El Escritor y las Normas del Canon Literario (The Writer and the Norms of the Literary Canon).

N

14

Authors; Latin American Literature; Literary Criticism; Novels

This paper speculates about whether a literary canon exists in contemporary Latin American literature, particularly in the prose genre. The paper points to Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa as the three authors who might form this traditional and liberal canon with their works "La Muerte de Artemio Cruz" (Fuentes), "Cien Anos de Soledad" (Garcia Marquez), and "La Cuiudad y los Perros" (Vargas Llosa). It discusses how the idea of a literary canon came about originally and how the canon of Latin American literature seems to be based mostly on the votes of publishing houses, reviews, anthologies, and preferences of academics. The paper states that, in a 1995 study Joan Brown and Crista Johnson found: "The present study indicates that there is currently no canon of 20th century prose fiction for Spanish or Spanish American literature, if "canonical" is defined as a work's presence on every reading list. Not one novel was selected unanimously by the Spanish faculty studied." Despite this finding, the paper contends that the three novels cited, because of their structure, aesthetics, linguistic expression, and thematic richness, form a Latin American literary canon. (NKA)

2004

ED477340