Books by José R. Ibáñez Ibáñez
Retrospective Poe: The Master, His Readership, His Legacy, 2023
This book analyzes a range of Edgar Allan Poe's writing, focusing on new readings that engage wit... more This book analyzes a range of Edgar Allan Poe's writing, focusing on new readings that engage with classical and (post)modern studies of his work and the troubling literary relationship that he had with T.S. Eliot. Whilst the book examines Poe's influence in Spain, and how his figure has been marketed to young and adult Spanish reading audiences, it also explores the profound impact that Poe had on other audiences, such as in America, Greece, and Japan, from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The essays attest to Poe's well-deserved reputation, his worldwide legacy, and his continued presence in global literature. This book will appeal particularly to university teachers, Poe scholars, graduate students, and general readers interested in Poe's oeuvre.
A View from the South: Contemporary English and American Studies. Proceedings of the 34th Internacional AEDEAN Conference Almeria 2010. José R. Ibáñez & José Francisco Fernández, eds., Nov 2011
Distancias cortas. El relato breve en Gran Bretaña, Irlanda y Estados Unidos (1995-2005), Jun 2010
Este libro no podrá ser reproducido, ni total ni parcialmente, sin previo permiso escrito del edi... more Este libro no podrá ser reproducido, ni total ni parcialmente, sin previo permiso escrito del editor. Derechos exclude los citados derechos. La editorial no se hace responsable, en ningún caso, de las opiniones expresadas por el autor.
Contemporary Debates on the Short Story, 2008
Contemporary Debates on the Short Story brings together the contributions of nine outstanding sch... more Contemporary Debates on the Short Story brings together the contributions of nine outstanding scholars in the field of the short story to reveal some of the many directions in which the genre is expanding. This book is a reasoned and well-documented anthology which casts light on new aspects of the short story. It participates in the current trend of the short story criticism characterized by the gathering in one single volume of a diversity of approaches with the main aid of promoting discussion on this thriving area of literary studies. All in all, the short story emerges in this study as a dynamic and flexible form that reacts and adapts better than any other literary genre to the challenges of the sceptical times we are in.
Articles and Book chapters by José R. Ibáñez Ibáñez
Journal of World Literature, 2023
This article examines the presence of Poe’s fiction in Spain, focusing on the reception of his an... more This article examines the presence of Poe’s fiction in Spain, focusing on the reception of his anthologized short stories in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, and taking this as a case of literary hospitality that helped to develop the fantasy genre in the country. In the early decades of publication, collections of Poe’s short stories were generally introduced into Spain as translations of anthologies of Baudelaire’s French versions. These anthologies appealed to a broad readership and sold well, being published by both large, professional houses and smaller, family-run presses. Poe came to form part of the literary canon that was being shaped in the final decades of the nineteenth century in Spain, and was thus published alongside major literary figures, which attests to the kind of literary hospitality he enjoyed in Spain’s cultural world in the decades following his introduction into the country.
Brno Studies in English, 2021
At the end of the 1970s, Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse predicted the demise of Jewish American ficti... more At the end of the 1970s, Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse predicted the demise of Jewish American fiction as a result of the process of acculturation affecting Jewish communities. However, the booming literary production of a younger generation in recent decades has called into question this announcement of the death of Jewish American fiction. Based on Marcus Hansen's theory of the third generation return, the current paper seeks to explore issues of identity and religion in the writing of Bernard Malamud and Nathan Englander, representatives of the second and the third generation of Jewish fiction, respectively. Malamud's storytelling portrays an all-embracing vision of Judaism in that all his characters are universal projections of humanity, while Englander's view on Judaism is that of a Jew raised in the strict yeshiva. However, his Orthodox upbringing permeates his writing entirely, shaping the unabashed way in which he views Jewish Orthodoxy and the Shoah.
