Explores the affective, ethical, and political demands that difficult reading places on readers of midcentury Latin American literature

The radical formal experiments undertaken by writers across Latin America in the mid-twentieth century introduced friction, opacity, and self-reflexivity to the very act of reading. Dwelling in Fiction: Poetics of Place and the Experimental Novel in Latin America explores the limitations and the possibilities of literature for conveying place-specific forms of life. Focusing on authors such as José María Arguedas, João Guimarães Rosa, and Juan José Saer, who are often celebrated for universalizing regional themes, Ashley R. Brock brings a new critical lens to Latin American writers who were ambivalent toward their era’s “boom.”
 
Beyond mere resistance to or critique of the commodification and political instrumentalization of rural topics and types, this countertrend of critical regionalism positions readers themselves as outsiders, pushing them to engage their senses, to train their attention, and to learn to dwell in unknown textual landscapes. Dwelling in Fiction draws on a transnational community of thinkers and writers to show how their midcentury aesthetic practices of sensorial pedagogy anticipate contemporary turns toward affect, embodiment, decoloniality, and ecological thought.

ASHLEY R. BROCK is an assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Pennsylvania.

“This smart, insightful, and novel study is an example of great scholarship, bringing together compelling critical infrastructure with a comparative and close reading methodology that makes the reader rethink their ideas about twentieth-century realism and the novel as an instrument of universal cultural translation.” —Alejandra Uslenghi, author of Latin America at Fin-de-Siècle Universal Exhibitions: Modern Cultures of Visuality 

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“A brilliant contribution to the field that speaks to diverse interests, covering both canonical and cutting-edge approaches and featuring first-class scholarship: rigorous, exhaustive and elegantly written.” —Gabriel Giorgi, author of Formas comunes: Animalidad, biopolítica, cultura 

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