In Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas, I write the unrecognized history of the co-development of radio and the novel in the middle half of the last century. I argue that just as photography helped re-invent pictorial representation in the nineteenth century, so authors across the Americas employed radio to retune the "unspeakable sentences" of the novel and string them together into rich acoustic environments, supplanting the narrator with the chorus, transforming character into a vocal effect, and turning away from the realist enumeration of Things to amplify instead the sound of social space. In representing and formally incorporating the radio into their narratives, John Dos Passos, Carson McCullers, Richard Wright, Gertrude Stein, Raymond Chandler, Severo Sarduy, and Manuel Puig wrote against the monolithic, charismatic, and nationalist orators who reached them over the radio. Taking seriously Jean-Paul Sartre's search for a "literary art of radio" and Frederic Jameson's speculation regarding a "radio aesthetic" in the novel, I demonstrate that authors in the radio age responded to radiophonics by developing a new kind of writing that was also a practice of listening. From the 1930s to the 1970s, they shaped the cultural imagination of radio's new social network, and initiated a project to define the neighborhood of the Americas.

I organize my dissertation around three thematic axes: acoustic engineering and aural media innovations developed in connection with the radio; the legal and political challenges posed by the commodification of sound; and the mutual influence between the novel and the radio that transformed narrative genre and fashioned radio's content and use. I show how, in contradistinction to the "Good Neighbor Policy," narrative artists from the founding nations of broadcast technology--the United States, Argentina, and Cuba--built an alternative sonic community connecting neighbors North and South. I bring together this new neighborhood of writers who latch on to the long legacy of sound technology's resistance to legal concepts of property--both intellectual and material. They find in radio a medium that occupies the domestic space of the phonograph at the same time that its range and reach contests national borders. In the novel, this means teaching readers how to listen, converting intimate scenes of overhearing into critiques of transnational relations.

However, I argue that rather than overtly seizing the means of radio production, as Brecht forcefully proposed, these writers used the novel to record the act of listening--archiving scenes radio itself cannot so easily represent. Attentive to listeners instead of speakers, these writers valorize listening as a creative, critical, and collective action against the nationalist and colonial voice. They underscore the novel's capacity to remediate other oral technologies, and the printed medium's own particularly dense work with multiple vocal registers. In addition to its own changes, the novel becomes a testing ground in which to work through the cultural value of the radio, its distinct reconfiguration of public and private space, its new forms of rhetorical address, and its previously unheard of massive and long distance communication. The novel emerges as the privileged form through which to understand radio's historical and cultural influence.

What can a poetics of longing suggest about unrequited political promises? In my dissertation I demonstrate how postcolonial fiction strategically recovers founding moments of civic awakening and revolutionary consciousness in order to transmit a greater understanding of anti-colonial resistance in the Americas. Focusing on four authors who retrace the transition from colony to nationhood and from royalist to republican rule in the Hispanic new world, I uncover a literary strategy that Spanish American (Martí and Carpentier) and Anglophone writers (Conrad and Naipaul) share in common. I argue that a structure of longing that yearns for a sense of the greater good, which it also mourns as unreachable, informs this subset of new world writing. Offering an image of a republican ideal under siege, this paradoxical mode of longing is also marked by a homosocial desire for male friendship and companionship, a desire increasingly at odds with modern commercial society and its overt reliance on a heterosexual private sphere. This homosocial desire for male friendship and companionship serves as a common structuring device, transforming Hispanic and Anglophone literary traditions into a cohesive body of writing.

At the heart of each work--from Martí's Versos sencillos to Naipaul's A Way in the World--lies an abiding preoccupation with the meaning of civic virtue and its oft-described opposite: corruption. Faced with realities that exceed North Atlantic republican models, each author reconsiders the relation between virtue and corruption under precarious political conditions. Moving beyond dualist definitions (duty versus self-interest, austerity versus greed, community versus individuality), I argue that postcolonial new world writing offers a more fluid and wide-ranging means of conceiving this relation than political theory has traditionally acknowledged. In its paradoxical formulation, each author reflects a poetics of longing that yearns for correspondence between Caribbean realities and a European civic vocabulary. In striving toward such an aim, however, each author inevitably confronts the painful knowledge of the impossible nature of his task. It is this moment of mournful self-awareness, I argue, that enables all four authors to abandon a project of mimetic correspondence and gesture toward an understanding of the Caribbean as a geography defined less by linguistic and insular categories, and more by a shared paradoxical experience of revolutionary modernity.

