Jason G. Summers

Research Agenda

Questions that interest me:

1. How do literatures of prison and exile connect to the theories and conventions of the "Post-Boom" in Latin American literature of the late 20th and early 21st centuries?

• Received an IPFW Summer Research grant to let me work during Summer 2005 on connecting Manuel Puig's El beso de la mujer araña and Graciliano Ramos' Memôrias do Cârcere. This will be a chapter of a longer project that deals with prison and exile writings from Latin American and US Latino writers.
• Revising a study of Ariel Dorfman's La muerte y la doncella.

2. How do texts from the Boom, the Post-Boom and the "McOndista" generations deal with the questions of magical realism, political involvement, memory and popular culture?

• Revising an article on Chicana author Gloria Anzaldúa and her connection to the Post-Boom.
• Submitted a paper about Boom and McOndo/Crack generation to Journal of Narrative special edition on realism - Jan. 2006.
• Published an article about Alberto Fuguet's Tinta roja in Novels of the Contemporary Extreme anthology - Continuum, 2006.
• Taught a Fall 2005 class (S412 Spanish American Civ) about Latin American Cinema and Society - we saw films, as well as read articles, two novels and a play (El beso de la mujer araña, La muerte y la doncella, and Tinta roja.)
• Presented a conference paper about Boom and Alberto Fuguet at IV Conferencia Internacional de Literatura Hispánica in Bayahibe, Dominican Republic - March 2005.

3. How does popular culture interact with national cultures in the Hispanic world?

• Revising an article on Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar and his 1993 film Kika.
• Taught a Spring 2005 class (I208 International Cinema) about recent European film and cultural representations and constructions of the "Other" based on race, gender, sexuality, nationality and socio-economic class.
• Presented a conference paper about Juan Luis Guerra and merengue in Dominican and Latin American culture at IV Conference of the Latin American Branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, National Center for the Arts (CENART), Mexico City. April 2002.

4. What does the literary representation of the environment and nature in the "Boom", "Post-Boom" and US Latino texts reflect on cultural and societal attitudes toward the environment and environmental questions in Latin America?

• Presented a conference paper about nature and healing in US Latino writing at Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Fourth Biennial Conference, Northern Arizona University. June 2001.