Knowledge taxonomy dates back to Greece with Plato and Aristotle. Later, during the seventieth and eighteen centuries, division among disciplines started in the universities. Differentiation brings hierarchy, and this has an institutional impact, as well as subsequent specialization. According to Peter Weingart, this segmentation privileges distance to support differentiation from other disciplines, which also prevents communication and integration into broader systems. Interdisciplinarity is a new trend that supports new research approaches.
The National Academy of Sciences published in 2004 the four primary drivers of interdisciplinarity: 1. the inner complexity of nature and society, 2. the desire to explore problems and questions that are not confined to a single discipline, 3. the need to solve societal problems, and 4. the power of new technologies (Facilitating interdisciplinary research, pp. 2-40 qt. by Julie Thompson Klein). The concept of interdisciplinarity raised the attention in the 1970s when the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) set up the debate to better understand human challenges and to propose more effective solutions. In 1994, based in this debate, Gibbons et al. proposed that academia should migrate from “Mode 1” of knowledge production to “Mode 2”, of a transdisciplinary model of knowledge.
Words, images, and all the other resources that create our reality have been brought together to tell myths, to represent stories, to tell history, and to construct figurative and nonfigurative art: Aztec calendar stone, Crete’s labyrinth, Aeneid, Avant-garde literature and music from the beginning of the 20th century, holographic poetry, visual essays, among other manifestations. These examples prove that knowledge has been interdisciplinary since the begging of western and non-western civilizations. It is our institutional understanding of knowledge what has created a disciplinary and specialized necessity—more autonomous, indeed, but more isolated and limited in terms of understanding literary, artistic, and non-artistic works which combine different expressions and fields.
This panel explores the concept of interdisciplinarity in Latin American literature of the 20th century. The presentations focus on authors of three different regions, Peru, Mexico, and Brazil, who deal with different disciplines and have a broader understanding of violence, culture, poetry, and reading.
Each participant will take no more than thirteen minutes to ensure at least fifteen minutes of unstructured discussion.
Tamara Mitchell focuses, in “Geopoetics and Journalistic Ekphrasis:(Un)Mapping Daniel Alarcón’s Lost City Radio”, on the ubiquity—both temporally and spatially—of violence and the elusive identity of the imagined community in which the narrative of Peruvian-Latinx author Daniel Alarcón unfolds. Lost City Radio is set in an unnamed country enduring the aftershocks of a terror-filled civil war. Her findings demonstrate how the network of cyclical violence established in Alarcón’s novel creates a geopolitical link among a multitude of real-world nations while, at the same time, rejecting easy identification with any individual nation. To grapple with this innovative narrative strategy, she employs Jacob Edmond’s term “geopoetics,” which describes how narrative frameworks are often deployed to reflect the dynamic relationship between spatial imaginaries and geopolitical realities. She posits that the unnamed nation of Alarcón’s novel makes legible a new conceptualization of space by insisting on what she calls “geopolitical universality.” The principal means through which Lost City Radio achieves this geopolitical universality is through what she calls “journalistic ekphrasis.” These analeptic and geographic leaps establish a geopoetics which creates a pantopia for world-historical violence and state repression. This presentation seeks to demonstrate that Alarcón’s novel facilitates a reckoning of hemispheric and global patterns of violence that critiques reductionist North-South divisions and first- versus third-world binaries.
In “Caution: Wet Paint. Xavier Villaurrutia’s Pragmatic Theory on Art”, María Inés Canto focuses on the evolution of visual discourse throughout the first half of the 20th century in Mexico. This work analyzes Xavier Villaurrutia’s art criticism published in journals and periodicals from 1926 to 1950. This new facet of Villaurrutia’s writing—best known for his poetry and playwriting— creates an alternative space for discussing modern Mexican culture, which is traditionally presented in a polarized setting: Nationalism vs. Cosmopolitanism. Villaurrutia's art criticism dismantles this dualistic narrative by promoting critical thinking in a more accessible linguistic register, targeting wider audiences through his collaborations in popular periodicals. Further, this presentation underscores how Villaurrutia’s art criticism is representative of significant development of his ideas on photography and film over the span 25 years, especially on his conceptualization of images as human function bodies.
“Voice, Sound, and Silence in Augusto de Campos’ concrete poems” by Marcelo Noah explores Augusto de Campos’ production. Literary critics have been historically invested mainly on the visual aspects of Brazilian concrete poetry as a movement inscribed almost exclusively in the long tradition of visual poetry. This paper focuses on another line of critical and scholarly analysis, the sonic appeal and vocal articulations of concrete poetry: the possibilities created by the use of paronomasia in dynamic structures oriented by gestalt psychology and informed by 20th century avant-garde and contemporary music. Observing the works of Augusto de Campos (b. 1931, in São Paulo) written during the so-called “orthodox phase” of the movement in Brazil (1956–1960), it is possible to dispute the supremacy of the optical over its aural dimension, and defend an equally central position for sound along the visual in de Campos poetic investigations. Noah also explains how de Campos has shaped his poetry around the presence of the human voice, despite his alignment with the constructivist tradition.
Finally, Patrícia Lino (“DO YOU NEED ME TO DRAW YOU AN ESSAY? Audiovisual Thinkers in Latin America”) will explore the use of non-traditional academic forms to analyze and respond to literary interdisciplinary texts. Among those non-traditional forms, Lino will focus her attention on the creation and application of the visual and audiovisual essay and present several examples of visual and audiovisual essays which were made between 2017 and 2019 to better understand the works of the following authors: Augusto de Campos (Brazil), Lygia Clark (Brazil), Wlademir Dias-Pino (Brazil), Juan Luis Martinez (Chile), and Nicanor Parra (Chile).