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 Aimé 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.
This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the Pennsylvania State University.
Inhoudsopgave
To the Reader: An Outstretched Hand
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Together, through the Backcountry
1. Fools of Empire: A Morning Constitutional, or Blind Eyewitnesses in the Early Republics (H. H. Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry and Alonso Carrió de la Vandera’s A Guide for Blind Travelers)
2. Dying Pastoral: The Power of Homology and Other Disappearances into the Open Range of Martín Fierro and The Searchers (and ‘Brokeback Mountain’)
3. The Size of Domesticity 1: Traveling Companions Flee from Cold War ‘Containment’ in On the Road and The Motorcycle Diaries
4. The Size of Domesticity 2: Subcomandante Marcos’s On-the-Run Dispatches Repurpose Cold War Anxiety
5. Doesn’t He Ever Learn? Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son and the Weight of Knowledge, or a Second Chance for a Lonely Picaro
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Over de auteur
John Ochoa is Associate Professor of Spanish at Pennsylvania State University and author of The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity.
Meer e-boeken van dezelfde auteur (s) / Editor
10.448 E-boeken in deze categorie
