THE PHILOSOPHY OF RICHARD RORTY AND THE FATE OF LATIN

AMERICA IN THE FIELD OF LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Luiza Lobo

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

SUMMARYThis essay discusses how the pragmatic philosophy of Richard Rorty can establish a new

pattern for an alternative perspective of culture according to the ´here and now` in social life. It envisages new ways for the continuation and spread of Latin American art and literature in the era of globalization. This art should aim to be autonomous from the domination of the Other (such as the First World), but, at the same time, it should be capable of interacting with other nations. The new demands of communication in relation to art and culture presuppose a shift from rhetoric and metaphysics into a new mentality and form of representation aimed at a quicker and more direct performance. To implement this shift and to comply with the new present forms of sensitivity and expression, it is very important to establish a constant exchange of experience both within and outside Latin America. These new means of communication can be the Internet, e-books, portals, virtual libraries and data bases, and could allow a superseding of old canons and old ways of thinking based on a purely rhetorical metaphysics of the absence. This new approach will allow Latin America to achieve its affirmation and spread its art and culture within the continent and around the world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Luiza Lobo is an Associate Professor of the Post-Graduate Program Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and is currently a Foreign Lecturer at Aarhus University, in Denmark. She has published ten books, five of essays and literary criticism, and five of short stories. She published more than a hundred articles in specialized periodicals in Brazil, Italy, France, Canada, Japan, and Germany and has lectured in more than a hundred conferences and universities, among them, Oxford, Princeton, Yale, Columbia and the Free University of Berlin. In 2001 she was a Senior Visiting Scholar there and in 2000 at the Centre for Brazilian Studies of the University of Oxford. She has also translated critical essays and about thirty books of fiction by authors such as Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Katherine Mansfield, Edgar Allan Poe, James Hogg, William Golding and Robert Burns. She has also edited ten books of essays, and is currently editing two publications for the University of Nantes, in France. She is the editor of two on-line magazines: Literatura e Cultura and Mulheres e Literatura (http://www.letras.ufrj.br/litcult), a page that also presents Brazilian authors in translation.

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Introduction: pragmatics as a philosophy of presence

The philosophy of Richard Rorty stresses the importance of communication,

observation and the assumption of a present state of affairs, rather than a purely

rhetorical and metaphysical inquiry about reality. Even a dialogical or dialectical

thought, as it consists of a triad based on two pairs of dichotomies, as Lévi-Strauss

(1969) has already written, may still be considered linked to metaphysics. However,

direct observation of everyday facts of life and their use in art from a pragmatic point of

view, in a more flexible approach to reality, can allow for better communication in a

globalized world.

Richard Rorty exposed his philosophy mainly in two of his “Philosophical

Writings,” Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers. I, 1995 a),

(Objetivismo, relativismo e verdade. Escritos filosóficos I, 1997a), and Essays on

Heidegger and Others. Philosophical Papers. Volume 2, 1995b); in his Spinoza

Lectures (1997 b), as well as in his first book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

(1993), published in 1979. Rorty’s article “Feminism, Ideology and Deconstruction: a

pragmatic Vision” (“Feminismo, ideologia e desconstrução: uma visão pragmática”)

included in the book A Map of Ideology (Um mapa da ideologia, 1996), is also an

important contribution. There he states that post-modernism or deconstruction,

following Paul de Man’s denomination, is a moment in our society and that the main

aim of pragmatic philosophy is to achieve a society in which there is no metaphysics, no

essentialism, nor any kind of “adoration” or cult, be it towards science, literature or

whatsoever (1995, p. 132, 133). This society, as it already exists in many Western

nations of the First World, would have no altars, “and instead just have lots of picture

galleries, book displays, movies, concerts, ethnographic museums, museums of science

and technology, and so on – lots of cultural options but no privileged central discipline

or practice” (1995, p. 132). Evidently, his proposition for the ideal society is a secular

one.

