Dialectical Criticism in the Provinces of the 'World Republic of Letters': The Primacy of the Object in the Work of Roberto Schwarz

Authors

  • Silvia López Carleton College

Keywords:

Roberto Schwarz, Brazil, literary theory, Machado de Assis

Abstract

For the Latin American critic, the constant replay of Eurocentric all-encompassing phenomenological campaigns of re-worlding literature, become in their tedium quite interesting, as they always unfailingly signal the erasure of Marxism as the critical theoretical apparatus that put at the center of knowledge construction a metacritique of epistemology, thereby setting a radically different framework for the analysis of culture and reification in late capitalism. After reviewing some of these attempts at a logic of “third world” literary production, the author presents the work of the Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz, whose immanent critical theoretical protocols, rigorously take us to the basic principle of modern Marxian/Adornian aesthetics: that of the primacy of the object. This kind of work provides a different answer to the perennial problems of external models of analysis versus text-based interpretations, of levels of particularity in literature versus extrapolating general models, as well as more specifically addressing how is that foreign aesthetic ideas and forms are always affirmed improperly in the peripheral context, thereby ciphering according to a law of their own the truth of the social world.

Published

2011-09-16

How to Cite

López, S. (2011). Dialectical Criticism in the Provinces of the ’World Republic of Letters’: The Primacy of the Object in the Work of Roberto Schwarz. A Contracorriente: Una Revista De Estudios Latinoamericanos, 9(1), 69–88. Retrieved from https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/37

Issue

Section

Articles / Artículos