Do the Americas Have a Common Literature?

Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? PDF Author: Gustavo Pérez Firmat
Publisher: Durham : Duke University Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
In contrast to traditional criticism which tends to examine World counterparts, the essays in this collection identify a distinctive pan-American consciousness (and literary idiom), engaging not only the major North American and Spanish American writers, but also such literatures as the Chicano, African-American, Brazilian, and Quebecois. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Do the Americas Have a Common Literature?

Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? PDF Author: Gustavo Pérez Firmat
Publisher: Durham : Duke University Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
In contrast to traditional criticism which tends to examine World counterparts, the essays in this collection identify a distinctive pan-American consciousness (and literary idiom), engaging not only the major North American and Spanish American writers, but also such literatures as the Chicano, African-American, Brazilian, and Quebecois. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

When We Arrive

When We Arrive PDF Author:
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816521418
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Most readers and critics view Mexican American writing as a subset of American literatureÑor at best as a stream running parallel to the main literary current. JosŽ Aranda now reexamines American literary history from the perspective of Chicano/a studies to show that Mexican Americans have had a key role in the literary output of the United States for one hundred fifty years. In this bold new look at the American canon, Aranda weaves the threads of Mexican American literature into the broader tapestry of Anglo American writing, especially its Puritan origins, by pointing out common ties that bind the two traditions: narratives of persecution, of immigration, and of communal crises, alongside chronicles of the promise of America. Examining texts ranging from Mar’a Amparo Ruiz de Burton's 1872 critique of the Civil War, Who Would Have Thought It?, through the contemporary autobiographies of Richard Rodriguez and Cherr’e Moraga, he surveys Mexican American history, politics, and literature, locating his analyses within the context of Chicano/a cultural criticism of the last four decades. When We Arrive integrates Early American Studies and Chicano/a Studies into a comparative cultural framework by using the Puritan connection to shed new light on dominant images of Chicano/a narrative, such as Aztl‡n and the borderlands. Aranda explores the influence of a nationalized Puritan ethos on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers of Mexican descent, particularly upon constructions of ethnic identity and aesthetic values. He then frames the rise of contemporary Chicano/a literature within a critical body of work produced from the 1930s through the 1950s, one that combines a Puritan myth of origins with a literary history in which American literature is heralded as the product and producer of social and political dissent. Aranda's work is a virtual sourcebook of historical figures, texts, and ideas that revitalizes both Chicano/a studies and American literary history. By showing how a comparative study of two genres can produce a more integrated literary history for the United States, When We Arrive enables critics and readers alike to see Mexican American literature as part of a broader tradition and establishes for its writers a more deserving place in the American literary imagination.

A New Literary History of America

A New Literary History of America PDF Author: Greil Marcus
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674265815
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1129

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Book Description
America is a nation making itself up as it goes along—a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history. In more than two hundred original essays, A New Literary History of America brings together the nation’s many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what “Made in America” means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric—cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape. The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on Tarzan, Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter, Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye, and Ishmael Reed on Huckleberry Finn. From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, Life, Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, new.

Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere

Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere PDF Author: Anna Brickhouse
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139456539
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
This wide-ranging comparative study argues for a fundamental reassessment of the literary history of the nineteenth-century United States within the transamerican and multilingual contexts that shaped it. Drawing on an array of texts in English, French and Spanish by both canonical and neglected writers and activists, Anna Brickhouse investigates interactions between US, Latin American and Caribbean literatures. Her many examples and case studies include the Mexican genealogies of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the rewriting of Uncle Tom's Cabin by a Haitian dramatist, and a French Caribbean translation of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley. Brickhouse uncovers lines of literary influence and descent linking Philadelphia and Havana, Port-au-Prince and Boston, Paris and New Orleans. She argues for a new understanding of this most formative period of literary production in the United States as a 'transamerican renaissance', a rich era of literary border-crossing and transcontinental cultural exchange.

South to A New Place

South to A New Place PDF Author: Suzanne W. Jones
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807128404
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
Taking Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place as a starting point, contributors to this exciting collection continue the work of critically and creatively remapping the South through their freewheeling studies of southern literature and culture. Appraising representations of the South within a context that is postmodern, diverse, widely inclusive, and international, the essays present multiple ways of imagining the South and examine both new places and old landscapes in an attempt to tie the mythic southern balloon down to earth. In his foreword, an insightful discussion of numerous Souths and the ways they are perceived, Richard Gray explains one of the key goals of the book: to open up to scrutiny the literary and cultural practice that has come to be known as “regionalism.” Part I, “Surveying the Territory,” theorizes definitions of place and region, and includes an analysis of southern literary regionalism from the 1930s to the present and an exploration of southern popular culture. In “Mapping the Region,” essayists examine different representations of rural landscapes and small towns, cities and suburbs, as well as liminal zones in which new immigrants make their homes. Reflecting the contributors’ transatlantic perspective, “Making Global Connections” challenges notions of southern distinctiveness by reading the region through the comparative frameworks of Southern Italy, East Germany, Latin America, and the United Kingdom and via a range of texts and contexts—from early reconciliation romances to Faulkner’s fictions about race to the more recent parody of southern mythmaking, Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone. Together, these essays explore the roles that economic, racial, and ideological tensions have played in the formation of southern identity through varying representations of locality, moving regionalism toward a “new place” in southern studies.

