The (Non)Modern Mesoamerican World: Literature and Politics in Twentieth-Century Central America and Mexico

This dissertation studies the literary construal of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica at critical moments in the cultural and political history of Central America and Mexico throughout the 20th century. I elucidate the aesthetic and political significance of pre-Columbian cultures in Central American and Mexican literature, and probe into the links between specific modes of writing about the ancient past, on the one hand, and key notions of aesthetic and political modernity—such as the state, the literary archive, and the revolution—on the other. Read as the contours of an expansive constellation of interpretations of the ancient past, the literary corpus discussed throughout this study outlines a master about the aesthetic and political milieux of literature in twentieth-century Central America and Mexico. I approach this interpretive constellation through the prism of what I call “the Mesoamerican (non)modern world,” by which I describe a conceptual domain within the symbolic production of the region that, at moments of crisis, elicits a critique of modernity from its antipodes. Chapter One focuses on essays by Octavio Paz and Luis Cardoza y Aragón that address questions of national identity and state modernization in Mexico and Guatemala based on myths and forms of social organization from pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. I explore the tensions that follow from juxtaposing their respective interpretations of pre-Columbian cultures against a mid-century critique of the modern state and show that the staging of these tensions is informed by questions of literary form concerning the essay genre. Chapter Two surveys the literary trajectory of Miguel Ángel Asturias and highlights the importance of surrealism and modern ethnography in the author’s production of a genealogical discourse on Latin American literary history against the modernist background of his own oeuvre. Asturias’s archival conception of Latin American literature, I argue, ultimately renders ancient Mesoamerican civilizations more remote and mythical than historical, while stressing the modernity of the author’s own literary imagination. Chapter 3 recalibrates the relationship between literature and revolution in Central America through the triangular prism of pre-Columbian myths, poetry, and policymaking. I read the works of Ernesto Cardenal in the context of 1980s Sandinismo and look at the literary articulation of pre-Columbian cultures in the political poetry of Central America to understand: 1) the wr