Patrick Dove Research Collection
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Item Territorios de la historia del presente y contratiempo literario en Boca de lobo(Pittsburgh University Press, 2012) Dove, PatrickLa novela de Sergio Chejfec Boca de lobo relata una improbable relacion romantica entre un escritor de mediana edad y una joven obrera Hamada Delia. La historia esta contada algunos afios mas tarde por ese mismo escritor an6nimo que evoca las circunstancias iniciales que condujeron al primer encuentro y ofrece tambien su propia vision, a menudo idiosincrasica, de las practicas y de las actitudes que caracterizan a la comunidad de clase obrera a la que Delia pertenece. El objetivo de este articulo consiste en plantear hasta que punto la cuesti6n historica constituye un problem a interpretative clave para la novela. Al hablar de cuestion hist6rica, de Ia relaci6n entre el pasado y el presente, de periodizaci6n y de transformaci6n, me refiero tan to a la historia liter aria coma a la historia social o incluso a la historia universal. Se trata entonces de tener en cuenta el hecho de que el paisaje de la Argentina del tiernpo que compartieron Delia y el narrador es muy distinto a la topografia del presente neoliberal en el cual se supone que se narra la historia.Item Mass Media Technics and Post-Politics in César Aira's La villa(Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 2009-01) Dove, PatrickIn recent years Latin Americanist cultural criticism has paid increasing attention to mass media as it affects both inner life (perception, imagination and thought), social relations (ways of representing community, projecting national belonging and envisioning alternative political possibilities) as well as the production, dissemination and archiving of knowledge. The German media theorist Friedrich Kittler characterizes the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century as the age of media differentiation. Differentiation marks a shift from a time dominated by a single media (print) to an era in which the written word must compete with visual and sound media—which in many respects prove more adept than print at capturing the speed and noise of modernity. For Latin America, meanwhile, the work of Néstor García Canclini, Jesús Martín-Barbero, Garlos Monsiváis, Nelly Richard, Beatriz Sarlo and others has contributed in important ways to broadening our understanding of how the proliferation of visual and auditory media (photography, film, television and radio in particular) has displaced or reshaped old notions about sociality that had evolved in societies dominated by print media.Item Review of Un asombro renovado: Vanguardias contemporáeas en América Latina(Revista Iberoamericana, 2019) Dove, PatrickUn asombro renovado ofrece un panorama de reflexiones interpretativas sobre el resurgimiento de las vanguardias literarias y artísticas en América latina durante la segunda mitad del siglo XX y en adelante. Se incluyen en la antología diez contribuciones particulares más una introducción escrita por los coeditores y un posfacio por Vicky Unruh. Los ensayos combinan tanto exámenes de obras canónicas como aproximaciones a escritores y contextos menos estudiados, y se organizan en dos partes. En la primera, “Reconceptualizaciones,” las contribuciones se ocupan de contextos neovanguardistas de los sesenta, setenta y ochenta, mientras que la segunda, “Actualizaciones,” trata escenarios del fin de milenio y de inicios del siglo XXI. Los ensayos de la primera parte tratan sobre tópico informados, directa o indirectamente, por los proyectos de emancipación nacional-popular, y se preguntan cómo es que las innovaciones artístico-literarias interactúan con las luchas por la transformación social. Los trabajos que forman la segunda parte se preocupan por cómo la globalización tecnológica y económica contemporánea afecta la producción literaria, abriendo nuevos caminos para la imaginación literaria, transformando vocabularios y símbolos, y agotando sueños radicales.Item Review of Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic(Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 2018-03) Dove, PatrickRecent Hispanic Studies scholarship and criticism has shown growing interest in problems inherent to modern ways of thinking about ethics, politics, and the relationship between these two conceptual spheres. With the publication of her edited volume The Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism: Reading Otherwise (Palgrave, 2007) and her first monograph, The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2008), Erin Graff Zivin established her reputation as a leading critical voice on these concerns. With her latest monograph, Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic, Graff Zivin helps to open up what may be taking shape as a new conceptual vocabulary for thinking about the singular and collective forms of relationality that we call ethics and politics, and thus also for the relation between the singular and the universal as such.Item Review of Literature and Subjection: The Economy of Writing and Marginality in Latin America(Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 2010-03) Dove, PatrickLiterature and Subjection is based on the premise that what we today call Latin American literature is inhabited by a series of constitutive ambiguities. These ambiguities allow us to situate literary works in relation to social and political conflicts, while also dislocating our understanding of "literature" by revealing its difference from itself This constitutive ambiguity is ptesented most succinctly in Legrás's discussion of "subjection" in the book's introduction. On one hand, borrowing from the Lacanian psychoanalytic