Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 61-10, Section: A, page: 4014.

Director: Josefina Ludmer.

In my dissertation, I explore how the drug experience represents an index of modernity in 20th-century Latin American literature. I examine the relationship between the "writing of the drug experience" and moments of globalization in the field of Latin American letters. Such writing has been denominated as "pharmacography." It is my contention that, throughout this century, young Latin American writers attempt to inscribe themselves within cosmopolitan literary traditions outside their national canons through this particular genre of writing that questions the established precepts of literary representation. In this work I have articulated four different processes that function as a theoretical framework from which to study this genre: initiation, intoxication, translation, and reproduction. In the process of defining such limits, I have established a constellation of writers from diverse literary traditions and intellectual backgrounds in order to perceive the "virtual" and globalized corpus of drug writing.

As literature reaches out for the notion of modernity, its locality disseminates in a process of transition as established temporal and spatial axes are questioned and re-defined. My purpose in this dissertation is to draw a "map of (mis)reading"---phrase coined by the critic Harold Bloom---of a particular series of those disseminations through which Latin American literature has undergone in this century. Specifically, I explore two such moments in Latin American literary history: modernismo at the turn of the 19th-century and the writing of the 1960's and 70's, with an emphasis on the Mexican onda writers. I also analyze the legacy of the drug experience in the literature of the 1980's and 90's. As a literary and cultural phenomenon, the drug experience problematizes notions of self, language, originality, and literary history. I examine how those pharmacographic processes radically change the traditional conceptions of writing spaces, representation, and subjectivity in literature and therefore question the foundations and directions of the Latin American canon.