Crisis and modernism: Culture, economy, and form in twentieth-century U.S. and Latin American literature

This dissertation concerns the relationship between U.S. modernism between the world wars and Latin American literature since the 1950s, and the relationship of each to transformations within the political configuration of the world economy. It argues that each of these literatures is the site of differing and competing conceptions of social relations, and demonstrates how the effort to reconcile an identity on the model of the family with a given position in the global economic order becomes the mainspring of formal tendencies in individual texts. The development of this dynamic from U.S. modernism to the Latin American "boom" novel, I claim, culminates in the "end of literature," an exhaustion of aesthetic and political possibility concomitant with what has been described as the neoliberal turn of the 1970s. And it is precisely in this turn, I contend, that contemporary U.S. Latino/a literature finds its origins.