Jeffrey Lawrence

Andrés Neuman

A kaleidoscopic, fast-paced tour of Latin America from one of the Spanish-speaking world’s most outstanding writers. Lamenting not having more time to get to know each of the nineteen countries he visits after winning the prestigious Premio Alfaguara, Andrés Neuman begins to suspect that world travel consists mostly of “not seeing.” But then he realizes that the fleeting nature of his trip provides him with a unique opportunity: touring and comparing every country of Latin America in a single stroke. Neuman writes on the move, generating a kinetic work that is at once puckish and poetic, aphoristic and brimming with curiosity. Even so-called non-places—airports, hotels, taxis—are turned into powerful symbols full of meaning. A dual Argentine-Spanish citizen, he incisively explores cultural identity and nationality, immigration and globalization, history and language, and turbulent current events. Above all, Neuman investigates the artistic lifeblood of Latin America, tackling with gusto not only literary heavyweights such as Bolaño, Vargas Llosa, Lorca, and Galeano, but also an emerging generation of authors and filmmakers whose impact is now making ripples worldwide. Eye-opening and charmingly offbeat, How to Travel without Seeing: Dispatches from the New Latin America is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of the Americas.

Dispatches from the New Latin America

How to Travel without Seeing

Anjuli I. Gunaratne

This book addresses the rise of the concept of the "Global Anglophone” in contemporary literary studies, both as an intellectual category and as a field designation. Moving beyond traditional postcolonial frameworks, it investigates how this emerging paradigm is reshaping our understanding of modern English-language literature across geographical boundaries. Distinguished scholars from diverse regions of the English-speaking world reveal how the Global Anglophone has evolved from a subset of postcolonial studies into a comprehensive framework for examining modern literary production in English. Through rigorous analysis and argumentation, the contributors demonstrate how this conceptual transformation reflects broader changes in academic field structures, job markets, and our understanding of world literature. Essential reading for literary scholars, The Global Anglophone interrogates the future of English literary studies while offering valuable insights into the shifting landscape of contemporary academia. It challenges conventional categorizations and proposes new ways of understanding the complex relationships among language, literature, and global cultural exchange. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Studies.

The Global Anglophone

Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño offers a new interpretation of US and Latin American literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Revisiting longstanding debates in the hemisphere about whether the source of authority for New World literature derives from an author's first-hand contact with American places and peoples or from a creative (mis)reading of existing traditions, the book charts a widening gap in how modern US and Latin American writers defined their literary authority. In the process, it traces the development of two distinct literary strains in the Americas: the "US literature of experience" and the "Latin American literature of the reader." Reinterpreting a range of canonical works from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass to Roberto Bolaño's 2666, Anxieties of Experience shows how this hemispheric literary divide fueled a series of anxieties, misunderstandings, and "misencounters" between US and Latin American authors. In the wake of recent calls to rethink the "common grounds" approach to literature across the Americas, the book advocates a comparative approach that highlights the distinct logics of production and legitimation in the US and Latin American literary fields. Anxieties of Experience closes by exploring the convergence of the literature of experience and the literature of the reader in the first decades of the twenty-first century, arguing that the post-Bolaño moment has produced the strongest signs of a truly reciprocal literature of the Americas in more than a hundred years.

The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño

Anxieties of Experience

'Anxieties of Experience' offers a new interpretation of US and Latin American literature. Rereading a range of canonical works from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass to Roberto Bolano's 2666, it traces the development and interaction of two distinct literary strains in the Americas: the 'US literature of experience' and the 'Latin American literature of the reader'

Jeffrey Lawrence

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