Historicity and Literariness: Problems in the Literary Criticism of Spanish American Colonial Texts

Abstract

One need only skim the table of contents of any anthology of Spanish American of the colonial period to realize that the majority of the selections appear to belong to the field of historiography rather than to And if we read beyond the titles, to the texts themselves, it might be surprising to find that the number of works of historical intent actually grows. If we were to limit ourselves to those texts which were produced with the intention of writing literature (as the term is commonly understood today, that is, as imaginative or creative writing with a primarily aesthetic purpose), we would need to reduce the list by more than half, retaining little other than lyric poetry and a few theatrical pieces. This scenario underscores a problem within the field of colonial literary studies that as critics we have a tendency to avoid or ignore. It also raises important questions regarding our critical and pedagogical mission, since the classification of these texts as literary colors all of our thoughts on their interpretation. In fact, a fundamental contradiction arises from the classification of these texts as literature. Because so many of the texts we consider literary today were not so at the time they were written in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, our critical and pedagogical work often is performed from an essentially anachronistic perspective.

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