After the Nation: Postnational Satire in the Works of Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon

If the geographic imaginings of the national map aim to contain and retain the nation within its projected borders, the narratives of national histories have as their central subject the teleological discourse of modernity as an experience of national fulfillment. The literary narratives studied in After the Nation, in contrast, aim to unravel and denounce those combined hegemonic processes while they start to contemplate the ensuing postnational constellations. These are literary narratives that playfully point to and debase “holy” borders, international borders as well as the internal lines where narratives of nation are embodied and consecrated. After the Nation proposes a series of new approaches to novels, essays, and short stories by Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon within the framework of a postnational, hemispheric American Studies.