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- Title
"The Relationships of Rivers": Neobaroque and Riverine Recreations in Anaya's New Mexican Tierra.
- Authors
Donohue, Micah K
- Abstract
Scholars have argued that Rudolfo Anaya's first and still best-known novel Bless Me, Ultima (1972) is a Neobaroque work. This essay expands that claim to Anaya's decades- and genres-spanning oeuvre. Anaya's stories, poems, and (above all) novels reimagine the hemispheric American Neobaroque in distinctly New Mexican and borderlands forms. The Neobaroque finds its most significant symbolic expression in Anaya in his many depictions of the Río Grande and other New Mexican rivers such as the Pecos. Rivers in Anaya's works represent a confluence of Indigenous, European, Mexican, and US histories in which local and global narratives reflect, refract, and re-create each other. Anaya is celebrated as a poet of the llano (the eastern New Mexican plains), but he should also be studied as a Neobaroque novelist of rivers whose texts verbally enact and critically illuminate a crossing point between studies of the Neobaroque and the recent river turn in the larger blue humanities movement in American literary studies. The "relationships of rivers" that saturate Anaya's writing bring together two hermeneutical approaches to American literature in which geoformal descriptors such as the Southwest or America are simultaneously understood regionally, nationally, transnationally, and globally. The waterways of Anaya's texts combine timelines and languages in flows of historically rich and polyvalent meanings. His rivers cross borders, blur timelines, dissolve and recreate geographies, and mirror the fluid nature of the US-Mexican borderlands. Mapping Anaya's rivers reveals a Neobaroque landscape in which Anaya reimagines world literature and history as part of a fluvial New Mexican mosaic.
- Subjects
RIO Grande (Colo.-Mexico &; Tex.); NEW Mexico; RIVERS in literature; ANAYA, Rudolfo Alfonso, 1937-; BLESS Me, Ultima (Book : Anaya); BAROQUE literature
- Publication
MELUS, 2023, Vol 48, Issue 1, p70
- ISSN
0163-755X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/melus/mlad011