tradition, subjection denotes the emergence of a subject who attains a certain degree of autonomy by articulating his or her desire with a traumatic cause that precedes the conscious, willful subject. On the other hand, in Foucault's wotk, subjection describes the social ptoduction of subjects who identify with—even when they appear to resist—the institutional discourses that dominate them. Subjection thus incorporates an emancipatory hope alongside a subjugating force. This ambiguity leads Legrás to conclude that these two tendencies are inseparable in modern societies. It is literature that best illustrates this ambiguous mutual implication of subjectivity and subjugation, in large part because literature as a social institution has frequently been charged with conveying or realizing one or the other of these goals—and sometimes both at the same time. Legrás demonsttates this lattet point in the historical context of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America by exploring several attempts to develop Latin American literature as a historical project capable of responding to pre-existing social, political and epistemological conditions and demands.Item Review of Reading Borges after Benjamin: Allegory, Afterlife, and the Writing of History(Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 2008-01) Dove, PatrickKate Jenckes's Reading Borges after Benjamin: Allegory, Afterlife, and the Writing of History is a study of Borges's early writings, including his poetry from the 1920s and his ^K-Ficciones writings of the 1930s, in relation to problems of time, history, politics and language. This book stands among the most original and importarit books on Borges in recent years, and is certainly a most welcome addition to Borges criticism. Especially admirable is the authors groundbreaking work in staking out commonalities between Borges and Walter Benjamin. Prior to Jenckes's book there has been little if any sustained discussion of connections between these two figures, whose names indisputably rank among the most important in Western modernity, and whose writings reflect similarly profound misgivings about the fundamental presuppositions of Western modernity. Ironically, the intellectual decision to read Borges together with Benjamin seems more likely to raise questions for North American readers (due to the obvious political, geographical, cultural and disciplinary differences that separate these two figures), whereas in the Southern Cone the names "Borges" and "Benjamin" have for some time travelled together in the same currents of intellectual debate and cultural critique.Item Literature and “Interregnum”: Globalization, War and the Crisis of Sovereignty in Latin America(SUNY Press, 2016) Dove, PatrickLiterature and “Interregnum” looks at late 20th- and early 21st-century literary responses to neoliberal-administered globalization and its impact on the conceptual vocabularies of political and aesthetic modernity in Latin America’s Southern Cone and Mexico. The book endeavors to establish dialogues between literature and a range of theoretical perspectives, including Continental philosophy (Aristotle, Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Nancy, Agamben, Schürmann, Thayer), political thought (Hobbes, Marx, Benjamin, Schmitt, Gramsci, Jameson, Laclau, Rancière, Virno, Galli), psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan), and sociology of globalization (Harvey, Sassen). Through juxtaposition of the methods and sensibilities proper to these traditions of inquiry I explore two related hypotheses.Item The Desencuentros of History: Class and Ethnicity in Bolivia(Culture, Theory and Critique, 2015) Dove, PatrickIn “Indianismo y marxismo: El desencuentro entre dos razones revolucionarias,” Alvaro García Linera takes up the theme of a repeated desencuentro in Bolivian history, a pattern of missed encounters or failures of understanding between projects vying for the social and/or political emancipation. While the essay title identifies these competing trends under two unifying headings—Marxism and indianismo—one can also construct a slightly different formulation of the problem: as a series of disagreements and missed opportunities for dialogue and collaboration between indigenous struggles for autonomy and/or full citizenship and decolonization on the one hand, and urban-centered modernizing and developmentalist projects of the Left including late 19th and early 20th century anarcho-syndicalism, a Marxist tradition that began to make serious inroads in Bolivia in the 1940s following the disastrous Chaco war (1932-35), and the national-popular revolution of 1952. Their ideological differences notwithstanding, all of the latter political tendencies viewed industrialization and proletariat struggle as the one and only path toward meaningful social transformation, while indigenous groups were seen as historically “delayed” forms whose “backwardness” was an obstacle to emancipation through modernization. The desencuentro emerges repeatedly through historical encounters between theories of political radicalism that are borrowed from European social and intellectual histories on the one hand, and social movements that claim to receive their conceptual orientation from Aymara and Quechua traditions on the other. The pattern of missed encounter comprises a fault line that runs alongside the social categories of class and ethnicity, and it poses significant challenges for Andean-based efforts either to articulate popular social categories as part of a larger chain of equivalencies or to separate them once and for all as simply distinct categories that have nothing in common. Desencuentro names an unthought at the heart of historical attempts to