Research by Facebook

I have become a Facebooker, and tonight I am using Facebook for research. I Friended some people who put up research links hand over fist. I might discover these books by browsing in bookstores, but there are no bookstores so on Facebook I learn about important books I should know but would probably not have … More Research by Facebook

Shocking new facts about Villaverde

I learned from Vanessa Nelsen that Creole costumbrista authors putatively intent on demonstrating social realism pulled characters not from reality, but from a historiographical discourse that they themselves had already created. Does Nelsen know that one of the lettered discourses masquerading as reality is the plaçage myth? It is all quite interesting because the way Emily Clark says … More Shocking new facts about Villaverde

Lezama

Here is another book we do not have, and that costs $100 to buy. I have La expresión americana somewhere and should seriously read it. Axé.

Cecilia Valdés, again

♦ There is little distance between exogamy and incest since Don Cándido is everyone’s father (as it were). ♦ There is no compatibility between the hierarchical, slaveowning society and the bourgeois, modern one. The secrets that must be kept from the bourgeois society cause problems: it cannot be said that Cecilia is Leonardo’s sister, so their romance … More Cecilia Valdés, again

So twentieth century

What Danny said about Doris’ book: In terms of its announced project, Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions turns to the canonical novels of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. Through a synthesis of writings about sexuality, nationalism, family history, and allegory, Sommer develops a theory of a nineteenth-century “erotic code” in order to explain … More So twentieth century

Research Wednesday

I am looking for negative reviews of Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions. If I do not find more by using Web of Knowledge and the MLA Bibliography I will call a reference librarian. I have already found an interesting one by Nancy Vogeley, in Modern Philology 91:3 (February 1994): 390-394. Danny Anderson has a review essay … More Research Wednesday