Reflections on the Origin: Transculturation and tragedy in pedro páramo
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Date
2001
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Angelaki: Theoretical Journal of the Humanities
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Abstract
Although his oeuvre consists by and large of only two published works, a collection of short stories (El llano en llamas, 1953) and a novella (Pedro Páramo, 1955), the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo has been generally recognized as one of the major figures in Latin American letters. In a famous assessment, Carlos Fuentes describes Rulfo’s work as “not only the highest expression achieved so far in the Mexican novel...[but where] we also find a thread that leads us into the new Latin American novel, and to its relation with the so-called international crisis of the novel” (La nueva novela hispanoamericana, 17). Rulfo’s considerable influence upon Latin American cultural production during the Boom period and beyond is only in part a reflection of a set of formal innovations constituting one of the most distinctive breaks with the naturalist tradition in Latin America, and which moreover is widely seen to have prepared the way for the proliferation of the “new novel” and a stylized “magical realism.” At the same time, and as Fuentes’ remarks only begin to indicate, the mark left by Rulfo’s work upon Latin Americanist reflection also announces the collapse of the aesthetic ideology through which the value of literature has traditionally been upheld by the Western philosophical tradition. At the precise moment and through the very succession whereby Latin American literature lays claim to the unique and authentic expression of a singular, Latin American truth—and thus by extension to a place in the global cultural market that is no longer relegated to producing bad copies of European works—this very literary act exposes a crisis situation in which the possibility of literature, or of its redemptive capacity, is radically unsettled.
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Accepted manuscript, post print version
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“Reflections on the Origin: Tragedy and Transculturation in Pedro Páramo,” Angelaki: Theoretical Journal of the Humanities 6:1 (April 2001): 91-110.
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