Rorty’s ideas can be divided into two parts, the speculative, when he discusses

Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Paul De Man, and the pragmatic, when he becomes

more political, following Dewey and Donaldson, and is more interested in the political

crisis of contemporary times. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature he proposes the

breaking up of the fundamental tradition of Descartes and Kant (1979), as well as of

analytical philosophy, a recent development of Kant. To replace it he proposes the

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“edifying” philosophy of hermeneutics, including Nietzsche, Dewey, Wittgenstein,

Heidegger and Gadamer. He vehemently denies that knowledge is either merely the

result of the mental or linguistic representation of reality (1997, p. 7), or that it is only a

representation of nature, following a statement common both to pragmatics and to post-

modern thought (1997, p. 8). In “Consequences of Pragmatism” (1982) he envisions

pragmatics as deeply rooted in literary criticism and in a hermeneutic approach to social

sciences (see also 1997, p. 7).

In “Truth, Politics and Post-Modern,” a lecture presented at the Department of

Philosophy in Amsterdam University in 1995, and published in 1997 as Spinoza

Lectures (p. 23-52), Rorty distinguishes two projects derived from Enlightenment: the

political and the philosophical. According to him, the first of these projects demanded

as much freedom as possible for society, and has been completed, whereas the second,

the philosophical project, remains to be completed. Thus, Rorty recognizes that

Enlightenment achieved the abolition of the Idea of God, but he admits that it could not

abolish the three main fundamental ideas that sustain Western society, which were left

for post-modernism to complete: Nature, Reason and Truth (in 1997, p. 9). It is towards

this aim that he directs his work as a pragmatist. He stresses that, in order to build a new

society, one should have a much more direct approach to reality, free from metaphysics

and even from dialectics, more akin to existence and to the body and its emotions, and

with a keener direct observation of everyday life.

Post-modern Society: Literature and Art in the Cultural Era

We know that, partially due to the influence of the media, contemporary society is

based upon the idea of an unending, continuous present; we live in a world in which

there is no space for abstract thought but only for shopping and acquiring material

goods that we will at best throw away very soon. This same idea of the discardable may

be also applied to our thought. The present crisis of metaphysical thought and the

disbelief in transcendence, in truth and in the eternity of humanity goes together with

this form of behavior. It is a continuation of Nietzsche’s philosophy, which gained

impetus with Heidegger, Derrida and the Yale School, Paul de Man, Geoffrey

Hartmann, Harold Bloom and Jonathan Culler. The post-modern movement is part of a

grandiose project that attempts to dismantle the fundamentals of Western philosophy as

supported by the metaphysics of absence, which rests upon the idea of transcendence of

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the world; that is, the explanation of human life would lie outside of the immanent

world itself. In the words of Jacques Derrida, this movement is an attempt to break up

with “phalogocentrism,” or the centralization in patriarchal order and with the notion of

identity and universal truth implied in the Cartesian logos. Derrida stresses that oral

communication and repetition eternize the metaphysical idea of Truth, and proposes a

revolutionary process to disrupt this order. It is this process that aims at dismantling the

Western-Greek-Jewish-Christian thought that he means by deconstruction. It should be

replaced by a post-modern post-metaphysical thought which would rely not on the

absence but on the presence, the immanence, the ´here and now´ in society.

Such is, in my view, the importance of the pragmatics proposed by the American

philosopher Richard Rorty, in the sense that it carries a positive means of reconstructing

our way of thinking. In his analysis of society, he invokes a down-to-earth experience of

reality and takes into consideration mass culture and the real facts of life as they present

themselves in society and in people’s existences. Therefore, his philosophy attempts to

find a way out of the history of transcendence, of meta-things, and to bring into light the

observation of immanence and existence. He may have some points in common with

Heidegger and with Emmanuel Levinas; however, both these philosophers were not as

radical in their deconstruction of metaphysics as Rorty is.

