Kelly Comfort

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Decimonónica

Volume

13

Issue

2

Publisher

Decimonónica

Publication Date

2016

First Page

32

Last Page

49

Abstract

In their introductory chapter to Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel examine the relevance of “place, proximity, [and] position” to diverse modernist discourses and invite a “dialogue about ‘placedness’” to constitute their proposed rethinking of modernist studies (1). By breaking modernism “open” into something they call “geomodernisms,” Doyle and Winkiel advocate for “a locational approach to modernisms’ engagement with cultural and political discourses of global modernity” (3). I take up their concern with literary works that display “a self- consciousness about positionality” in the present analysis of two chronicles by Mexican modernista author Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (1859-1895). Whereas “Stora y las medias parisienses” (1881) presents the titular character as a poor, foreign-born artist wandering the streets of Paris, “La novela del tranvía” (1882) introduces a wealthy and idle narrator- protagonist who enjoys traversing Mexico City in a streetcar. The former text begins with a juxtaposition of the putrid and contaminated Mexico City and the privileged and delicious city of Paris, while the latter tale celebrates the living pictures that can be observed when traveling to the many unknown worlds and virgin regions that surround Mexico City. In the present investigation, I aim to analyze the extent to which Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera is able to show an “aesthetic self-awareness [… of] a geocultural consciousness.” That is, to speak “from outside or inside or both at once”; to orient “toward and away from the metropole” or to unhinge “simple binaries (such as metropole and margin)”; and to exist “somewhere between belonging and dispersion” (Doyle and Winkiel 4, 7-8).

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