Beyond Individualism - by Lois Parkinson Zamora (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Expanding the reach of her previous, award-winning book with this Press, Lois Zamora further complicates and challenges the kinds of periods and categories for Latin American literature and art imposed on the Americas by (Old) Europe. She argues that characters and figures in recent Latin American fiction and artworks are identified not so much by their psychological specificity as by their affiliations to family, community, and clan, and by religious order, village, country house, or ideal planet. Zamora shows them to be less like individuals, and more like types or archetypes-sometime stereotypes-and occasionally spirits, ideas, or emblems. In the fiction and visual art she surveys in Beyond Individualism, Zamora finds that belonging and participation are more important than autonomy, i.e., selves in relation, embedded and embodied in larger systems. These characters and figures are, for Zamora, unstable nodes in historical networks that precede and succeed individual instances, where collective characteristics overshadow idiosyncratic interiority-all in an effort to produce both visual art and literature that is less personal than political. Zamora describes a different kind of "enlightenment" than the one that developed in North America and in Europe, one that produced figures in Latin American fiction and art that moved toward symbolic status in collective currents, an energy that impelled new and different kinds of reciprocities between self and society, interiority and community, history and myth"--

Book Synopsis

A sweeping analysis of "archetypal realism" in Latin American literature and art.

Beyond Individualism examines the portrayal of collective identities over two centuries in Latin American literature and visual art. Lois Parkinson Zamora shows that many authors and artists are less concerned with singular selves than with selves-in-relation: less with individual autonomy than with communal affiliation. Their works--sometimes situated under the labels Neobaroque, magical realism, Surrealism, Expressionism, and idealism--resist the kind of psychological realism typical of European and North American novels, moving instead toward a wholly new kind of fiction.

Zamora calls this new Latin American form "archetypal realism" because its characters represent entities larger than themselves. They may embody entire communities, cultures, families, religious orders, or ideal planets. Through deft readings of collective characters in fiction by Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, and more alongside the art of Diego Rivera, Remedios Varo, and Xul Solar, Zamora reveals a modernity based not on Enlightenment conceptions of selfhood but on community, collectivity, and kinship.

Review Quotes

"Zamora has written another major work in Latin American literary and artistic studies spanning the Baroque to the contemporary periods. Beyond Individualism is unquestionably original, impeccably researched, and beautifully written. Zamora offers close, rigorous readings of literature and art across time, place, and medium. Thanks to her deep knowledge of a dizzying span of periods and traditions, formal and thematic considerations become communicating vessels that offer new interpretations of famous works at every turn."--Charlotte Rogers, University of Virginia

"Zamora's Beyond Individualism is a tour de force of literary and visual analysis. Following in the steps of her now classic The Inordinate Eye, this book offers original and insightful readings of works by figures as diverse as Francisco Javier Clavijero, Francisco Toledo, Remedios Varo, and others. Zamora's erudition unveils unsuspected connections between the colonial and modern eras and invites us to reimagine the history of Latin American letters and art."--Rubén Gallo, Princeton University

About the Author

Lois Parkinson Zamora is the Moores Distinguished Professor of literature and art at the University of Houston. Her books include The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction, also published by the University of Chicago Press.