History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction (review)

Abstract

Deborah Cohn's new book, History and Memory in the Two Souths, is a fruitful combination of wide-ranging historical and regional concerns and intensely focused analyses of texts, texts that are paired under rubrics that delineate those concerns. Building on the growing body of scholarship that connects the literatures of the Americas, such as Lois Parkinson Zamora's The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas and her Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin American Fiction, in which, as Cohn notes, she posits "a shared comprehension of America and a shared mode of narrating its history," Bell Gale Chevigny and Gari Laguardia's and Gustavo Pérez Firmat's collections Reinventing the Americas: Comparative Studies of the Literature of the United States and Spanish America and Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? and other studies, including articles by James Irby, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Harley Oberhelman, who have compared Faulkner and various Spanish American authors, Cohn constructs a convincing case for regarding the U.S. South and Spanish America as "neighboring spaces." At the outset she invokes Frederick Hoffman's idea that "values of place in literature come from its being . . . associated with neighboring spaces that share a history, some communicable tradition and idiom, in terms of which a personality can be identified" (2). More specifically, she traces common concerns, especially of place and past, and shows how those concerns in the South and Spanish America have attracted Spanish American writers to Faulkner and led them to see the past of the South as similar to their own.