The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments This book and I are both beholden to some impressive mentors, colleagues, and friends. Andrew Bush has been an ideal reader and a consistent guiding spirit since my undergraduate days; Vera Kutzinski ’s honesty and thoroughness were both forbidding and necessary ; Roberto González Echevarría provided deep guidance, especially through the example of his works (this project is a field-test of several of his theories); and Raymond L.Williams has offered a tireless example of how to do and be. I am also deeply grateful to Ernesto Livon Grosman, Christopher Bolton, Catharine Wall, and Ben and Linda Kleindorfer for listening and prodding. All of the above read or heard most of what I have to say and guided my thoughts in ways more important than they perhaps realize. They have become a chorus in my head, and I hope I do them justice. Since this book attempts to cover such a broad range of periods and subjects, I took to heart Alfonso Reyes’s dictum ‘‘entre todos lo sabemos todo’’ and reached out to others more knowledgeable than I. Some generous readers were instrumental in shaping individual chapters: Beni Trigo and Julio Ortega on Gómez-Peña; Elzbieta Sklodowska on Vasconcelos ; Lois Parkinson Zamora on Fuentes and the Neobaroque. Andy Bush wisely sent me back to the drawing board on Lizardi, which luckily coincided with a working group at the University of California , Riverside Center for Ideas and Society, where I benefited especially from the insights of Katherine Kinney and Steven Gould Axelrod . Sandra Comas Ferdman read and commented on early versions of the chapter on Bernal Díaz. Some generous Germanists and Humboldtists forgave and aided my incursion into their field: Nicholas Rennie, Jeffrey Sammons, Graham Burnett, Stuart Peterfreund, and Gretchen Hachmeister (who also provided moral support and wedding cake). David Quint, Vilashini Cooppan, Pericles Lewis, and Anita Gallers read early drafts and offered helpful suggestions for improvement.The comments of Nina Gerassi-Navarro and an anonymous reader at the Uni- versity of Texas Press were thorough, fair, and deeply useful. I also appreciate permission from the publishers of Foucault in Latin America (2002, reproduced by permission of Routledge, Inc., part of The Taylor & Francis Group), MLN, and the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (St. Louis), where some of this work appeared in earlier forms; thanks to Theresa May, Allison Faust, and Leslie Tingle at UT Press and Kathy Lewis for their thoroughness. The material demands of this project were unusually well met. Lisa Paravisini-Gebert, Ray Williams, and Nicolas Shumway carried out baroque , behind-the-scenes efforts on its behalf. For daily sustenance I am deeply thankful to the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at UC Riverside, the Dorothy Danforth-Compton Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the University of California Academic Senate, the UC Institute for Mexico and the United States, and the UC Riverside Center for Ideas and Society. From them I received, respectively, a job and the permission to leave it for a while; fellowships; grants; and time. The Interlibrary Loan office at Rivera Library fielded my aggressive requests with humor and efficiency; my colleagues in the Department of Hispanic Studies at UCR offered years of productive collegiality, and two graduate student assistants in the department, Shannon Polchow and Rose Dutra, were instrumental in getting things done well and on time. The happy arrival of two sons, John Jr. and Pablo Eduardo, kept the entire notion of failure in perspective. Thanks, too, to Julia Zaragoza for maintaining order. Finally, this project owes the most to Stacy Andersen, whose approval has meant the world to me.Throughout she has been my favorite interlocutor and muse but most importantly my friend. x FAILURE IN MEXICAN LITERATURE AND IDENTITY The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK ...