A book review of: Giles Scott-Smith, and Charlotte Lerg, editors, Campaigning Culture and the Glo... more A book review of: Giles Scott-Smith, and Charlotte Lerg, editors, Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War: The Journals of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
No es común que algo tan insignificante como una mera esponja figure entre los últimos pensamient... more No es común que algo tan insignificante como una mera esponja figure entre los últimos pensamientos de un hombre agonizante, pero así es en el caso de Artemio Cruz. "Dicen que las células de la esponja no están unidas por nada," piensa, y sin embargo la esponja está unida: eso dicen, eso recuerdo, porque dicen que si se rasga violentamente a la esponja, la esponja hecha trizas vuelve a unirse, nunca pierde su unidad, busca la manera de agregar otra vez sus células dispersas, nunca muere, ah, nunca muere. 1 No obstante aunque no es común, sí es muy apropiado porque esta descripción constituye, en efecto, una metáfora exacta de la vida del protagonista. Fuentes ha comentado la vigencia del modelo del mito de la creación, de la pérdida de la unidad primordial como resultado del contacto con la historia, en la obra de Juan Rulfo: yo diría que este mismo principio rige su propia obra. La vida de Cruz se organiza alrededor de cuatro relaciones principales, cada una configurada como un nuevo comienzo, sin tomar en cuenta el pasado. En el principio, sale expulsado del (falso) paraíso de su niñez, su visión se ajusta al fluir unidireccional del tiempo, abarcando solamente el porvenir; deja de mirar hacia atrás. El construye cada una de las siguientes etapas como una célula independiente, desligada de lo que la había precedido y, en efecto, dado origen. Las unidades se describen en términos del campo semántico de la caída del Edén: en cada relación hace un esfuerzo explícito por recobrar su inocencia, borrando todo recuerdo de la pérdida de la misma, y de la vergüenza que ha provocado. El desea que cada "mundo nuevo" que erige sea-como su arquitecto
Cohn 262 de todas las capitales que no esconden su interés …" (ibid.). Rather, for Donoso, the te... more Cohn 262 de todas las capitales que no esconden su interés …" (ibid.). Rather, for Donoso, the term means the story of how "la novela hispanoamericana comenzó a hablar un idioma internacional", 2 that is, how he and fellow Boom writers Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa found their inspiration in the work of modern writers such as Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, and Woolf, among others; the term also refers to the Spanish American authors' aspiration to reach audiences outside of their own nations. It is, however, impossible to overlook the role of international publishers, literary prizes, translations, agents, and politics in bringing the Boom to a Western audience. Critics have long noted the key
This essay examines the history of an academic certificate in American studies that was developed... more This essay examines the history of an academic certificate in American studies that was developed and implemented by Robert Spiller (University of Pennsylvania) at the behest of the US Information Agency, and targeted at non-US citizens outside of the US. The certificate’s genesis and trajectory were rooted in and inflected by contemporary interest in the field of American studies as offering a means of conducting cultural diplomacy by disseminating information about the US, its way of life, and the benefits offered by the democratic system. The history of the program, like that of the field as a whole, thus reveals how American studies assumed an ambassadorial role abroad for the nation in its new capacity as a world power. At the same time, it also shows the fault lines between the images of the nation that scholars and US officials sought to project, and what audiences abroad were most interested in knowing.
