El gran piramde de Cholula: An exercise in ruins

What at first appears to be a cathedral prominently standing atop a large hill is really an exercise in ruins, the ruins of what was at one time the largest pyramid in the world.

While this particular pyramid isn't the subject of my study, these are the beginnings of my dissertation. In an e-mail to a friend I described it in this way:

Mexico in/as Ruins in 20th Century Mexican Poetry and Narrative. The title is a bit broad, but in one chapter I want to look at earlier manifestations of Mexico as ruins. In Octavio Paz and Pacheco, the poetry of the 40-60's often returns to the metaphor of ruins to describe the political or social situation of the country. But there is also an element of time as flux, the past is creeping back into the present, the wrongs of the past that we thought were buried are coming back to haunt us. That may transition into the next chapter which would look at Rulfo and maybe another dude named Tario who, when everyone else is concerned about the nation and a "national" literature, are writing about ghosts and ghost towns. That is their critique of the national project and the govt. and reforms that came out of the revolution. There could also be a contemporary novel included here, because at the turn of the century, it went back to that era and explored how the polished facade of what the nation and the city were, was really just that. That Mexico City was populated by corpses, drug addicts, prostitutes, etc.

Finally the last chapter may be an ecocritical reading of the poetic response to the 1985 quake that literally made a ruin out of Mexico City. I think this topic will allow me to use, as a point of comparison, theory on time, ghosts, and repetition (the stuff I like) while not looking beyond the make and replacing the text with theory.

This project may be derailed or radically changed due to my recent discovery that this book exists. But I hope not. Today I was reading about the building of the Catedral Metroploitana in Mexico City and looking for a good text that I can use in a term paper. In the term paper I want to address that the cathedral (or at least its predecessor which was built by Cortés) was built with stones from the Temlpo Mayor of Tenochtitlan and how the two  buildings are, in a way, one and the same while not being the self-same. If I am understanding my readings this quarter, that means they are an instance of the Deleuzian notion of repetition. But I can't tell you that I am understanding Deleuze well, if at all. That has been a source of frustration and maybe I shouldn't have taken these Deleuze courses this quarter. Regardless, I am excited to get working on my PhD reading list/dissertation list. I am beginning to see light shining through the edges of the jungle.