One of the consequences of post-modernism and of this kind of pragmatics is the

breaking up of old canons. Of course, this tendency originated in the more radical

Modernist movement of the 1920s; however, it still exists today, although it is tainted

with the less radical notion of hybridization of culture and homogenization of high and

low cultures, as proposed by Nestor Canclini and by Cultural Studies in general. This

direct approach to reality points to a major revolution in our Weltanschauung about our

possibility of changing the old, by replacing the old, while, in the words of Derrida, it

proposed to replace the old stagnant “metaphysics of absence” with a new “metaphysics

of presence.”

A whole set of preoccupations linked to the emotional, the body and everyday life

follows the notion of the ´politically correct,´ the political minorities, women’s and gays

´ studies, gender studies, feminist studies, race studies etc. All of these new interests are

not sheer rhetoric but a fact, a possible action that can really be attained or performed

nowadays.

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The global panorama of art and literature has dramatically changed in the

contemporary world, to the extent that we sometimes ask ourselves if tomorrow there

will still be the kind of art and literature that we know today. The large installations in

the museums of contemporary art and the new forms of media are only some of the

signs of these transformations. E-books and the Internet, laser machines, and the media

revolution in general, such as digital radio and TV, all hint to this great revolution in

terms of the way we can communicate thought and emotion through art. The diffusion

of international cultures and experiences through the mediation of the computer, which

reaches out to people apart in the globe in a local culture (the global village dreamed of

by MacLuhan) signals that even in Latin America we approach a new era.

The most immediate consequence of this process of globalization is the shift from

multiple views of society, mentality and culture into a unified human sensitivity with

one single view of the world. Therefore, if the poorer countries do not resist, their

culture will be increasingly absorbed into or invaded by the products, habits, culture and

art originating in the First World countries. Culture is today the most powerful weapon

of civilization and politics and allows for the creation of a new kind of empire

domination which employs image, color, movement and the word. This is an empire

only comparable to the Roman in Antiquity which was able to incorporate the basic

foundations of Greek culture and spread itself onto Europe and Africa. Then a relatively

slow process of expansion and domination of the other cultures was achieved step by

step, even through wars. Colonial domination by the British Empire lasted only 20 years

but has now been replaced by the media invasion in homes, theaters, supermarkets,

schools. The only form of resistance is to negotiate which aspects of one’s culture could

be conceded and which retained.

Richard Rorty thinks that literature and philosophy should be kept apart, as two

separate disciplines. Their only proximity lies in the fact that both have to exert

themselves in the search for the canon through the study of history. Which authors

should be selected to be studied in a course? In science, the criterion of choice is more

obvious, since it relies on the importance of its subject matter proper and on the most

recent discoveries rather than on sometimes highly controversial human figures.

Therefore, science employs a much more detached and distant approach to its subject

matter than the humanities, where including an author in a syllabus immediately

represents an ideological choice relying on taste and subjectivity. Due to deeper

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subjectivity than in the sciences, the humanities are much more susceptible to criticism,

censorship or appreciation than the sciences. For Rorty, the canon is deeply dependent

on one’s perspective, and he poses questions such as: Where do you speak from? What

is the good of your speech? For him, there is nothing like a general canon nowadays – it

depends on who construes it, why and how (1998: p. 49-75).

Printing activity today, except for best-sellers, is almost entirely dedicated to books

clearly marked with a didactic, professional, informational or technical profile. Any

work linked only to art or literature can be rejected by publishers, sold as any ordinary

product, or is so highly priced that it does not circulate. At the same time that the book

has become an object of consumerism and a practical tool for information, one should

not forget that it might very well also be “an efficient vehicle for the transmission of

culture,” according to Roberto Reis (in Jobim, 1992, p. 72). At the same time, for

centuries books have also been powerful tools for the domination exerted by

individuals of a certain class on lower social groups.

In the present financial climate I consider that the only possibility for art and

literature to survive in contemporary Latin America is by the employment of new

media, such as the Internet, or other several new resources that would minimize

expenses. These forms of communication would enable Latin American art and culture

to spread and be known within the continent as well as around the world. And this also

applies to African, Asian or other marginalized cultures.

