Criticism in the Borderlands

Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology

Héctor Calderón, José David Saldívar, Héctor Calderón, José David Saldívar, Stanley Fish, Fredric Jameson

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 1991
• Print ISBN: 9780822311430, 9780822311379
• eBook ISBN: 9780822382355
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This pathbreaking anthology of Chicano literary criticism, with essays on a remarkable range of texts—both old and new—draws on diverse perspectives in contemporary literary and cultural studies: from ethnographic to postmodernist, from Marxist to feminist, from cultural materialist to new historicist.
The editors have organized essays around four board themes: the situation of Chicano literary studies within American literary history and debates about the "canon"; representations of the Chicana/o subject; genre, ideology, and history; and the aesthetics of Chicano literature. The volume as a whole aims at generating new ways of understanding what counts as culture and "theory" and who counts as a theorist. A selected and annotated bibliography of contemporary Chicano literary criticism is also included.
By recovering neglected authors and texts and introducing readers to an emergent Chicano canon, by introducing new perspectives on American literary history, ethnicity, gender, culture, and the literary process itself, Criticism in the Borderlands is an agenda-setting collection that moves beyond previous scholarship to open up the field of Chicano literary studies and to define anew what is American literature.

Contributors. Norma Alarcón, Héctor Calderón, Angie Chabram, Barbara Harlow, Rolando Hinojosa, Luis Leal, José E. Limón, Terese McKenna, Elizabeth J. Ordóñez, Genero Padilla, Alvina E. Quintana, Renato Rosaldo, José David Saldívar, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Rosaura Sánchez, Roberto Trujillo

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword: Redefining American Literature
• Editors’ Introduction: Criticism in the Borderlands
• Part I Institutional Studies and the Literary Canon
• Part II Representations of the Chicana/o Subject: Race, and Class, and Gender
• Part III Genre, Ideology, and History
• Part IV Aesthetics of the Border
• Works Cited
• Selected and Annotated Bibliography of Contemporary Chicano Literary Criticism
• Index
• Contributors