Tradition and Modernity in Spanish American Literature From Darío to Carpentier

by Sharman, Adam

• ISBN13: 9781403974877
• ISBN10: 140397487X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-10-17
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Modernity in Spanish America has been viewed by a 'postmodern' cultural studies as a condition of the first half of the twentieth century whose major political, philosophical and cultural assumptions the region would do well to leave behind. This book explores a corpus of Spanish-American literary texts from that 'modern' period which dramatize the constitutive dynamics of modernity, in particular the legacy of the French Revolution, the logic of nationalism, the founding of the modern city, and the awkward relationship to both Western and indigenous traditions. Its argument is that one cannot so easily take leave of modernity.

Author Biography

Adam Sharman is Lecturer in Hispanic and Latin American Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK.  He has published on Spanish-American literature and critical theory, and is the editor of The Poetry and Poetics of César Vallejo: The Fourth Angle of the Circle (1997).
 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	viii
Introduction: Tradition and Modernity, Literature and Cultural Studies	ix
The Things that Travel: On Tradition and Modernity in Latin America	1	(26)
Introduction	1	(2)
Modernity as Material Reality and as a Philosophico--Aesthetic Concept	3	(8)
Latin American modernidad	11	(4)
Hybrid Cultures and One Postmodern Critique of Modernity	15	(2)
A Note on Names: Postmodernism, Postmodernity, or Late Capitalism	17	(2)
Modernity under Erasure, or, the Limits of Postmodern Relativism	19	(8)
Culture Is (Not) Ordinary: The Secrets of the Slow in the Public Sphere	27	(22)
La ideologia de lo culto moderno	29	(4)
Note on the Word Culture	33	(1)
A Paradigmatic History of Latin American Cultural Studies	34	(4)
Modernism and Hegemony	38	(4)
Globalization and the Fast and Slow Economies of Art	42	(7)
Fieldwork: Cultural Studies and the Problem of Tradition	49	(18)
To Create Is to Resist	50	(2)
The Immanence of Cultural Studies and Hermeneutics	52	(3)
The Question of Context	55	(3)
The Politics of the Question of Context, or, Avant-Garde Subalternism and the Problem of Tradition	58	(5)
Articulation versus Homology	63	(4)
Modernismo, Positivism, and (Dis)inheritance in the Discourse of Literary History	67	(18)
History and Modernity	67	(3)
Autonomy Domine	70	(4)
El cuchillo divisor	74	(2)
LEMA: Arte y progreso	76	(3)
History and the Proper Name	79	(1)
Rituals	80	(5)
Vallejo, Semicolonialism, and Poetemporality	85	(24)
Postcolonial Theory on Semicolonial Times	86	(5)
The Ghost of Lenin	91	(2)
Symbolist Imperial Nostalgias	93	(3)
The (Peruvian) Western Discourse of Modernity	96	(3)
Poetemporality	99	(2)
Two Alternatives for Trilce VI	101	(5)
The Peruvian (Western) Discourse of Modernity	106	(3)
Borges and a Differently Colored History	109	(26)
The History of Eternity	111	(2)
The Question of Modernity (and Tradition)	113	(5)
A Personal (Platonic) Theory of Eternity	118	(4)
The Eternal Return: `44, `46, `43, `44, `46 . . .	122	(4)
The Context of Nationalism	126	(5)
Otra historia	131	(4)
Rulfo and the Mexican Roman Trinity	135	(24)
Transculturation	135	(3)
Pedro Paramo and the Mexican Roman Trinity	138	(9)
``Luvina'' and the Time of Tradition	147	(4)
The Origins of Technique	151	(3)
Demo(cra)tic Design	154	(3)
Conclusion	157	(2)
This Is Not a Revolution: Carpentier on the Age of Enlightenment	159	(20)
Of Ripe Immaturity: Enlightenment and Popular Culture	161	(2)
The Two Functions of Religion: Birthright and Grand Narrative	163	(4)
The Grand Narrative of Nature	167	(8)
Narrative Art and Magic	175	(4)
Conclusion	179	(8)
Notes	187	(34)
Bibliography	221	(10)
Index	231