Antonio Skármeta’s Uniqueness

Authors

  • Randolph Pope University of Virginia

Keywords:

Antonio Skármeta,

Abstract

This chapter uses the collective works of Antonio Skármeta as a metric with which to gauge how the world's perception and expectation of Latin American intellectual subjectivity has evolved, sometimes erratically, since the end of the Cold War. This sociological analysis of Skármeta, and his need to morph formally alongside the rapidly shifting Latin American aesthetic landscape, traces the Generation of '72's collective unease with World Literary schema and economies of prestige.  Imagistically skipping from a young Chilean writer in the sixties that cannot convince his Californian contemporaries that Chile and Argentina are different countries to Skármeta's recent triumphs at the Los Angeles and Paris Opera Houses, Pope points out that global success, for this generation, is always cut with an undercurrent of irony.

Author Biography

Randolph Pope, University of Virginia

Randolph Pope is the Commonwealth Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of Virginia, where he has served as Chair of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese (2004–2007) and Director of Comparative Literature (2008–2011). Born in Chile, he studied Spanish Literature and Classics at the Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. He received an M.A. and Ph.D. in Spanish from Columbia University in New York. His field of specialization is the Peninsular novel and autobiography, but he has also written extensively on other topics, such as Latin American literature, cultural studies, literature and architecture, literature and the arts, and literature and philosophy. He has taught at Barnard College, the University of Bonn in Germany, Dartmouth College, Vassar College, where he was Chair of Hispanic Studies, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he served as Chair of Comparative Literature for seven years. He has been Visiting Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and at the University of Tübingen in Germany. For four years he directed the Middlebury College Spanish Summer School in Vermont. He was one of the two founders and main editors of Ediciones del Norte and serves in several editorial boards. From 1991 to the Spring issue of 2002 he was Editor of the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. He has published three books and over one hundred scholarly essays. He has directed twice an NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers on Spanish autobiography in the European context.

Published

2012-10-15

How to Cite

Pope, R. (2012). Antonio Skármeta’s Uniqueness. A Contracorriente: Una Revista De Estudios Latinoamericanos, 10(1), 124–146. Retrieved from https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/627

Issue

Section

Dossier: Poesía e imagen