Ramón Saldívar

Figural language in the novel : the flowers of speech from Cervantes to Joyce

Novels affirm the power of fiction to portray the horizons of knowledge and to dramatize the ways that the truths of human existence are created and preserved. Professor Saldivar shows that deconstructive readings of novels remind us that we do not apprehend the world directly but through interpretive codes.Originally published in 1984.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Multicultural Politics, Aesthetics, and the Realist Theory of Identity: A Response to Satya Mohanty

Satya Mohanty makes an eloquently compelling case for the existence of objective values in ethics, aesthetics, and progressive politics. Basing his argument on the “postpositivist” notion of “realism” that he delineates in Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics, Mohanty positions himself in opposition to what he characterizes as extreme subjectivity in the ethics, epistemology, and politics of postmodernism.1 Indeed, in the preface to Literary Theory and the Claims of History, Mohanty states that his aim there is “to explore and develop a theoretical alternative to the notion of objectivity which is assailed by postmodernists, an alternative position that can be characterized in philosophical terms as ‘realist’” (xii). His task is both epistemological and political, as he desires to establish a notion of objectivity that can further both cultural theory and social projects. In my response to Mohanty, I am in the curious position that my grandmother in Mexican south Texas used to warn me always to avoid: of being “mosca en leche,” a fly in the cream, that is, obviously and embarrassingly out of place in the realist cream on the postmodern dinner table. I consider myself neither a bona fide “postpositivist realist” nor a card-carrying postmodernist. As a consequence, my response to Mohanty’s postpositivist realist critique of postmodernism must of necessity be made from outside the margins of both positions. In what follows, I wish to respond to Mohanty less by contesting his position than by interrogating some of its implications. I begin by summarizing Mohanty’s position, at least as I understand it. In the preface to Literary Theory and the Claims of History, Mohanty is straightforward in his description of his project, and so I begin by quoting him:

Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary

In his underappreciated and early essay “Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity” C. L. R. James observes that “the simplest reflection will show the necessity of holding fast … the affirmation that is contained in every negation, the future that is in the present” (1992:161). James’s notion of “the future in the present” helps me begin to respond to a question paraphrased from Michael Hames-Garcia as to “who our own people are” (2000:102) and to the larger issue of the series of discussions taking place under the rubric of “The Future of Minority Studies.” With C. L. R. James, I make the preliminary observation that the future is in the present and that the future is in the past.

Chicano Literature and Ideology: Prospectus for the '80s

In the decades since its contemporary renaissance, the Chicano novel has contributed to a general reassessment of the cultural-historical creativity of Mexicans in the American Southwest. Generally speaking, the Chicano novel has provided a mediated truth about a culturally determinate people in a historically determined context. The truth of the real world that Chicanos experience has thus been made to inhabit literature. Readers and critics of the literature have assumed that to know this cultural truth one