Regionalism Re-imagined: Avant-garde Voices of Non-urban Spaces By Ashley Roome Brock A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Comparative Literature in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Natalia Brizuela, Chair Professor Francine Masiello Professor Anne-Lise François Professor Candace Slater Spring 2017 Abstract Regionalism Re-imagined: Avant-garde Voices of Non-urban Spaces By Ashley Roome Brock Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Berkeley Professor Natalia Brizuela, Chair This project challenges the perceived dichotomies between regionalist literature and high literature, between political literature and avant-garde literature, by tracing the emergence of a Critical Regionalist literary aesthetic in the mid-twentieth-century Americas. In the most experimental works of James Agee (United States), João Guimarães Rosa (Brazil), José María Arguedas (Peru), and Juan José Saer (Argentina), I identify a common commitment to transmitting the experiential dimensions of regional life – the daily rhythms of working life, the precarious existence of marginalized rural communities – through avant-garde poetics. All four of the diverse works examined are characterized by the dissolution of visual landscapes in favor of an immersive, sensorial experience of material place, and the related renunciation of an objective and omniscient point of view in favor of intimate proximity to and participation in the local world depicted. At the same time, these texts remind their readers, through the defamiliarization of language and recourse to metafictional techniques, of the mediated nature of the “authentic” experiences conjured. Though many of these formal features are common to urban high modernist and postmodernist fiction as well, I argue that they are freighted with a particular political function in the regionalist texts I examine: these works critique not only the hegemony of Western modernity but also the self-sameness of local identity, the quaint and timeless pastoral ideal, the construct of a coherent national culture grounded in an autochthonous past, and the facility with which images of local color circulate in an age of visual culture. In my first chapter, I argue that the literary journalism of James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), illustrates the political and ethical stakes of breaking with the model of documentary realism that predominated in North American regionalism of the 1930s, and which is widely acknowledged to have informed the leftist, social realist vein of Latin American regionalism in the same time period. In fact, I read Famous Men as a manifesto of sorts for a conscience-driven quest to represent rural poverty in more humanizing and less sensationalistic terms. Agee replaces invasive and objectifying expository prose with dense, difficult, and highly self-reflexive language, which I read as training the reader to respect the opacity of the surfaces that buffer the 1 rural subjects depicted from our gaze. These surfaces include those of the written pages and photographic images through which we encounter this world. My second chapter continues to explore the relationship between word and image in Juan José Saer’s El limonero real (1974). I contend that Saer disrupts the image of Argentina’s rural interior as an ahistorical landscape by drawing attention to the inescapable temporality of perception, in contrast with the illusion of stillness furnished by the photographic image. I read the iterative structure and temporally animate gaze of Saer’s most experimental novel as restoring the within-timeness of rural life, thereby challenging nationalistic progress narratives invested in displacing regional spaces into archaic time. Chapter Three turns to João Guimarães Rosa’s Grande sertão: veredas (1956), which has often been read as marking the moment when Brazilian literature overcomes regionalism – treated as a minor genre and a symptom of cultural underdevelopment – in order to become universal and modern. Yet, I read this iconic novel as signaling the continued relevance of regionalist literature. I argue that the spiraling, recursive narrative structure of the novel thwarts any teleological reading that seeks an end (either of the sertão or of the story related) and, instead, asks the reader to inhabit this landscape from within. Grande sertão: veredas insists that neither the region nor its figuration in the Brazilian imaginary can be dismissed as quaint, archaic, and fully of the past. My fourth and final chapter comes full circle to draw unlikely parallels between Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the last novel of José María Arguedas, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (1971). Like Agee’s text, Los zorros, continually interrupts its representational project in order to foreground the ethical and aesthetic challenges that haunt it and which, the author fears, condemn it to failure. I read Los zorros as dramatizing the struggle to reimagine regional landscapes at a historical moment when rural-urban migration and increasingly complex economic structures collapse the geographic and cultural distance between city and country. Ultimately, I argue, these works all insist on the contemporaneity and coevalness of the region, underscoring the fraught social, political, and economic relationships that bind the region to the urban centers that seek to figure it as archaic. In doing so, they also expose the ideological mechanisms through which the modern American nation has tried to absorb and domesticate unruly and untimely regional subcultures by mourning their passing and nostalgically celebrating them as folklore. The Critical Regionalist aesthetic I articulate thus removes the nostalgic patina that often obscures urgent social issues in which regional spaces are enmeshed: class, race, rural-urban migration, and the uneven rates of development that condemn many rural communities to stagnation and poverty. Moreover, each of these texts I examine confront us – as the readers who consume images of barbarity, underdevelopment and rural poverty – with our complicity in the systems of exploitation and marginalization that ravage the regional spaces depicted. Stressing the interconnectedness of natural and social worlds, of the landscape and the viewer, of literary representation and material reality, this project engages with the political and ethical questions that have become central to Critical Regionalism, Ecocriticsm, Landscape Studies, and Postcolonial Studies. 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Introduction Anything but Quaint: Re-thinking Regionalism in the Americas 1 Chapter One James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: A Lesson in Looking with Care 23 Chapter Two Algo más que mirar: the Temporality of Looking in Juan José Saer’s El limonero real 69 Chapter Three Back, Back into the Backlands: the Regressive Temporality of Grande sertão: veredas 114 Chapter Four Regionalism in the Wake of Arguedas’s Foxes 168 Coda Let the Bedbugs Bite 217 Works Cited 224 i Acknowledgements This has been a journey of finding my way through a labyrinth of texts and ideas I have never presumed to master. I am grateful to have undertaken it with guides who have honored my need to lose myself in the material, while also persistently steering me towards making the fruits of my immersive approach communicable and relevant to others. I could not have written this dissertation without Natalia Brizuela, who recognized and named patterns in my thinking when I felt the most lost, who always seemed to know which reading suggestions would provide the landmarks I needed, and who offered her enthusiasm, support, and humor from beginning to end. I have always been able to count on Francine Masiello to read my work attentively, nudge me towards more rigorous thought and expression, celebrate ground gained, and most importantly, reinforce my faith in the value of spending time with literary texts. Candace Slater has inducted me into the world of Brazilian literature with infectious passion, and she has reminded me again and again that real people and the chance of connecting with them are what make academic work worthwhile. Anne-Lise François has expanded my conception of what literary criticism can be and empowered me to define and defend my own ethos for my work; she continues to inspire me to pursue thought that is both radical and beautiful. At various stages in the process, I received additional guidance from Karl Britto, Adriana Amante, David Oubiña, and Marília Librandi-Rocha; this project would not be what it is without their intellectual generosity. For financial support, I am grateful to the Department of Comparative Literature and the Graduate Division at the University of California, Berkeley. It is increasingly rare to be afforded the time to carry a project like this to term, and I thank UC Berkeley for investing in the intellectual process. For countless other forms of support, I would like to thank the many people who have worked to make the Department of Comparative Literature a community where rigor goes hand-in-hand with camaraderie, including Kathy McCarthy, Miryam Sas, Vicky Kah n, Chana Kronfeld, Barbara Spackman, Erica Roberts, Kathy Barrett, Sandy Richmond, Tony Soyka, and Gail Ganino. I would also like to extend my gratitude the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and to Verónica López in particular, for taking me in as one of their