The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality in US Literature and Culture. Eds. Amanda Ellen Gerke, Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan & Patricia San José Rico. Leyden: Brill/Rodopi, 2020
In Adieu to Emmanuelle Levinas, Jacques Derrida observed that the author of Totality and Infinity... more In Adieu to Emmanuelle Levinas, Jacques Derrida observed that the author of Totality and Infinity privileged the term ‘dwelling’ over that of ‘hospitality’ although this work “bequeaths to us an immense treatise of hospitality” (Derrida [1997] 1999, 21). As interpreter of the concept of hospitality in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida also reminded us of the conditions of the host, as the one that gives asylum, while, at the same time, the law of hospitality, the law of the place (house, hotel, hos- pital, hospice, family, city, nation, language, etc.) become the delimitation where that host maintains his/her authority (Derrida 2000b, 4). More recently, Abi Doukhan has accounted for a dimension of the Levinassian hospitality, the exilic structure, which has been disregarded by many commentators of the Lithuanian-born philosopher (Doukhan 2010, 235).
In this paper, I intend to examine Ha Jin’s (a Chinese-born American migrant writer and one of the most successful Asian-American authors in current American fiction) exilic condition. Forced to remain in the United States after viewing on television the response of Chinese authorities to the demonstrations at Tiannamen Square in June 1989, Ha Jin has developed his entire literary career in English, a language that he learned after the end of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Writing in this language thus became “a matter of survival” (Weinberger 2006, 46), a safe haven to which this author retreated in an attempt to exile himself from Chinese, a language loaded with “a lot of political jargon” (Fay 2009, 122) and unsuitable for the representation of his fictional worlds.
I will be paying close attention to some of Ha Jin’s best known essays: “In Defence of Foreignness” and The Writer as Migrant. In this latter book, this Chinese-American writer delves into the Manichean relationship that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Lin Yutang, Vladimir Nabokov, V. S. Naipaul, among other foreign authors, had with the English language so as to justify his own decision to write in English. Having accepted being an outcast from his native language (Chinese), Ha Jin’s adopted language (En- glish) became, metaphorically speaking, a hospitable space in which he could secure a successful literary career at the expense of being accused of betrayal by both Chinese intellectuals and authorities.
The Edgar Allan Poe Review, 2019
Pío Baroja (1872-1956), the most prolific novelist of the so-called Spanish Generation of ’98, be... more Pío Baroja (1872-1956), the most prolific novelist of the so-called Spanish Generation of ’98, began his literary career as storyteller. The publication of Vidas sombrías [Somber Lives] in 1900, a volume of over thirty stories set in the Basque Country, Madrid and Valencia, earned him wide critical acclaim, despised its poor reception by Spanish readers. Baroja himself acknowledged that four or five of the stories were written in imitation of Edgar Allan Poe. This article explores traces of Poe in Baroja’s early storytelling, although it sets out by considering a concept such as unity of sensation (unity of effect), which Baroja indeed borrowed from Poe, although he never acknowledged this. My central concern here is that Baroja’s early admiration of the writer from Boston manifests itself in the adoption of bleak landscapes, Gothic interiors and psychologically unstable characters. This trend was soon to be abandoned, although Baroja’s concept of the novel, a development of Poe’s poetics of the tale, would remain with the Basque writer for the rest of his life. The final part of this study analyzes Poe-like elements–literary devices, Gothic motifs, semantic elements–which can be found in “Médium,” one of the stories in Vidas sombrías.
Complutense Journal of English Studies, 2018
Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" has received a great deal of scholarly attention over the years... more Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" has received a great deal of scholarly attention over the years from a variety of perspectives, not least the domestic and symbolic presence of Pluto in the story. Kent Ljungquist (1980) saw Poe's narrative in terms of classical literary tradition, specifically the notion of the daemonic, yet confined his study to Pluto's demonic features, arguing that the cat may be an infernal spirit sent to castigate the narrator. Other studies, such as Clark Moreland and Karime Rodriguez (2015), have reached similar conclusions. However, there is a surprising absence in the literature of any discussion of Poe's decision to name the 'phantasm' of his narrative after the Hellenic god of the Underworld. The present paper seeks to address this, and proposes that Poe's Pluto may not simply function as a demonic spirit, but rather as the Pluto of Hellenic mythology himself.