The Internet represents an opening for a great number of virtual worlds, and it

attests to the huge range of possibilities that can multiply our up to now “real” but

limited world of knowledge. It makes it possible to recreate reality in a much broader

world opening new portals in a new Internet era of communication that expands

knowledge at a much faster rate and with increased capacity to communicate. In other

words, the Internet represents a new Gutenberg revolution – provided of course that it

will not be dominated by business transactions. In the Third World, the distribution of

this knowledge would lead to an ethical and balanced form of sharing culture between

the rich and the poor, the public and the private, the local and the universal. Provided

that the internet is installed, few resources are needed for its functioning, which makes it

financially viable to establish a constant dialogue between the periphery and the First

World. However, these powerful markets do not necessarily lie in the First World

anymore. Geography is constantly being redesigned, not in terms of real space but

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rather in terms of lines of exchange, negotiation, communication and a new distribution

of power and income – such as has recently happened with financial expansion in China

and India.

Mass communication and mass culture, since their creation during the Second

World War, have cannibalized art and literature. They have complied with a “society of

the show” (société du spectacle), as Guy Debord (1997) so aptly put it. They have

transformed the history of “fine arts” into a history of low and hybrid culture, in the

words of Nestor García Canclini in his Hybrid Cultures (Culturas híbridas, 1997). For

Canclini, art and literature spread in the same way as any other form of communication;

therefore it is irrelevant whether they are high or low forms of art. They dispense with

institutions for their expression and can be produced even by popular artists in street

markets. Notwithstanding some defenses of high forms of literature, such as Leyla

Perrone-Moysés’ latest book, Altas literaturas (2000), the fact is that only when a book

or art object has reached notoriety or that it has achieved a response, a reception can it

be known to a wider audience or public. I propose in this paper that the Internet should

be employed as a powerful ancillary means of journalism and mass media

communication for art and literature. Its low cost, and its potential to reach the public

through the installation of computers in cyber cafés, schools, universities, libraries and

the like, allow it to bridge all gaps and unite all forms of intertextualities, be they news,

information, art, film, music, books, debates, and many we may not yet be aware of.

The very fact that the Internet normally does not demand a critical body of experts to

select and judge beforehand what it will exhibit is the key factor in the exposure of a

work of art, unlike the established institutions of art. Because a work of art is from Latin

America might mean that it could be badly received or not received at all by one of the

institutions above mentioned. It would hardly find a way to be printed, were it a book,

or to be accepted in the highly valued markets and galleries of New York or any other

First World centers, were it a work of art. This would happen not only because Latin

America lacks the prestige that only economic power can lend it, but also because it

lacks the material and financial support from the media and other sponsors that First

World works of art have.

The Fate of Latin America in the Field of Literature and Culture

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I would like to stress the importance of Latin America participating in the media and

Internet revolution. It should not refuse to participate by arguing for the preservation of

its national authenticity, since that would hinder its entrance into the global community.

The view that advocates preservation of authenticity of Latin American values in art and

literature in practice preserves only old canons and old forms of thought and expression.

To promote these forms which continue to be only local, rural, “authentic,” national or

“exotic” means that they are distanced from the decision arenas and societies that have

the financial and political power. It also means reducing Latin America to continue

being a mere exporter of agricultural or pre-industrialized goods. In art, it would enslave

Latin America as a producer of “exotic” or naïve objects, handcrafts that would have no

power of communication within the cultures where development really exists. Of

course, it is difficult to find a balance between total defacement of reality and total

preservation of the “natural” and the “genuine”. Some European countries, such as

France, Spain and Holland, have found this balance in the development of a clean

industry, or in a combination of new and old in architecture. There must always be a

compromise between the past and the future, the “authentic” and the developed forms of

society and art.1 To defend nationalism in Latin America means to reduce it to a

storehouse of goods and images of archaic and popular art and to deny its right to

control its own means for independence and autonomy of expression. Of course the

same could also apply to some communities of Africa and Asia.

