Elena Altuna: Reader of José María Arguedas

Abstract

Elena Altuna's critical work was ascribed to the American colonial period, specifically to the Andean area, but her “point of speech” as Ortega y Gasset would say, transcends the borders of time and the limitations of the cultural area. As one of the prominent figures of a profoundly original critical tradition, the Argentinian scholar helps to shape a generation of renewal of Latin American criticism, placing her work in long-term historical horizons that have points of contact, articulation and continuity throughout. of periods in American cultural history. This explains the attention that Altuna  ̶̶ an expert in the colonial period ̶̶ paid to the literary and non-literary work of José María Arguedas. In this paper we intend to establish the relevance of Altuna's approach to the Arguedian work to exemplify how this case, metonymically, expresses the reality of an intellectual and artistic flow between the South Atlantic and Andean cultural areas. Under the lens of some of Altuna's critical categories, we will reread the Arguedas/Cortázar polemic of the 1960s in order to, from that reflection, situate the critical work of Elena Altuna, attending to a paper that the author read about Arguedas in 2011.