THE PRESENT IS PERPETUAL. MEMORY, HISTORICITY AND FORMS OF LITERARY THOUGHT IN LATIN AMERICA
“The present is perpetual,” wrote Octavio Paz in Viento entero (1965) [Wholly Wind]. The phrase encodes a conception of time in which tradition, memory, and the present do not follow one another as sealed compartments, but as territories with porous borders that question and transform one another. It is no accident that Alfonso Reyes called his great treatise on literary theory El deslinde (1944) [The Demarcation]. To think literature may consist less in sealing off its borders than in recognizing them, traversing them, and discussing them anew. From there, this symposium proposes to study the forms, sites, and operations through which Latin America has thought literature and, at the same time, has used literature to think its historical, cultural, and political experience.
Latin American literary thought has not been produced solely in systematic treatises nor within the academic precincts of theory and criticism. It is also found scattered across a more restless and less docile archive: essays, manifestos, magazines, letters, diaries, autobiographies, translations, editorial work, and, of course, creative works. Returning to this broad archive allows us to recognize genealogies, concepts, and poetics that did not arise from a passive reception of foreign models. Theories arriving from other latitudes were translated, discussed, displaced, and remade upon coming into contact with other histories, other languages, and other problems.
But literature has not only been thought about on our continent. It has also served as a tool for thinking. Its forms are not limited to representing a prior, external reality, as if the work were a somewhat more beautiful mirror or a less reliable document. Fiction, poetry, the essay, testimony, and border writings establish their own relationships with time and memory, order experience, alter its hierarchies, and return to the present voices that seemed extinguished. That is why what matters is not only what works say about history, identities, power, or violence, but what the works do with these materials and the singular knowledge they produce by giving them aesthetic form.
The symposium will address Latin American theories and poetics, the historicity of genres, the links between literature, history, and memory, and the problems of reality and fiction, testimony and verisimilitude. It is also interested in the controversies surrounding literary ideas, the relationships between the Hispanic and Lusophone traditions, and the ways in which works and concepts from the past return to the present, transformed and yet still current and active.
This proposal arises within the Ibero-American Network of Literary Theory and Studies (REDITEL-AUIP), where these questions have long sustained a conversation among researchers, books, projects, and critical traditions from different countries. The symposium seeks to bring that conversation to the ICA and open it to other voices. Ultimately, it is a matter of returning to an old question: how we have thought about literature and how literature, in turn, has shaped the way we understand the time we have lived.
