Catastrophic Historicism : Reading Julia de Burgos Dangerously

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mendoza-de Jesús, Ronald, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Historicism in literature.

Burgos, Julia de, 1914-1953. Poema en 20 surcos.

Burgos, Julia de.

Genre:

Literary criticism.

Place of Publication:

Fordham University Press 2024

Summary:

"Catastrophic Historicism unsettles the historicist constitution of Julia de Burgos (1914-53), Puerto Rico's most iconic writer - a critical task that necessitates redefining the concept of historicism. Through readings of Aristotle, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Werner Hamacher, and Frank Ankersmit, Mendoza-de Jesús shows that historicism grounds historical objectivity in the historian's capacity to compose totalizing narratives that domesticate the contingency of the past. While critiques of historicism as a realism leave untouched the sovereignty of the historian, the book insists that reading the text of history requires an attunement to danger - a modality that interrupts historicism by infusing the past with a contingency that evades total appropriation. After desedimenting the monumental tradition that has reduced de Burgos to a totemic figure, Catastrophic Historicism reads the poet's first collection, Poema en 20 surcos (1938). Mendoza-de Jesús argues that the historicity of Poema crystallizes in the lyrical speaker's self-institution as an embodied ipseity, which requires producing racialized/gendered allegorical figures - the bearers of an abject flesh - that lack any ontological resistance to modern alienation. Rather than treating de Burgos's poetics of selfhood as the ideal image of Puerto Rican sovereignty, Mendoza-de Jesús endangers this idealization by drawing attention to the abjection that sustains our attachments to ipseity as the form of a truly sovereign life. In this way, Catastrophic Historicism not only resets the terms of ongoing critiques of historicism in the humanities - it also intervenes in Puerto Rican historicity for the sake of its transformation"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction: Reading danger

Catastrophic traditions: reading the image of Julia de Burgos, dangerously

The closure of historicism; or, history in deconstruction

Reading now: the catastrophic modernity of Julia de Burgos

Epilogue: After sovereignty?

ISBN:

9781531507664

1531507662

9781531505653

1531505651