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Reading the Archival Remains of Arturo Islas’s La Mollie and the King of Tears

Reading the Archival Remains of Arturo Islas’s La Mollie and the King of Tears This essay considers Arturo Islas’s posthumously published novel, La Mollie and the King of Tears (1996), arguing that an examination of its “archival remains”—its drafted and rejected material found in Islas’s archive—offers compelling evidence of the text’s anxious resistances to bodily, narrative, and cultural annihilation. Drawing on textual scholarship that prioritizes notions of texts as “fluid” or “in process” as well as on theories of queer and asycnhronous temporalities, I argue for a reading of the novel as haunted by its erasures and absences, and for a reading practice that more purposefully imagines the role of the body—of the author, of the text, and of the reader— in constituting and reconstituting the narrative. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Twentieth-Century Literature Duke University Press

Reading the Archival Remains of Arturo Islas’s La Mollie and the King of Tears

Twentieth-Century Literature , Volume 67 (4) – Dec 1, 2021

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Copyright
Copyright © 2021 Hofstra University
ISSN
0041-462X
eISSN
2325-8101
DOI
10.1215/0041462x-9528815
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This essay considers Arturo Islas’s posthumously published novel, La Mollie and the King of Tears (1996), arguing that an examination of its “archival remains”—its drafted and rejected material found in Islas’s archive—offers compelling evidence of the text’s anxious resistances to bodily, narrative, and cultural annihilation. Drawing on textual scholarship that prioritizes notions of texts as “fluid” or “in process” as well as on theories of queer and asycnhronous temporalities, I argue for a reading of the novel as haunted by its erasures and absences, and for a reading practice that more purposefully imagines the role of the body—of the author, of the text, and of the reader— in constituting and reconstituting the narrative.

Journal

Twentieth-Century LiteratureDuke University Press

Published: Dec 1, 2021

References