Latin Americanists Dr. Rebeca Olmedo and Prof. Ketevan Kupatadze participated in the panel, “The Knowledge Within: Balancing Chaos in the Works of Contemporary Latin American Writers – Severo Sarduy, Gloria Gervitz, Myriam Moscona, Alberto Blanco, Jordi Soler and Ignacio Padilla.”
Dr. Olmedo analyzed how the Cuban novelist Severo Sarduy created a revolutionary art which parodied conventional aesthetics, thus exposing to deeper scrutiny the artistic canon as well as issues of gender and identity.
Professor Kupatadze explored the work of Mexican novelist Ignacio Padilla in Amphitryon (2000), which inquires into the theme of literary hospitality as a fascinating but simultaneously violent encounter. This is a text that borrows from other texts and as such is presented by the author in a dual character, as host that invites previous traditions and as guests that ask for their readers’ hospitality. All of this takes place within a process that can be described as violence caused by purposeful erasure and forgetfulness.
The University of North Carolina at Wilmington hosted the 58th Annual Mountain Interstate Foreign Language Conference Oct. 9-11.