Current Research
My research has ranged widely over Latin American fiction in the twentieth century from a variety of points of view with articles and books on authors including Onetti, Borges, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cabrera Infante, Carpentier, Fuentes, Monterroso, Donoso, Gallegos, Güiraldes, Piñera, Amado, Fonseca and Peri Rossi. My last book, Hombres in/visibles: La representación de la masculinidad en la ficción latinoamericana 1920-1980, examined a variety of narrative fiction and, as well as theorizing the issue of masculinity, traced changing patterns of representation in different Latin American nations across the twentieth century. I have also worked on post-colonialism and the theory of transculturation in the Latin American context.
In relation to current research, my interests in film have led to the recent publication of an article on Buñuel. A strand of current research is focused on Carlos Reygadas, his relation with cinematic precursors and his exploration of the medium of film. Another major area of current research centres on intellectual life in Mexico in the twentieth century. Broadly I am exploring the public role(s) which were available to intellectuals and whether these may have changed over time, and the nature of their intellectual formation and ideological orientation. I have published a study of politics and the role of the intellectual as explored in Martín Luis Guzmán's La sombra del caudillo and José Revueltas's Los días terrenales. My current focus is on José Vasconcelos (1882-1959), and in particular his four-volume autobiography on which I have published two articles and am preparing a book for Liverpool University Press. On the one hand, my interest is in how he uses his autobiography to configure a self-image as intellectual and public figure and in the degree to which that image is coherent. On the other hand, I am interested in the rather more difficult task of trying to identify the nature of his political thinking and ideology in his autobiography, and relating these dimensions of his outlook to the rapidly changing political and institutional environment of early twentieth-century Mexico. From a theoretical point of view, the challenge of studying both these aspects of Vasconcelos is to understand the interplay of the personal and the public, of the self and the other, to maintain a clear sense of the individual but to understand how that individual was embedded in collective social and cultural processes.
Past Research
Recent Publications
My research is focused on Spanish American culture and particularly its literature. My main interests are in the short story and the novel in the twentieth century. I have taken a special interest in using contemporary theoretical approaches both to the form and content of literary production, and these approaches have ranged from narratology through to psychoanalysis. It is my conviction that critical work should focus on trying to understand the literary work in ways in which it cannot understand itself, in other words critical analysis must go beyond the text to grasp its conditions of possibility and its presuppositions. I have published two books and numerous articles on Juan Carlos Onetti, but in addition I have published on many other Spanish American and Brazilian authors: Carpentier, Piñera, Monterroso, Gallegos, García Márquez, Rivera, Borges, Güiraldes, Donoso, Vargas Llosa, Ramos, Fonseca, Trevisan etc. My most recent book, Hombres (in)visibles: la representación de la masculinidad en la literatura latinoamericana 1920-1980 (Fondo de cultura económica, 2007) is a study of a range of novels and stories from all over the sub-continent. Drawing substantially on psychoanalysis, the book aims to bring the surface many unspoken or invisible presuppositions about the nature of men and expectations of how they perform their gender identity. The frequently implicit but nonetheless clear and often damaging impact of their performance both on themselves and on others is a major concern of the book. In addition, I have published a number of articles on cultural difference in Latin America and on the ethical and political issues at stake in reading cross-culturally. I have a specific interest in the theoretical issue of transculturation and, as well as publishing articles on the subject, I have co-edited a book on transcultural architecture in Latin America.