The Comps Reading Project part 2

(I calculate that I need to read on average 4 books a week this summer in order to complete my massive reading list for comprehensive exams, and I have enlisted my blog in the cause of keeping me accountable).


Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, 1800-2000, David Lloyd.

The mouth is the focus of David Lloyd's 2011 study on Irish history--the mouth that sings and speaks in oral tradition, the mouth that keens in mourning and protest, the mouth that drinks in despair, the mouth that is empty during the Famine, the mouth that breaks out in laughter against a prison's code of silence, and in turn the mouth that refuses to confess under torture.  Speaking of torture, Lloyd argues that the Troubles in Northern Ireland were a laboratory and precursor to the West's contemporary state-sponsored violence.  (Guantanamo Bay began in Belfast, in other words).


La muerte de Artemio Cruz [The Death of Artemio Cruz], Carlos Fuentes.

This 1962 novel is about Mexico.  That may sound a tad reductive, but that's exactly what this book's about.  The text is narrated in a fragmentary pastiche of stream-of-conscious recollections by the titular Artemio Cruz on his deathbed in the late-50s--the style is positively Beckettian (or is Beckett positively Fuentian?).  The titular Artemio Cruz has been around for some of the most important developments in Mexican history of the first-half of the 20th century: he fights in the civil wars following the 1910 revolution, and, as his wife later accuses him, he had to betray his own brother to survive it.  The betrayals continue post-war, as Cruz becomes part of the political machinery that sells-out on the very principles for which the Revolution was fought, e.g. worker's rights, exploitation of the indigenous, and domestic control by foreign (especially U.S.) capital.  Artemio Cruz represents Mexico, in other words, and his death is part of the passing of a past-Mexico that has bequeathed all of its troubles onto modern Mexico.  

This was by far my favorite novel so far, and Fuentes' reputation as one of the premier writers of not only Mexico, but the entire Latin America Boom, is well-deserved.



Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism, Walter Benn Michaels.

In this comprehensive 1996 study of Anglo-American Modernism, Benn Michaels argues that in the early-20th century, "American" was for the first time something you became, not just something you are.  By means of the works of Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cather, the Harlem Renaissance, and many others, Benn Michaels examines how racialized "Americanness" became, which resulted in culture becoming  intertwined with race in the popular imagination.  He concludes by arguing against racial culture as intrinsically incompatible with pluralism--we can only have one or the other, which is a claim I am still mulling over.

The Pearl of the Antilles, Andrea O'Reilly Herrera.

Though not a major work, this 2001 novel was put on my list largely because the author is Irish-Cuban American, and my Spanish professor thought it might be interesting to see what relevance it might have for my larger dissertation project.  The book itself is set in Cuba, both in the years leading up to the Revolution and in its immediate aftermath, and follows several generations of women from one aristocratic family in particular.  The text makes no bones about the abuses of either the ancien régime or of the communist government.  The novel is written in a combination of both third-person omniscient and epistolary.

The novel appears to center (at least in its second half) upon the character of Margerita, who is forced by the U.S. consulate to abandon her child when she flees to Florida during the Revolution.  When she later learns her son was killed by anti-Castro guerillas, she cuts off all contact with the island to salve her pain.  She later marries a gringo who, I assume, is Irish-American; I say this because Margerita's daughter Lilly turns out to be the main character, as she pieces together her silent Mother's Cuban family history from old letters and photographs, and announces her intention to become a writer.  Lilly is O'Reilly Herrera, in other words--and Herrera is Irish-Cuban (but then, given the history of the Irish in the Caribbean, it is entirely possible that Margerita was already at least partially Irish before she ever left Cuba).