Bergson in Mexican Literature and Film

This is the first book-length analysis of the influence of Henri Bergson’s philosophy in Mexican literature and film. Following the publication of Matter and Memory (1896) and Creative Evolution (1907), Bergson’s philosophy swept the world in the early twentieth century and was a touchstone for the voices of change during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). Bergson’s writing on time, memory, consciousness and intuition found a receptive home with intellectuals confronting the ideology of positivism and the nation’s syncretic pasts and futures. Against the assumption that Bergson quickly fell from favour, Penn demonstrates their enduring presence in Mexican aesthetic production. Over four chapters of in-depth analyses covering novels, short fiction, memoirs, poetry, and cinema, Penn moves from the Revolutionary period intellectuals of Alfonso Reyes and José Vasconcelos, the 1930s of José Gorostiza and the Contemporáneos, to the Boom and post-Boom fiction of Carlos Fuentes, finishing with the contemporary films of Carlos Reygadas. Penn’s penetrating analyses of temporally ‘mobile’ images uncover a continuous, Bergsonian aesthetic unfolding questions of time, memory and identity in Mexico. The study extends our understanding of the place of Bergson in the international arts and the role played by his philosophy of pure duration in postcolonial and hybrid cultures.