Carlos Fuentes was an extremely influential figure in my intellectual development. His novels sti... more Carlos Fuentes was an extremely influential figure in my intellectual development. His novels stimulated my interest in Spanish American literature, and his writings on William Faulkner inspired the work that became my dissertation and, ultimately, my first book. He was likewise a dominant figure in my research on the Mexican intelligentsia, and there is not a single chapter in my latest book, The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism during the Cold War, in which he does not play a determining role. Through Julio Ortega, I was fortunate to meet him at Brown as a graduate student and, later, talk to him about my most recent book project, and these interactions were formative for me. This essay focuses on Fuentes's roles as what José Donoso so aptly characterized as "el primer agente activo y consciente de la internacionalización de la novela hispanoamericana de la década de los años sesenta," and, more generally, as cultural ambassador for the Boom (49). Specifically, I examine two episodes in which Fuentes carried out this role while navigating the fraught political waters of Spanish American-U.S. relations in the decade following the Cuban Revolution. "Ridiculous Rather Than Secure": Fuentes and the McCarran-Walter Act My first case study centers on Fuentes's multiple brushes during the 1960s with Section 212(a)28 of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, otherwise known as the McCarran-Walter Act, which denied U.S. visas on ideological grounds, that is, in effect, on the suspicion of Communist beliefs. The close encounters of Spanish American writers of notably different political stances-CARLOS FUENTES: FOSTERING LATIN AMERICAN-U.S. RELATIONS DURING THE BOOM 1
Set during the years of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) terrorist campaign that wrought havoc... more Set during the years of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) terrorist campaign that wrought havoc on Peru's social and political systems, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (Historia de Mayta, 1984) and Death in the Andes (Lituma en los Andes, 1993) coincide in their exploration of political violence within revolutionary contexts: both depict a nation that has become apocalyptic as a result of Sendero Luminoso's actions; both look to the past to identify the origins of the destructive forces that have taken over the nation; and both cast the Andes as the place of origin of Peru's political crises, with turbulence in la sierra setting the course for the nation's urban centres. Vargas Llosa also grapples with the role of Peru's indigenous populations in bringing about this social upheaval in both novels. In The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta , this question is subordinated to explorations of political ideology and of how history is written – vehicles for a critique of socialism's legacy in Latin America – but in Death in the Andes , the representation of the indigenous lies at the heart of the author's assessment of the state and fate of the nation. Hence this essay's attention to the representation of Peru's indigenous populations in both novels, and to the role that Vargas Llosa posits for them in determining Peru's political stability and future. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta recounts the investigation into a failed rebellion led by Alejandro Mayta and a young military officer named Vallejos in Jauja, a town in the Peruvian highlands, in 1958. In each of the novel’s first nine chapters, an anonymous first-person narrator, a Vargas Llosa persona researching the uprising for a novel, interviews participants in the rebellion and individuals connected to its organisers. The narrator claims to have chosen Mayta as his subject because the latter was a former classmate.
... Sur also pub-lished the work of Argentine writers who were at the forefront of the avant-gard... more ... Sur also pub-lished the work of Argentine writers who were at the forefront of the avant-garde move-ment in Spanish America, including Adolfo Bioy Casares, Borges, Cortázar, Eduardo Mallea, and Ocampo herself. As Tanya Fayen has detailed, Faulkner criticism began to ...
In the 1960s, the Cuban Revolution sparked great interest in Latin America throughout the U.S. No... more In the 1960s, the Cuban Revolution sparked great interest in Latin America throughout the U.S. Not coincidentally, the promotion and translation of literature from Latin America increased dramatically during this period. Numerous organizations developed programs to subsidize the dissemination of Latin American literature in an effort to counter Cuba¹s influence on Latin American writers and to make U.S. cultural activity attractive to the latter. This paper explores the interplay of market and political forces in the promotion of Latin American literature in the U.S. through an examination of two programs funded by Rockefeller family philanthropies during the 1960s and 1970s: a translation subsidy program supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and administered by the Association of American University Presses from 1960 to 1966; and the Center for Inter-American Relations, which first received funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in 1967. I trace the efforts of both programs at working the U.S. market to promote works and authors and create bestsellers. I also study the political motivations fostering these efforts, demonstrating how these programs were sometimes implicated in conflicting aims, seeking to promote cross-cultural understanding throughout the Americas on the one hand and, on the other, to further U.S. foreign policy interests.
Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Dedicat... more Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact:
American Studies—one of the most historically prominent venues for the study of the Americas—is u... more American Studies—one of the most historically prominent venues for the study of the Americas—is under siege on many fronts. The annual conference, once parodied as a bizarre and quirky mix of pop cultural ephemera, is still dismissed as “anti-American Studies.” Leaders of the field have been engaged in a lengthy, introspective, somewhat bloody monologue about its complicity in projects of empire, exceptionalism, and global advantage, with most of these debates referring, almost inevitably, to the reckless use of the term “American,” and suggesting, in one way or another, a more self-reflexive, transnational, cosmopolitan, or internationalist deployment of that troublesome name.1 Finally, American Studies is an easy target in an age of budget crises and proto-corporate initiatives. Conceived in a nation renowned for its anti-intellectualism and its supposedly practical “know-how,” the field has no easily summed methodology, produces no immediately or instrumentally significant skills for the workplace, and the object of its study is, as some see it, so blurry as to be beyond mere vagueness and imprecision.
