Escribir En El Aire: Ensayo Sobre La Heterogeneidad Sociocultural En Las Literaturas Andinas

by Antonio Cornejo Polar

Originally published in 1994, Writing in the Air is one of the most significant books of modern Latin American literary and cultural criticism. In this seminal work, the influential Latin American literary critic Antonio Cornejo Polar offers the most extended articulation of his efforts to displace notions of hybridity or "mestizaje" dominant in Latin American cultural studies with the concept of heterogeneity: the persistent interaction of cultural difference that cannot be resolved in synthesis. He reexamines encounters between Spanish and indigenous Andean cultural systems in the New World from the Conquest into the 1980s. Through innovative readings of narratives of conquest and liberation, homogenizing nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses, and contemporary Andean literature, he rejects the dominance of the written word over oral literature. Cornejo Polar decenters literature as the primary marker of Latin American cultural identity, emphasizing instead the interlacing of multiple narratives that generates the heterogeneity of contemporary Latin American culture.

242 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Giovanni Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Entrañable con la "e" del ejemplo.

[Anarresti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un ensayo critico sobre el carácter abigarrado, plural y heterogéneo de las literaturas en los Andes centrales. Especialmente en lo que hoy es Perú.

Esclarecedor para quienes buscan explorar las tensiones, relaciones y vasos comunicantes entre la oralidad y la escritura.

Me quedo con su lectura de Vallejo y Arguedas. Y también con la idea de la utopía de un lenguaje total. Uno que no busque una síntesis conciliante, sino una coexistencia múltiple y contradictoria. La palabra escrita que retoma su sentido primordial de voz, por obra del hervor de una poesía que figura mezclar ambas.

Una piedra de sangre hirviente.

[Naomi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very dense and theoretical analysis of Andean literature looking particularly at the role of Quechua and oral storytelling and their effect on nation building and identity. I most appreciated the sections on José Carlos Mariátegui and José Maria Arguedas because I have read their work and thus had a stronger understanding to back up the literary analysis. This book is most valuable and interesting for literature students, but I valued the political social analysis that showed how literature underlies society.

[Mills College Library]

860.9985 C813 2013