan people. He writes, “the Guatemalan subject is a hybrid subject”. He also writes that the tension created by Asturias' mixed identity, spans his entire works.
4) Stephen Henighan “Two Paths to the Boom: Carpentier, Asturias, and the Performative Split”
The Modern Language Review, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Oct., 1999), pp. 1009-1024
In this article, Henighan presents an in-depth comparison of Asturias and Carpentier's work. His basis of comparison is comprehensive and it includes the following: their writing styles, their linguistic and literary traditions, their ties to surrealism, how their writing was received in Europe and in Latin America, the evolution of their writing styles, and other similarities and differences between the two authors. Henighan credits them as being authors who “enlarged the novels creative capacity to express Spanish America's linguistic diversity and mythologize Spanish America's experience” (1019). He identifies both authors as being two of the pioneers of the contemporary Spanish-American novel. --Daquigg (talk) 05:34, 1 March 2010 (UTC)