conceptualize social struggle in Bolivia.Item The Allegorical Machine: Politics, History, and Memory in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El sueño del retorno(Yearbook of Comparative Literature, 2015) Dove, PatrickPaul de Man proposes that of all literary modalities it is allegory that best illuminates the temporal nature of existence—and of thought and action in particular. Allegory as de Man understands it also sheds light on disjunction, on separation and finitude, as a constitutive moment or condition for history, politics, and all creative activity. If allegory discloses what de Man calls the “authentically temporal destiny” of existence, it also ruins the humanistic assumptions through which terms such as “existence,” “memory,” “language,” and even “the human” are understood in the modern philosophical tradition. Allegory brings to light an in-human dimension in what we call language, and this is a register that cannot be ignored when it comes to thinking about history, art, or politics.Item Reflections on the Origin: Transculturation and tragedy in pedro páramo(Angelaki: Theoretical Journal of the Humanities, 2001) Dove, PatrickAlthough his oeuvre consists by and large of only two published works, a collection of short stories (El llano en llamas, 1953) and a novella (Pedro Páramo, 1955), the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo has been generally recognized as one of the major figures in Latin American letters. In a famous assessment, Carlos Fuentes describes Rulfo’s work as “not only the highest expression achieved so far in the Mexican novel...[but where] we also find a thread that leads us into the new Latin American novel, and to its relation with the so-called international crisis of the novel” (La nueva novela hispanoamericana, 17). Rulfo’s considerable influence upon Latin American cultural production during the Boom period and beyond is only in part a reflection of a set of formal innovations constituting one of the most distinctive breaks with the naturalist tradition in Latin America, and which moreover is widely seen to have prepared the way for the proliferation of the “new novel” and a stylized “magical realism.” At the same time, and as Fuentes’ remarks only begin to indicate, the mark left by Rulfo’s work upon Latin Americanist reflection also announces the collapse of the aesthetic ideology through which the value of literature has traditionally been upheld by the Western philosophical tradition. At the precise moment and through the very succession whereby Latin American literature lays claim to the unique and authentic expression of a singular, Latin American truth—and thus by extension to a place in the global cultural market that is no longer relegated to producing bad copies of European works—this very literary act exposes a crisis situation in which the possibility of literature, or of its redemptive capacity, is radically unsettled.Item Memory between politics and ethics: Del Barco's letter(Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2008) Dove, PatrickThis paper looks at an ongoing debate in Argentina concerning how experiences of political conflict during the 1960s and 70s are remembered today. I am particularly interested in a controversy concerning experiences of militancy and armed struggle that began with the publication of an interview with Héctor Jouvé, a former guerrilla participant, published in the Córdoba monthly journal La intemperie. Jouvé recounts his experiences as a young political activist in the 1960s, beginning with his decision to join the Ejército Guerrillero del Pueblo (EGP), a small group—modeled after Che Guevara’s Sierra Maestra guerrilla force—that was to operate in the northern Argentine province of Salta. In the wake of this two-part interview with Jouvé, the journal published a letter by the Córdoba philosopher Oscar del Barco denouncing the political use of violence and asserting an ethical injunction of non-violence—“No matarás” (Thou Shalt Not Kill)—as the first principle of all social life. Del Barco’s letter also delivers a “confession” in which the author discloses his own support for armed struggle during the 1960s and 70s. He asserts that, by virtue of his intellectual and moral decisions, he shares responsibility for the errors and transgressions committed by armed Leftist militant groups. Moreover, he calls on others who formerly voiced intellectual and moral support for political violence to acknowledge their errors and seeking forgiveness. Del Barco’s missive has prompted responses from a significant number of Argentine intellectuals of his generation, many of whom have expressed reservations about the nature of the critique. The polemic rapidly extended beyond the confines of the Córdoba journal La intemperie, making its mark in cultural venues such as Conjetural, El interpretador, El ojo mocho, Página 12 and Pensamiento de los Confines.Item Hegemony in Latin America(Blackwell, 2016) Dove, PatrickThe conceptual development of “hegemony” has a major impact on Latin Americanist political thought beginning in the 1960s. The concept is deployed in a wide range of contexts including: the role of intellectuals in society; transition from dictatorship to democracy; the triumph of the “Washington consensus”; and the return of populism in its neoliberal and anti-neoliberal forms. Hegemony theory is seen as enabling social theory to account for the complexity of social organization in modern societies and to understand the tenuous unity of the social without losing sight of heterogeneity and contingency.Item Visages of the Other: On a Phantasmatic Recurrence in Borges’s Fictions(Latin American Literary Review, 2000) Dove, PatrickIn his study of the mythic basis of