My dissertation, titled "Transnational Crime Fictions and Argentina's Criminal State," proposes a new understanding of the dictatorship novels of Ricardo Piglia, Juan José Saer, and Manuel Puig grounded in their shared appropriation from popular crime fiction. Across the 1940's, 50's, and 60's, a wide range of popular crime fiction was translated, written, theorized, printed and reprinted in Argentina, and these popular genres grew steadily in readership, visibility, and cultural legitimacy. These genres were largely dismissed as insipid forms of mass-culture entertainment by contemporary criticism, however, and their relevance has been downplayed by literary history to this day. My study of the novels of these influential authors restores this context in order to highlight their appropriations from these undervalued narrative traditions, in which they found incipient forms of social critique and unique modes of representing history and the social order. In three genre-focused studies, the dissertation maps out vernacular sources for these authors' formal experiments, linking a generational fixation on "active reading" to a contemporary reconsideration of sensationalism and melodrama; the problematics of historiography to the tenuous boundary between crime fiction and crime journalism; and, finally, the polemic psychoanalysis of violence to the unpleasures of the lurid psychological thriller.

Beyond reconsidering one generation of Argentine literary history and its relationship to popular culture, this work also functions more generally as a case study in how avant-garde literature poaches forms from popular culture in order to access the imagination of "the masses". The dissertation begins with a brief pre-history of crime fiction in the work of Jorge Luis Borges and the generation immediately before that of Puig, Piglia, and Saer. Borges put one form of crime fiction at the heart of his epochal project for a speculative and "irreverent" modernism in the 1940's, yet emphatically rejected any other direct contact with mass culture. When the next generation challenged Borges' taboo on melodrama, they did so by shifting their focus from the least melodramatic forms of crime fiction to the most melodramatic ones. Thus, I focus on the forms of social critique particular to these melodramatic crime narratives, such as the spectularized martyrology of Puig's Boquitas pintadas, the small-town naturalism of Saer's Cicatrices, and the gendered sentiments of Piglia's early short fiction. These works are read against melodramatic intertexts that were being reprinted and reconsidered in that period: James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce, William Faulkner's Light in August, and Roberto Arlt's Los siete locos, respectively.

Honing in on that boundary between fiction and journalism, the dissertation then plots out various conceptions of the author in true-crime fiction, creative non-fiction, and the more overtly polemic testimonio tradition against the backdrop of the Cold War. This entails a detailed consideration of the legacy of bridge-figure Rodolfo Walsh, whose populist works of crime-fiction and reportage redrew the boundaries between the literary and the popular spheres. I read Piglia's nostalgic and ironically testimonial Plata quemada (1999) as a working through of Walsh's legacy, updating his Cold War ethics of writerly veracity to the age of television and to the postdictatorial problematics of memory. Similarly, I read Puig's Beso de la mujer araña (1976), his Maldición eternal a quien lea estas páginas (1980), and Saer's Glosa (1986) as three distinct explorations of the readerly psychology of sensationalism and of the limits of testimonio. In these works, confession is considered as an inadequate mechanism for the memory work demanded of literature by post-dictatorial society.

Finally, the dissertation attempts to provide a tentative theory and genealogy of the three psychological dictatorship thrillers written by Puig, Piglia and Saer, constitutively marked by readerly affects of paranoia, doubt, and menace. Drawing from Piglia's evolving definitions of "paranoid fiction" and its generically diverse sources, I frame these thrillers as affective-manipulative hybrid texts responding to the historiographical impasse of totalitarianism. Starting with Puig's prescient psychoanalytic thriller, The Buenos Aires Affair (1969), I look to Hitchcock's Freudianism and the vernacular of the thriller as sources for a tradition, beginning with Puig, of psychopathologizing Argentine fascism. I consider Piglia's Respiración artificial (1980) not only as a novelistic critique of psychological and linguistic transparency, but also as modernist form of thriller following Puig's lead. Saer's novelistic representation of life under the menace of totalitarian violence, Nadie nada nunca (1980), is an equally hybrid of diverse cultural narratives structured by a rhetoric of aporia, combining high philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the most base pop-culture fantasies as equally inadequate approaches to the psychopathology of the criminal State. These polemical experiments in the limits of narrative representation are the culmination of a generational project of historiographical and novelistic experiment, the scope, scale, and importance of which fails to come into view without a restoration of the cultural context of their production and an expansion of the purview of literary studies.

