Monika Kaup

John Ochoa

Honoring the lifework of the comparative literature scholar, From the Americas to the World: Essays in Honor of Lois Parkinson Zamora traces artistic and cultural pathways that connect Latin American literature and culture to the Americas, and to the world beyond. The essays in this collection cover three critical fields: comparative hemispheric American literature, magical realism, and the Baroque/New World Baroque/Neobaroque. Beginning with a critical reassessment of hemispheric American studies, these essays analyze the works of a wide array of writers, such as Roberto Bolaño, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Waldo Frank, and José Lez. These chapters build upon the legacy of the scholarship done by Dr. Zamora and exemplify the pattern of literary studies that she has driven forward.

From the Americas to the World

Essays in Honor of Lois Parkinson Zamora

Honoring the lifework of comparatist Lois Parkinson Zamora, this collection traces artistic pathways that connect Latin American culture to the Americas, and to the world beyond. Its essays range from canonical writers like Roberto Bolaño and Gabriel García Márquez to non-canonical forms such as contemporary developments of Mexican folk Baroque.

Road trips loom large in the American imagination, and stories from the road have been central to crafting national identities across North and South America. Tales of traversing this vast geography, with its singular landscape, have helped foster a sense of American exceptionalism. Examining three turning points that shaped exceptionalism in both Americas--the late colonial and early Republican period, expansion into the frontier, and the Cold War--John Ochoa pursues literary travelers across landscapes and centuries. At each historical crossroads, the nations of North and South invented or reinvented themselves in the shadow of empire. Travel accounts from these periods offered master narratives that shaped the notion of America's postimperial future. Fellow Travelers recounts the complex, on-the-road relationships between travelers such as Lewis and Clark, Alexander von Humboldt and Aimeì Bonpland, Huckleberry Finn and Jim, Kerouac's Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, and the Che Guevara and Alberto Granado of The Motorcycle Diaries. Such journeys reflect concerns far larger than their characters: tensions between the voices of the rugged individual and the democratic many, between the metropolis and the backcountry, and between the intimate and the vast. Working across national literatures, Fellow Travelers offers insight into a shared process of national reinvention and the construction of modern national imaginaries.

John Ochoa

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