Canada & Its Americas

Canada & Its Americas PDF Author: Winfried Siemerling
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773584641
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
The chapters in this volume, a groundbreaking work in the burgeoning field of hemispheric American studies, expand the horizons of Canadian and Québécois literatures, suggest alternative approaches to models centred on the United States, and analyze the risks and benefits of hemispheric approaches to Canada and Quebec. Revealing the connections among a broad range of Canadian, Québécois, American, Caribbean, Latin American, and diasporic literatures, the contributors critique the neglect of Canadian works in Hemispheric studies and show how such writing can be successfully integrated into an emerging area of literary inquiry. An important development in understanding the diversity of literatures throughout the western hemisphere, Canada and Its Americas reveals exciting new ways for thinking about transnationalism, regionalism, border cultures, and the literatures they produce.

Sub-versions of the Archive

Sub-versions of the Archive PDF Author: Carlos Riobó
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 161148037X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Sub-Versions of the Archive: Manuel Puig's and Severo Sarduy's Alternative Identities analyzes recent theories of the archive to examine how Manuel Puig and Severo Sarduy reformulate the Latin American literary tradition. This study focuses on eclectic theories of the archive as both repository and danger, drawing from an array of sources both within and outside the Hispanic literary tradition: from Borges, Foucault, Arrom, Derrida, Gonz_lez Echevarr'a, and Guillory to digital media and biotechnology. This book also applies theories of cultural contamination (Maria Lugones) and symbolic capital (Pierre Bourdieu) to the novels of Puig and Sarduy to explore the representation of marginal cultures within a body of literature that previously altered or elided these subaltern cultures from the tradition. Through close readings and critical theoretical applications, this book demonstrates how archival fiction continues to be one of the most popular strategies among Latin American novelists and, most importantly, how they have successfully managed to find new ways to inscribe their alternative fictions within this tradition. Puig's and Sarduy's novels reproduce discourses-popular culture and the mass media-that lack prestige within the traditional archive. These discourses mirror realities of marginal groups-gay people, children, the poor, the illiterate, women, and racial minorities. Their cultural variants, sub-versions of hegemonic masterstories, are endowed with truth-bearing power for them, but were previously left out of the archive as legitimate novelistic models. To date, this is the only study of contemporary Latin American fiction that puts current theories of the archive-especially that of Roberto Gonz_lez Echevarr'a-to practice in such a systematic way. Riob-'s analysis of how Puig and Sarduy reformulate the Latin American canon is both a necessary complement of Gonz_lez Echevarr'a's work and an intelligent answer to the first of his projected masterstories. Riob-'s multidisciplinary approach offers a deep understanding and analysis of both the archive and of some of the Spanish language's most innovative and complex fiction.

The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature

The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature PDF Author: Yogita Goyal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316982629
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
For two decades, the 'transnational turn' in literary studies has generated enormous comment and controversy. This Companion provides a comprehensive account of the scope, impact, and critical possibilities of the transnational turn in American literary studies. It situates the study of American literature in relation to ethnic, postcolonial, and hemispheric studies. Leading scholars open up wide-ranging examinations of transnationalism in American literature - through form and aesthetics, theories of nation, gender, sexuality, religion, and race, as well as through conventional forms of historical periodization. Offering a new map of American literature in the global era, this volume provides a history of the field, key debates, and instances of literary readings that convey the way in which transnationalism may be seen as a method, not just a description of literary work that engages more than one nation. Contributors identify the key modes by which writers have responded to major historical, political, and ethical issues prompted by the globalization of literary studies.

After the Nation

After the Nation PDF Author: Pedro Garcia-Caro
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810129957
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
After the Nation proposes a series of groundbreaking new approaches to novels, essays, and short stories by Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon within the framework of a hemispheric American studies. García-Caro offers a pioneering comparativist approach to the contemporary American and Mexican literary canons and their underlying nationalist encodement through the study of a wide range of texts by Pynchon and Fuentes which question and historicize in different ways the processes of national definition and myth-making deployed in the drawing of literary borders. After the Nation looks at these literary narratives as postnational satires that aim to unravel and denounce the combined hegemonic processes of modernity and nationalism while they start to contemplate the ensuing postnational constellations. These are texts that playfully challenge the temporal and spatial designs of national themes while they point to and debase “holy” borders, international borders as well as the internal lines where narratives of nation are embodied and consecrated. !--StartFragment--

The Routledge Companion to Inter-American Studies

The Routledge Companion to Inter-American Studies PDF Author: Wilfried Raussert
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317290658
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 461

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Book Description
An essential overview of this blossoming field, The Routledge Companion to Inter-American Studies is the first collection to draw together the diverse approaches and perspectives on the field, highlighting the importance of Inter-American Studies as it is practiced today. Including contributions from canonical figures in the field as well as a younger generation of scholars, reflecting the foundation and emergence of the field and establishing links between older and newer methodologies, this Companion covers: Theoretical reflections Colonial and historical perspectives Cultural and political intersections Border discourses Sites and mobilities Literary and linguistic perspectives Area studies, global studies, and postnational studies Phenomena of transfer, interconnectedness, power asymmetry, and transversality within the Americas.