Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas. By Tom McEnaney. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2017. 313 pages.

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Reading and its discontents: Nation and interpellation in the twentieth-century transatlantic crónica

This dissertation strives to fill the gaps between Spain and Latin America, modernismo and postmodernismo, and aesthetics and politics that remain in many critical studies of the journalistic crónica by reading together the twentieth-century texts of Catalan Eugem d\u27Ors (1881-1954), Colombian Germán Arciniegas (1900-1999), and Mexican Carlos Monsiváis (1938-). I study these works in light of the conditions of nationhood with which they engage, focusing on the moments of political transition or crisis in which Ors, Arciniegas, and Monsiváis produce newspaper texts that conceive of subjectivity as a means of going beyond the party politics of the nation, opening up a space for alternative collectives instead. I therefore take a historical approach to reading the chronicle that draws from Jürgen Habermas\u27s sociological works on public and private spheres, while also using my reading of the twentieth-century genre to engage in a theoretical discussion on what I refer to as the form of interpellation. Considering how these interpellative chronicles refigure notions of public and private, aesthetics and politics, ideology and ethics, I argue that the texts allow us to consider a theory of aesthetics that lends form and representation a hold over subjectivity. As such, my dissertation attempts to reveal not only the error of viewing the chronicle as a mere reflection of contemporary society, but also how its perceived production of readers might be of use for understanding the weaknesses of the interpellative mechanism itself. Thus, the project calls into question several theories on ideology and subjectivity (Althusser, Žižek, Butler, De Certeau), ethics (Kant, Levinas), and aesthetics (Debord), in which imagined or practiced publics and subjects are easily inscribable into homogenizing theories and mechanisms; drawing in part on the work of Brian Massumi, the work calls instead for a turn to affective aesthetics--such as that seen in the crónica --as a means of rethinking both reading and subjectivity in theoretical, as well as literary, texts