Written on a Body

Cuban-born Sarduy ( Cobra ) is an accomplished man of letters--a novelist, poet, playwright, book editor and critic. Exiled in Paris for the past 30 years, he has been closely associated with the influential French structuralistslc according to chicago style . Sarduy urges that literary criticism ``return to the original meaning of the word text--textile, tissue--considering everything written and everything yet to be written as a single, unique, simultaneous text in which the discourse we initiate at birth is inserted''--a focus that permits him to discuss the work of one artist in terms of another (George Bataille and Julio Cortazar, Francisco Jose de Goya and Jose Donoso). He assumes readers share his familiarity with the works he analyzes, but not every writer here is readily available in English (an essay on Cuban poet Jose Lezama Lima is pivotal to this volume). While his particularity might elude some, Sarduy's theses concerning the uses of language, words as signifiers and the relation between text and image are developed well. (Oct.)