Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado answered a few questions for us about the new volume he edited, Mexican Literature in Theory.
How would you describe your book in one sentence?
An engagement between Mexican literature from the 19th to the 21st century and different schools of literary and critical theory, to explore the ways in which they illuminate and problematize each other.
What drew to you writing about this subject?
The Mexican literary studies field tends more toward philological and historiographic approaches and the book is meant to open the space for more conversations related to theory and to conceptual work.
How long have you been researching it? How did you come to study it?
It’s a collective effort that gathers the work of some of the top Mexicanists working in the English-language academy.
What does your book focus on that hasn’t been explored elsewhere?
The focus on theory in relation to Mexican Literature.
What initially drew you to Literary Studies?
An interest in reading literature in its sociocultural context.
Which Bloomsbury Lit Studies books have you read? Which are your favorites, and why?
I have read a good bit. My current favorite is Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader, which is a brilliant recovery of a major literary thinker of the 20th century.
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis, USA. He is the author of El canon y sus formas: La reinvención de Harold Bloom y sus lecturas hispanoamericanas (2002), Naciones intelectuales: Las fundaciones de la modernidad literaria mexicana 1917-1959 (2009, winner of the LASA Mexico 2010 Humanities Book Award) Intermitencias americanistas: Ensayos académico y literarios 2004-2009 (2012), and Screening Neoliiberalism. Transforming Mexican Cinema 1988-2012 (2014). He has edited and co-edited nine books, the most recent of which are Democracia, Otredad y Melancolía. Roger Bartra ante la crítica (with Mabel Moraña, 2015) and A History of Mexican Literature (with Anna Nogar and José Ramón Ruisánchez, 2016). He is the editor of the new collection Mexican Literature in Theory, now available from Bloomsbury.