Introduction Posnacionalistas: Tradition and New Writing in Latin America

Abstract

In the 1977 preface to the Ayacucho Collection’s edition of Rubén Darío’s poetry, Angel Rama opens with the question “Why is he still ‘alive’? Why, after new writers have eliminated his aesthetics, abandoned his precious vocabulary, surpassed his themes, and even repudiated his poetics, he stubbornly continues to sing with his powerful voice?” (“Pr ó logo” 9). What fascinated Rama about modernismo — and made him return to the topic time and again—was the movement’s position within Latin American literary history as founders of a tradition. Modernistas were the creators of a literary system that, among other things, took into account the relationship between authors and their main literary market, the Latin American readers. For Rama, modernismo’s foundational gesture had two important consequences: one, the search for a mode of expression uniquely Latin American, an idea originally started in the early nineteenth century, and, two, the unprecedented influence of the movement on the region’s literary history. Modernismo became an obligatory point of reference for future authors and movements.