Education
He attended Miami-Dade Community College, the University of Miami, and the University of Michigan, where he earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature.
(From Desi Arnaz and "I Love Lucy" to Gloria Estefan and t...)
From Desi Arnaz and "I Love Lucy" to Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine, Cuban-Americans have conga'd and mambo'd their way into the heart of popular culture in the United States. This engaging book, which mixes the author's own story with his reflections as a trained observer, explores how both famous and ordinary members of the "1.5 Generation" (Cubans who came to United States as children or adolescents) have lived "life on the hyphen," neither fully Cuban nor fully American, but a fertile hybrid of both. Ranging widely from music to movies to television to literature, Gustavo Perez Firmat chronicles what it means to be Cuban in America. He offers an in-depth look at Cuban-Americans who have become icons of popular and literary culture, including Desi Arnaz, Oscar Hijuelos (whose The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love won the Pulitzer Prize and became a major motion picture), musician Perez Prado, poet Jose Kozer, and crossover pop stars Gloria Estefan and Jon Secada.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0292765517/?tag=2022091-20
('Before it becomes a political, social, or even linguisti...)
'Before it becomes a political, social, or even linguistic issue, bilingualism is a private affair, intimate theater'. So writes Firmat in this ground-breaking study of the interweaving of life and languages in a group of bilingual Spanish, Spanish-American and Latino writers. Unravelling the 'tongue ties' of such diverse figures as the American philosopher George Santayana, the emigré Spanish poet Pedro Salinas, Spanish American novelists Guillermo Cabrera Infante and María Luisa Bombal, and Latino memoirists Richard Rodriguez and Sandra Cisneros, Firmat argues that their careers are shaped by a linguistic family romance that involves negotiating between the competing claims and attractions of Spanish and English.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1403962898/?tag=2022091-20
( Recent literary studies and related disciplines have gi...)
Recent literary studies and related disciplines have given much attention to phenomena that seem to occupy more or less permanently eccentric positions in our experience. Gustavo Perez Firmat examines three of these marginal or liminal phenomena—paying particular attention to the distinction between "center" and "periphery"—as they appear in Hispanic literature. Carnival (the traditional festival in which normal behavior is overturned), choteo (an insulting form of humor), and disease are three liminal entities discussed. Less an attempt to frame a general theory of such "liminalities" than an effort to demonstrate the interpretive power of the liminality concept, this work challenges conventional boundaries of critical sense and offers new insights into a variety of questions, among them the notion of convertability in psychoanalysis and the relation of New World culture to its European forebears.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0822306581/?tag=2022091-20
(The sense of the radical newness of Spanish America found...)
The sense of the radical newness of Spanish America found in literary works from the chronicles of the conquest to the work of the criollistas has more recently given way to a stronger recognition of the transatlantic roots of much Spanish-American literature. This indebtedness does not imply subservience; rather, the New World's cultural and literary autonomy lies in the distinctive ways in which it assimilated its cultural inheritance. Professor Pérez Firmat explores this process of assimilation or transculturation in the case of Cuba, and proposes a new understanding of the issue of Cuban national identity through revisionary readings of both literary and non-literary works by Juan Marinello, Fernando Ortiz, Nicolds Guillén, Alejo Carpentier and others, dating from the early decades of the twentieth century, a time of intense self-reflection in the nation's history. Using a critical vocabulary derived from these works, he argues that Cuban identity is translational rather than foundational and that cubanía emerges from a nuanced, self-conscious recasting of foreign models.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521027322/?tag=2022091-20
( An expanded, updated edition of the classic study of Cu...)
An expanded, updated edition of the classic study of Cuban-American culture, this engaging book, which mixes the author’s own story with his reflections as a trained observer, explores how both famous and ordinary members of the “1.5 Generation” (Cubans who came to the United States as children or teens) have lived “life on the hyphen”—neither fully Cuban nor fully American, but a fertile hybrid of both. Offering an in-depth look at Cuban-Americans who have become icons of popular and literary culture—including Desi Arnaz, Oscar Hijuelos, musician Pérez Prado, and crossover pop star Gloria Estefan, as well as poets José Kozer and Orlando González Esteva, performers Willy Chirino and Carlos Oliva, painter Humberto Calzada, and others—Gustavo Pérez Firmat chronicles what it means to be Cuban in America. The first edition of Life on the Hyphen won the Eugene M. Kayden National University Press Book Award and received honorable mentions for the Modern Language Association’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize and the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0292735995/?tag=2022091-20
( The "idle fictions" of the vanguard novel of the 1920s ...)
The "idle fictions" of the vanguard novel of the 1920s and 1930s in Spain and Spanish America represented a kind of interlude of playfulness--a vacation or parenthetical insertion--in what was perceived as the established course of the modern Hispanic novel's development. Yet, as Pérez Firmat argues, though this genre saw itself as recreative and interstitial, it deliberately precipitated "a class war not between social classes but between literary classes." Concentrating on source material not widely available, Pérez Firmat reconstructs the reception these novels received at the time of their publication, then develops a reading of them based on the intellectual context of this reception. A new preface and an appendix on vanguard biographies have been added to this paperback edition.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0822314231/?tag=2022091-20
( Cuba, an island 750 miles long, with a population of ab...)
Cuba, an island 750 miles long, with a population of about 11 million, lies less than 100 miles off the U.S. coast. Yet the island’s influences on America’s cultural imagination are extensive and deeply ingrained. In the engaging and wide-ranging Havana Habit, writer and scholar Gustavo Pérez Firmat probes the importance of Havana, and of greater Cuba, in the cultural history of the United States. Through books, advertisements, travel guides, films, and music, he demonstrates the influence of the island on almost two centuries of American life. From John Quincy Adams’s comparison of Cuba to an apple ready to drop into America’s lap, to the latest episodes in the lives of the “comic comandantes and exotic exiles,” and to such notable Cuban exports as the rumba and the mambo, cigars and mojitos, the Cuba that emerges from these pages is a locale that Cubans and Americans have jointly imagined and inhabited. The Havana Habit deftly illustrates what makes Cuba, as Pérez Firmat writes, “so near and yet so foreign.”
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300141327/?tag=2022091-20
He attended Miami-Dade Community College, the University of Miami, and the University of Michigan, where he earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature.
He taught at Duke University from 1979 to 1999 and is currently the David Feinson Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. In 1995, Pérez was named Duke University Scholar/Teacher of the Year. In 1997 Newsweek included him among “100 Americans to watch for the 21st century” and Hispanic Business Magazine selected him as one of the “100 most influential Hispanics” in the United States.
In 2004 he was named one of New York’s thirty “outstanding Latinos” by El Diario Louisiana Prensa.
In 2005 he was selected Educator of the Year by the National Association of Cuban American Educators. GPF has been featured in the documentary CubaAmerican and in the 2013 Public Broadcasting Service series Latino Americans.
( The "idle fictions" of the vanguard novel of the 1920s ...)
(The sense of the radical newness of Spanish America found...)
( An expanded, updated edition of the classic study of Cu...)
(From Desi Arnaz and "I Love Lucy" to Gloria Estefan and t...)
( Recent literary studies and related disciplines have gi...)
('Before it becomes a political, social, or even linguisti...)
( Cuba, an island 750 miles long, with a population of ab...)
(Reflexiones sobre el exilio, el lenguaje y la identidad, ...)