This dissertation studies the representation of custom in nineteenth-century Cuban proto-nationalist, anti-slavery novels along with Brazilian and U.S. novels of the same time period. I base my readings on Gómez de Avellaneda's Sab, Villaverde's Cecilia Valdés, Machado de Assis' Quincas Borba, and Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Through these novels, I study how the representation of custom within these novels elucidates the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and ethics. Narratives of custom, particularly of Spanish American costumbrismo, comprise a literary genre that emerges from the rise of print culture and journalism in urban centers in the mid-eighteenth century and enters the novel shortly thereafter. Custom sketches or articles are short, thick in description of elements from social reality, and populated by character types (the dandy, the pedant, the intellectual, etc.), set scenes, and descriptions of local color. Drawn from social reality and often critiquing that reality, representations of custom present themselves as intrinsic to their social spaces, as traditional, and thus as always already historical. But, in fact, these representations are contemporaneous writings based on a mythic or imagined past. Though ostensibly custom sketches narrativize core practices or values proposed as originary, the historicity of the types and scenes of these sketches is rootless. Thus, these sketches narrate an imagined past in order to establish social values that tie or attempt to tie communities together in the present and into perpetuity.

I study custom sketches and manners within 19th century novels as distinct novelistic discourses that enter into a dialogical relationship with the other narrative elements in the novel. This dialogical relationship is marked by a troubled coexistence, as these discourses are often in competition with one another. In Sab, the confrontations between custom and other novelistic discourses, namely romanticism, are used to expose a linkage between tradition and social decay. Gómez de Avellaneda suggests that ending slavery and mitigating patriarchy by appropriating tradition leads to no emancipation at all. In Cecilia Valdés, the encounters between custom and novelistic discourses demonstrate how custom can work in tandem with liberal politics to produce, paradoxically, a political project that seeks national independence by instantiating a liberal colonial order. Lastly, the interaction between custom and the novel, in Quincas Borba and The Scarlet Letter, uncovers how manners, the sphere of custom marked by description of social behavior as opposed to character types, mark subjects as aliens and as individuals. Though manners make possible and stabilize alienation, the quixotic and irreverent elements in Quincas Borba and The Scarlet Letter, respectively, are both the sources of alienation and of potential emancipation. Parallel to the potentiality constitutive of ethics, manners carry within themselves latent alternative notions of the good that may be potentially liberating. Altogether, these treatments of custom open to a double reading of repression and freedom and of liberal social critique and colonial power.

This dissertation argues that Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 offers us a new way of thinking about the relationship between the individual and the multitude in the globalized world. I argue that the novel manages to capture the oppressive nature of its structures not by attempting to represent them directly but instead by telling the stories of individuals who feel especially alienated from them. These characters largely fail to connect with one another in any lasting way, but their brief encounters, some of which take place in person, others through reading, have pride of place in a text that, I propose, constitutes a brief on behalf of the marginal and the forgotten in its overall form: it is an example of the novel as an ever-expanding, multitudinous crowd; it strives to preserve the singularity of each of its members while at the same time suggesting that the differences between them are less important than their shared presence within a single narrative whole. I proceed by examining these characters in all their particularity and closely reading the novel’s key scenes, in which they meet one another, while also tracking how these characters and encounters are paradigmatic of different ways of relating. Chapter 1, “Insufferable Hierarchies,” focuses on 2666’s most bookish characters and their rage for “greatness,” exploring how literature in the novel both enlarges the moral imagination of certain characters and curdles that of others. My second chapter, “Women in the Shape of Monsters,” is centered on the novel’s least bookish stretch, the famous middle section about the murdered women of Santa Teresa. It examines how the fight waged by that section’s living women against gendered violence runs up against patriarchal power and the overwhelming burden of having to represent or avenge their murdered sisters. In “Everything in Anything,” my final chapter, I explore how the novel—itself a storehouse of miscellaneous but true information—allows its characters to form multi-generational and trans-historical bonds through the sharing of random facts and by unsystematic but assiduous reading in marginal spaces. In a brief coda, I argue that 2666’s ethics and poetics require both an openness to the possibility of change and a commitment to one’s particular way of being.

Abstract

Shattering Dogma: Feminist Debate, Transgression and Mourning

in Selected Works by Gioconda Belli, Diamela Eltit and Cristina Peri Rossi

by

Tanya V. Varela

Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Languages and Literatures

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Francine Masiello, Chair

This dissertation examines selected works of renowned authors Gioconda Belli, Diamela Eltit and Cristina Peri Rossi, with the objective of identifying the various levels of resistance that emerge from their texts against authoritative and dogmatic discourses -especially feminism-- prevalent in 1980's Latin America. Assessing how these women writers manage to break away from the decade's normative discursive tone, the introductory chapter discusses the cultural and historical factors that contribute to produce the distinctive qualities that define Latin American feminist thought.

