Search

The present paper partly explores the debates on men's natural rights which took place in the public sphere in mid-nineteenth century Latin America. In Colombia, as in many other countries in the region, such debates were related to civil wars between liberals and conservatives which started around the year 1848. Romantic poet Julio Arboleda Pombo (1817-1862), military chief and catholic thinker, was a central figure of such doctrinal debates and of such civil wars. In his poetic and journalistic works it is possible to trace the emergence of a post-republican conservatism that would gravitate over the public sphere and academia in Nueva Granada, during the second half of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the circles to which he belonged during his youth, Pedro Henríquez Ureña was one of the first to gather information regarding the American literary culture in the Spanish language and systematize it through modern methods. This work is inscribed with the marks of his situation in time and space: the climate of Spanish regenerationism, the idealist Hispanic theses developed by José Enrique Rodó in Ariel, and various formulations fed by the philosophical environment of spiritualism. In the measure in which Henríquez Ureña established the bases of his historiographical model on the notion of a Hispanic literary community, his writings surpassed the renewed and vindicative horizon of the regenerationist and Arielist theses in order to claim a utopian dimension. In this model the regenerationist thesis has a strategic importance in the Spanish Renaissance. Thanks to this process the Dominican writer contributed significantly to the design and accreditation of the idea of a Hispanic literary community. This article will explain this contribution in the field of intellectual history, especially with respect to the socially constructed identity of the intellectuals and the universes of concepts through those who regulate their behavior and intervene in the public sphere. [TRANSLATION]

In the first third of the 20th century the literary field was rearranged, in part around the controversial topic of money. The modernization of the publishing industry implicated as much a change in the concept of the editor as in the presence of the author in the negotiations of the book. The article studies the decisive protagonism in the editorial sector of some intellectuals that began from a few progressive approaches in an economic and cultural context of expansion. The capital investments brought about this rearrangement as much to the level of the publishing as the creation of the book. [TRANSLATION]

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s stay in Argentina (1909-1914) allows us to analyze aspects of Hispano-American relations at the beginning of the 20th century, and analyze more concretely the problem of the Spanish editorial industry in relation to its expansion in the American market. This is analyzed here according to Blasco, who as an object of study exhibits not only the figure of the European colonist but also of the mechanic of the editorial trade and of the best-selling author that he came to be. In this way, Blasco outlines a lucid view of the situation of the writer and the editor in modern society, but also currently: the extraordinary compendium that defines a policy of self-management as author-editor. [TRANSLATION]

The article presents a review of the papers presented in the issue that revolve around the writing of 20th century Peruvian author José María Arguedas, and discusses the need to reread the works of Arguedas as the 21st century begins. The author asserts that the 21st century's trends of globalization and transculturation make Arguedas' work, which offers and preserves glimpses into often-marginalized Quechuan and Andean cultures, increasingly relevant to the study of contemporary Latin American literature.

This article studies how the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and, more generally, neoliberalism rearticulate the opposition between civilization and barbarism, and the vision of the world that underlies it. During a time in which many intellectuals have embraced a relativistic notion of culture that makes judgment problematic, neoliberals embrace this clear-cut value hierarchy with complete abandonment. In fact, one cannot but be surprised by the ease with which Vargas Llosa makes pronouncements based on the identification of individuals, groups, and political movements with either civilization or barbarism. However, the fact is that his reference to this dichotomy differs substantially from its nineteenth-century version and its colonial precedents. The implicitly racial hierarchization proposed by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and other nineteenth-century thinkers has been replaced in Vargas Llosa's writings by one based on cultural and social values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the theory that violence, with particular attention to crimes against humanity, as experienced in Latin American literature is a response to the globalization of the literary market and the common associations of Latin America with revolution and rebellion. The connection in post-dictatorial Latin American literature between human rights and financial globalization is explored, with the suggestion that such violence in Latin American literature may give a false image of the region to international readers. Books and stories such as "El Desierto" by Chilean author Carlos Franz, "Abril Rojo" by Santiago Roncagliolo, and "La Muerte y la Brújula" by Jorge Luis Borges are discussed with respect to the global theme of human rights.

The article discusses the process of globalization of Latin American literature and the strong need of Latin American authors to create a geographic, ethnic and literary identity. The writers of the 1960s-1970s Latin American literary boom and after, into the 1990s, demonstrated awareness of self, expressed through autobiography or fiction. Literature began to focus on the exile of the narrator, which is cited as a representation of the author who cannot participate in the literary course of history. Modernization required self-representation, the author suggests, so as to leave a permanent legacy of one's contribution to Latin American narrative.

El artículo ofrece la reflexión del autor sobre los estudios de teoría y crítica literaria en América Latina y en respuesta al artículo "Estudios latinoamericanos y nueva dependencia cultural (apuntes para una discusión)" de Nelson Osorio, publicado en el número 66 (2007) de la Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana. El autor considera la independencia intelectual en los estudios latinoamericanos de literatura y la construcción del diálogo intercultural.

The figure of the soldier writer in literature stories constitutes a foundational paradigm in the construction of the idea about the Latin-American intellectual. Such paradigm is the object of a dynamic that we named the circle of metamorphosis, which evidences the process that begins with the soldier writer in battle —represented by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada— and ends with the hero writer as a constructor of public opinion and narrator of national history. All these images take part in the construction of national identity and in the ideal of the Latin-American intellectual linked to the battle and performance characteristics of Emancipation. Thus, this article aims to open the door for future discussions around the rol of literature stories inside the social and historical development of the continent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The romantic outlook is the conceptual axis this paper is about. Its main aim is to specify the precepts of this notion starting from the foundations proposed by literary socio-criticism (George Lukács 1920, Lucien Goldman (1955, René Girard 1963), sociological studies (Norbert Elias 1982) and communication studies (Jesús Martín-Barbero 1998). In order to reach this objective we have considered the possibility of developing a unique definition without drawing sharp differences among the disciplines and their authors so that we may accurately realize which are the common contributions to the romantic attitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]