Ciphers of History Latin American Readings for a Cultural Age

Ciphers of Historyis a collection of seven classic essays written by the eminent Latin Americanist Enrico Mario Santi, compiled here in a single volume for the first time. Santi covers a broad range of topics in Latin American poetry, narrative, film, and intellectual history, with one brief excursion into Peninsular subject-matter: the Spanish Generation of 98's response to Spain's loss of Cuba in the Spanish-American War of 1898. The collection is defined by a bracing critique of dominant trends in current critical practice, and advocacy of an alternative methodology focused on the retrieval of local knowledge. Santi stresses reading as opposed to theory, and employs the notion of the "cipher" as a figure for "the ultimate ambivalence of interpretation." The essays are tied together by this common approach, which acts as both incisive challenge and demanding blue-print for the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies.

Enrico Mario Santí has taught at Cornell and Georgetown and is currently the William T. Bryan Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of half a dozen books and serves on a number of editorial boards. His research has been supported over the years by fellowships from The Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Introduction * Poetry and the Cold War: Pablo Neruda's "Canto general" * This Land of Prophets: Walt Whitman in Spanish America * Sor Juana, Octavio Paz and Poetics of Restitution * Through the Grapevine: Rulfo, Garro and National Allegory * 98: Narcissism and Melancholy * After the Revolution: Strawberry and Chocolate, or the Politics of Reconciliation * Fernando Ortiz: Counterpoint and Transculturation * Appendix 1: Latinamericanism * Appendix 2: The Neruda Whitmaniana