Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination

In Ghost-Watching American Modernity, María del Pilar Blanco revisits nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts from Spanish America and the United States to ask how different landscapes are represented as haunted sites. Moving from foundational fictions to Westerns, Blanco explores the diverse ways in which ghosts and haunting emerge across the American hemisphere for authors who are preoccupied with evoking the experience of geographical transformations during a period of unprecedented development.

The book offers an innovative approach that seeks to understand ghosts in their local specificity, rather than as products of generic conventions or as allegories of hidden desires. Its chapters pursue formally attentive readings of texts by Domingo Sarmiento, Henry James, José Martí, W. E. B. Du Bois, Juan Rulfo, Felisberto Hernández, and Clint Eastwood. In an intervention that will reconfigure the critical uses of spectrality for scholars in U.S./Latin American Studies, narrative theory, and comparative literature, Blanco advances ghost-watching as a method for rediscovering haunting on its own terms.

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Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination

In Ghost-Watching American Modernity, María del Pilar Blanco revisits nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts from Spanish America and the United States to ask how different landscapes are represented as haunted sites. Moving from foundational fictions to Westerns, Blanco explores the diverse ways in which ghosts and haunting emerge across the American hemisphere for authors who are preoccupied with evoking the experience of geographical transformations during a period of unprecedented development.

The book offers an innovative approach that seeks to understand ghosts in their local specificity, rather than as products of generic conventions or as allegories of hidden desires. Its chapters pursue formally attentive readings of texts by Domingo Sarmiento, Henry James, José Martí, W. E. B. Du Bois, Juan Rulfo, Felisberto Hernández, and Clint Eastwood. In an intervention that will reconfigure the critical uses of spectrality for scholars in U.S./Latin American Studies, narrative theory, and comparative literature, Blanco advances ghost-watching as a method for rediscovering haunting on its own terms.

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Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination

Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination

by María del Pilar Blanco
Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination

Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination

by María del Pilar Blanco

eBook

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Overview

In Ghost-Watching American Modernity, María del Pilar Blanco revisits nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts from Spanish America and the United States to ask how different landscapes are represented as haunted sites. Moving from foundational fictions to Westerns, Blanco explores the diverse ways in which ghosts and haunting emerge across the American hemisphere for authors who are preoccupied with evoking the experience of geographical transformations during a period of unprecedented development.

The book offers an innovative approach that seeks to understand ghosts in their local specificity, rather than as products of generic conventions or as allegories of hidden desires. Its chapters pursue formally attentive readings of texts by Domingo Sarmiento, Henry James, José Martí, W. E. B. Du Bois, Juan Rulfo, Felisberto Hernández, and Clint Eastwood. In an intervention that will reconfigure the critical uses of spectrality for scholars in U.S./Latin American Studies, narrative theory, and comparative literature, Blanco advances ghost-watching as a method for rediscovering haunting on its own terms.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780823242160
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Publication date: 03/01/2012
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 234
File size: 378 KB

About the Author

Maria del Pilar Blanco is Lecturer in Latin American Literature and Culture at University College London. She is the co-editor, with Esther Peeren, of Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

1 Unsolving Hemispheric Mystery 30

2 Desert Mournings 61

3 Urban Indiscretions 100

4 Transnational Shadows 149

Epilogue 179

Notes 183

Bibliography 209

Index 221

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