Modernism and Latin America: Transnational Networks of Literary Exchange by Patricia Novillo-Corvalán

Abstract

Reviewed by: Modernism and Latin America: Transnational Networks of Literary Exchange by Patricia Novillo-Corvalán Vanessa Marie Fernández (bio) MODERNISM AND LATIN AMERICA: TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS OF LITERARY EXCHANGE, by Patricia Novillo-Corvalán. New York: Routledge Publishers, 2018. 190 pp. $140.00 cloth, $54.95 ebook. Patricia Novillo-Corvalán's Modernism and Latin America: Transnational Networks of Literary Exchange adds to the increasing scholarship that seeks to re-articulate Anglo-Modernism by pointing to its connections with other cultural networks. In five loosely connected chapters, Novillo-Corvalán examines Latin America as an overlooked modernist geography. Each chapter explores a unique avenue in which Latin America's impact on modernism has been overlooked. Novillo-Corvalán's exhaustive research offers new readings of canonical modernist texts such as Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, D. H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent, and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano alongside new perspectives on Latin American writings by the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges and Chileans Pablo Neruda and Roberto Bolaño.1 On the one hand, her work explores Latin America's influence on canonical Anglo-Modernist writers such as Argentina's importance for Woolf and Mexico's impact on Lawrence and Lowry. On the other, Novillo-Corvalán studies Latin America's relationship with Anglo-Modernism by offering examples such as Borges's and Bolaño's appreciation of a Joycean aesthetic and its presence in their work. A line of inquiry that permeates Novillo-Corvalán's study is attention to empire's role in shaping modernism. Exploring anti-imperialism in Woolf and Neruda in her first two chapters, for instance, offers two perspectives on the topic, the former from an insider, and the latter from an outsider. In chapter 1, "Empire and Commerce in Latin America: Historicising Woolf's The Voyage Out," she points out "that Virginia Woolf puts the complex issue of Great Britain's neocolonial domination in Latin America squarely on the cultural agenda of The Voyage Out" (10). Novillo-Corvalán's analysis in this chapter is an admittedly "intertwined reading" of Woolf's novel because it relies heavily on notes taken by the novelist two years after The Voyage Out was published (21). An engrossing read nevertheless, this first chapter offers an interesting discussion of topics such as Argentina's beef export industry, the country's relationship with Britain, and the novel's critique of British economic imperialism. Novillo-Corvalán [End Page 199] makes it plain that "the prevailing view that [Woolf's] knowledge of the continent was vague, deficient, and, at its worst, non-existent" is false (23). Questioning empire's role in modernist scholarship, NovilloCorvalán's second chapter, "Anti-imperialist Commitments: Mapping Neruda's Transnational Modernist Networks," offers Neruda as an example that "challenges the notion that aesthetic innovation is the product of the West" (51). She bases her argument on the Nobel Laureate's non-Eurocentric "complex émigré status" as a diplomat assigned to South Asia and Buenos Aires (51). In Novillo-Corvalán's estimation, having bypassed "a long-standing Latin American tradition" that required "the pilgrimage to Paris" as a rite of passage for an "aesthetic journey of initiation," "Neruda 'decentres' modernism by underscoring the aesthetic production of alternative cultural centres such as Colombo and Buenos Aires" (51, 52). Juxtaposing Neruda's perspective with Leonard Woolf's "reluctant insider" opposition to British imperialism in Ceylon, this chapter further underscores Neruda's own anti-imperialist position as a "self-conscious outsider" (59). While Novillo-Corvalán's appraisal of Virginia Woolf's and Neruda's negotiation of modernism and empire is thought-provoking, her most engaging examination of the topic surfaces in chapter 3, "The Cultural Politics of World Literature: Beckett, Paz, and UNESCO." This section provides a captivating account of the publication of UNESCO's An Anthology of Mexican Poetry, edited and translated by two Nobel Laureates, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz and the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, respectively.2 Foregrounding UNESCO's narrow, imperialistic attitude towards Latin America, this chapter first delves into Paz's initial misgivings about the project and the contentious episodes surrounding the "Mexicanness" of the anthology that ensued with his...