Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a Comparative Context (review)

REVIEWS Writing in the Margin is an exceptionally ambitious work, and one cannot help but admire Smith's critical gifts and the breadth of his knowledge. This is a stellar performance, yet there is a certain irony in the studied marginality. As Smith seeks difference, he calls attention to "the other side of the story," even in the case of those critics whose perspectives he (at times too reductively ) dismisses. He may be as self-consciously selective in what he chooses to stress (and to defer) as more impressionistic and less talented critics. There is something disorienting about writing from the margins, for decentering must invert priorities and thus may turn against itself. The poststructuralist paradox notwithstanding, the study is a major achievement and a testament to changing times in Hispanic critical circles. Edward H. Friedman Indiana University EARL E. FtTZ. Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a Comparative Context. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1991. xiv + 275 pp. William Spengemann's/i MirrorforAmericanists (1989) makes a linguistically based argument that there is no such thing as "American literature," defined geographically or any other way, because there is no "American" language . Literature is written in English, or French, or Spanish, or whatever. He argues that "English" literature contains a few texts written in America, or by Americans, but only those masterpieces that earn a place in the world canon of literary works in English. The same would be true for American writing in Spanish or French. According to Spengemann, it is not possible to have a comparative literary history across languages, because literature is defined as such by its transforming effect on the language in which it is written. What is one person's impossibility is another's challenge. Earl E. Fitz, in Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a Comparative Context, boldly sets forth to do what Spengemann says cannot be done. Fitz takes us on a journey of literary exploration stretching from the far north of Canada to the tip of Argentina, moving in time from the pre-Columbian era to the present, examining and interrelating texts in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. His stated purpose is to approach the literatures of English and French Canada, the United States, Spanish America, and Brazil on the sharedground oftheir common historyoriginatingin"theEuropean discovery, conquest, and settlement of the New World," and to study these literatures "as a unit, as different manifestations of the Americanism or New Worldism that each represents" (xi). To accomplish this task, Fitz limits himself to looking at ten basic themes or issues he finds across these literatures and to a limited number of texts, mostly canonical but including others, especially texts by women, that manifest these themes. For every issue discussed, he uses only one or two texts from each New World literary culture. Fitz is quick to note the problems with his methodology, especially the problems oftext selection, ofthe immense accompanying bibliography for each canonical text chosen, of depth of coverage, and of his very limited critical commentary on each text. He insists to the reader 146 THE COMPARAnST that his work is introductory, a prolegomenon to encourage more detailed future studies of inter-American literature. The issues Fitz examines include both sociopolitical themes and formal concerns in inter-American literature. Beginning with Pre-Columbian native song, Fitz links it to the Western tradition of lyric poetry, and argues that its emphasis on the word as sacred object parallels the magic realism ofcontemporary Spanish American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez. He next examinesthe English,French, Spanish, andPortuguese "narratives ofdiscovery and conquest" bywriters such as John Cabot, Jacques Cartier, Bernai Diaz del Castillo, and Pero Vaz de Caminha, grouping them by the presence or absence of plot-like structure and by the nature of the basic conflicts they describe, whether that between the individual and nature as explorers struggle in the wilderness (e.g., John Franklin's Narrative ofa Journey to the Shore of the PolarSea), or the clash of human cultures as the conquistadors overthrow the Aztec empire in Diaz's eyewitness account, True History ofthe Conquest of Spain. Each chapter takes up an issue, whether a...