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Elena Garro and Mexico's Modern Dreams

Rebecca E. Biron

Elena Garro and Mexico's Modern Dreams uses Elena Garro’s eccentric life and work as a lens through which to examine mid-twentieth-century Mexican intellectuals' desire to reconcile mexicanidad with modernidad.

The famously scandalous first wife of Nobel Prize winner poet Octavio Paz, and an award-winning author in her own right, Garro constructed a mysterious and often contradictory persona through her very public participation in Mexican political conflicts. Herself an anxious and contentious Mexican writer, Elena Garro elicited profound political and aesthetic anxiety in her Mexican readers. She confused the personal and the public in her creative fictions as well as in her vision of Mexican modernity. This violation of key distinctions rendered her largely illegible to her contemporaries. That illegibility serves as a symptom of unacknowledged desires that motivate twentieth-century views of national modernity. Taken together, Garro's public persona and critical perspective expose the anxieties regarding ethnicity, gender, economic class, and professional identity that define Mexican modernity.

Blending cultural studies and detailed literary analysis with political and intellectual history, Mexico's Modern Dreams argues that, in addition to the intriguing gossip she elicited in literary and political circles, Garro produced a radical critique of Mexican modernity. Her critique applies as well to the nation's twenty-first-century crisis of globalization, state power, and pervasive violence.

University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press

Pages: 294 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-61148-470-0 • Hardback • December 2012 • $120.00 • (£92.00)

978-1-61148-588-2 • Paperback • June 2014 • $60.99 • (£47.00)

978-1-61148-471-7 • eBook • December 2012 • $58.00 • (£45.00)

Series: Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Caribbean & Latin American, Literary Criticism / Semiotics & Theory, Literary Criticism / Women Authors

Elena Garro and Mexico's Modern Dreams

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Elena Garro and Mexico's Modern Dreams uses Elena Garro’s eccentric life and work as a lens through which to examine mid-twentieth-century Mexican intellectuals' desire to reconcile mexicanidad with modernidad.

The famously scandalous first wife of Nobel Prize winner poet Octavio Paz, and an award-winning author in her own right, Garro constructed a mysterious and often contradictory persona through her very public participation in Mexican political conflicts. Herself an anxious and contentious Mexican writer, Elena Garro elicited profound political and aesthetic anxiety in her Mexican readers. She confused the personal and the public in her creative fictions as well as in her vision of Mexican modernity. This violation of key distinctions rendered her largely illegible to her contemporaries. That illegibility serves as a symptom of unacknowledged desires that motivate twentieth-century views of national modernity. Taken together, Garro's public persona and critical perspective expose the anxieties regarding ethnicity, gender, economic class, and professional identity that define Mexican modernity.

Blending cultural studies and detailed literary analysis with political and intellectual history, Mexico's Modern Dreams argues that, in addition to the intriguing gossip she elicited in literary and political circles, Garro produced a radical critique of Mexican modernity. Her critique applies as well to the nation's twenty-first-century crisis of globalization, state power, and pervasive violence.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press

Pages: 294 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-61148-470-0 • Hardback • December 2012 • $120.00 • (£92.00)

978-1-61148-588-2 • Paperback • June 2014 • $60.99 • (£47.00)

978-1-61148-471-7 • eBook • December 2012 • $58.00 • (£45.00)

Series: Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Caribbean & Latin American, Literary Criticism / Semiotics & Theory, Literary Criticism / Women Authors

Author

Rebecca E. Biron is the Chair of Latin American/Latino/Caribbean Studies Program at Dartmouth College.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
1. Ex-centricities
2. The Political is Personal
3. Critical Confrontations
4. Contradictions and (In)Comprehensions
5. Life Writing
6. Nation Writing
7. Modern Dreams
8. The Anxiety of Desire
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Reviews

This engaging, readable book by Biron examines Elena Garro's personal and literary relationships, maintaining that readers often find the writer "illegible" due to her contradictory and controversial public interventions. Biron examines Garro's creative work as well as her journalism and interviews to give a more coherent portrait. The chapter on "Critical Confrontations" describes key events that have triggered the discomfort surrounding Garro: the aftermath of the 1968 student massacre at Tlatelolco, when she was accused of naming intellectuals as co-conspirators; an incident in 1965 when Garro championed the rights of dispossessed campesinos by staging a sit-in at a writers' conference; and, more bizarrely, Garro's involvement in the JFK assassination investigation. The author examines Garro's conflicting statements about her identification with feminism, magical realism, and communism, and manages to trace a coherent line in these seemingly erratic and arbitrary pronouncements. Biron helpfully locates the influence of French personalism in Garro's work and life, underscoring her commitment to the individual and idiosyncratic over the collective and imitative. A thought-provoking text that shows how this important Mexican author fits within the literary history of the 20th century, and that joins other explorations like Sandra Messinger Cypess's Uncivil Wars Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.
— Choice Reviews

Elena Garro and Mexico's Modern Dreams

Rebecca E. Biron

Elena Garro and Mexico's Modern Dreams

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