Rubén Gallo - Proust’s Latin Americans

​Online registration is currently closed but members may arrive before the event and pick up tickets. Non-members may pay at the door. Please email jnegroni@as-coa.org with questions.

Award-winning author Rubén Gallo (Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis and Mexican Modernity), along with Mexican writer Alvaro Enrigue (Hypothermia) and Proust scholar Caroline Weber (Barnard College), will discuss Gallo’s latest acclaimed publication. Part biography, part cultural history, part literary study, Proust’s Latin Americans has been heralded as the first discussion of Proust’s circle of Latin American friends, lovers, and literary models—including composer Reynaldo Hahn, Argentinian dandy Gabriel de Yturri, and Cuban poet José-Maria de Heredia, among others.  In his fascinating study, Gallo discusses Proust’s correspondence with this group of Latin Americans and provides fresh insights on Proust’s masterwork, In Search of Lost Time that posit Latin America as the novel’s political unconscious. With Johns Hopkins University Press and the additional collaboration of the Mexican Cultural Institute and the French Embassy/Cultural Services.

We thank the following additional institutions for helping publicize this event:  the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, CUNY; Columbia University; the Consulate General of Argentina in New York; the Consulate General of Colombia in New York; the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute; the Hispanic New York Project; Hunter College, CUNY; Instituto Cervantes New York; InterAmericas®; The International Literary Quarterly; McNally Jackson Books; the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York; New York University; The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church; The 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center; and Words Without Borders.

This event will be held in English.

Event Information: Jose Negroni | jnegroni@as-coa.org | 1-212-277-8353

Press Inquiries: Adriana La Rotta | alarotta@as-coa.org | 1-212-277-8384

Rubén Gallo is the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr., Professor in Language, Literature, and Civilization of Spain at Princeton University. He is the author of several books, including Mexican Moderity (2005; Katherine Singer Kovacs Award) and Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis (2010; Gradiva Award).

Alvaro Enrigue (b. 1969, Mexico City) is the acclaimed author of four novels and two books of short stories, including La muerte de un instalador (1996; Joaquín Mortiz Prize) and, most recently, the lauded Hypothermia (2006); published in translation by Dalkey Archive Press in 2013.  His work has also been translated into German and French.

Caroline Weber is associate professor of French at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she specializes in 18th to 20th-century French literature, history, and culture. Her "Proust's Duchess," is forthcoming from Knopf.

About the book: “Rubén Gallo's book explores the presence of Latin America in Proust's life and work. The novelist lived in an era shaped by French colonial expansion into the Americas: just before his birth, Napoleon III installed Maximilian as emperor of Mexico, and during the 1890s France was shaken by the Panama Affair, a financial scandal linked to the construction of the canal in which thousands of French citizens lost their life savings. It was in the context of these tense Franco–Latin American relations that the novelist met the circle of friends discussed in Proust's Latin Americans: the composer Reynaldo Hahn, Proust’s Venezuelan lover; Gabriel de Yturri, an Argentinean dandy; José-Maria de Heredia, a Cuban poet and early literary model; Antonio de La Gandara, a Mexican society painter; and Ramón Fernández, a brilliant Mexican critic turned Nazi sympathizer. Gallo discusses the correspondence—some of it never before published—between the novelist and this heterogeneous group and also presents insightful readings of In Search of Lost Time that posit Latin America as the novel’s political unconscious.” [from the book jacket]