Ghost-watching American modernity
Subtitle: haunting, landscape, and the hemispheric imagination
By: María del Pilar Blanco
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 225
ISBN-13: 9780823242146
Subjects: Nationalism in literature; Landscapes in literature; History and criticism; American literature; Ghosts in literature; Haunted places; Spanish American literature; Comparative literature; Latin American and American; American and Latin American
Other titles: Haunting, landscape, and the hemispheric imagination
Description: In Ghost-Watching American Modernity, Mar̕a del Pilar Blanco revisits nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts from Spanish America and the United States to ask how different landscapes are represented as haunted sites. Moving from foundational fictions to Westerns, Blanco explores the diverse ways in which ghosts and haunting emerge across the American hemisphere for authors who are preoccupied with evoking the experience of geographical transformations during a period of unprecedented development.

The book offers an innovative approach that seeks to understand ghosts in their local specificity, rather than as products of generic conventions or as allegories of hidden desires. Its chapters pursue formally attentive readings of texts by Domingo Sarmiento, Henry James, Još Marť, W. E. B. Du Bois, Juan Rulfo, Felisberto Herǹndez, and Clint Eastwood. In an intervention that will reconfigure the critical uses of spectrality for scholars in U.S./Latin American Studies, narrative theory, and comparative literature, Blanco advances ghost-watching as a method for rediscovering haunting on its own terms.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Unsolving hemispheric mystery; title: Desert mournings; title: Urban indiscretions; title: Transnational shadows.