摘要：Those of us who began the study of Latin American literature a half-century ago remember well the core of the reading list, which was comprised of novels having to do with the countryside, whether as part of the national mythology (Ricardo Güiraldes’s Don Segundo Sombra, 1926), as part of a national-continental problematic (José Eustacio Rivera’s La vorágine, 1924), or as the scenario for the transition from a problematic to a national mythology (Rómulo Gallegos’s Doña Bárbara, 1929). One also remembers that the first full-time professor of Latin American literature in the U.S. in the 1930s, Berkeley’s Arturo Torres-Ríoseco, very clearly demarcated the separation of the waters of the Latin American narrative. This he did by distinguishing la novela de la ciudad (novel of the city) from the la novela del campo (novel of the countryside). Almost universally, the former had to do with the degradations and depredations of the city, with all sorts of nasty foreign influences, as perceived equally by both the left and the right, while the latter, even when it dealt with horrible forms of exploitation (and today these novels can be read in terms of environmental concerns and not just injustices done to the indigenous/mestizo peasants), it was still evoking something quintessential about Creole or national identity.
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