ALI books

• Lifshey, Adam. Absence and the Transatlantic in Literatures of America.
  
  (Purchase from Fordham University Press).
  
  This book posits "America" as not a particular country or continent but as an archetypal foundational narrative in which a conqueror arrives at a shore determined to overwrite local versions of humanity, culture, landscape, etc., with inscriptions of his own design. This imposition of foreign textualities, however dominant, is never complete because the absences of the disappeared still linger manifestly. These absences are therefore present. That apparent paradox provides for an America whose Conquest is always partial and whose conquered are always contestatory. The five principal texts on which Absence and the Transatlantic in Literatures of America focuses - the Popol Vuh of the Maya, Columbus's diary of his first voyage, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Evita's Cuando los Combes luchaban (the first African novel in Spanish), and Pynchon's Mason & Dixon - are examined as foundational stories of America in their imaginings of its transatlantic commencement. These texts are rarely if ever read together because of their discrete provenances in time and place, yet their juxtaposition reveals how the disjunctions and ruptures that took place on the shores of the Atlantic upon the arrival of Europeans became insinuated as recurring and resistant absences in the texts of the conquistadors and their heirs.