A Latin American Existentialist Ethos

Modern Mexican Literature and Philosophy

Stephanie Merrim

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781438493183, 9781438493190
• eBook ISBN: 9781438493206
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Examines twentieth-century Mexican literature and philosophy within the broad panorama of Latin American and European existentialisms.

With their emphasis on freedom and engagement, European existentialisms offered Latin Americans transformative frameworks for thinking and writing about their own locales. In taking up these frameworks, Latin Americans endowed them with a distinctive ethos, a turn towards questions of identity and ethics. Stephanie Merrim situates major literary and philosophical works-by the existentialist Grupo Hiperión, Rosario Castellanos, Octavio Paz, José Revueltas, Juan Rulfo, and Rodolfo Usigli-within this dynamic context. Collectively, their writings manifest an existentialist ethos attuned to the matters most alive and pressing in their specific situations-matters linked to gender, Indigeneity, the Mexican Revolution, and post-Revolution politics. That each of these writers orchestrates a unique center of gravity renders Mexican existentialist literature an always shifting, always passionate adventure. A Latin American Existentialist Ethos takes readers on this adventure, conveying the passions of its subjects lucidly and vibrantly. It is at once a detailed portrait of twentieth-century Mexican existentialism and an expansive look at Latin American literary existentialism in relation-and opposition-to its European counterparts.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translations
• Chapter One Engaging Existentialism: Transformative Possibilities and Local Agendas
• Chapter Two The Mexican Existentialist Ethos
• Chapter Three The Seminal Mexican Existentialism of Rodolfo Usigli’s Theater
• Chapter Four Excavating Comala: The Existentialist Juan Rulfo, the Grupo Hiperión, and Lo Mexicano in Pedro Páramo (1955)
• Chapter Five “Christs for All Passions”: José Revueltas’s El luto humano [Human Mourning]
• Chapter Six Rosario Castellanos’s Freedom
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover