Voices From The Fuente Viva

"Voices from the fuente viva is the first full-length study in English of the issues of orality and literacy in contemporary Latin American literature. Lucid and wide-ranging in scope, this book demonstrates the tension between orality and the written word in Latin American culture. Drawing upon anthropology and literary theory, Amy Nauss Millay explores the representation of oral cultures and oral traditions by important Spanish American ethnographers and writers such as Lydia Cabrera, Jose Maria Arguedas, Miguel Barnet, and Augusto Roa Bastos. Millay argues that for these writers oral discourse is paradoxically inscribed by means of creating an oral effect, and that this enterprise calls into question the traditional divide between orality and writing."--Jacket.