Anxieties of experience. The literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolano

309 Pages·2018·1.715 MB·English

by  Lawrence, Jeffrey

Anxieties of Experience
oxford studies in american literary history
Gordon Hutner, Series Editor
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Jeffory A. Clymer Nancy Glazener
America’s England Surveyors of Customs
Christopher Hanlon Joel Pfister
Writing the Rebellion The Moral Economies of
Philip Gould American Authorship
Susan M. Ryan
Antipodean America
Paul Giles After Critique
Mitchum Huehls
Living Oil
Stephanie LeMenager Unscripted America
Sarah Rivett
Making Noise, Making News
Mary Chapman Forms of Dictatorship
Jennifer Harford Vargas
Territories of Empire
Andy Doolen Anxieties of Experience
Jeffrey Lawrence
Propaganda 1776
Russ Castronovo White Writers, Race Matters
Gregory Jay
Playing in the White
Stephanie Li
Anxieties of Experience
the literatures of the americas from
whitman to bolaño
Jeffrey Lawrence
1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lawrence, Jeffrey, 1983– author.
Title: Anxieties of experience : the literatures of the Americas from
Whitman to Bolaño / Jeffrey Lawrence.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2018] |
Series: Oxford Studies in American Literary History |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017014043| ISBN 9780190690205 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780190690229 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: America—Literatures—History and criticism. |
National characteristics, American, in literature. |
National characteristics, Latin American, in literature. |
Literature and history—United States. | Literature and history—Latin America.
Classification: LCC PN846 .L39 2018 | DDC 809/.897—dc23 LC
record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014043
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For my mom, Karen, my best reader
He was an American; he wanted to submerge himself in the flow of
experience to distill the art of fiction.
Era un norteamericano; buscaba hundirse en el fluir de la experiencia
para destilar el arte de la ficción.
—ricardo piglia, Prisión Perpetua (1988)
{ Contents }
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 3
part i Hemispheric Literary Divides
1 Cultural Divergence: The US Literature of Experience
and the Latin American Literature of the Reader 31
2 An Inter-American Episode: Jorge Luis Borges, Waldo
Frank, and the Battle for Whitman’s America 75
3 Uncommon Grounds: The Representation of History in
Absalom, Absalom!, One Hundred Years of Solitude,
and Song of Solomon 101
part ii Literary Fields of the Americas
4 Full Immersion: Modernist Aesthetics and the US
Literature of Experience 125
5 Voracious Readers: The Latin American Lettered
City and the US Literature of Experience 166
Epilogue: After Bolaño: Toward a Contemporary
Literature of the Americas 206
Notes 243
Index 281

{ Acknowledgments }
This book was written, read, and edited in various places throughout
the United States and Latin America, and I’m indebted to friends and
colleagues both near and far. At Rutgers, I have benefited from dis-
cussing the book with many of my colleagues in the English Depart-
ment. I’m particularly grateful to David Kurnick, Rebecca
Walkowitz, Carter Mathes, and Nick Gaskill for reading portions of
the manuscript. During my graduate studies at Princeton, I was for-
tunate to work with faculty members in several different departments:
Comparative Literature, English, Spanish and Portuguese, and Classics.
My first thanks go to Gabriela Nouzeilles, who believed in this proj-
ect from the time it was just an idea for a dissertation prospectus.
Michael Wood, Susana Draper, and William Gleason gave me valua-
ble feedback during the dissertation process, and Daniel Rodgers,
Eileen Reeves, Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, and Rubén Gallo commented
on early versions of several chapters included here. My fellow graduate
students at Princeton provided so much of the intellectual (and anti-
intellectual) force behind this book. I especially want to thank Luis
Othoniel Rosa, Carlos Fonseca, Dora Zhang, Carl Fischer, Luis
Moreno-Caballud, Ron Wilson, Charles Samuelson, Carolina
Alvarado, Ana Sabau, Gavin Arnall, Leah Klement, Andy Lemons,
Sergio Delgado, Alejandra Josiowicz, Ivan Ortiz, Jill Jarvis, Javier
Patiño, Cate Reilly, Rachel Galvin, Kameron Collins, Sarah Wasserman,
Ritwik Bhattacharya, and Joel Suarez. I also owe a great deal to Jay
Garcia, who helped me find my disciplinary footing during the disser-
tation’s first stages. Going back even further, Anxieties of Experience has
its roots in an undergraduate thesis I wrote on Roberto Bolaño with
Ilan Stavans at Amherst College.
Parts of this book have been published in American Literary History,
Twentieth-Century Literature, and Pensamiento de los confines. During
the course of writing it, I consulted archival materials in the Centro
de Documentación e Investigación de la Cultura de Izquierdas en
Argentina (CeDInCI) in Buenos Aires, the Department of Rare Books
and Special Collections at Princeton’s Firestone Library, the Waldo
Frank papers at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Katherine