Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Sep 2018)
A cronopio’s journal
Abstract
Since its founding, Hispamérica has transgressed every explicit rule of the literary journals’ arkhé: the norms that determine positions of power and appoint the ‘appropriate’ people to fill them. Hispamérica has published writers who are already consecrated, others who are brand new, as well as those who are unknown, forgotten or marginalized. The essayists, reviewers and interviewers are academics, but they are professors as well as young assistants and graduate students, and they come from prestigious universities and from small state campuses. The "academic component", moreover, is just one aspect of the magazine, which also publishes short stories, poems, documents, interviews, etc. Still, the most flagrant and conflictive element for the Academy is the absence of an editorial board, the sacrosanct peer-view: the director decides. He never justifies his choices, which sometimes include "Antipodes lovers" (Molina 1974) of literature and criticism. Hispamérica, however, paradoxically, is 47 years old and has 139 issues of undisputed academic prestige. This article suggests a hypothesis as unconventional as the journal, supported by two of the rare moments in which the director, Sosnowski, talks about the magazine: an informal interview with two very young students and another with the most famous Spanish-American informal writer.
