Writing American Space: History, Fiction and Territory In Cather, Carpentier, Borges and Delany.

Abstract

Drawing on the works of four twentieth century authors from the United States, Cuba and Argentina, this dissertation analyzes how America is encountered as an event, rather than a space, in fiction. This study examines the writers in question in a new light, searching for patterns that evince the processes of globalization that established a worldwide network of material and cultural exchange marked by an uneven development. Because of the authors under consideration the range of American circumstances includes significant national, ethnic, cultural and geographic differences as well as differences in the extent of urban development. Within these vastly different spaces of narration there are repetitions of encounters with space that attain a recognizable identity without negating the difference of their circumstance. Without assigning these spaces a totalizing identity suggests that the geographies of globalization provide one ground for interamerican literary comparison. Chapter one examines the apparent time travel in two itinerant fictions of Willa Cather and Alejo Carpentier, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Los pasos perdidos (1953). Each of these books presents itself not only as a journey into the past stages of humanity but as a return to another time, although it is clear that the encounters are all coeval. Chapter two deals with these same books to argue that, while they have a convergent image of the beginnings of history, the situation of each author in relation to globalization’s centers of hegemony gives the books a different image of the future. Chapter three examines the importance of the relation between urban space and the construction of a world-system in an analysis of three works by Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel R. Delany, “El Aleph,” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand.