Ethnocentric Orthodoxies vs. Text as Cultural Action: Some Issues in Latin-American Literature

Abstract

The study of modern Latin-American literature in British Universities and Polytechnics has tended to locate itself, in the past two decades at any rate, at a certain distance from the various traditional orthodoxies which have dominated British Hispanism, such as Leavisism, New Criticism, Stylistics, as well as from the various recent gestures in the direction of Formalism and Structuralism gestures which have not prevented the original figure showing through.1 There seem to be two main reasons for this. Spanish-American writers and critics have on the whole participated more directly and influentially than their Spanish counterparts in the European debates on literary theory. And Spanish-American literature is connected with Third World experiences such as the presence of native cultures which have resisted colonialism or dependency upon the metropolitan Capitalist countries. Both of these sets of factors have stimulated more radical approaches than those offered by the mainstream of British literary criticism in the Universities.