The Edgar Allan Poe Review, 2018
During the early 1950s, Argentine writer Julio Cortázar was commissioned by UNESCO to translate E... more During the early 1950s, Argentine writer Julio Cortázar was commissioned by UNESCO to translate Edgar Allan Poe's prose into Spanish. Cortázar's deep knowledge of the English language and his acquaintance with the life and work of the American writer meant that, over the ensuing decades, he produced renditions which are still considered to be among the most literary of all twentieth-century Spanish translations of Poe's work. This article presents a detailed analysis of two paragraphs from “The Tell-Tale Heart,” comparing Cortázar's translation with other, more recent Spanish versions. I aim to show that although Cortázar's rendering is in many ways the most faithful to the original text, his sometimes nonstandard use of Spanish substantially changes the meaning of the original. For this reason, speakers of Peninsular Spanish may have difficulty in understanding his translation, and might not fully appreciate the unity of effect around which Poe composed this story.
Contribuciones interdisciplinares a la traducción, ed. Nobel Perdú Honeyman, 2003
Superando límites en traducción e interpretación. Eds. Carmen Valero Garcés y Carmen Pena Díaz. Geneva: Editions Tradulex,, 2017
Gracias a la enorme expansión que tuvo después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, la lengua inglesa se... more Gracias a la enorme expansión que tuvo después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, la lengua inglesa se ha convertido no sólo en uno de los idiomas con mayor número de hablantes nativos sino también la segunda lengua de una gran comunidad internacional. Debido en parte a su propia permeabilidad, el inglés adapta términos de diverso origen que han logrado convertirla en una lengua plural. Este hecho se observa en la obra de escritores que conviven entre dos lenguas, la propia y el inglés. A este respecto, Braj B. Kachru articuló el concepto de la "creatividad bilingüe " para aludir a la permeabilidad exhibida por estos escritores que usan el inglés pero que, a la vez, proyectan de diversas maneras el substrato de su lengua nativa. El objeto de este trabajo es examinar la obra literaria de Ha Jin (1956-), escritor chino-americano residente en los Estados Unidos desde 1985. Ha Jin comenzó a cultivar una literatura híbrida, la cual, si bien se ha gestado lejos de China como consecuencia de su exilio, recoge en gran parte el legado y substrato cultural y lingüístico de su país. Ha Jin escribe en inglés, pero su narrativa rezuma peculiaridades propias de la cultura china. En este trabajo intento exponer a través de ejemplos tomados de su narrativa breve, cómo la presunta ignorancia lingüística y falta de precisión de la que ha sido acusado, es posible que obedezca a un estudiado uso de estrategias discursivas y narrativas cuyo fin sea la creación de una literatura híbrida. Abstract: Thanks to its rapid growth following the end of the Second World War, the English language has become not only one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, but also the vehicle of a large international community. Due in part to its own permeability, English has welcomed terms from diverse origins which have made it become a pluralistic language. This aspect can also be seen in the literary production of authors who coexist in between two languages, their mother tongue and English, their adopted language. In this regard, Indian linguist Braj B. Kachru articulated the concept of " bilingual creativity " to explain the permeability displayed by such authors whose English displays features from their mother tongues. The aim of this paper is to explore the oeuvre of Ha Jin (1956-), a Chinese-American author who has resided in the U.S. since 1985. Ha Jin developed a hybrid literature which, although it has no substantial connection with his homeland, displays both a Chinese cultural and linguistic background. Ha Jin writes in English but his fiction oozes cultural and grammar features which undoubtedly refer to China. In this work, I also intent to expose through examples from his short fiction how Ha Jin's alledged linguistic naivety and inaccuracy can thus be understood as discursive and narrative strategies whose goal is to account for the hybrid nature of his literature.
