José María Arguedas aquém da literatura

Abstract

A RETURN to Peruvian writer José Mar ía Arguedas today, amidst discussions regarding the historical and conceptual specificity of literature, may allow us to see in a new light his defense of a theory of representation in which the dichotomy fact/fetish loses its ground. If the narratives of transculturation in mid-twentieth-century Spanish American literature transformed religion into literature, in Arguedas what one sees is, on the contrary, the attempt to ritualize literature and defend something we could call, perhaps, a right to not be literature.