Ramón Saldívar

Ramón Saldívar

Hoagland Family Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Professor, by courtesy, of Iberian and Latin American Cultures

Contact:

Building 460, Room 322
Phone: 650 725 1213
saldivar@stanford.edu

BIO:

Ramón Saldívar's teaching and research areas at Stanford have concentrated on the areas of cultural studies, literary theory, modernism, Chicano narrative, and Post-colonial literature. He is also interested in the history of the novel and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and American comparative studies. With a degree in Comparative Literature, his publications reflect the variety of his interests. His first book, Figural Language in the Novel: The Flowers of Speech from Cervantes to Joyce (1984), was a study of the authority of meaning in selected canonical European and American novels. His second book, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990), is a history of the development of Chicano narrative forms. His most recent book, titled The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (2006), is a study of the modern American borderlands, transnationalism and globalism and their role in creating and delimiting agents of history.

Saldívar has served on the Board of Governors of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, on the Editorial Board of American Literature, and Modern Fiction Studies and on the national council of the American Studies Association. He is a past recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a National Council on Chicanos in Higher Education grant, a Danforth Doctoral Fellowship and various University of Texas Research Institute Faculty Awards. At Stanford, he has received Irvine and Bing curriculum development grants. He is the 1994 recipient of the Lillian and Thomas B. Rhodes Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at Stanford, the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Distinctive Contribution to Undergraduate Education in 1998, and is the Hoagland Family Professor of Humanities and Sciences and Milligan Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.

EDUCATION:

1977: Ph.D., Yale University
1975: M.Phil., Yale University
1972: B.A., University of Texas, Austin

News & Events

May 3, 2012
The DLCL is pleased to announce that Russell Berman, Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities,...
Oct 26, 2011
Oct 17, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht on:"How I Think (and Write) about What We Feel When We Read (...

Courses

  • COMPLIT
    142
    Win
    2012-13

    The course offers a wide-ranging overview of the literatures of the Americas in comparative perspective, emphasizing continuities and crises that are common to North American, Central American, and South American literatures as well as the distinctive national and cultural elements of a diverse array of primary works. Topics include the definitions of such concepts as empire and colonialism; the encounters between world-views of European and indigenous peoples; the emergence of creole and racially mixed populations; slavery; the New World voice; myths of America as paradise or utopia; the coming of modernism; twentieth-century avant-gardes such as the Brazilian Antropofagia or Cannibalist movement; and distinctive modern episodes—the Harlem Renaissance, the Beats, magic realism, Noigandres—in unaccustomed conversation with each other. 

    While the course is formally organized by lectures, it is unusually dialogic. Professors Greene and Saldívar often question or challenge each other's interpretations, and a major part of each meeting is devoted to an open discussion in response to issues raised by students during the week. Close to the research interests of both professors, the course demonstrates how new contexts—in this case, the hemispheric—change our understanding of literary works and how interpretation emerges out of conversation and debate.

    The course welcomes students of all majors and interests.

    GER:DB-Hum EC-AmerCul

Publications