Argentine nation-building (The Invention of Argentina), Nicholas Shumway offers a standard and seemingly irrefutable assessment: as a post-nationalist writer, Jorge Luis Borges conceives of Argentine modernity as taking shape through the eventual depoliticization of literature. The fact that any number of Borges' own self critical comments could be used to substantiate this claim would seem to place him well within a Western thought of politics that derives its impetus from Plato's meditations on the organization of the polis. According to this tradition, history could be described as a movement toward the completion or elimination of the political (of the strife, conflict and disorder which accompany political struggle) and the realization of a state of permanent accord. Perhaps even more profoundly than the post-ideological epoch of bureaucratic navigation imagined by Fukuyama and others in the so-called "end of history," this dream of permanence could be seen to take root in the idea of a space of absolute autonomy. For many modern discourses, this space belongs to art. Such a Utopian conception of art, envisioned as an ideal evacuation of discord and unfulfilled desire, finds in Borges' work a strong resonance with the tumultuous history of Argentine politics (and notably following the September 1930 military coup d'etat and leading up to Borges' adversarial experience with the populist-authoritarian regime of Juan Peron). In the absence of any foreseeable end to ideological conflict in Peronist Argentina, literature (or so this argument goes) represents the Utopian space of a post-political, post-nationalist existence.Item Herman Herlinghaus, Violence Without Guilt: Ethical Narratives from the Global South(Latin American Literary Review, 2009) Dove, PatrickHermann Herlinghaus 's Violence without Guilt offers an original and illuminating approach to contemporary Latin American cultural production in the context of global capital and its impact on local lived experience. The book focuses primarily on narcocorrido ballads by groups such as Los tigres del norte and cinematic, sociological and literary treatments of drug-related violence in 1990s Colombia. The analyses are framed by a theoretical engagement with the notion of "bare life" and its connection to sovereignty and violence, a theme first introduced by Walter Benjamin and more recently taken up in different ways by Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. While much of Herlinghaus's critical focus is informed by Benjamin and Agamben, Violence Without Guilt also introduces a new dimension to the debate: whereas Derrida and Agamben explore the juridical ambiguities of sovereignty, Herlinghaus is interested in how socially-produced affects (fear, anxiety and guilt) illuminate what is at stake with "bare life" in a situation characterized by the crisis of traditional figures of sovereignty. He seeks to show how affect provides a vehicle for projects of exclusion and domination while also testifying to the resilience of those who resist social annihilation and struggle to affirm existence in the absence of any overarching goal or direction that would justify it.Item Tonalities of Literature in Transition: The World of the End of the World, or Marcelo Cohen’s El oído absoluto(CR: The New Centennial Review, 2004) Dove, PatrickIn a well-known formulation, Fredric Jameson characterizes postmodernity as an epochal shift coinciding with the tendential colonization of the planet by transnational capital. The postmodern is what ensues when even those territories previously considered to lie beyond the reach of market forces—that is, especially, nature and the unconscious—are found to have been assimilated into the calculating rationale of exchange and use. Such a world-historical transformation poses considerable difficulties for critical thinking in its endeavor to think the contingency of the present-day dominant regime of signification. One of the attendant effects of the hegemonic ascent of neoliberalism around the globe is that resistance to capital becomes difficult or impossible to define. In its relentless colonization of peripheral zones, capital appears to have succeeded in divesting itself of any identifiable—and hence finite—point of origin. Its agency is everywhere in general, and thus it emanates from nowhere in particular. Working in sync with the seeming defeat or exhaustion of all existing alternatives to free-market capitalism, the logic of the market also works to ensure that any conceivable alternative to the market could only come into view at the expense of its own legibility.Item Erin Graff Zivin, The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary(Shofar, 2008) Dove, PatrickErin Graff Zivin's The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary explores representations of Jewish presence in the region in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American literature. The book does not present itself as a study of Jewish experience and identity, but is instead an investigation of how literary representations of "Jewishness" bear witness to conflicts that accompany the historical transformation of Latin American societies during the previous two centuries. The key distinction between representations authored by Jewish writers on the one hand, and literary portraits of "Jewishness" by authors who do not necessarily meet any definition of Jewishness (and who in some cases apparently had very limited first-hand experience of "real Jews"), establishes a productive tension. Graff Zivin acknowledges that cultural representations of "Jewishness" have frequently coincided with—at times helping to conceal—real experiences of violence and discrimination against Jewish communities. At