Here is the presentation I made in Monterrey, in the National Young Writers, the panel shared with Heriberto Yepez, Jezreel Salazar, Noah and Eduardo Morales Huchin. Thank Zaira Espinosa, Ivan Trejo, Renata Rodriguez and all the organizers and the work platform. And all the other guests for a conference level and new friendships. This version contains two pages that I had to cut for lack of time, focusing on a modest proposal about the critic and newspaper.
The lack of criticism in Mexico is one of those ideologies that every generation revisits literary and refuses to disappear. The very premise of this panel is based on it, the idea that, despite sitting on the table five critical works published and recognized in various fields (journalism, essays, academia, etc.), We are called to discuss the lack of practice, presumably, we have all worked with enough power to be invited to talk about it. Criticism is nonexistent, in my opinion, a symptom of the peculiar institutionalization Mexican literature. On the one hand, this idea is usually stated at a time when fighting for a literary group constitute itself as hegemonic. We must remember that Contemporaries complained of the lack of criticism in Mexico, as did Octavio Paz and company they founded Plural and Vuelta or Hector Aguilar Camin and company when they established the group Nexus. Furthermore, the complaint of criticism does not exist or does not work often come from authors who are not subject to it, a recurring theme of those who did not receive any scholarship or, worse still, young writers who claim to be " supported "as if literary criticism was an advantageous form of child care aimed Montessori holding the creativity of the author beardless. Also, not without some degree of paradox, the criticism is perceived as non-existent because certain forms of institutionalization produce bad review: the comfort academic ideas for manufacturing endless repetition, the grid intellectuals who converted to criticism in ad hominem attacks . Finally, the criticism is perceived to exist because it is often masked by the essay, where style matters more than the idea, or the review, merely cyclical review of new publications. If anything, the review and testing are two smaller practices, and perhaps of little relevance in a trade that should be thought more broadly.
All these ways of understanding the criticism should be resisted and rejected, because the echo them destroy a way of thinking and knowledge more necessary than ever in these times of defeat and barbarism. Saying that there is no criticism or criticism in Mexico is bad because it produced a majority of bad books is stupid, because the same could be said of the Slovak minifiction Australian or experimental poetry. Any literary or critical exception rests on a mountain of mediocrity. However, the comparison itself is incorrect. I venture the idea that literary criticism is not primarily a literary genre, but an apparatus of producing knowledge about and from the literature. To understand in this way, it opens a very different understanding of what is critical. First, the criticism takes place in a large series of spaces and places of enunciation, which include book and magazine, but also the classroom, reading group, social networks and cafes. Literary criticism is realized when a teacher designs a literature course, when a student reacts against criticism by his teacher, when a reading circle meets every week to discuss a book and when a friend recommended a book to another. Certainly, there are layers professionalized this year, but the criticism is not confined to them. On the other hand, if the critical production of knowledge is essentially an exercise group. Literary criticism makes sense only as a constant conversation, directly or indirectly. This dimension is destroyed when we understand the literary criticism as a literary genre, favoring the view of individuality and critical as last place of articulation. The criticism emerges above all against the host of readings, talking to other forms of criticism. In its public statements, this is represented in the literature and notes, but in any event serious criticism is implicit dialogue. One critic, in my view, is primarily a speaker and a self-taught, and their work has meaning only as part of a constellation of readings and discussions of what is a simple component. Finally, if the criticism is knowledge, it implies that there is a dimension approaching the world only through such knowledge and, at dusk this function on behalf of a narrow and ridiculous concept of critique, functionalized to daily environment literature, we are betraying the ethical responsibility of the literary critic.
If one speaks of a lacking critical because Mexico is very poorly understood the idea of \u200b\u200bcriticism as knowledge, although it certainly occurs. To go no further than this table, I admire the work of Heriberto Yepez ( Everything is another , The rule of neomemoria ) are betting erect literary reading at a level of knowledge than the simple exegesis . I admired Alfonso Reyes put it best: there are printing and interpretation, but the trial, in a way that crosses the classical Kantian with romantic idealism, is the goal to follow. However, publicly visible manifestations of literary criticism are completely taken by the vicissitudes and superficialities of national literary grid. The reviewer is peculiarly ill-fated Mexican in this sense, as the books reviewed are generally chosen not by merit but by the emotional relationship of the publishers to authors, while the vast majority of Mexican publications understand the review section or as a blank space in which first-time writers make merit, or as reliable chambitas allow several live from the accumulation of receipts from fees. While this is what we identify as critical, is impossible to maintain a minimally adult conversation on the topic we could spend the day Whole complaining of "censorship" (which generally means no published review or not the complainant) or the "reactionary" is a magazine (which generally means that the pristine political and cultural ideology of the complainant is not reflected verbatim in publication).
One of the reasons for being critical of the myth of the absent third world lies in our desire to reject as hegemonic as successful and inclusive that we wanted to belong but can not. The truth is that in Mexico we have some publications that regardless of our agreement or disagreement with their editorial lines are first rate. When I was in some literary events in Quito, I would invariably say the desire of many people of that country to have style magazines Letras Libres or Links , which, despite their controversial and political lines all possible critical editorial practices are publications read, well-edited, well produced and sustainable, something that nowadays is almost a feat. Also, a large number of public universities publish journals of great bill. I can proudly say that either Harvard or Stanford, or Princeton produced literary magazines bill Review, the journal of the BUAP or Luvina , the U. G. If one takes the trouble to buy and read these magazines, together with several others ( Arms and Letters, Words and man, magazine University, Storm, Replicante ) along with emerging online magazines such as Super Pig Brother , the only possible conclusion is that there is not only literary criticism in Mexico, but, at times, is exceptional. Seen from this perspective, as it did recently in a text Evodio Escalante in which he defended criticism citing the large number of critical assets in our day, critique nonexistent not a description of a state of things. Rather, it points to the tremendous ignorance that the Mexican literary world has the best of himself and the way our peculiar cultural institutionalization tends to confuse the grid with the theory. If you understand the criticism in its entirety, the very low intellectual level of controversy in Mexico would meet its political functions and the crowd of writers cazabecas that populate our literary landscape would be devoted to thinking.
