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A study of Mexican modernity through the author Juan Rulfo.
From its very beginnings Latin American writing linked itself to public duty—to the constitution of symbolic kinship—in the hopes of holding in abeyance the question of its debt—that is, the problem posed by its production as economic expenditure. Indeed, while such demands were once made on literature as such (not coincidentally at a certain highpoint of the US academy), such a judgment was carried out with particular force on the body of a so-called Third World literature by metropolitan and Third World intellectuals alike. Juan Rulfo's work inhabits this peculiarly distanced and specular relation to historical event-as-allegory. Its effect in his writing grounds the book’s conception of the "ghostscript," as well as a broader critique of institutional norms of literary study. It is not that Rulfo's putative magical realist telling of Mexican (or, more broadly, Latin American) reality is more faithful to the difference and particularity of Mexican or Latin American reality. Rather, Rulfo's writing conveys the virtuality of Mexican history itself—its structurally phantasmal character—in order to unbind writing from its dutiful, allegorical support of the social.
"Juan Rulfo has been studied by many critics of Mexican literature but never in relation to the question of the discipline of Hispanism or how and to what purpose Mexican literature is studied in universities in the United States. Steinberg's use of canonical theory (Derrida, Freud, etc.) is unique as well, as is the study of cinema as it pertains to Rulfo." — Rebecca Janzen, author of Unlawful Violence: Mexican Law and Cultural Production
"Makes a highly original and significant contribution to the understanding of both Mexican and Latin American literature, literary history, and literary criticism by calling attention to the way literature has traditionally been placed at the service of duty and debt." — Ryan Long, author of Queer Exposures: Sexuality and Photography in Roberto Bolaño's Fiction and Poetry
Samuel Steinberg is Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Photopoetics at Tlatelolco: Afterimages of Mexico, 1968.