Remembering Maternal Bodies: Melancholy in Latina and Latin American Women's Writing

by B. Trigo

Overview

Remembering Maternal Bodies is a collection of essays about the writings of several Latina and Latin American women writers who remember their mothers, and/or challenge our commonly held beliefs about motherhood and maternity, in an effort to stop depression and melancholy. It suggests that the widespread violent depression and sometimes suicidal melancholy that haunts our culture and society is the result of a terrible fantasy about the way we become ourselves. This fantasy has a matricide at its core, and this matricide will continue to have its depressing effect on us as long as it remains in place and invisible. The authors showcased in this book make visible this fantasy and change it in their works in an effort to bring us out of our depression and melancholy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349999675
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	01/01/1900
Series:	New Directions in Latino American Cultures
Edition description:	1st ed. 2006
Pages:	205
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Benigno Trigo is currently Associate Professor of literature at Vanderbilt University. His areas of expertise include literary theory, psychoanalysis, and Spanish American literature. His publications include Subjects of Crisis: Race and Gender as Disease in Latin America (2000), Noir Anxiety (Co-authored with Kelly Oliver, 2003) and Foucault and Latin America: Deployments and Appropriations of Discursive Analysis (2002).

Table of Contents

The Mother Tongue * Transformative Witnessing * Maternal Jouissance * Labile Time * Memoirs for the Abject * Accidents of Chicana Feminisms * Body, Language and Memory

Editorial Reviews

"Remembering Maternal Bodies provides a profound engagement with Latino and Latin American women writers. It invites the reader into a body of imaginative connections and lines of flight shared by writers generally not read in unison. Benigno Trigo significantly advances an exploration of a new corpus redefining literature and criticism in the Americas." - Roman de la Campa, Stony Brook University

"Drawing on insights from psychoanalytic, feminist and post-feminist thought, Trigo undertakes a thoughtful, provocative and strikingly original reflection on the inscription - and, at times, proscription - of the maternal body in contemporary Latin American and Latina writing. Remembering Maternal Bodies is certain to inspire lively debate. I know of no other book like it." - Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Columbia University

'Insightful and introspective study of maternal writing that tells us as much about the text as it does about ourselves. Trigo provides a highly analytical, patient, and perceptive counter reading to patriarchal narratives. In so doing, he convincingly links symbolic matricide in Latin American and Latina literatures..' William Luis, Vanderbilt University

"Trigo presents a compelling critical vision of a literary corpus that, through a rigorous and theoretically informed analysis of maternal themes, contributes significantly to existing definitions of Latin American and Latina women's writing." - Dara Goldman, University of Illinois atUrbana-Champaign

"An important contribution to the fields of Latin American literary and Latina/o literary studies." - Laura Gutiérrez, University of Iowa

From the Publisher