3 août 2020
info:eu-repo/semantics/OpenAccess
Eduardo Eguiarte Ruelas, « The Central American Essay as Possibility: Horacio Castellanos Moya, Miguel Huezo Mixco, and Rafael Lara Martínez », HAL-SHS : littérature, ID : 10670/1.t3r2y0
This paper explores the transformations in the post-war Central American literary field based on three books of essays published in El Salvador: Recuento de incertidumbres. Cultura y transición en El Salvador (1993) by Horacio Castellanos Moya, La casa en llamas. La cultura salvadoreña a finales del siglo XX (1996) by Miguel Huezo Mixco, and La tormenta entre las manos. Ensayos sobre literatura salvadoreña (1999) by Rafael Lara Martínez. These essays are of particular relevance to the literary-intellectual field because they account for the transformations of the Central American subjects’ imaginaries, symbolic universes and epistemological systems. Furthermore, they give an account of the reconfiguration of the roles of intellectuals and literature in post-war Central American societies. They challenge the conception that literature and the writer-intellectual should be engaged or revolutionary, while also proposing that new horizons should be opened for writers and literature to explore, and that intellectuals should dedicate themselves to constructive criticism in the new political and social context.