An elaborate comparative analysis in the core chapters leads me to examine to what extent Belli, Eltit and Peri Rossi both address and erode the ideological dogmatism and the essentialist tendencies that prevail in feminism. In these chapters, I also study their proposals for alternative representations of gender through innovative aesthetic quests. I argue that through ideological and aesthetic transgression, these writers attempt, with varying degrees of success, to drastically subvert and dismantle notions such as `patriarchy,' `femininity,' `motherhood' and `family'. In doing so, they liberate their respective texts from heavy categorical burdens and allow these politically disputed concepts to be aesthetically produced, reformulated, and modified. I propose that by positing a profoundly self-critical brand of feminism, these novelists rearticulate the theoretical and aesthetic debates in each of their selected works, and establish a healthy distance between the rigidity of militant ideological discourses and their literary production.

In the last chapter, I analyze three recent novels by this trio of authors, seen in light of their contributions -in the 1980's-- to reformulating the dogmatically-oriented feminist discourse and now, at the start of the millennium, under the shadow of a less strident post-feminism that has settled in Latin America. I conclude that, just as the act of transgression was indeed necessary as a means to break away from the rigid symptoms detected in 1980's feminism, these recent texts are framed within an equally forceful imperative of mourning, which stems from the vacuum left by a shattered feminist dogma and the installation of a new global cultural context that has effectively co-opted and neutralized debates on gender. In the end, though this outcome is seemingly ironic, it has nevertheless propelled Belli, Eltit and Peri Rossi to continue their creative quests for contestatory new discursive proposals, while still searching for balance in the never-ending negotiation between aesthetics and ideology.

Does the Hispanic tradition offer an alternative perspective to the problem of copyrights and digital piracy? This dissertation examines the narrative that connects copyrights and creativity. It focuses on how prevailing representations of the practice, circulation, and experience of creativity that link it to copyrights are governed by specific epistemological structures and a rhetoric of fear. The dissertation focuses on three competing and overlapping traditions of conceiving and codifying property and national identity: first, the personal, natural and deontological tradition of continental Europe which comes to be crystallized in droits d'auteur; then the commercial and utilitarian Anglo-American tradition represented by copyright; and finally the public domain-centered Hispanic tradition represented by its preprinting license and tasa.

My investigation traces the genealogy of each tradition and registers the increasing tension in the Hispanic world between notions of possessive individualism, droit moral and reason of state while documenting the relentless dominance of copyrights in postnational times. I argue that different codifications of individual property lead to opposing views of the public domain, which in turn relate to competing exemplars of sociopolitical organization. I show that the codification of intellectual property in the Hispanic transatlantic is peculiar in that it was aristocracy which defeated liberal bourgeois revolutions in the early modern and enlightenment eras. The debate seen as a hallmark of European modernity opposing, on the one hand, classic participative republicanism and droits d'auteur, and, on the other hand, liberal contractual republicanism and copyrights, is often superseded in the Hispanic tradition by a discourse stressing the importance of the public domain and the rights of «well-crafted works.» I argue that while copyrights and author laws are the response of corporate England and revolutionary France to the increasing power of printing guilds and corporations, the Spanish enlightened state of Carlos III addressed the similar problem of the power of religious corporations by protecting readers, through the empowerment of a secular sui generis printing tribunal, and through the legislation of the public domain. I put forward the idea that the codification of intellectual ownership as copyright is one of the key mechanisms by which literature becomes commodified. As such, copyright is one of the engines of a historical process of reification that asserts the materiality of culture over its «spiritual» content. In this regard, copyright replaces literal canonicity and becomes a technology of Schumpeterian creative destruction that ensures the affirmation of the new or emergent over the established: Enlightenment over Renaissance modernity; Liberal over Classic republics; and the global and hybrid postnational over an older universalizing humanism.

Within this framework, I develop a new genealogy of the legal codification of intellectual property starting with common property of the public domain in Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and continuing with northern Europe's codification of individual intellectual property in the seventeenth and nineteenth. My dissertation registers the implications of the the different conceptions of intellectual property and the public domain in the seventeenth and eighteenth century in Spain, as the Spanish imperial project failed in the nineteenth century, and then in contemporary times when the internationalization of copyrights through multinational treaties and the struggles to codify first cinema and then the Internet, reproduced a context similar to the one in which copyrights were first crystallized: a context of imperial justification and expansion.

