"The Ends of Literature" analyzes the part played by literature
within contemporary Latin American thought and politics, above all
the politics of neoliberalism. The "why?" of contemporary Latin
American literature is the book's overarching concern. Its wide
range includes close readings of the prose of Cortazar, Carpentier,
Paz, Valenzuela, Piglia, and Las Casas; of the relationship of the
"Boom" movement and its aftermath; of testimonial narrative; and of
contemporary Chilean and Chicano film. The work also investigates
in detail various theoretical projects as they intersect with and
emerge from Latin American scholarship: cultural studies,
deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial studies.
Latin American literature, both as a vehicle of conservatism and as
an agent of subversion, is bound from its inception to the rise of
the state. Literature's nature, role, and status are therefore
altered when the Latin American nation-state succumbs to the
process of neoliberalism: as the "too-strong" state (dictatorship)
yields to the "too-weak" state (the market), and as the various
practices of civil society and public life are replaced by private
or privatized endeavors.
However, neither the "end of literature" nor the "end of the state"
can be assumed. The end of literature in Latin America is in fact
the call for more literature; it is the call of literature, in
particular that of the Boom. The end of the state, likewise, is the
demand upon this state. The book, then, analyzes the "ends" in
question as at once their purpose, direction, future, and
conclusion.
Also key to the study is the notion of transition. Within much
recent Latin American political discussion "la transicion" refers
to the passage from dictatorship to democracy, as well as to the
failure of this shift, the failure of post-dictatorship. The author
argues that the movement from literary to cultural studies, while
issuing from intellectual and aesthetic circles, is an integral
component of this same transition. The thematization of the bind
between these two displacements--hence of Latin America's voyage
into "post-transition"--forms a fundamental portion of the text.
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