Apuestas fundacionales en el campo de los estudios literarios hispanoamericanos

Abstract

When the Spanish American literary field was able to define an autonomous space within the aesthetics of the modernism, new problems were posed in the Spanish American intellectual space in the beginning of the XX century: How could the literary phenomenon be studied without breaking its aesthetic elaboration and its historical – cultural position? This question was the basis for the search that was started by the literary studies in Spanish America in order to define their own space by generating their own discourse; moreover, a space where their contribution to the humanities and to the intellectual Spanish American autonomy could be recognized. Thinkers as Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Alfonso Reyes and José Carlos Mariátegui contributed significantly to open this space, by integrating, in turn, historical and cultural problems as interpretative criteria to the literary phenomenon. In this paper, I propose to observe the critical, historical and cultural thinking which operated as a bet, so that the literary studies function as a specific field, open to the integration of current knowledge and debates.