Description
El rumor de la frontera (2006), by Alfonso Armada with photography by Corina Arranz, blends references to Anglophone and Hispanic literary representations of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and, notably, the idea of the American West. The exploration of physical landscapes through travel writing and travel photography is accompanied by the exploration of the imagined landscapes and constructed myths of two distinct but interconnected literatures of place. Armada is invested in works that represent very specifically and often with novelistic sensitivities the precise zone he traverses. For example, as they are mobilised in Armada's writing among the many intertextual references that the author intersperses, Roberto Bolaño and Cormac McCarthy have in common a fusion of the mythic nature of storytelling with the bleaker and more apocalyptic elements of frontiers, with their suggestion of pervasive evils. Armada's own writing is preoccupied with facts, statistics, and the personal stories of the people he encounters, but all set against the epic imaginary of this region and therefore simultaneously repeating the inscription of the borderlands as a space of transgression and ungovernability and modifying it as a multiply inhabited landscape with many layers of historical meaning and affective engagement. El rumor de la frontera explores a space often seen from one language and literary tradition or the other and finds it inextricably tangled up with many languages and literatures, with a "West" that was never a single story, and which is being constantly rewritten in the new stories of its mobile and multiple inhabitants.| Period | Sept 2023 |
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| Event title | De guiris y castizos: Confluencias literarias de los mundos hispánico y anglosajón |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Madrid, SpainShow on map |