Unhomely Rooms

In Unhomely Rooms, Roberto Ignacio Diaz explores the practice of writing in English and French by Spanish American authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Traditionally, writers such as the Contesse Merlin (a Cuban-French author) and W.H. Hudson (The Anglo-American best known for his ornithological works) have been excluded from the established discussion of Spanish-American literature because they wrote in a language other than Spanish. Seeking to revise the notion that "heterolingualism" should lead to literary-historical elision, Diaz underscores the ties that bind the works of these authors to the Spanish American literary canon. Through his close readings of texts by Merlin and Hudson, as well as Maria Luisa Bombal, G. Cabrera Infante, and Carlos Fuentes, foreign tongues emerge as valid. If perplexing, tools of writing for Spanish Americans. Even as he exposes the cultural fragmentation of Spanish America, Diaz's critical gesture allows strangeness to become an integral part not only of individuals, as Freud argues in "The Uncanny," but also of national cultural communities.