A book review of: Giles Scott-Smith, and Charlotte Lerg, editors, Campaigning Culture and the Glo... more A book review of: Giles Scott-Smith, and Charlotte Lerg, editors, Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War: The Journals of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
No es común que algo tan insignificante como una mera esponja figure entre los últimos pensamient... more No es común que algo tan insignificante como una mera esponja figure entre los últimos pensamientos de un hombre agonizante, pero así es en el caso de Artemio Cruz. "Dicen que las células de la esponja no están unidas por nada," piensa, y sin embargo la esponja está unida: eso dicen, eso recuerdo, porque dicen que si se rasga violentamente a la esponja, la esponja hecha trizas vuelve a unirse, nunca pierde su unidad, busca la manera de agregar otra vez sus células dispersas, nunca muere, ah, nunca muere. 1 No obstante aunque no es común, sí es muy apropiado porque esta descripción constituye, en efecto, una metáfora exacta de la vida del protagonista. Fuentes ha comentado la vigencia del modelo del mito de la creación, de la pérdida de la unidad primordial como resultado del contacto con la historia, en la obra de Juan Rulfo: yo diría que este mismo principio rige su propia obra. La vida de Cruz se organiza alrededor de cuatro relaciones principales, cada una configurada como un nuevo comienzo, sin tomar en cuenta el pasado. En el principio, sale expulsado del (falso) paraíso de su niñez, su visión se ajusta al fluir unidireccional del tiempo, abarcando solamente el porvenir; deja de mirar hacia atrás. El construye cada una de las siguientes etapas como una célula independiente, desligada de lo que la había precedido y, en efecto, dado origen. Las unidades se describen en términos del campo semántico de la caída del Edén: en cada relación hace un esfuerzo explícito por recobrar su inocencia, borrando todo recuerdo de la pérdida de la misma, y de la vergüenza que ha provocado. El desea que cada "mundo nuevo" que erige sea-como su arquitecto
Cohn 262 de todas las capitales que no esconden su interés …" (ibid.). Rather, for Donoso, the te... more Cohn 262 de todas las capitales que no esconden su interés …" (ibid.). Rather, for Donoso, the term means the story of how "la novela hispanoamericana comenzó a hablar un idioma internacional", 2 that is, how he and fellow Boom writers Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa found their inspiration in the work of modern writers such as Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, and Woolf, among others; the term also refers to the Spanish American authors' aspiration to reach audiences outside of their own nations. It is, however, impossible to overlook the role of international publishers, literary prizes, translations, agents, and politics in bringing the Boom to a Western audience. Critics have long noted the key
This essay examines the history of an academic certificate in American studies that was developed... more This essay examines the history of an academic certificate in American studies that was developed and implemented by Robert Spiller (University of Pennsylvania) at the behest of the US Information Agency, and targeted at non-US citizens outside of the US. The certificate’s genesis and trajectory were rooted in and inflected by contemporary interest in the field of American studies as offering a means of conducting cultural diplomacy by disseminating information about the US, its way of life, and the benefits offered by the democratic system. The history of the program, like that of the field as a whole, thus reveals how American studies assumed an ambassadorial role abroad for the nation in its new capacity as a world power. At the same time, it also shows the fault lines between the images of the nation that scholars and US officials sought to project, and what audiences abroad were most interested in knowing.
