ABSTRACT
American literature, Latin or otherwise, has a peculiar and agonic worldliness that defines it as world literature, starting with the fortuities of these primal scenes. Latin American literature has its genesis in a series of defining worldly matrices – the Indigenous cosmogonies; the propagandistic discourse in praise of worldly materiality of free real estate, minerals, and other earthly goods coveted by the venture capitalists of their time that underwrote the hemisphere’s invasion and colonization. A basic matrix for the phenomenon and concept of “world literature” is the mutual implication of world and literature as continuous transformative process. As for the definition of world literature as “windows on the world,” in the case of Latin America, those windows are the world just as much as they are the prospect called literature that is formed and perpetually transformed by that world for its viewing. The diagnostic characterizations form yet another layer of Latin America’s mercurial palimpsest whose name is, perforce, world literature.
