Excess baggage
Subtitle: a modern theory and the conscious amnesia of Latin Americanist thought
By: Jonathan Pitcher.
Series: American university studies -- 29
Publisher: P. Lang
Published: 2009
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 250
ISBN-13: 9781433104404
Subjects: Spanish American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Latin America -- Civilization -- Philosophy
Description: "Excess Baggage investigates how we read modern theory, how we apprehend Latin American culture through that theory, why this approach is flawed, and how our reading could be different. It is a study of modernity's supersessive, paradoxical attempts to outthink thought. This methodology, never autochthonous to any context despite its claims, is traced through one of its more extreme moments, the Enlightenment, and then through the work of Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx to the Reformation." "This book traces post-1960 Latin Americanism through readings by its critics-cum-theorists, as dictatorially assigning a univocal reading to a continent's cultural production, regardless of how ethical the theory may itself seem. Though predominantly a metacritical work, a reading of philosophy and its Latin Americanist manifestations, there is also a comparative reading of European, North American, and Latin American literature.".

"Meaning has always existed in all such contexts, but is either eradicated or misread by the premises of our critical equipment. In fact or fiction, Excess Baggage appeals for an admission of contextualized mnemotechny, inevitable in thought regardless, and the real danger in the present milieu."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: A history of unreason; title: Days of Doxa : osmotic and otherwise; title: Canonical suspicions : after Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx; title: Mutatis Mutandis : novel theory; title: Narrative entrapment : Carlos Fuentes' una familia lejana; title: Secondhand aphasia, or "New" Latin Americanism; title: Borges' Others : betwixt and In-between; title: Canudos revisited.