LASA/EANLAS: Rethinking Trans-Pacific Ties: Asia and Latin America

Literatura global: la presencia de China en la narrativa de Edmundo Paz-Soldán

• In Event: The Asian imagination in Hispanic literature

Abstract

As many other social and historical phenomena left their traces in the literature that developed along the way, the globalized and technologically advanced era in which we live inevitably marks the literature of the twenty-first century.
On the linguistic level, we observe a hybridization of language such as code-switching in the science fiction Iris written by the Bolivian writer Edmundo Paz-Soldán. In contrast of the traditional use of a French word to denominate a “novum” (in Darko Suvin's terms), Paz-Soldán applied the Chinese language, presenting a demonstration of cultural exchange in the context of globalization. On the textual level, the creation of Asian subjects enters the scene in the Bolivian writer's narratives. It conformed to Jameson’s (2005) point of view, that the postmodern society has a greater facility of acceptance of other languages and cultures different from the pure West.
Cinematography, a product of new technologies and the progress achieved in the mass media, becomes an artistic resource that feeds back into the literature. Wong Kar-wai’s Chinese film Fallen Angels, in this sense, is a metalinguistic reference that completes and enriches the layering of Paz-Soldán’s Bolivian novel Sueños digitales, thus forming an intermediate mise en abyme. We study the role played by the Chinese film in the Bolivian novel from three perspectives: the richness of the content that the film brings to the novel, the cosmopolitan vision and the fusion between reality and fiction as a narrative strategy.

Author

• Chen Lin, University of Granada