Literary criticism and Marxism in Latin America - paradoxes

Abstract

This study seeks to discuss the paradox between a high quality literary production in Latin America and socioeconomic conditions that are backward and peripheral. The discussion opens with the writings of Marx and Engels on literary aesthetics where they address the relationship between base and superstructure, of art being independent of ends and the inconsistencies between the developmental capacities of art and the forces of production. Later, this study examines some specific cases which are related with such issue in Latin America: 1- The cultural plasticity found in several writers of our region, through the critical analyses of Ángel Rama and Antonio Candido, the research of Roberto Schwarz over the figure of Machado de Assis in Brazil, and the figure of Borges in Argentina through the critical study of Beatriz Sarlo.