Mistral takes advantage of her status as representative, and the representational capacities of language, to make visible the traces of what otherwise escapes the official order of things.
Monthly Archives for February 2023
On Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems
A conversation for SPAN 312 and RMST 202 about Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. With Brianne Orr-Alvarez and Jon Beasley-Murray.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
A great writer not only writes great work, but also, more fundamentally and importantly, changes our sense of what great work is, and even charts a new role for the writer in society.
On Mariano Azuela, The Underdogs
A conversation for SPAN 312 about Mariano Azuela’s novel of the Mexican Revolution, The Underdogs (Los de abajo). With Ignacio Sánchez Prado and Jon Beasley-Murray.
The Underdogs
Azuela reveals aspects of the Revolution that are apolitical, anti-political, or even infrapolitical (the non-political conditions of possibility for the political), in that he depicts it in terms of drives and emergent habits that have not yet fully coalesced into political form.
On Nellie Campobello, Cartucho
A conversation for SPAN 312 about Nellie Campobello’s novel of the Mexican Revolution, Cartucho. With Ryan Long and Jon Beasley-Murray.
Cartucho
Campobello restores the idea that something was truly at stake in a conflict that can otherwise appear so chaotic and disorderly: at its best, it was fought for the right to play, to laugh, to feel, to be free from constraint.
Mama Blanca’s Memoirs
This is a “backwoods” history that aims, with gentle irony, to question the usual privileging of “civilization” over “barbarism” that otherwise structures most literary depictions of nineteenth-century Latin America.
Hopscotch! The Rules of the Game
What is the “play”—the “freedom, opportunity, or room for action; scope for activity”—that literature offers, once we realize that there is no one “right” way of reading?
Posthegemony 