Manuel Puig: Despues del Fin de La Literatura

It was Kiss of the Spider Woman, the 1985 English-language film version of his fourth novel, El beso de la mujer arana (Vintage, 1994), that won international renown for iconoclastic Argentine author Puig (1932-90). This could be seen as a form of poetic justice, as Puig derived more inspiration from Hollywood than from any literary tradition. This analysis of Puig's career is an exemplary work of cultural studies, connecting divergent fields of thought and blurring traditional distinctions between high and low culture. Author, most recently, of Razones intensas: Conversaciones sobre arte (Intense Reasonings: Conversations about Art, Perfil, 2001) Speranza is also a University of Buenos Aires professor, a critic, and a screenwriter. She pored through Puig's correspondence, archives, and the catalog of his video library of some 5,000 films in preparing these six scholarly essays that examine the cultural contexts and influences that made him, she argues, the first novelist to effectively apply the principles of Pop art to literature. Illustrating her points with photographs of Pop works, she finds intriguing resonance with the novelist's narrative technique in sources ranging from Warhol to Wittgenstein, from Hitchcock to Hedy Lamarr. Recommended for large bookstores and academic libraries as well as art history and film studies collections. Bruce Jensen, UCLA Graduate Sch. of Latin American Studies and Information Studies