Literature Class, Berkeley 1980 [Paperback]

I want you to know that Im 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 Cort?zar delivered at UC Berkeley in 1980. These classes are as much reflections on Cort?zars own writing career as they are about literature and the historical moment in which he lived. Covering such topics as the writers 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,One of those books that radically shifted my thinking about the possibilities of narrative. There's no question that Julio Cort?zar is among the most revered Latin American writers of any age. InThe consequent lecturesoriginally delivered in Spanish and translatedadeptly by Katherine Silverare erudite, intimate, charminglyfragmented, and anecdotal, covering a range of topics, from Eroticismand Literature to The Realistic Short Story.Based on the words spoken by Cort?zar and his students, the class thathe taught appears to be an interesting hybrid of Cort?zar as tour guideof his body of work, and as mentor into the broader lessons about thequalities of fiction that resonated most with him.A first-class literary imagination.As Cort?zar stresses throughout his talks, writing is rarely a pursuit of answers but, rather, about investigationof the self, of ones work, and of the world at large. The goal of the novel, Cort?zar says, is to harmonize its formal and literal questions into a central, destabilizing quandary: 'Why are things like they are and not otherwise?[T]helectures, at times, do feel cobbled togetherbut in the best way, inthe way of art that thrives in complexity and contradiction. They aremade from pieces of Cort?zars life, his writing, his experiences as ayoung writer in Argentina and an as exile in Paris, his deep engagementwith literature and cinema and politics, and they show the milÓ