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    A Study Guide for Julio Cortazar's "The Pursuer"
    A Study Guide for Julio Cortazar's "The Pursuer"
    A Study Guide for Julio Cortazar's "The Pursuer"
    Ebook37 pages22 minutes

    A Study Guide for Julio Cortazar's "The Pursuer"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Julio Cortazar's "The Pursuer," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535839099
    A Study Guide for Julio Cortazar's "The Pursuer"

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      A Study Guide for Julio Cortazar's "The Pursuer" - Gale

      1

      The Pursuer

      Julio Cortázar

      1959

      Introduction

      In 1959, the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar published a short story entitled El Perseguidor (The Pursuer) that vividly brought to life the bebop scene of 1950s Paris. Taking the final months in the life of the prodigious jazz musician Johnny Carter as its subject, the story is in many ways an exploration of the career and personal life of the famous alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, the most influential musician of the style of jazz music known as bebop. The Pursuer offers a glimpse into Johnny's personal life, from his severe drug addiction and psychological instability to his profound philosophical insights, and it follows the key moments of Johnny's relationship with his biographer and critic Bruno, the narrator of the story.

      With its daring narrative structure, which uses shifting verb tenses as a way of reinforcing its challenging conception of time and philosophy, Cortázar's short story is clearly the work of a talented and ambitious writer. By the time he published his early short stories, such as The Pursuer in Paris, Cortázar had begun to establish himself among an international community of innovative writers. His depiction of the tensions between the critic and the artist, the theme of pursuit in art and life, and newly emerging philosophies of time and space, have earned The Pursuer a place among the classic texts of post-World-War-II literature. The story was originally published in the collection Las Armas Secretas (The Secret Weapons), but Paul Blackburn's translation from the Spanish became available in End of the Game and Other Stories, published by Random House in 1963.

      Author Biography

      Julio Cortázar was born in Belgium in 1914 and raised by his mother in a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Throughout his youth he developed a passion for classic literature, but he was forced because of his family's financial situation to drop out of the University of Buenos Aires after one year and become a teacher. He continued to read foreign literature and published a book of sonnets entitled Presencia (Presence) in 1938, under the pen name Julio Denis. In 1944 he took a post teaching French literature

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