Do the Americas have a common literature?
This volume takes an important step toward the discovery of a common critical heritage that joins the diverse literatures of North America and Latin America. Traditionally, literary criticism has treated the literature of the Americas as "New World" literature, examining it in relation to its "Old World"--Usually European--counterparts. This collection of essays redirects the Eurocentric focus of earlier scholarship and identifies a distinctive pan-American consciousness. The essays here place the literature of the Americas in a hemispheric context by drawing on approaches derived from various schools of contemporary critical thought--Marxism, feminism, culture studies, semiotics, reception aesthetics, and poststructuralism. As part of their search for a distinctly New World literary idiom, the contributors engage not only the major North American and Spanish American writers, but also such "marginal" or "minor" literatures as Chicano, African American, Brazilian, and Québecois. In identifying areas of agreement and confluence, this work lays the groundwork for finding historical, ideological, and cultural homogeneity in the imaginative writing of the Americas. --! From publisher's description
Criticism, interpretation, etc
ix, 394 pages ; 23 cm
9780822310549, 9780822310723, 0822310546, 0822310724
21330208
The usable past : the idea of history in modern U.S. and Latin American fiction / Lois Parkinson Zamora
Form and function in the New World legend / David T. Haberly
The dialectics of our America / Jose David Saldivar
The repeating island / Antonio Benitez-Rojo
Through blues / Jose Piedra
Plagiarized authenticity : Sarmiento's Cooper and others / Doris Sommer
The accidental tourist : Walt Whitman in Latin America / Enrico Mario Santi
American theriomorphia : the presence of Mulatez in Cirilo Villaverde and beyond / Eduardo Gonzalez
Mysteries we reread, mysteries of rereading : Poe, Borges, and the analytic detective story ; also Lacan, Derrida, and Johnson / John T. Irwin
Marking space, charting time : text and territory in Faulkner's "The Bear" and Carpentier's "Los pasos perdidos" / Wendy B. Faris
In-fringe : the role of French criticism in the fiction of Nicole Brossard and Severo Sarduy / Rene Prieto
Mischling and metis : common and uncommon languages in Adrienne Rich and Aime Cesaire / Jonathan Monroe
The strut of the centipede : Jose Lezama Lima and New World exceptionalism / Gustavo Perez Firmat