Bøger i Latin American Literatures in the World / Literaturas Latinoamericanas en el Mundo serien

Landscape, as it appears and is described throughout the works of Bernardo Carvalho and Robert Walser, provides an excellent-yet virtually unexplored-pathway to the authors' literary projects. The landscape functions here as a synthetic and unifying figure that triggers, at first, through the analysis of its description per se, the main and most evident elements of the authors' works. However, when sustained as a methodological figure beyond the scope of its own description, the landscape soon reveals a darker, far more fascinating and far less explored side of the authors' oeuvres: a vengeful, seemingly defeatist resentment against the status quo, which gives way to the more latent and biting elements of the authors' prose, such as irony, the unheimlich, an anti-heroic agenda, the apocalyptic aesthetics of a disaster-prone fictional world, as well as an understanding of history and literature through the figures of failure and marginality. By drawing from diverse critical traditions from Latin-America and Europe, this comparative text seeks to unravel, in all of its complexity and scope, the fictional stage upon which Walser's and Carvalho's characters narrate, with their dying breath, a world that is slowly undoing itself.

From today's vantage point it can be denied that the confidence in the abilities of globalism, mobility, and cosmopolitanism to illuminate cultural signification processes of our time has been severely shaken. In the face of this crisis, a key concept of this globalizing optimism as World Literature has been for the past twenty years necessarily is in the need of a comprehensive revision. World Literature, Cosmopolitanism, Globality: Beyond, Against, Post, Otherwise offers a wide range of contributions approaching the blind spots of the globally oriented Humanities for phenomena that in one way or another have gone beyond the discourses, aesthetics, and political positions of liberal cosmopolitanism and neoliberal globalization. Departing basically (but not exclusively) from different examples of Latin American literatures and cultures in globalized contexts, this volume provides innovative insights into critical readings of World Literature and its related conceptualizations. A timely book that embraces highly innovative perspectives, it will be a mustread for all scholars involved in the field of the global dimensions of literature.

Phenomena such as the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, or the surge of political populism show that the current phase of accelerated globalization is over. New concepts are needed in order to respond to this exhaustion of the global project: the volume scrutinizes these responses in the aesthetic realm and under a "post-global" banner, while incorporating alternative, non-Western epistemologies and literatures of the post-colonial Global South.

The volume asks how the literatures of the Americas and the Caribbean present multiple or internally differentiated spaces and how these are distinguished or traversed by different temporalities. The historical and (post)colonial experiences of these areas turns them into especially fertile ground for the exploration of the connections between landscape/geography and historical/temporal palimpsests as well as the specificities of literary form. The contributions are dedicated to individual, yet conceptually interconnected studies of staggered, multiple, non-simultaneous temporalities in modern and contemporary literature. The volume adopts a comparative perspective throughout and intends to foster the dialogue between the study of Latin/American and Caribbean literatures-in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English. Therefore, the individual essays are not grouped according to geographical or linguistic areas, but follow a trajectory from spatiotemporal constellations of the 19th century to ruined/catastrophic landscapes and the geopoetic inscriptions of time in regions. The essays should appeal to all readers interested in World Literature, Hemispheric Studies as well as temporal approaches to space and geography.

Die Studie schreibt eine transatlantische Kulturgeschichte der Beziehungen zwischen Europa und Hispanoamerika an der Schwelle vom 18. zum 19. Jahrhundert. Am Beispiel der beiden Hauptwerke des neuspanischen Dominikanermönchs fray Servando Teresa de Mier (1763-1827) untersucht sie, wie hispanoamerikanische Schriftsteller der Sattelzeit geographische, kulturelle, gattungstheoretische und diskursive Grenzregime überschritten und dadurch nicht nur die politische Unabhängigkeit der spanischen Kolonien in Hispanoamerika vorbereitet, sondern auch deren literarische Unabhängigkeit ins Werk gesetzt haben. Indem sie Miers Historia de la Revolución de Nueva España (1813) und seine sogenannten Memorias (1817-1820) mit vergleichbaren Werken von europäischen und hispanoamerikanischen Zeitgenossen in Beziehung setzt, gelingt ihr der Nachweis, dass der kreolische Autor bewusst kanonische Gattungsmuster aus Europa transformiert, um eine eigene "expresión americana" (J. Lezama Lima) zu begründen. Auf diese Weise leuchtet der Band nicht nur das Panorama emanzipatorischen Schreibens in der Zeit zwischen dem Ende der Kolonialzeit und der beginnenden Unabhängigkeit aus, sondern auch dessen Potential für die hispanoamerikanische Literatur des 20. und frühen 21. Jahrhunderts.