Emir Rodríguez Monegal Totally Explained

Everything about Emir Rodr Guez Monegal totally explained

Emir (28 July 1921 – 14 November 1985) was a Uruguayan scholar, literary critic, and editor of Latin American literature. From 1969 to 1985, Rodríguez Monegal was professor of Latin American contemporary literature at Yale University. He is usually called by his second surname Emir R. Monegal or Monegal, sometimes ERM, or erroneously Emir Monegal. Described as "one of the most influential Latin American literary critics of the 20th century" by the Encyclopædia Britannica, He had the double-barrelled name Rodríguez Monegal (erroneously "Rodríguez-Monegal" in some texts) but was often referred to as R. Monegal or Monegal only, a Spanish naming custom when the first surname is extremely common.
From 1945 to 1957 (age 24 to 36), he edited the literary section of the Montevideo weekly Marcha. Conversely, he got a cameo in a pseudo-autobiographical Borges short story:

The second episode took place in Montevideo, months later. Don Pedro's fever and his agony gave me the idea for a tale of fantasy based on the defeat at Masoller; Emir Rodriguez Monegal, to whom I'd told the plot, wrote me an introduction to Colonel Dionisio Tabares, who had fought in that campaign.

In 1949 (age 28), he won a scholarship from the British Council for a year's study at the University of Cambridge; he went to study under F. R. Leavis and complete a project on Andrés Bello.

(1969-1985) Yale University

In 1969 (age 48), Monegal was appointed professor of Latin American contemporary literature at Yale University.

Legacy

His 1966–1968 work with Mundo Nuevo, as well as his books and lectures, was influential for the spread of Latin American literature, launching the career of such as Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Severo Sarduy, and Manuel Puig, and contributing to the internationalization of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa.

His April 1968 article (reused in a chapter of his 1970 Borgès) introduced the concept of "Biorges". According to him, when Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges collaborated under the pseudonyms H. Bustos Domecq or B. Suárez Lynch, the results seemed written by a new personality, more than the sum of its parts, which he dubbed "Biorges" and considered in his own right as "one of the most important Argentine prose writers of his time", for having influenced writers such as Leopoldo Marechal (an otherwise anti-Borgesian), or Julio Cortázar's use of fictional language and slang in his masterpiece Hopscotch.

His 1966 biography of his friend Pablo Neruda, who accepted to lend him his personal papers, remains a key book on the topic. Similarly, his 1970 study and 1978 biography of his friend Borges remain key books.

In June 1985, Monegal famously derided philosopher Jacques Derrida, alleging an obfuscated recycling of Borges's ideas (from essays and tales such as (1928), (1933), "Pierre Menard" (1939), "Tlön" (1940), (1951)), opening his article with:

I've always found it difficult to read Derrida. Not so much for the density of his thought and the heavy, redundant, and repetitive style in which it's developed, but for an entirely circumstantial reason. Educated in Borges's thought from the age of fifteen, I must admit that many of Derrida's novelties struck me as being rather tautological. I couldn't understand why he took so long in arriving at the same luminous perspectives which Borges had opened up years earlier. His famed "deconstruction" impressed me for its technical precision and the infinite seduction of its textual sleights-of-hand, but it was all too familiar to me: I'd experienced it in Borges avant la lettre.

, 1985), in Borges and His Successors. The Borgian Impact on Literature and the Arts., 1990, p. 128}}

Bibliography

The bulk of Monegal's works exists only in Spanish. For untranslated texts, an English equivalent of the title is provided in parentheses.

Books

1950: ("José Enrique Rodó in the twentieth century")

1956: ("The trial of the parricides. The new Argentine generation and their masters.", study of the dismissal of Borges, Mallea, and Martínez Estrada in Argentina)

1961: ("The roots of Horacio Quiroga")

1961: ("Storytellers of this America", seventeen essays on prominent fiction writers of contemporary Latin American literature)

Expanded to thirty-four writers in two volumes (1969 and 1974)

1963: ("Eduardo Acevedo Díaz. Two versions of a same theme.")

1964: (with Homero Alsina Thevenet, "Ingmar Bergman. A cinematographic playwright.")

1966: ("The immobile traveler: an introduction to Pablo Neruda")

(1973, French)

1967: ("Genius and character of Horacio Quiroga")

1968: ("The exile: life and work of Horacio Quiroga")

1969: ("The other Andrés Bello")

1970: (French, "Borges by himself")

(1979, Spanish)
(1987, Greek)

1976: ("Borges: towards a poetic reading"), erroneous title printed for ("Borges: towards a poetics of reading")

(1980, Portuguese)

1978: Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography

(1982, Italian)
(1983, French)
(1985, Spanish)

Articles

Selected among more than 330 articles and notices:

1955:, in: Número 27

Expanded, in: (1969)

1968:, in: Mundo Nuevo 22

1972:, in: TriQuarterly 25

1974: "Borges, Jorge Luis", in: Encyclopædia Britannica, Macropædia Vol. 3

1974: "Borges, a Reader", in: diacritics 4

1975:, in: Yates, A. Donald, ed. (1975)

1976:, in: Revista Iberoamericana 42

1985:, in: Maldoror 21

"Borges and Derrida. Apothecaries", in: Aizenberg, Edna, ed. (1990). Borges and His Successors. The Borgian Impact on Literature and the Arts.

Edited

1950: ("Uruguayan literature of the twentieth century", compilation of essays and documents)

1957: ("José Enrique Rodó: complete works")

1963: ("José Enrique Rodó: pages", anthology)

1966: ("The Uruguyan tale", short-story anthology)

1966: ("Juan Carlos Onetti: the faces of love", erotic texts anthology)

1968: ("The art of narration", interviews with leading Hispanic prose fiction writers)

1970: ("Juan Carlos Onetti. Complete novels and tales", anthology)

1977: The Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature, 2 volumes (with Thomas Colchie)

1979: ("Hispanic masters of the 20th century", with Suzanne Jill Levine)

1980: (collection of critical essays on Pablo Neruda)

1981: Borges: A Reader (anthology, with Alastair Reid)

(1984, Spanish)

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