The first step to overcome this impasse, I believe, is to show both in theory and the idea works of literary criticism as production of knowledge, rescuing her from the clutches of the vagaries of short-term (or when emergencies such as Alfonso Reyes called) and return them to a place where readers can find it. I think that criticism can give readers of literature, from specialists to the casual space for discussion and thought essential to a truly democratic society, one in which the exercise of culture is not only a right but also a everyday act. In a text published a couple of years ago (I apologize for the self-citation, but as I run out of time and I can not develop the point with the extension, may find it in my blog) suggested that literary criticism has three definitions. The first review of the literature, excessive emphasis on exegetical work, while the second, critical literature written and stylistically, it emphasizes some of the vices that I have discussed so far. The third meaning seems the most productive and promising: the critical use of literature as an instrument of approach to the world. This is the criticism that gave us Walter Benjamin when he read of modernity from the work of Baudelaire or the Peruvian Antonio Cornejo Polar, sadly ignored in Mexico, when he produced from his reading of José María Arguedas an anthropology of the American condition, or the great Edward Said, whose untranslatable notion of worldliness (Worldliness) speaks of the intellectual power of the relationship between words and world. This criticism is rare in Mexico largely because of the high degree of self-referentiality that consumes the cultural world. While critics such as Said defined the third way of the Palestinian conflict, or critical, as Beatriz Sarlo has emerged as privileged readers of the reality of Argentina from the language of the bill, in Mexico is called critical to any moron who wrote the latest book review Anagrama. Literary criticism as knowing is half antinomian to accommodating as Mexico, where the use value of literature takes a back seat to its value as a commodity to exchange traffic scholarships awards, influences and Chamba. I appreciate, of course, the value of making a living from literature: after all I myself am a professor of literature. However, the use of these material conditions on behalf of the production of critical knowledge is an ethic that needs further assertion: there is the possibility of a significant literary criticism, which, following the seductive Marxist cliché, not only analyze the world but transforms them. So despite what I've said so far, it bothers me conclude with the emphasis on the negative half-Mexican. It makes no sense to tear down an institutional apparatus of such proportions if you can use.
of ideals is easy, but concrete proposals are sometimes rare. Therefore, I propose to help restore critical to their status in Mexico are: the disappearance of the cultural supplement. This type of publication, despite powerful interventions such as Roger Bartra or John Villoro in the Day, is primarily a symptom of a complacent literature, able to speak of itself to irrelevance. Even we have two seemingly opposite aspects: In its provincial demonstration, we can find the newest of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec poets or plays Toluca of births in the nineties, while in its manifestation pseudocosmopolita, a luminary of the national average usually presents his impressions of the last boring Austro-Hungarian writer who read German Bohemia. Thus, the literary supplement is a tacit admission of the irrelevance of literature, a ghettoization autoasumida understanding literature as separate from the rest. While the Anglo-Saxon model of Book Review, where books are discussed a wide range of topics, framing literature in a constellation of intellectual practices, would be a good alternative, I might have to go further, take the newspaper itself. What if a literary critic on the staff of a national or regional newspaper wrote about the issue of narconarrativa in the Police Department as a modernist would have done serious, or if the columns of political opinion the perspective proposed in literature was a more than you have?. In a country where it is read the newspaper, where news of radio and television and even the alternative media continue to play a crucial role in public life, the literary critic might have to search for your area of \u200b\u200bknowledge in this space speech. This I knew the old liberals of the right as Lionel Trilling and the leftist of the old guard. If literary criticism is to be a literary reading of the world, it should not remain suspended which monad in the contemplation of aesthetics, but taking its place in the public domain. The tools are there: the great democratic potential of media arts and electronic books will make it unusual to have a place in public life, a place we do not know understand or articulate. In that possible world, literary criticism is necessary, not as an esoteric discourse culturatis, but as an instrument of combat and understanding of life itself. I am perhaps a utopian pessimistic. However, from the perspective that grants have a foot in Mexican literature and another in the American academy, it became clear that the bureaucrats cleared funds available for culture in Mexico and technocrats who attack the humanities from a new American university utilitarianism have something in common: their declaration of the irrelevance of literature is part of the annihilation of critical thinking that could undermine their positions power. I do not know whether the literature has the potential to change the world, to speak to power or to challenge it, but I choose to think so, even in the tone of the old slogan of the French 68: let's be realistic, demand the impossible. What I do is clear is that while literature is assaulted every day by the power and while his name continues to be invoked to construct mafias and interests, we have a clear indicator that depressing but at its core is a force corresponding to recognize and recover critical. In one of his thesis on the history, Benjamin notes: "Turn in the past spark of hope is a gift that is only found in that story that is imbued with this: the dead are not safe from the enemy if he wins . And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious ". Something similar could be said of the critic: the critic can only find in the literature that knowledge potential to help us make sense of such knowledge can rescue world. Talk about a nonexistent critic instead of fighting for existence criticism, sink into the mediocrity of cultural scene while maintaining fidelity to the thought is a way to strengthen the enemy. And this enemy, as it has constantly taught the erosion of culture and country, the daily violence and oppressive ignorance, has not ceased to be victorious.
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