The Evolution of Literature in the Americas

Earl E. Fitz is Professor of Portuguese, Spanish, and Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University, where he regularly teaches courses on Brazilian literature, inter-American literature, literary history, and translation. He is the author of many articles and some fifteen books on these topics.

Dedications

1. Introduction. Inter-American Literature as Academic Discipline: A Definition and a Statement of Principles and Praxis. What inter-American literature is, what its study means, why it matters, and how it’s currently being done; different approaches, different results; the pioneering role historians have played in inter-American study; early Brazilian inter-Americanists and the case for Brazil in the larger inter-American project; language study and the importance of the comparative method; some recommendations.

2. The Pre-Columbian World as Foundation and as an Enduring Ancient Tradition.

Our common New World heritage; Canada, or kanata, a Huron word for village or community; Tenochtitlán, the fabulous Aztec citadel; Nezahualcóyotl, the great poet and philosopher-king; the vast Incan empire; the Iroquois Confederation, the place of women in it, and Marxism; the nature of oral literature and its social significance; the enduring power of Native American literature and culture; the ongoing importance of our indigenous heritage to the inter-American project.

3. The Fifteenth Century: The Inter-American Experience Begins to Take Shape.

America as an idea and its collective invention versus America as political and cultural reality; visions (and revisions) of the New World as earthly Eden, a terrestrial paradise; Spain, England, Portugal, and France in 1492, 1497,1500, 1534, and, once again, England (now intending to settle) in 1607; Indigenous America and late fifteenth-century Europe; the European traditions that will be implanted in the New World and the impacts these will have on how culture and literature in the Americas will develop; the startlingly contrastive discovery letters of Spain’s Colón and Portugal’s Caminha and the very different traditions these represented and, in the New World, begat; the oral traditions of Native America and the written traditions of Europe; drama as a genre and the special role it played in cultural communication; the seeds of conflict.

4. The Sixteenth Century: Brazil and Spanish America Blaze a Trail.

Indigenous America; epic struggles between the powerful Aztec, Mayan, and Incan empires and the Spanish conquistadores; Luso-Brazilian différance; the clash of worlds hitherto unknown to each other; exemplary genres and the emergence of outstanding writers: Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Álvar Núñes Cabeza de Vaca, Pêro Vaz de Caminha, José de Anchieta, and Manuel da Nóbrega; key differences between Spain in the Americas and Portugal in the Americas; the birth of what will become two very distinct literary traditions, the Spanish American and the Brazilian; early French (and Portuguese) claims to Canada; Newfoundland (a disputed territory) and the voyages of Gaspar Corte-Real and Giovanni da Verrazano; Jacques Cartier; the French, their failure to make allies of the Iroquois Confederation, and the fur trade.

5. The Seventeenth Century: England Arrives in the New World.

Jamestown, 1607, and Québec, 1608; Samuel de Champlain and the establishment

of New France; the importance of the Iberian Baroque to literary and cultural

development in Spanish America and Brazil; early Brazilian identity and brasilidade;

the Puritan “plain style” and the intellectual and rhetorical arabesques of the Spanish

American and Brazilian Baroque; Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the New World’s first

great writer, intellectual, and feminist; Gregório de Matos (“the Devil’s Mouthpiece”)

and Antônio Vieira; Vieira and Sor Juana: the first inter-American literary dispute; the

French-Canadian Jesuit Relations; the importance of literacy and educational systems

to the development of literature in the Americas; Catholicism and the Jesuits versus

Protestantism and the Puritans; the development of letters, both religious and secular.

6. The Eighteenth Century: The Inter-American Project Becomes both More Viable and More Complex.

Religious and political conflict; the long struggle between France and England for control of North America comes to an end on the Plains of Abraham, on the outskirts of Montréal; revolution in New England, decadence and decline in Spanish American life and letters; steady growth and consolidation in Brazil; Brazilian Ufanismo; the “special relationship” between Brazil and the United States begins to sprout; the emergence of two distinct literary traditions, the North American “plain,” pragmatic, and (in the English tradition) realistic mode versus the elaborate, opulent, and imaginative Latin American mode; the English influence in Canada versus the English influence in the United States; survivance and Québec’s struggle to maintain its own linguistic and cultural identity; New World literature and the American revolution, new issues of influence and reception; political independence and cultural independence in the Americas.

7. The Nineteenth Century: Inter-Americanism Begins to Flower.

Political independence comes to Latin America: the Spanish American experience versus the Brazilian; Canadian Confederation and Canada’s relationships with Great Britain and its New World neighbors; a synchrony of European influence, periodization, thematics (nature, independence, and miscegenation being three prime examples), and genre development in the Americas; the earliest novels; politics, slavery, a sharp increase in specific cases of inter-American influence and reception; the Confederation Poets; the importance of Poe and Whitman to the rest of the Americas; the portrayal of the Indian; differing American cultural identities; the special importance of Romanticism in the Americas; the concept of Nuestra América begins to take shape; Brazilian literature and a new consciousness of women, their identities, and their places in society; the questions of race and identity; the importance of Realism and the emergence of New World narrative, Machado de Assis and Henry James; Naturalism and its unique place in inter-American literary history; poetry, prose fiction, and five end-of-century gems: Henry James, Sara Jeannette Duncan, Émile Nelligan, Rubén Darío, and Machado de Assis.

8. The Twentieth Century: Changing Patterns of Influence.

Unease in Canada and Latin America over the growing economic and political power of the United States; issues of political, economic, and cultural influence; Modernism in the Americas; American Studies and the United States vis-à-vis the rest of the Americas; the case of Faulkner; the 1960s and the “Boom” era; Canada’s “Quiet Revolution” and the new Canadian novel; Machado, Borges, Lispector, Márquez, and Barth and the influence of “Latin American” literature on writers and critics in the United States; the connections between Canadian, Spanish American, Brazilian, and Caribbean literature in the 1960s and 1970s; the importance of translators and translation to the rise of inter-American literature; new issues of influence and reception; García Márquez, realismo mágico, and English-Canadian narrative; Eduardo Galeano’s epic American vision; the 1982 International Comparative Literature Association’s recognition of inter-American literature as an emergent discipline; the growing importance of Canada, the Caribbean, Spanish America, and Brazil as leaders in the inter-American project; the special role of Brazil.

9. The Twenty-First Century: A Look Back and a Look Forward.

Trends and developments; the formal entrance of Canadian literature into the inter-American game; new possibilities for a rapidly developing field; Américanité; the importance of Comparative Literature as a discipline to the inter-American project; American Studies, International American Studies, and International Inter-American Studies; What is being done? What needs to be done? How can interested students and scholars become involved? Inter-American literature and the United States; pride and prejudice, American style; immigration and the Hispanization of the United States; the future of inter-American literature and its relationship with the disciplines of History and Latin American Studies and with the various national literature departments involved; American literature (understood in its hemispheric sense) and World Literature

10. Conclusion