The Places of History

by Sommer, Doris

• ISBN13: 9780822323105
• ISBN10: 0822323109
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-05-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

The Places of History regrounds literary criticism in the particularities of history so as to probe those gaps created by reading Latin American literature through either the lenses of a totalising view of a globalised culture or through universal formulae for reading offered by metanarratives. It is history which points to the tension between social reality and the theoretical categories used to talk about it-an idea which resides in the background of each of the essays. Several of the essays explore this concept in detail to flexibly probe the incommensurability of empirical history with any code or formula. Other essays go on to explore this problem with relation to the differences between Latin American reality and principally north Atlantic models of modernity, these differences in turn becoming signs of particular regional identity in an increasingly globalised world; the response of elites to these differences through the establishment of monocultural patriotism and nationalism; and the possibilities of dialogue and alliance opposed to monocultural representations as expressed within the Romance in Latin American literature. At the centre of this collection is the idea of the shifting, unstable signpost which points to multiple and equivocal meanings. It is only by exploring the particularities of regional historical cultures that the sign's span of meaning may be delimited and differentiated, probed for its revelation into the life at the heart of Latin American literature. The Places of History will be of interest to Latin Americanists and literary scholars alike for its eclectic and often experimental approach to the reading of texts and the reality they seek to capture.

Table of Contents

The Places of History: Regionalism Revisited in Latin America	1	(10)
Doris Sommer
The Corpus Delicti	11	(10)
Josefina Ludmer
Overwriting Pinochet: Undoing the Culture of Fear in Chile	21	(13)
Mary Louise Pratt
The Historical Meaning of Curelty in Machado de Assis	34	(15)
Roberto Schwarz
Linguistic Maps, Literary Geographies, and Cultural Landscapes: Languages, Lanugaging, and (Trans)nationalism	49	(17)
Walter D. Mignolo
The Lightning Bolt Yields to the Rainbow: Indigenous Histroy and Colonial Semiosis in the Royal Commentaries of El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega	66	(15)
Jose Antonio Mazzotti
The True History of Early Modern Writing in Spanish: Some American Reflections	81	(13)
Mary M. Gaylord
The Burden of Modernity	94	(10)
Carlos J. Alonso
Salvador Brau: The Paradox of the Autonomista Tradition	104	(15)
Arcadio Diaz-Quinones
Nation and Mockery: The Oppositional Writings of Simon Rodriguez	119	(15)
Susana Rotker
Melodrama, Sex, and Nation in Latin merica's Fin de Siglo	134	(10)
Francine Masiello
Italin Opea in Early National Mexico	144	(10)
Nancy Vogeley
The Real Thing (Our Rigoberta)	154	(11)
John Beverley
Reading Loose Women Reading	165	(15)
Debra A. Castillo
``Damnable Iteration'': The Traps of Political Spectacle	180	(19)
Diana Taylor
Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi and the Emergence of the Spanish American Novel as National Project	199	(15)
Antonio Benitez-Rojo
Translation and Revenge: Castilian and the Origins of Nationalism in the Philippines	214	(22)
Vicente L. Rafael
Mexicans, Foundational Fictions, and the United States: Caballero, a Late Border Romance	236	(13)
Jose E. Limon
The Repose of Heroes	249	(13)
Julio Ramos
His America, Our America: Jose Marti Reads Whitman	262	(12)
Sylvia Molloy
Broken English Memories	274
Juan Flores