Our interrogation emerges from a shift over the last thirty years in nineteenth-century Latin American studies. The field has expanded its scope to include not only institutionally sanctioned literature but also unorthodox novels, autobiographies, periodicals, letters, lithographs, testimonies, and scientific writings drawn from what Juan Carlos González Espitia calls the “dark side of the archive.” This proliferation of materials—along with renewed attention to the racialized, ethnicized, and gendered subjects who produced them—raises a central methodological question: what is gained by treating these materials as “literary”? What does treating texts as “literary” entail in a subfield where no stable consensus exists about what the term designates?
Victoria Zurita (Université de Montréal) opens the panel with "Spaces, Horizons, Formations, and Games: Metaphors for Literary Worldmaking?," which examines concepts from intellectual history and reception theory: Jauss’s horizon of expectations, Koselleck’s space of experience, Williams’s formations, and Wittgenstein’s language games. Contra “reflective” theories, these concepts acknowledge that cultural objects provide historical insights by mobilizing shared forms and ideas. She explores the intersection of these metaphors and the worlds implicated by literary texts. Using José Martí’s Versos sencillos as a case study, she provides a rationale for the interanimations of literary and non-literary discourses while marking the limits of literature’s evidentiary value. She argues that combining formal analysis with contextualization pressures our normative beliefs by forcing the redescription of unexpected normative entanglements of the past.
In "Close-reading El Latinoamericano’s Fashion Supplement," Catalina Rodríguez (Boston University) analyzes the fashion supplement included in the Spanish-language periodical El Latino Americano. Periódico para las familias (1884–1885), showcasing the centrality of literary analysis in nineteenth-century counter-archives. Published in New York and distributed throughout the hemisphere, this periodical played a key role in imagining a transnational Latin American identity. It is no coincidence that José Martí’s foundational essay “Our America” appeared in one of its issues. Rodríguez uses close reading to challenge the supplement’s assumed “banality” and to show how its cosmopolitan trends, lithographs, and commentary function as a space for envisioning a hemispheric Latin American identity.
In "Are Foundational Fictions Good Novels?," Romina Wainberg (University of Southern California) posits that the historical underestimations of canonical Latin American novels as novels—including Doris Sommer’s allegorical reappraisal in the 1990s and later critiques of her hermeneutics—have eclipsed the canon’s craft. She suggests that fathoming the possibility that a foundational fiction might be a well-wrought literary artifact has become increasingly difficult within Latin Americanism. A reorientation attuned to narrative consistency and textual intricacy shows that these canonical fictions, long thought to “reproduce” nation-state projects through the power of the written letter, depict writing itself as an “unproductive” activity. Moreover, processual representations of unproductive writing constitute thematico-formal achievements that remain aesthetically and theoretically illuminating today.
Closing the panel, Isabela Fraga (Tufts University) revisits, in "Literary Bureaucracies," the question of what makes a text literary when many figures we now read as literary authors also worked as physicians, lawyers, bureaucrats, or planters. Taking as a case study bureaucratic documents and press discussions surrounding slave and free people insurance companies in nineteenth-century Brazil, her presentation asks what scholars do when we approach finance capital and the archives of slavery as literary objects. Does close reading a non-literary text render it literary? Is literariness a transferable or retroactive property? Drawing on canonical Western definitions of literariness alongside Latin American intellectual traditions, she reflects on how literariness may be understood less as a property of texts than as a critical lens.
To ensure both rigor and exchange, the session is structured around four 10-minute presentations, each focused on a specific primary source and a distinct understanding of literary analysis. This compressed format foregrounds clearly delimited case studies alongside their corresponding literary methodologies. A 10-minute response by Niloofar Sarlati (University of Michigan), whose work on political economy, colonial encounters, and cross-media analysis spans multiple linguistic and medial traditions, will situate the discussion within a broader comparative framework, enabling a transregional and transtemporal reflection on concepts of literariness across heterogeneous archives, the reach and limits of available literary methods, and their sociopolitical functions within processes of modernity/coloniality. The session will thus reserve at least 20 minutes for open discussion, securing meaningful audience engagement and a timely conclusion within the 75-minute format.