Synopsis "Is There a Latin American Text in This Class?"
Is there a Latin American Text in this Class?, companion volume to Latin American Literature and Post-Structuralism (2018), addresses some two decades of the interaction of deconstruction and the so-called cultural turn in literary studies. Again and here with a pronounced pedagogical inflection, critical theory meets Latin American fiction and poetry in a challenging analysis of literature and literary criticism through the agencies of post-structuralism. A further reminder that deconstructions cannot occur spontaneously, the book highlights confrontations between theory, politics and literature at and across linguistic and cultural frontiers. The use of literary theory never as a circumscribed field, never as an alternative to literary study, but built ever instrumentally into critical and classroom practice, may ensure that one's own reading, each and every time, will be rendered, soon, unreadable, a deconstructed, displaced authority. If there appears to be an inexorable shift towards a preoccupation with the role of an ethics in deconstructive discursiveness, this book suggests that the enterprises of post-structuralism, post-Marxism and the post-colonial turn are not, by any means necessarily, at odds.
