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Anxieties of Experience offers a new interpretation of US and Latin American literature. Rereading a range of canonical works from Walt Whitman's
Leaves of Grass to Roberto Bolaño's
2666, it traces the development and interaction of two distinct literary strains in the Americas: the "US literature of experience" and the "Latin American literature of the reader."
List of contents
- Introduction
- Part I: Hemispheric Literary Divides
- Chapter 1: Cultural Divergence: The US Literature of Experience and the Latin American Literature of the Reader
- Chapter 2: An Inter-American Episode: Jorge Luis Borges, Waldo Frank, and the Battle for Whitman's America
- Chapter 3 Uncommon Grounds: The Representation of History in Absalom, Absalom!, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Song of Solomon
- Part II: The Literary Fields of the Americas
- Chapter 4: Full Immersion: Modernist Aesthetics and the US Literature of Experience
- Chapter 5 Voracious Readers: The Latin American Lettered City and the US Literature of Experience
- Epilogue
- Notes
About the author
Jeffrey Lawrence is Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers-New Brunswick.
Summary
Anxieties of Experience offers a new interpretation of US and Latin American literature. Rereading a range of canonical works from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass to Roberto Bolaño's 2666, it traces the development and interaction of two distinct literary strains in the Americas: the "US literature of experience" and the "Latin American literature of the reader."
Additional text
A massively erudite and elegantly written book, Anxieties of Experience takes its readers on a hemispheric journey through modern times, leading up to the present. Comparing and contrasting the literatures of North and South America is ultimately, for Lawrence, a means of examining whether a bookish life is a life lived to the fullest. With its sustained line of inquiry across corpora, the volume makes a valuable contribution to several fields of studywhile also introducing general readers to hemispheric studies.
