Appropriating Theory. Ángel Rama's Critical Work by José Eduardo González (review)

José Eduardo González—author of Borges and the Politics of Form (Garland/Routledge, 1998); and co-editor of New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative: Post-National Literatures and the Canon (Palgrave McMillan, 2014) and Primitivism and Identity in Latin America. Essays on Art, Literature and Culture (U of Arizona P, 2000)—has written an important, and problematic, overview of Ángel Rama's influential and prolific critical writing on Latin American culture, and more specifically, on Latin American literature. To my knowledge, this is the first volume in English to engage this ambitious effort.

Appropriating Theory was clearly conceived as a mediating book. It was designed to mediate between Ángel Rama and the English-language academic public that know little about his work. In order to successfully deliver on the promise of that mediation, Gonzalez's book emphasizes over and over the relations between Rama's thought and the more prestigious and better-known thinkers his audience will have no trouble recognizing: Adorno, Lukács, Benjamin, Said, Foucault. This is a standard move—and, here, a well accomplished one—of traditionally conceived comparativism. By the same token, this strength is also, on the reverse, the most significant limitation of this fine and useful study of Ángel Rama's thought. The book includes an introduction, seven chapters, and a brief but important conclusion.

The first chapter, "Debates, Dreams, and Fears," presents some of González's main claims and guiding threads: the debates refer to Rama's famous clashes with other important Latin American critics, such as Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Mario Vargas Llosa; the dreams are those of social justice and progress for the continent as inspired by the Cuban revolution of 1959; the fears, finally, are thus stated: "in his later years, the painful experience of exile clouded his writings, and Rama produced pessimistic readings of Latin American culture in which he expressed doubts that democracy or education could have any lasting, significant effect in transforming the societies in the region" (12). González's claim is that Rama's critical work has two parts: the first—and positive—one includes Rama's book on Latin American modernismo and culminates in Transculturación narrativa. The second, more pessimistic, would presumably be represented by Rama's alleged mis-reading of Foucault in La Ciudad letrada and its tone is explained here by Rama's biography.

The second chapter presents "The early influence of Benjamin and Adorno in Ángel Rama's literary criticism" (5). The third and fourth chapters deal with Benjamin's influence on Rama. The third concentrates on Benjamin's impact on the development of Rama's idea of narrative transculturation. It includes the book's second big claim: "as my research in this chapter shows Benjamin's essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction', alongside with his writings on photography, were an unacknowledged inspiration for Rama's early ideas about the process of transculturation. I demonstrate that Ángel Rama had fully developed his theory before he encountered the work of Fernando Ortiz and borrowed the latter's term" (6). The fourth chapter, by further exploring "Benjamin's influence on Rama, as well as that of several other thinkers such as Ernst Cassirer, Lucien Goldman, and Lukács" focuses on the concept of mediation as both the connection between writing and the specific historical and social context in which it emerges, and that between the writer as intellectual and society (6).

The fifth chapter discusses "The importance that the concept of literary technique possesses for Rama's idea of the role of literature as a social act" and claims that "Rama's uncritical acceptance of the notion of advanced artistic techniques limits his view of modern literature" (7). Since Rama's preoccupation with the development of creative and original novelistic forms in the transculturating work of José María Arguedas is one of the key aspects González and many other critics before him appreciate in...