Anxieties of Experience

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Latin American Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Leaves Of Grass ◽  
Literary Authority ◽  
The Us ◽  
New Interpretation

Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño offers a new interpretation of US and Latin American literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Revisiting longstanding debates in the hemisphere about whether the source of authority for New World literature derives from an author’s first-hand contact with American places and peoples or from a creative (mis)reading of existing traditions, the book charts a widening gap in how modern US and Latin American writers defined their literary authority. In the process, it traces the development of two distinct literary strains in the Americas: the “US literature of experience” and the “Latin American literature of the reader.” Reinterpreting a range of canonical works from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Anxieties of Experience shows how this hemispheric literary divide fueled a series of anxieties, misunderstandings, and “misencounters” between US and Latin American authors. In the wake of recent calls to rethink the “common grounds” approach to literature across the Americas, the book advocates a comparative approach that highlights the distinct logics of production and legitimation in the US and Latin American literary fields. Anxieties of Experience closes by exploring the convergence of the literature of experience and the literature of the reader in the first decades of the twenty-first century, arguing that the post-Bolaño moment has produced the strongest signs of a truly reciprocal literature of the Americas in more than a hundred years.

Uncommon Grounds

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Latin American Literature ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Song Of Solomon ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
The Us

This chapter turns from a historical account of the development of the US literature of experience and the Latin American literature of reading to a textual analysis of the US and Latin American historical novel. Hemispheric/inter-American scholars often cite William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) as exemplifying instances of literary borrowing across the North–South divide. As I demonstrate, however, each of the later texts also realigns its predecessor’s historical imaginary according to the dominant logics of the US and Latin American literary fields. Whereas the American works foreground experiential models of reconstructing the past and conveying knowledge across generations, García Márquez’s Latin American novel presents reading as the fundamental mode of comprehending and transmitting history.

A Case of Exploding Markets: Latin American and South Asian Literary “Booms”

2018 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 466-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roanne L. Kantor
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
South Asian ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Latin American Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractThis article seeks to explain the recent popularity of South Asian Anglophone literature (beginning in 1981 and peaking between 1998 and 2008) in light of the boom in Latin American literature of the 1960s. It argues that the phenomenon of regional literary “booms” shares features across both eras, and that a unified theory of booms is increasingly important to understanding the way contemporary literature circulates around the globe. Scholarship about both eras has tended to coalesce around three types of boom-driving agents: “creators,” “contexts,” and “curators.” Within that broader agreement, however, scholarship about the South Asian boom has tended to overemphasize the political symbolism of recent South Asian Anglophone literature and its global popularity, while under-emphasizing the political realities that create the conditions under which that literature became popular. This line of criticism has come at the expense of attention to literature’s other dimensions as a cultural object, as well as contextual explanations of popularity involving the role of governments, demographics, and market flows. The more diverse scholarship on the Latin American boom offers a corrective with insights for both the future of South Asian Anglophone literature and the field of World Literature.

scholarly journals The War of the Worlds May Well Start in Latin America

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 414-429
Author(s):  
Luis A. Medina Cordova
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Short Story ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Latin American Literature ◽  
Orson Welles ◽  
Production Methods ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Systems

Abstract This article analyses the literature-cinema dialogue established by the Ecuadorian writer Gabriela Alemán in her short story collection La muerte silba un blues (2014). Firstly, I revise how Alemán borrows the production methods of the cult Spanish filmmaker Jesús “Jess” Franco to craft a collection that aids us to see the world as an interconnected whole. Secondly, I close read the story that opens the collection, El extraño viaje, which takes Orson Welles’ radiophonic adaptation of The War of the Worlds to the Ecuadorian context. My argument is that, in making the city of Quito the target of H.G. Wells’ Martian invasion, Alemán engages with a rich history of multimedia adaptations and places Ecuador’s capital at the centre of a global narrative. I argue that her work decentres and recentres world literature dynamics where Latin American literature in general, and Ecuadorian writing in particular, sit at the periphery of world literary systems.

A History of Chilean Literature

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Latin American Literature ◽  
Chilean Literature ◽  
Ethnocultural Groups ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Times

This book covers the full range and diversity of Chilean literature from the times of the Spanish conquest to the present. By emphasizing transnational, hemispheric, and global approaches to Chilean literature, it reflects the relevance of themes such as neoliberalism, migration and exile, as well as subfields like ethnic studies, and gender and sexuality studies. It showcases the diversity of Chilean literature throughout all periods, regions, ethnocultural groups and social classes, all the while foregrounding its regional variations. Unlike previous literary histories, it maps a rich heterogeneity by including works by Chileans of indigenous, African, Jewish, Arab, Asian, and Croatian ancestries, as well as studies of literature by LGTBQ authors and Chilean Americans. Ambitious and authoritative, this book is essential reading for scholars of Chilean Literature, Latin American Literature, the Global South, and World Literature.

Introduction to Latin American Literature: A Bilingual Anthology

Chasqui ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 131
Author(s):  
Evelio Echevarría ◽  
Jack Child
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Latin American Literature
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