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One of the characteristics of the emerging Latin American public sphere is precisely a shift away from the predominantly "literary" model of the nation and national culture held by both traditional and modernizing elites in Latin America. The book that provided the main impetus to broaden the perspective of Latin American literary studies to embrace larger cultural contexts was La ciudad letrada ¹ (The Lettered City, 1984), by Angel Rama, perhaps the most important figure in modern Latin American literary criticism. Rama sketched in that book an incipient critique of what might be called the "literature-centrism" of Latin American culture, showing the involvement of a certain idea of literature and its institutionalization in the construction of systems of social power and exclusion from the colony onward. This was in part a self-criticism of his own sense of the progressive role of literature in his earlier work on the problem of what he called "narrative transculturation", which was extremely influential in defining a major direction of Latin American criticism in the seventies. Since then, a series of books and articles have deepened and problematized his basic thesis: for example (to mention only one indicative title) John Beverley's Against Literature ².

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