Weltliteratur, Weltkultur. Los aportes del comparatismo latinoamericano

BONFIGLIO, FLORENCIA

Kölner Beiträgen zur Lateinamerika-Forschung

ASPLA

Lugar: Colonia; Año: 2008 p. 321 - 331

1438-6887

This article revises basic concepts of Comparative Literature in order to discuss the validity of the discipline today when –with the advent of Cultural Studies and the phantom of globalization– it is being criticized for its eurocentrism, its focus on belletrism and its inability to understand complex cultural phenomena. In the context of an increasingly larger EU and with the necessity of rethinking European Literature as a dynamic, multilingual and multicultural system we suggest, however, to recover Comparative Literature as practised in the peripheries. The Latin-American model of comparative literature proposed by critics such as Ángel Rama, Ana Pizarro, Antonio Cândido, and Beatriz Sarlo (among others) in the early eighties already aimed to overcome the reductionism and simplicity of the metropolitan model and proves extremely helpful to understand the complex, uneven and heterogeneous cultural relationships generated by ethnical, linguistic and social diversity. The article explores briefly some of the contributions of the Latin-American comparative model to the analysis of literature and culture in transnational contexts and highlights its importance for the understanding of cultural identity as a dynamic process of negotiation between the self and the other, the local and the global.