Cooptation, Complicity, and Representation: Desire and Limits for Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Mexican Fiction: 175 (Currents in Comparative Romance Languages & Literatures) - Hardcover

Mato, Shigeko

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1433109123 ISBN 13: 9781433109126

Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing Inc, 2010

Synopsis

Is the affiliation between intellectuals and hegemony unbreakable? When intellectuals attempt to retell history from its bottom side, or when writers try to represent the so-called marginalized subject, are they not simply reinforcing the perspective and agenda of society’s hegemonic currents? Cooptation, Complicity, and Representation engages in a discussion of the problem of this potentially unbreakable affiliation between intellectuals and hegemony. Through five twentieth-century Mexican literary works: Pedro Páramo (1955, Juan Rulfo); Hasta no verte Jesús mío (1969, Elena Poniatowska); three short stories from Ciudad Real (1960, Rosario Castellanos); Llanto: Novelas imposibles (1992, Carmen Boullosa); and Muertos incómodos (falta lo que falta) (2005, Subcomandate Marcos and Paco Ignacio Taibo II), this book attempts to examine the contradictory phenomenon that emerges when intellectuals’ desire to represent a marginalized subject or history clashes with their own limited ability to fully know the marginalized. No critics have compiled these five seemingly unrelated Mexican texts in order to scrutinize such a contradictory tendency. Cooptation, Complicity, and Representation provides an innovative way to connect the five texts by delineating, within specific Mexican historical and geopolitical contexts, how and why intellectuals have difficulty moving away from the reproduction of «otherness», when they attempt to represent a marginalized subject or history. This book can be useful for those who are interested in the Spanish American boom literature, twentieth-century Mexican literature, women writing, testimonial writing, subaltern studies, postcolonial studies, historical novels, and cultural studies.

About this title

About the Author

The Author: Shigeko Mato received her Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico. She is currently Associate Professor of Spanish at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. Her articles have appeared in Letras Femeninas, Confluencia, and Hispanic Journal.

Edition details

• Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing Inc
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1433109123
• ISBN 13: 9781433109126
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 159