'A bitter devotion to home': Southern questions and family romances in the literature of the Americas

This dissertation traces crises of national culture and family history in novels by William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jose Donoso, and Toni Morrison, seeking to chart a comparative critique for literature of the Americas. I argue that these narratives of kin manipulate and subvert the familial mythologies of nation, using genealogy to reveal economies buried in bloodlines and cultural destinies segregated by region. Deploying fiction against history, these genealogical novels act as counter-memories that subvert history's political finality. Contesting ideological maps, my readings pose a series of "Southern questions" to trace points of congruence across the Americas and emphasize the important relation between geographies of underdevelopment, both national and hemispheric. Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, I argue in chapter one, uses race and incest as Southern cover stories to engage Northern audiences, revealing behind private histories of miscegenation the more threatening racialized currencies of economic modernity. Reading Cien anos de soledad as a text of neo-colonial anxiety, chapter two argues that Garcia Marquez undermines the patrilineal biography of nation, creating a domestic periphery where the repetitions and amnesia of the private displace the public and lose history in the home. Chapter three explores how Donoso's Obsceno pajaro de la noche reveals the abject, menacing underground of national patriarchy, the secret history of witch-servants and monstrous heirs whose schizophrenic nightmare tears the narratives of bourgeois modernity. Chapter four argues that Morrison's Beloved deterritorializes the home genres of race in American letters, and that her portrait of a dangerously protective maternity signals the perils of misrecognition in any struggle to "possess" the lost subject of history. My readings underline the status of these authors as "national poets" narrating endangered histories, their reputation as cultural authorities, and their promotion in a global market of identity. I read the politics of cultural cartography to probe the critical legends and strategic uses of these novels: how they are read as epics or allegories, as prehistories and fantasies lost to the metropolis but nevertheless vital to its survival.