O NOVO COMPARATISMO NA AMÉRICA LATINA: REFLEXOS NO ENSINO E NA HISTORIOGRAFIA LITERÁRIA

Abstract

As a result of a process of colonization which lasted over three centuries and which can still be felt, though not from the same matrixes, in economical and cultural terms, Latin American intellectuals have always taken Western European ideas and institutions as paradigms and have always sought to internalize their world view. As such, the teaching and research of literature at the Latin American universities have usually been based on European models: at first, by means of Historicism, and later, through the critical currents, especially of an immanent character, that came from that context. In both cases, the idea of national literature was seen as a dominant element and the study of literature was centered upon the canon of each country, founded on nationalistic bases. However, with the advent of Deconstruction and of Cultural and Post-Colonial Studies in the second half of the twentieth century, this model has been deeply queried in Latin America, and has given way to a tension between those who try to maintain the hegemonic concept of nation on the one side, and those who approach literature as one among other expressions of the political affirmation of each group that compose the continent’s ethnic, social, cultural and linguistic mosaic on the other side. Considering the criticisms raised nowadays both to the hegemonic construction of the nation-states and to the responses that they have generated, particularly on the part of minority groups, our purpose in this paper is to draw a few questions regarding the teaching of literature and the writing of literary histories at the present time in Latin America.