Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (Volume 14) (FlashPoints) - Softcover

Siskind, Mariano

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810129906 ISBN 13: 9780810129900

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2014

Synopsis

Mariano Siskind's groundbreaking debut book redefines the scope of world literature, locating Latin America in the context of cosmopolitan imaginaries and mappings. In Siskind's formulation, world literature is a modernizing discursive strategy, a way in which Latin American culture has negotiated its aspirations to participate in global networks of cultural exchange, and an original tool to reorganize literary history. Reading across novels, poems, essays, travel narratives, and historical documents, Siskind shows how Latin American literary modernity was produced as a global relation, from the rise of planetary novels in the 1870s, to cosmopolitan modernism at the turn of the twentieth century, to the global spread of magical realism. With its unusual breadth of reference and a firm but unobtrusive grounding in philosophy, literary theory, and psychoanalysis, Cosmopolitan Desires will have a major impact in the fields of Latin American studies and comparative literature.

About this title

About the Author

MARIANO SISKIND is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University.

From the Back Cover

"In this probing and highly original study, Mariano Siskind stages a fascinating confrontation between peripheral cosmopolitanism and the discourse of world literature, both in modernist literary culture and in today's academic study. Bolstered with illuminating readings of major writers and little-discussed figures, Cosmopolitan Desires challenges Latin Americanists and students of world literature alike to rethink the terms, and the agendas, of literary studies in a global age."--David Damrosch, author of What is World Literature?

"Rarely is such a consequential critical intervention so firmly grounded in exquisite close readings. Cosmopolitan Desires recovers the largely forgotten story of the profound ways in which--from modernismo through the Boom to contemporary debates about globalization--'Latin American literature' and 'world literature' have desired and shaped one other. Anyone interested in Latin American literature will have read it; anyone interested in world literature should."--Christopher Bush, author of Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media

"This sophisticated and provocative book rethinks the functions, values, and conflicts of Latin American literature in modern societies. Within the frame of 'world literature,' Siskind sheds new light on the geopolitical configurations of knowledge and cleverly explains the dynamics of local literary productions."--Graciela Montaldo, author of La sensibilidad amenazada. Fin de siglo y modernismo

Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810129906
• ISBN 13: 9780810129900
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328