Poetics of the Americas

Emanating from a colloquium held at Louisiana State University entitled “Intertextuality and Civilization in the Americas,” this volume features some of the best minds now writing in comparative and interdisciplinary fields. Through lively discussions of topics ranging from Sigmund Freud to Zora Neale Hurston, from Christopher Columbus to the Holocaust, and including latter-day cultural icons such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the contributors create a stimulating dialogue on the crucial role of the poetic imagination in shaping the identity of civilizations.

Addressing themes such as the Moses story in modern literature, the relation between power and cultural encounter, the first African-American novel, and the foundations of Latin American literature and the New World baroque, the contributors link multiculturalism with intertextuality, crossing disciplinary, national, linguistic, and hemispheric boundaries. The volume closes with Jefferson Humphries’ deft translation of a poem by Edouard Glissant, a featured speaker at the conference whose writings bear a special relation to the subject of intertextuality.

Together, the essays offer a full consideration of cultural identity and bring to the fore the difficult question of the larger responsibilities that identity entails. As Bainard Cowan illustrates in his perceptive introduction, in both the past and the future of the Americas, in moments of foundation as well as of conflict and dispersal, there has been or will be present the recurrent need for mythic and poetic understanding. An unusually timely work, Poetics of the Americas skillfully addresses the crises that the world faces in the confrontations of cultures, traditions, and peoples.