A Few Notes on Constructed Worlds: The Contradictory Legacy of Past Decades

Abstract

In addition to the dissolution and complex reconstruction of thought regarding the social and the cultural, divergent ways of thinking about literature have long existed in Latin America. These currents touch upon its methods, its character and, above all, its relevance to social discourse. Literature has lost its density, aesthetically as well as ideologically—at least, the density that we are or were accustomed to finding in it has changed. Through an examination of several Latin American narratives from the 1960s and 1970s, I seek to describe both the anticipation of these (future) modalities and the moments of explicit resistance to the aesthetic mandates of the time. Their gestures of resistance rendered these texts, in a sense, illegible, reinforcing not only a dominant strain of critical representation but also a mode of reading, both of which tended to reduce the aesthetic scope visible in Latin American literature. This scene is further complicated when one considers its variable “ethics,” in the sense bestowed upon the word in recent decades: the ethics of writing, of action, of politics. It is impossible to ignore the sense of transformation inherent to these offerings, or the contradictory conclusions that can be drawn from terms considered so diffuse.