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 2016
This article analyzes Ha Jin’s “Winds and Clouds over a Funeral” within a Kachruvian framework. F... more This article analyzes Ha Jin’s “Winds and Clouds over a Funeral” within a Kachruvian framework. Firstly, it examines Braj B. Kachru’s concepts of “contact literature” and the “bilingual’s creativity” in that both of these undermine the traditional homogeneity of a monolingual conceptualization of the English language. I then offer an overview of Kachru’s taxonomical model as a means of explaining the cultural, grammatical and linguistic alterations in the creativity of bilinguals, especially that of writers who use English as a second language. In this regard, and bearing in mind Haoming Gong’s concept of “translation literature,” I explore Ha Jin’s “Winds and Clouds over a Funeral” in terms of the linguistic processes and nativization strategies employed by this Chinese-American author in order to transfer cultural aspects from his native language, Chinese. Through this I aim to reveal and describe the hybrid nature of the work of Ha Jin, a writer who I believe is paving the way for a reassessment of Asian-American fiction in the United States.
Una llegada inesperada y otros relatos
Introducción (50 páginas) a la antología de relatos cortos de Ha Jin, "Una llegada inesperada y o... more Introducción (50 páginas) a la antología de relatos cortos de Ha Jin, "Una llegada inesperada y otros relatos"
Fragmentos de realidad. Los autores y las poéticas del cuento en lengua inglesa
Un repaso sobre la concepción del relato corto en tres escritoras del sur de los Estados Unidos: ... more Un repaso sobre la concepción del relato corto en tres escritoras del sur de los Estados Unidos: Katherine A. Porter, Eudora Welty y Flannery O'Connor.
El propósito de este trabajo es triple. En primer lugar, se propone analizar la concepción del re... more El propósito de este trabajo es triple. En primer lugar, se propone analizar la concepción del relato corto que tiene Aleksandar Hemon, un emigrado bosnio quien se ha convertido en una de los voces representativas más destacadas del actual panorama literario americando. En segundo lugar, se adentra a evaluar la crítica al relato corto actual en los Estados Unidos teniendo en cuenta el camino emprendido por muchos escritores noveles quienes ansían el éxito inmediato poniendo para ello en práctica los marcados estándares estructurales y temáticos que imponen las revistas literarias nacionales. Hemon cree que de este modo el relato norteamericano actual, por una parte, desafía su naturaleza solitaria, como bien expuso Frank O'Connor en The Lonely Voice, mientras que, por la otra, se muestra incapaz de responder al tiempo cambiante, "el mundo de los refugiados e inmigrantes y su espectacular disparidad económica". En base a esta última noción, se ofrecerá un breve análisis de tres de las historias más representativas de Hemen, publicadas en su The Question of Bruno, la obra con la que hizo su debut en el género del cuento.
La Andalucía rural vista por viajeros extranjeros. Campos, posadas y tabernas. Eds. Vicente López Folgado y Mª Mar Rivas Carmona. New York: Peter Lang, Jun 2013
Distancias cortas. El relato breve en Gran Bretaña, Irlanda y Estados Unidos (1995-2005), 2010
Este capítulo ofrece un breve recorrido del relato corto norteamericano, desde sus inicios en el ... more Este capítulo ofrece un breve recorrido del relato corto norteamericano, desde sus inicios en el siglo XIX, hasta la actualidad.
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Books by José R. Ibáñez Ibáñez
Articles and Book chapters by José R. Ibáñez Ibáñez
In this paper, I intend to examine Ha Jin’s (a Chinese-born American migrant writer and one of the most successful Asian-American authors in current American fiction) exilic condition. Forced to remain in the United States after viewing on television the response of Chinese authorities to the demonstrations at Tiannamen Square in June 1989, Ha Jin has developed his entire literary career in English, a language that he learned after the end of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Writing in this language thus became “a matter of survival” (Weinberger 2006, 46), a safe haven to which this author retreated in an attempt to exile himself from Chinese, a language loaded with “a lot of political jargon” (Fay 2009, 122) and unsuitable for the representation of his fictional worlds.
