The critical-historiographic project of literature based on heterogeneity

Abstract

The proposal to review and rewrite Latin American literary

history launched by the Chilean critic Ana Pizarro was part of a larger

critical-historiographic project. Thanks to her initiative, and the fact that

she managed to establish a dialogue with the intellectual network that

reflected on the specificity of Latin American literature –proposing its

own theory and criticism–, two meetings were held to propose and discuss

methodologies and approaches with the aim of creating a renewed literary

history. This was initially raised from a comparativist perspective. Although

there was no consensus, nor was a continental literary history written, the

project was maintained until the 1990s. Here we propose to see how the

socio-cultural heterogeneity, which was present in the debates, and which

was deepened by the Peruvian critic Antonio Cornejo Polar, maintains a

dialogue with this project, and influences the result of these meetings.