Carlos Fuentes was an extremely influential figure in my intellectual development. His novels sti... more Carlos Fuentes was an extremely influential figure in my intellectual development. His novels stimulated my interest in Spanish American literature, and his writings on William Faulkner inspired the work that became my dissertation and, ultimately, my first book. He was likewise a dominant figure in my research on the Mexican intelligentsia, and there is not a single chapter in my latest book, The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism during the Cold War, in which he does not play a determining role. Through Julio Ortega, I was fortunate to meet him at Brown as a graduate student and, later, talk to him about my most recent book project, and these interactions were formative for me. This essay focuses on Fuentes's roles as what José Donoso so aptly characterized as "el primer agente activo y consciente de la internacionalización de la novela hispanoamericana de la década de los años sesenta," and, more generally, as cultural ambassador for the Boom (49). Specifically, I examine two episodes in which Fuentes carried out this role while navigating the fraught political waters of Spanish American-U.S. relations in the decade following the Cuban Revolution. "Ridiculous Rather Than Secure": Fuentes and the McCarran-Walter Act My first case study centers on Fuentes's multiple brushes during the 1960s with Section 212(a)28 of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, otherwise known as the McCarran-Walter Act, which denied U.S. visas on ideological grounds, that is, in effect, on the suspicion of Communist beliefs. The close encounters of Spanish American writers of notably different political stances-CARLOS FUENTES: FOSTERING LATIN AMERICAN-U.S. RELATIONS DURING THE BOOM 1
Set during the years of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) terrorist campaign that wrought havoc... more Set during the years of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) terrorist campaign that wrought havoc on Peru's social and political systems, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (Historia de Mayta, 1984) and Death in the Andes (Lituma en los Andes, 1993) coincide in their exploration of political violence within revolutionary contexts: both depict a nation that has become apocalyptic as a result of Sendero Luminoso's actions; both look to the past to identify the origins of the destructive forces that have taken over the nation; and both cast the Andes as the place of origin of Peru's political crises, with turbulence in la sierra setting the course for the nation's urban centres. Vargas Llosa also grapples with the role of Peru's indigenous populations in bringing about this social upheaval in both novels. In The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta , this question is subordinated to explorations of political ideology and of how history is written – vehicles for a critique of socialism's legacy in Latin America – but in Death in the Andes , the representation of the indigenous lies at the heart of the author's assessment of the state and fate of the nation. Hence this essay's attention to the representation of Peru's indigenous populations in both novels, and to the role that Vargas Llosa posits for them in determining Peru's political stability and future. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta recounts the investigation into a failed rebellion led by Alejandro Mayta and a young military officer named Vallejos in Jauja, a town in the Peruvian highlands, in 1958. In each of the novel’s first nine chapters, an anonymous first-person narrator, a Vargas Llosa persona researching the uprising for a novel, interviews participants in the rebellion and individuals connected to its organisers. The narrator claims to have chosen Mayta as his subject because the latter was a former classmate.
... Sur also pub-lished the work of Argentine writers who were at the forefront of the avant-gard... more ... Sur also pub-lished the work of Argentine writers who were at the forefront of the avant-garde move-ment in Spanish America, including Adolfo Bioy Casares, Borges, Cortázar, Eduardo Mallea, and Ocampo herself. As Tanya Fayen has detailed, Faulkner criticism began to ...
In the 1960s, the Cuban Revolution sparked great interest in Latin America throughout the U.S. No... more In the 1960s, the Cuban Revolution sparked great interest in Latin America throughout the U.S. Not coincidentally, the promotion and translation of literature from Latin America increased dramatically during this period. Numerous organizations developed programs to subsidize the dissemination of Latin American literature in an effort to counter Cuba¹s influence on Latin American writers and to make U.S. cultural activity attractive to the latter. This paper explores the interplay of market and political forces in the promotion of Latin American literature in the U.S. through an examination of two programs funded by Rockefeller family philanthropies during the 1960s and 1970s: a translation subsidy program supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and administered by the Association of American University Presses from 1960 to 1966; and the Center for Inter-American Relations, which first received funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in 1967. I trace the efforts of both programs at working the U.S. market to promote works and authors and create bestsellers. I also study the political motivations fostering these efforts, demonstrating how these programs were sometimes implicated in conflicting aims, seeking to promote cross-cultural understanding throughout the Americas on the one hand and, on the other, to further U.S. foreign policy interests.
Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Dedicat... more Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact:
American Studies—one of the most historically prominent venues for the study of the Americas—is u... more American Studies—one of the most historically prominent venues for the study of the Americas—is under siege on many fronts. The annual conference, once parodied as a bizarre and quirky mix of pop cultural ephemera, is still dismissed as “anti-American Studies.” Leaders of the field have been engaged in a lengthy, introspective, somewhat bloody monologue about its complicity in projects of empire, exceptionalism, and global advantage, with most of these debates referring, almost inevitably, to the reckless use of the term “American,” and suggesting, in one way or another, a more self-reflexive, transnational, cosmopolitan, or internationalist deployment of that troublesome name.1 Finally, American Studies is an easy target in an age of budget crises and proto-corporate initiatives. Conceived in a nation renowned for its anti-intellectualism and its supposedly practical “know-how,” the field has no easily summed methodology, produces no immediately or instrumentally significant skills for the workplace, and the object of its study is, as some see it, so blurry as to be beyond mere vagueness and imprecision.
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