Hacia una teoría de la lectura en la época colonial

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between the history of reading and current theories of reading in the context of Colonial Latin America. Specifically, I study scenes of public and private reading in colonial texts by Hernán Cortés, Diego Mexía, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to argue that scenes of reading and reading accounts create a space of struggle between the public place that people occupied in society and their private will to surpass it. Departing from a set of questions that focus on the conditions of reading depicted in such texts, I propose that the public relevance of private reading directs our attention to a larger corpus of testimonies in which reading is not a uniform or replicable act, but a contingent and individual one. Moreover, it reflects on the relationship between violence and reading as one of the critical elements of the constitution of the colonial subject.