This dissertation analyzes the emergence of alternatives forms of historical narration in late modernist or what I call postvanguardia works of the 1930s by Jorge Luis Borges (Historia universal de la infamia, 1935), William Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom!, 1936), and the Brazilian novelist Graciliano Ramos (Angústia , 1936). Through strategies of interruption, circularity, repetition, and arrest, these texts propose a syntax of historical interpretation that refuses to find in narrative a suture for the conflicted relationship between past, present, and future. These strategies, I contend, constitute a simultaneous critique of and reapproachment with earlier modernisms and the avant-gardes, inflecting these through a historical turn.

Through a contrapuntal reading of these texts and archival research from little magazines and essays from the period, I show how the intensity with which Borges, Ramos, and Faulkner approached the problem of history can best be understood in terms of their engagement with contemporaneous debates that alternately positioned history either as a foundation to shore up crisis, or as in crisis itself. Individual chapters underscore the ways in which historical interpretation dovetailed with the languages of mass culture (detective fiction, popular journalism) and historical revisionism specific to the 1930s. In this sense, it is not merely a question of locating these authors “within” a context, but of understanding how their fictional texts constructed their own theories of history. In reading the Argentine, Brazilian, and US contexts together during the same period, the dissertation also proposes that the modernisms of the Americas require their own periodization and interpretation, one that cannot be merely routed through a European modernist center. Ultimately, these texts offer a provocation to contemporary scholarly debates not only with respect to hemispheric studies and the specter of comparison, but also in their imperative to find new modes to narrate history, both within and beyond literary studies.