I will be paying close attention to some of Ha Jin’s best known essays: “In Defence of Foreignness” and The Writer as Migrant. In this latter book, this Chinese-American writer delves into the Manichean relationship that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Lin Yutang, Vladimir Nabokov, V. S. Naipaul, among other foreign authors, had with the English language so as to justify his own decision to write in English. Having accepted being an outcast from his native language (Chinese), Ha Jin’s adopted language (En- glish) became, metaphorically speaking, a hospitable space in which he could secure a successful literary career at the expense of being accused of betrayal by both Chinese intellectuals and authorities.
In this paper, I intend to examine Ha Jin’s (a Chinese-born American migrant writer and one of the most successful Asian-American authors in current American fiction) exilic condition. Forced to remain in the United States after viewing on television the response of Chinese authorities to the demonstrations at Tiannamen Square in June 1989, Ha Jin has developed his entire literary career in English, a language that he learned after the end of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Writing in this language thus became “a matter of survival” (Weinberger 2006, 46), a safe haven to which this author retreated in an attempt to exile himself from Chinese, a language loaded with “a lot of political jargon” (Fay 2009, 122) and unsuitable for the representation of his fictional worlds.
I will be paying close attention to some of Ha Jin’s best known essays: “In Defence of Foreignness” and The Writer as Migrant. In this latter book, this Chinese-American writer delves into the Manichean relationship that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Lin Yutang, Vladimir Nabokov, V. S. Naipaul, among other foreign authors, had with the English language so as to justify his own decision to write in English. Having accepted being an outcast from his native language (Chinese), Ha Jin’s adopted language (En- glish) became, metaphorically speaking, a hospitable space in which he could secure a successful literary career at the expense of being accused of betrayal by both Chinese intellectuals and authorities.
Ha Jin was ten years old when Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, which aimed at removing capitalism and Chinese traditions by way of the strict implementation of communism. Colleges were closed for ten years and many young people became Red Guards, an armed revolutionary youth organization aiming to eradicate the ‘four Olds’ – Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits and Old Ideas – which were described as anti– proletarian. At the age of thirteen, Ha Jin joined the People’s Liberation Army as a way of leaving home as he declared in different interviews (Gardner 2000; Weinberger, 2007; Fay 2009). While in the army, he worked as a telegrapher, a post which allowed him some free time to read literature and educate himself.
He left the army in 1975 and worked for three years in a railway company. In 1977 colleges reopened in China and, a year later, Ha Jin began his studies at Heilongjiang University where he earned a B.A. in English in 1981. He then decided to pursue his studies in Anglo–American literature at Shandong University, where he received his M.A. in 1984. A year later, he won a scholarship to study American literature at Brandeis University, from which he earned a Ph.D. in English in 1993. While he was at Brandeis, Jin saw on television the Tiananmen Square massacre, an incident which split his life in two: along with his wife, he decided to remain in the U.S. as a refugee. This political incident made him realize he could never go back to China and teach in a state–controlled educational system. After a series of odd jobs, Ha Jin was offered a teaching position at Emory University. Later on, he moved to Boston University where he currently teaches literature and creative writing.
