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Born in Mexico City in 1914, writer, poet, and diplomat Octavio Paz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990, eight years before his death in 1998. The Writing in the Stars explores Paz's life and ideas by establishing a dialogue between the structure and recurring images of his major poems and the ideas of Carl Jung. Although other literary critics have pointed to Jungian concepts in Paz, a comprehensive study on the subject has yet to be undertaken. Rodney Williamson takes up this challenge, adopting a Jungian perspective to explore successive phases of Paz's poetry. Williamson illustrates how archetypal images infuse Paz's early poetry and his surrealist period and shows how the circular structure of Paz's longer poems, such as 'Piedra de sol' and 'Blanco,' are based on the Eastern sacred circle or mandala, a major archetype of psychic wholeness in Jung. He argues that a grasp of the psychological importance of Jung's archetypes is essential to understanding the various syntheses of creative truth and existence sought by Paz at different defining moments of his career as a poet. The Writing in the Stars will prove fascinating to anyone interested in Latin-American literature, Jungian psychology, or critical theory.

Octavio Paz (México, 1914-1998) was one of the foremost poets and essayists of the twentieth century. Read in translations into many of the world’s languages, Paz received numerous awards and prizes during his lifetime, participated in major artistic and political movements of the twentieth century, served as Mexico’s ambassador in India (1962-1968), and was the editor of Plural and Vuelta, two literary journals of prominent influence in Mexico, Latin America, and Spain. In 1990 Paz was award.

Blending biography, literary analysis, and cultural history, Uncivil Wars reveals a new understanding of the works of Elena Garro and Octavio Paz, placing these iconic writers in the context of the revolutions—military, social, and feminist—that shaped their lives.

In the last couple of decades there has been a surge of interest in Octavio Paz's life and work, and a number of important books have been published on Paz. However, most of these books are of a biographical nature, or they examine Paz's role in the various intellectual initiatives he headed in Mexico, specifically the journals he founded. Reality in Movement looks at a wide range of topics of interest in Paz's career, including his engagement with the subversive, adversary strain in Western culture; his meditations on questions of cultural identity and intercultural contact; his dialogue with both leftist and conservative ideological traditions; his interest in feminism and psychoanalysis, and his theory of poetry. It concludes with a chapter on Octavio Paz as a literary character-a kind of reception study. Offering a complex and nuanced portrait of Paz as a writer and thinker-as well as an understanding of the era in which he lived- Reality in Movement will appeal to students of Octavio Paz and of Mexican literature more generally, and to readers with an interest in the many significant literary, cultural, political, and historical topics Paz wrote about over the course of his long career.

The meanings of passage are so many. Most often, they reflect ways of inscribing ourselves in time and space. And since time and space are in constant flux, adapting to the very idea of passage eventually leads us to a wisdom that accommodates metamorphosis, ephemerality and incompleteness. Passages force us to interact. It is precisely this kind of transversal thinking, which defies the idea of fixity, that we will be reflecting on. Under the aegis of Walter Benjamin, the man of the Parisian passages , we'll begin by asking what happens to the word passage in the passage of languages, more specifically, between French, German and Italian. This philological reflection will then lead us to specifically geocritical considerations, aimed at including the examination of representations of human spaces in a dynamic perspective, a flow, a passage. It should be noted that immobility is more a feature of the political construction of places than of the literary perception of spaces . As it is difficult to sum up in a few formulas the different meanings of passage that populate this research, I will confine myself to three occurrences of the term, all of which imply mobility: transgressivity, multifocalization and interdisciplinarity .

The undisputed intellectual leadership of Octavio Paz, not only in Mexico but throughout Spanish America, rests on achievements in the essay and in poetry. In the field of the essay, he is the author of more than twenty-five books on subjects whose diversity -- esthetics, politics, surrealist art, the Mexican character, cultural anthropology, and Eastern philosophy, to cite only a few -- is dazzling. In poetry, his creativity has increased in vigor over more than fifty years as he has explored the numerous possibilities open to Hispanic poets from many different sources. The bridge that joins the halves of his writing is a concern for language in general and for the poetic process in particular. Toward Octavio Pazdefines this process of creation through a close examination of the books that represent the summit of the poet's development, three long poems and three collections. It is intended for readers of varied poetic experience who are approaching Paz's work for the first time. By studying the relationship of the parts of the poem, particularly structure and theme, Fein traces the poet's growth through approaches to the reader, each embodied in a separate work. From the divided circularity of Piedra de sol through the intensification of the subject ofSalamandra, the multiple meanings ofBlanco, the polarities ofLadera este, and the literary solipsism ofPasado en claro, to the silences ofVuelta, Paz has shaped his audience's responses to his work through suggestion rather than control. The result is not only a new poetry but a new receptivity.

Pienso que la palabra aislada es como el pez fuera del agua. La palabra es un haz de relaciones y tal vez la tarea crítica sea en principio la de fjar esas relaciones y comunicárselas al lector. El asunto es que la poesía y la política se han servido de las grandes imágenes religiosas para cons-truir sus metáforas y su praxis social, respectivamente. Como las palabras no habitan en el vacío, ni caen en él, sino, como dije, son un haz de relaciones, la palabra ceniza se vincula, dentro del marco de la conciencia moderna, con el horror del Holocausto y de Hiroshima. Hay un peligro para quien utiliza una palabra tan culpable y muchos poetas lo saben, aunque algunos, como Pier Paolo Pasolini, se declaren en forma desafante poeta de las cenizas.

Estas páginas de reflexión constituyen, pues, una suma de estudios sobre casos concretos y diversos, pero su disposición en orden cronológico (en un arco temporal que abarca de 1937 a 1962), la selecciôn misma de esos casos y el enfoque historiográfico que los rige ofrecen al lector un relato felizmente cohesionado sobre la experiencia del destierro de la intelectualidad española. La profunda lectura de esos textos -inteligente, perspicaz, afectiva- proporciona a la indagación historiográfica la posibilidad de la poesía como conocimiento de la historia y la condición humana, con sus desprendimientos y afanes. Afortunadamente, Prados es trasladado a París por mediación de su amistad con el embajador mexicano en la capital francesa, Narciso Bassols, quien lo protege en su casa y cuya generosidad lo animará a embarcarse con dirección a México. Valender destaca que, frente a las múltiples destrucciones y pérdidas a causa de la guerra civil, fueron varios los escritores exiliados que decidieron «rescatar» su obra pasada y juntarla con la nueva, como Manuel Altolaguirre (Nube temporal, 1939), Emilio Prados (Memoria del olvido, 1940), Luis Cernuda (la segunda edición de La realidad y el deseo, 1940) o Jorge Guillén (la segunda edición de Cántico, 1945).