The Boom, The Literary, and Cultural Critique

Abstract

This essay is an effort to consider the Boom of Latin American literature in the 1960s and 1970s within the context of Ángel Rama’s critical writing, especially his essays on the development of twentieth-century narrative (first part) and his Transculturación narrativa en América Latina (second part), which their author saw as critical attempts to deal with the discursive, cultural, and political effects generated by the Boom. Running parallel to and, later, defining the Boom, Rama’s thinking is here posited as both an organic critique of and a historico-anthropological correction to the movement. I will highlight the relationships among Rama’s central concepts (i.e. transculturation and the modern literary system, involving notions of authorship, readership, text and book) and his two main methodological perspectives (i.e. the sociological and the anthropological). The essay will consider how Rama’s critical readings demonstrated that Boom textual products, in the decade between 1962 and 1972, were constituted through the tensions between mass, elite and popular cultures, which also involved a re-thinking of authorship, readership, textuality, and context.1 This reading of the Boom through Rama will be developed with references to the works of Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, Donoso, García Márquez, and Arguedas.2.