SOURCE: Hogue, W. Lawrence. “An Unresolved Modern Experience: Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory.” Americas Review 20, no. 1 (spring 1992): 52–64.

In the following essay, Hogue discusses Rodriguez's attempts to create a new style of modernist text with Hunger of Memory.

Two of the most common features of literary modernism are the radical rejection of history and the hostility between high art and mass culture. First, for a modern individual to experience the raw, unmediated present, he is required to reject the frozen structures of understanding inherited from the past. The rejection of history constitutes a revelation of time itself, for there is an epochal shift in the very meaning and modality of temporality, a qualitative break in our ideological style of living history.¹ In the modern project, there is, what Irving Howe calls, a “bitter impatience with the whole apparatus of cognition and the limiting assumption of rationality.”² A writer imbued...