ABOUT THIS BOOK

After the Nation proposes a series of groundbreaking new approaches to novels, essays, and short stories by Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon within the framework of a hemispheric American studies. García-Caro offers a pioneering comparativist approach to the contemporary American and Mexican literary canons and their underlying nationalist encodement through the study of a wide range of texts by Pynchon and Fuentes which question and historicize in different ways the processes of national definition and myth-making deployed in the drawing of literary borders. After the Nation looks at these literary narratives as postnational satires that aim to unravel and denounce the combined hegemonic processes of modernity and nationalism while they start to contemplate the ensuing postnational constellations. These are texts that playfully challenge the temporal and spatial designs of national themes while they point to and debase “holy” borders, international borders as well as the internal lines where narratives of nation are embodied and consecrated.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

PEDRO GARCÍA-CARO is an associate professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Participating Faculty in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon.

REVIEWS

“After the Nation is an extraordinarily rich book that encompasses more than literary criticism—the cultural history of divergent nations that cannot or should not be ignorant of each other’s culture nor of its dissident voices.” —Jean Franco, from the foreword

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“Exemplary in its inter-American scope, well conceived and clearly written, this book offers an innovative framework to investigate a wide array of interrelated American topics—border crossing, modernity, enlightenment, postcolonalism, exceptionalism—that have shaped the works of Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon and, by extension, of many contemporary U.S. and Latin American writers.” —Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Michigan and author of The Censorship Files: Latin American Writers and Franco’s Spain

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“After the Nation is an extraordinarily rich book that encompasses more than literary criticism—the cultural history of divergent nations that cannot or should not be ignorant of each other’s culture nor of its dissident voices.” —Jean Franco, from the foreword

— -

“Exemplary in its inter-American scope, well conceived and clearly written, this book offers an innovative framework to investigate a wide array of interrelated American topics—border crossing, modernity, enlightenment, postcolonalism, exceptionalism—that have shaped the works of Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon and, by extension, of many contemporary U.S. and Latin American writers.” —Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Michigan and author of The Censorship Files: Latin American Writers and Franco’s Spain

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Foreword by Jean Franco

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction - Bordering Can(n)ons: Postnational Satire in the United States and Mexico

Part One: Narrative Undergrounds in the Postnational City

Chapter 1. Modernity Versus Its National Demons: La región más transparente

Chapter 2. Innocents Abroad and at Home: The Profane History of American Modernity in V.

Part Two: Dissenting from the Nation: The New Left

Chapter 3. La muerte de Artemio Cruz and the Agonic Mexican Nation

Chapter 4. The Crying of Lot 49 and the Nationalist Colonization of the Unconscious

Chapter 5. Epidermic Metamorphosis? Shedding the Nation in Cambio de piel

Part Three: (Post)Colonial Enlightened Origins: Americanism Born

Chapter 6. Enlightened Nationalists: The Conquest Rides Again in La campaña

Chapter 7. Surveying American Exceptionalism in Mason & Dixon

Conclusion - Beyond the Nation

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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