My dissertation, then, engages in a double movement. On the one hand, it shows how recent controversies opposing Spain and the United States in regard to peer-to-peer file exchange are part of a long struggle over the codification of international law, and the construction of an international community to enforce it that evolves from the European struggle to legitimate its overseas empires in the early-modern era. On the other hand, it examines how these controversies are presented through rhetorical strategies that pose romantic creative expression and intellectual property legal protection as two universal human rights. This artifice ties an ethical- legal conceptualization of creativity to a neorepublican form of sociopolitical association, both of European origin, to the European imperial legacy.

The systematic analysis of the correlation between copyrights and creativity leads me to conclude that the volatility of copyrights does not put creativity at risk, but rather shows itself linked to imperial projects and institution associated to copyrights. Conversely, the Hispanic intellectual property tradition provides a new framework to think new media differently, and a more nuanced alternative to the idea of the death of creativity that the imperial narrative of copyrights presents. Of particular interest to me are the implications of such debates for Modern and Postmodern Spanish American transatlantic and transcontinental cultural production, with Spain and Mexico as my primary case-studies.

This dissertation asks how aesthetic objects—novels, poems, literary nonfiction, and sculptures—register the temporal effects produced by the experience of illness. I stage a series of encounters between writers and artists from the Caribbean basin and Argentina, along with their European interlocutors, in order to glean what we might broadly call a tempo of illness. What these figures have in common, I contend, is a tendency to deploy ornamentation as a textual strategy whose aim is twofold: first, ornamentation effectuates temporal shifts by appearing to freeze the mobile flow of time; and second, it functions as a cipher through which the ill body is simultaneously obscured and revealed. Indeed, for each of the writers I study, the language of embellishment—associated with jewels, gems, and stylistic “frivolity” writ large—intersects so extensively with the language of sickness that the two become nearly indistinguishable. In this regard, they at first appear to vindicate a longstanding critical tradition that pathologizes all things decorative—a lineage that reached its apogee in fin-de-siècle medical and criminological treatises by Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso. Against the forward-leaning drive towards a given telos so forcefully expounded by positivist rationality, however, these writers privilege dissipation and stasis, and the immediacy of affect over the distance of action. The thick descriptions of ornate scenes that abound in texts by Colombian José Asunción Silva—like those that become emblematic of the neobaroque decades later—delay, but do not completely halt, our steady movement through the narrative, and it is precisely this technique that allows these writers to inscribe illness formally and thematically into their works. Just as the ill body slows down, or oscillates between bouts of paralysis and intense hyperactivity, so too do these texts stall their reader’s progress. This dynamic, I argue, yields an altered sense of time and thus offers a new point of entry into debates about queer temporalities, which have tended to emphasize either the past or the future, without attending to conditions that might disorient us to the present.

My first chapter, “Diving for Pearls: José Asunción Silva’s Etiophilia,” examines Silva’s vexed relationship to the problem of etiology. On the one hand, I show, Silva was immensely drawn to the virulently anti-Decadent writing of Nordau and Lombroso, who sought to locate the origins—the causes—of pathology and criminality in literary works they deemed “deviant.” On the other hand, his own aesthetic style is marked by excess and an abundance of ornamentation, features that one typically associates with the work of Wilde and Huysmans. Tracing how this ambivalence constrains the poet’s writing, I take as my case study his only novel, De sobremesa, and demonstrate how he experiments with narrative time by re-organizing the temporal order of cause and effect. Chapter Two, “Too Tired to Write: Severo Sarduy’s Fatigue,” shifts our attention to the latter half of the twentieth century in order to trace how illness circulates in and shapes the form of neobaroque writing. My focus here is on the trope of fatigue in Cuban novelist and playwright Severo Sarduy’s final novel Pájaros de la playa. Set in a clinic that brings to mind Cuba’s AIDS sanatoriums of the late 1980s and early 90s (the so-called “sidatorios”), the novel, as critics have tended to agree, can be read obliquely as a meditation on HIV/AIDS; while the ward’s patients suffer from an illness referred to only as “el mal,” they exhibit symptoms that include skin lesions (a clear allusion to Kaposi sarcoma) and, most frequently, an almost paralyzing lack of energy. My argument is that the fatigued body, needing to exert maximal force in order to perform the most minimal gesture, becomes the guiding trope through which Sarduy attempts to counter the linear passage of time. I claim, moreover, that this reversal mimics the mechanism by which Retrovir—one of the earliest AIDS medications (the most common side effect of which was a debilitating muscle fatigue)—neutralizes the virus’ replication in the host’s body. This unresolved tension between retrograde and forward-leaning motion ultimately leaves us in a temporal mode that, toward the end of his life, Sarduy called the “prepóstumo,” a time that marks the ambiguous threshold between life and death. Chapter Three, “Nomadismo en la fijeza: Suspended Flow in Perlongher and González-Torres,” reads essays and poems by Argentine poet and anthropologist Néstor Perlongher in tandem with sculptures by Cuban-American visual artist Félix González-Torres, both of whom turned to art to register their experiences with HIV/AIDS. I identify in their work what I call a poetics of suspended temporal flow. This, I show, is a warped form of temporality that emerges through movement in stasis; it bears the markers of what Perlongher, reading Deleuze and Guattari, identified as a kind of “nomadismo en la fijeza,” a nomadism in fixity. In a Coda, finally, I explore the interplay between chronic and terminal temporalities by focusing on the shifting terrain of HIV/AIDS discourse in the era of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) and “undetectability.”

