North America

Overview

The United States gave itself a national literature in the middle of the nineteenth century, with Moby-Dick and Leaves of Grass, seeking to stop writing like England. Mexico belongs to the same continent and to another world: Pedro Paramo, published in 1955, founded the modern Latin American novel in a language with nothing in common with that of the north. Hollywood, settled in California from 1910 to escape Edison's patents, gave cinema a grammar the whole world took up, from the western to comedy, from Stagecoach to Citizen Kane.

What circulates

New York publishing sets what is read in English worldwide, and a Canadian book often passes through it before being read at home. Quebec publishes in French and looks to Paris as much as to Toronto; Mexico publishes in Spanish and belongs to the Latin American book market, whose other capitals are Buenos Aires and Barcelona.

Limits of this grouping

Attaching Mexico to the north is a matter of geography, not of letters: its literature is read alongside that of Lima and Buenos Aires, and the division cuts it off from its immediate neighbours. The indigenous languages of the continent, Nahuatl, Cree, Inuktitut, hardly appear at all, for want of publishing and translation.

Works cited

• NovelMoby-DickHerman Melville · 1851American whalers then set out on voyages of several years to fetch sperm oil from the other side of the world; these pages give the detail of it and use it for something else.LiteraturePublic domain
• PoetryLeaves of GrassWalt Whitman · 1855This collection arrives without metre or rhyme and without an author's name, preceded by the portrait of a man in shirtsleeves who speaks of his flesh and that of others.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelPedro PáramoJuan Rulfo · 1955A village peopled by voices, in the rural Mexico of the caciques, where a son goes in search of his father.Literature
• CinemaStagecoachJohn Ford · 1939Big-budget westerns had gone out of fashion since the end of the silent era, and the genre lived mostly on cheap B films; the producer hesitated to make an A-category one.Cinema
• CinemaCitizen KaneOrson Welles · 1941The film tells the life of its hero through several successive points of view, out of chronological order; Gregg Toland uses great depth of field, visible ceilings and low-angle shots.Cinema