His literary career began with the publication of poetry: Between Silences (1990) and Facing Shadows (1996). He soon turned to short fiction, a genre which Ha Jin claimed he feels more at home with than with any other (Fay 2009). To date, he has published four collections of short stories: Ocean of Words (1996), ner the e lag (1997) – for which he received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction –, The Bridegroom (2000) and A oo all (2009). He has also published six novels, among which are the critical- ly–aclaimed Waiting (1999), awarded with the National Book Award for Fiction in 1999 and War Trash (2004), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His latest novel to date, Nanjing Requiem (2011), is a fictional account based on a historical episode, the Rape of Nanking, a mass murder that ocurred following the capture of this city by Japanese troops in 1937. A Map of Betrayal, a novel set in the U.S., is scheduled for its release on 4th November 2014. Interest in his works is evinced by the number of studies dealing with the immigrant experience (Juncker 2010; Kong 2012), the transnational identity (Marting 2011), or the bilingual creativity (Zhang 2002; Gong 2014) of his fiction.
Initially, Ha Jin did not consider the idea of becoming a writer as his main goal was to work as a translator. He knows that writing in English, though viewed as a betrayal of his mother tongue by many Chinese (Fay 2009), was his only option if he wanted to have his books published after the banning of the majority of his oeuvre in China. His fiction has been described as harsh, marked by a subtle fierce irony, his male characters finding themselves in precarious situations, harassed by either Chinese authorities or the grim conditions they experience when living in the United States.
As many others, this interview took place in Ha Jin’s office at Boston University. What follows is an edited transcript of our talk recorded by the interviewer, with the kind per- mission of the author. However, due to time constraints, several questions were answered via e–mail exchange.
Her literary production has also been widely acclaimed and Ms. Crone has been the recipient of prestigious awards including the Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction from the Southern Fellowship of Writers in April 2009, or the 2004 Faulkner/Wisdom Prize for Novella for “The Ice Garden,” the opening story in her latest volume of short stories, What Gets Into Us.
Her first collection of short stories, The Winnebago Mysteries and Other Stories, was published in 1982. In 1997 Ms. Crone acknowledged that she “didn’t really begin to grasp the form until the last ten years or so. I mean consciously, so that I understand what short stories are doing” (Rohrberger 1997: 76). Four years later, she published A Period of Confinement, a novel that tells the story of a young woman who abandons her baby and her husband in a depressed post-partum ‘period of confinement’, as a way to explore her own identity. This novel was followed by another volume of short fiction, Dream State (1995), a collection of local-color stories centered in Louisiana, a land envisioned not as the rural setting or social entity understood as the South in the fiction of Faulkner, McCullers or Welty, but as a multicultural society, represented by New Orleans, a city that for Ms Crone becomes “the northern capital of the Caribbean” and an epitome of what “America might have been” if the French, Spanish or African influences had prevailed (1997: 82).
Her next volume of stories, What Gets Into Us, published in 2006, comprises stories across four decades of intertwined lives in the small fictional village of Fayton, North Carolina. Crone explores the fortunes and misfortunes of a group of white middle class neighbouring families during the pre- and post-Civil Rights America. In April 2012, her latest work, a science fiction novel, The Not Yet, was launched and it has recently been nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award for the best original science fiction novel published in 1912.
In this interview, Ms Crone explores the authors and cultural elements which shaped her fiction. She also reveals an intimate view of Southern storytelling in which she acknowledges the importance of Cajun tradition in Louisiana, the region where she lives, the concept of regional literature as well as historical aspects such as racial discrimination and the ensuing Civil Rights Movement which shook the social foundations of the Southern states of the Union during the 1950s and 60s.
the years from a variety of perspectives, not least the domestic and symbolic presence of Pluto in the
story. Kent Ljungquist (1980) saw Poe’s narrative in terms of classical literary tradition, specifically
the notion of the daemonic, yet confined his study to Pluto’s demonic features, arguing that the cat
may be an infernal spirit sent to castigate the narrator. Other studies, such as Clark Moreland and
Karime Rodriguez (2015), have reached similar conclusions. However, there is a surprising absence
in the literature of any discussion of Poe’s decision to name the ‘phantasm’ of his narrative after the
Hellenic god of the Underworld. The present paper seeks to address this, and proposes that Poe’s
Pluto may not simply function as a demonic spirit, but rather as the Pluto of Hellenic mythology
himself.