In this dissertation, I examine the ways in which four contemporary Latin American authors have rewritten seventeenth-century Baroque aesthetics, histories, and texts by focusing on the queer body. Rather than following the usual trajectory from the Hispanic Baroque to the Cuban Neobaroque, I trace an alternative path in which I analyze the works of a seemingly disparate group of poets and artists: Néstor Perlongher, Alejandra Pizarnik, Luis Felipe Fabre, and Jesusa Rodríguez. Their texts and performances appropriate not only the structures and themes of the Baroque, but also the minutiae of their source texts. Each writer establishes a practice that draws from Baroque aesthetics and Neobaroque intertextuality—namely its parody, artifice, and proliferation of citations—while more extensively and critically reworking a specific text or group of texts. Rooted in a queer sexuality that is mapped onto the page and materialized as textual play, their rewritings, I argue, structure an aesthetics of the sensuous, material surface. Their rewritings thus constitute a critique of heteropatriarchal cultural legacies and present us with alternative modes of understanding our relationship to literature and history. By weaving together close readings of the source texts and their rewritten versions, I explore how these rewritings carve out a space for non-normative histories, interpretations, and literary practices.

Chapter One focuses on the work of Néstor Perlongher, particularly on his first two books of poetry, Austria-Hungría (1980) and Alambres (1988). In this chapter, I argue that the queer body serves as the structuring mechanism of Perlongher’s neobarroso poetics. Through the queer body, Perlongher disrupts and perverts the semblance of realism and normativity. This disruption drives the queering of History through the violent corrosion of language and reimagining of historical figures that results in a queer carnival of pleasure and wordplay in place of linearity and communicative language. This chapter also serves to outline and structure what is meant by queer rewriting throughout this dissertation and serves as a starting point for the construction of an aesthetics of the surface.

Chapter Two studies Alejandra Pizarnik’s 1965/1971 short prose text, La condesa sangrienta. This chapter explores the connections between Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta and the Baroque; the chapter’s aim is to find new affinities in Alejandra Pizarnik’s work and to read La condesa as a precursor to the neobarroso. Chapter Three turns to the work of Mexican poet Luis Felipe Fabre’s La sodomía en la Nueva España (2010), a poetic text that rewrites the seventeenth-century history of a group of men who were tried and burnt at the stake for their sodomitic acts in New Spain. My analysis centers on how Fabre’s rewriting of these particular texts counter the poetic model that had been at the center of Mexican poetry since José Gorostiza and Octavio Paz. Chapter Four takes up the 1995 performance Sor Juana en Almoloya (Pastorela virtual), written and directed by Jesusa Rodríguez. In Sor Juana en Almoloya, Rodríguez imagines the seventeenth-century nun imprisoned in Almoloya in the twenty-first century. The performance structures a critique of the Catholic church and the Mexican state, as well as a critique of the way we have come to understand and historicize the past. Beyond simply appropriating baroque structures and aesthetics, these four authors return to specific historical moments and figures to reread them from the perspective of the body and queer pleasure. Their textual engagement with the surface, both as an act of rendering the hidden visible and as language play that reveals but never resolves paradoxes, thus opens up countless possibilities for non-normative literary and historical genealogies and practices.