the same time, she insists on the distinction between "Jewish" and "Jewishness" in order to underscore the crucial role played by representation (and thus fabrication, distortion, and figuration) in the unfolding of "real experience." "Jewishness" describes a rhetorical function of naming "differences" that have not been fully assimilated into dominant national and regional narratives of belonging in Latin America. Graff Zivin argues that these literary representations have the potential to secure prevailing hegemonic configurations (by providing negative examples of what the nation must overcome or repress) or to destabilize these operations (by preserving or reintroducing the thought of a remainder that has yet to be assimilated into dialectics of self and other, familiar and stranger, and so on).Item The night of the senses: literary (dis)orders in nocturno de chile(Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2009) Dove, PatrickOver the course of the last decade, and particularly in the wake of his untimely death at the age of fifty, the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano (1953–2003) has come to be viewed by critics and reviewers as perhaps the greatest Latin American writer of his generation and as a literary phenomenon rivaling the international impact of the Boom writers of the 1960s (Garcia Marquez, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Cortazar).1 No doubt Bolano’s reputation as a poete maudit – which has been cultivated through his own accounts of vagabondism and drug and alcohol abuse, together with his well-publicized and broadly aimed attacks on Latin American writers and literary institutions – has helped to bolster his critical reception outside the Spanish-speaking world, creating a somewhat ironic situation in which a figure renowned for his iconoclastic attitudes and positions emerges as an international representative of what we continue to call ‘Latin American literature’. Although the question of Bolano’s reception is interesting in its own right, I only allude to it as a rhetorical point of departure for what will be my real concern here: the relation between literary language, aesthetics and politics. I begin by rehearsing some arguments advanced by the French thinker Jacques Ranciere concerning the politics of literary aesthetics, after which I will turn to a discussion of Bolano’s 2000 novel Nocturno de Chile, a literary treatment of the 1973–89 military dictatorship.Item Aesthetics, Politics and Event: Borges’s “El fin,” the Argentine Tradition and Death(CR: The New Centennial Review, 2014) Dove, PatrickThis essay takes up the relationship between literary aesthetics and the critique of nationalism in Jorge Luis Borges. I begin with a critical overview of Josefina Ludmer’s genealogy of the gaucho genre and then turn to Borges’s “Elfin,” which by my reading, poses a number of challenges, not only to the ideology of cultural nationalism, but also to Ludmer’s attempts to distinguish between the popular and its aestheticization.Item In the Wake of Tragedy: Citation, Gesture and Theatricality in Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa(Hispanic Issues Online, 2013) Dove, PatrickIn recent decades there has been a surge of interest in memory and history in Southern Cone cultural production. This interest can be understood in the context of two transitions taking place in the 1980s and 1990s: from political violence and repressive military dictatorship during the 1970s to representative democracy on the one hand; and from state to market, or from the modern state form in its various manifestations (liberal, populist, national security) to the neoliberal state of privatization and financial speculation on the other hand. The rise of memory politics in the decades following dictatorship is propelled by conflicts left unresolved by these transitions. To the extent that Francis Fukuyama’s characterization of the market as the overarching telos that guides all of modern history has been accepted as the obligatory point of departure for post-dictatorship political reason, then a fully accomplished transition—one in which the market has been inscribed as the sine qua non for any participation in the political—would mean the disappearance of any traces of historicity from the social landscape of postdictatorship Southern Cone societies. Memory politics aims to forestall the erasures that accompany this reinscription by looking to the past for material that would revitalize our sense of history today. Its strategies are myriad and include both the goal of salvaging old libidinal investments and that of shattering the post-historical mirror of the present.Item Eco, Latin America, and the West(CR: The New Centennial Review, 2005) Dove, PatrickThe journal Eco: Revista De La Cultura De Occidente published its first volume in May 1960, with the financial support of the Instituto Cultural Colombo-Alemán in Bogotá, Colombia. The journal continued to publish its volumes on a monthly basis until 1984, weathering five changes in editorial leadership and periodic financial difficulties. In the early years, its editorial staff and contributors were drawn primarily from a small local group of European expatriate intellectuals. Its editors, in announcing their intention to provide a voice of and for la cultura de occidente, advocated a fundamental connection between Latin America and the Western tradition. At the same time, the journal proposed what at first glance must have struck many Latin American readers as little more than a curiosity: it promised to introduce its Latin American audience to a Germanic face that had historically been overshadowed in these latitudes by its French, English, and Spanish brethren.