The distribution of computers to schools, public cafés and libraries, which is taking

place in some countries of Latin America including Brazil, is essential for the

abolishment of the so-called “illiteracy in Informatics.” It is also a weapon against what

Gwyn Prins called “post-modern illiteracy,” a phenomenon that originated in the 1950s,

when people tended to replace reading with watching television. This resulted in their

becoming illiterate due either to the lack of everyday practice or any interest in reading

and writing.2 Nowadays, by being obliged to consult a browser, by online shopping or 1 It is extremely important that the International Association of Comparative Literature has chosen universities in Japan, South Africa and China for its latest meeting points because it demonstrates that Eurocentrism is not the only answer existing in the humanities. Post-modernism makes us realize that solutions do not emerge from only one source of knowledge, but rather that they come from several parts of the globe at once. The fact that the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro will sponsor ICLA´s next conference in 2007 means not only that Latin America are open to the world but also that funds will be destined for this particularly high scientific aim.

2 Gwin Prins states in ”Oral History:” “Existence within a composite culture is, in fact, typical today of all the great world languages. People are either personally illiterate or semi-literate yet ruled by the book, as with nineteenth-century Maori, in much of the Islamic world, or post-literate in the new world or

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by reading news or even by sending emails, people are at least resorting again to reading

and writing in their everyday lives.

Of course it will be extremely difficult to catch up with all the commodities and

facilities that English-speaking societies have already acquired in places as

differentiated as Puerto Rico, Alaska, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand or Australia,

not to mention Hong-Kong. As one is aware from reading Ashcroft, Gareth, and Tiffin’s

book The Empire Writes Back (1991), England was a more recent empire already in the

capitalist era than previous metropolis of the Renaissance, such as Portugal, Spain or

Holland. Therefore, it was more efficient in dominating its colonies and spreading its

language and culture than these pre-capitalist nations above. The spread of English

culture and language was also aided by the Protestant’s idea that the Bible must be

known to and read by everyone. This led to a demand on reading it without imposition

on the part of the population that stimulated literacy. The opposite happened under

Catholic influence in pre-Capitalist nations, in whose colonies literacy was not

encouraged and where the press was prohibited.3 The first press in Brazil dates only

from 1808, when Don John VI, the Emperor of Portugal, fled Napoleon and arrived in

Rio de Janeiro Court to rule the empire from there. Until then, the use of a press

represented exile in Africa or imprisonment. This kind of colonization led to an ever-

lasting hatred of the colonized towards the colonizer, as still exists today in Brazil. Post-

colonial thought can only be practiced in Brazil and in Spanish-America when their

peoples release themselves from the sense of being colonized and start to believe in

their own power and in their own culture. Only by fighting to spread their art and idea

will they enter a new era in an autonomous way. Otherwise they will go on behaving as

slaves in relation to their new masters, in Nietzsche’s expression.

Replacing the Concept of National for that of the ´Internet-ional` in Latin

America

Cultural Studies have changed the definition of art from Kant’s idea of disinterested

art, or art for art’s sake, based on transcendentalism and the sublime, to pragmatic

reasons deeply rooted in mercantile laws characteristic of post-modern society.

electronic mass communication: dominated by the radio, television and telephone” (in Burke, ed., 1992, p. 114-39. p. 118).3 For instance, the Minister of Portugal, the Marquis of Pombal, even expelled the Jesuits from Brazil in 1750, which was the main religious order that was most responsible for the educational institutions in the country. He did it in order to fight the power of the Church during Enlightenment, the Age of Reason.

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Beginning in the 1920s, selective committees for art have become increasingly

institutionalized and dependant upon the Capitalist idea of profit. A work of art

represents commercial profit, especially when supported by the press, and therefore

becomes a happening or a fact of marketing. The idea of its having an intrinsic aesthetic

value according to Kant is hardly ever taken into account by present critics of art and

literature. Cultural Studies have helped to denounce the fact that experts, committees, or

privileged groups who are in charge of the selection of works of art, are strongly

influenced by the financial potential rather than any principle or idea that they may have

in the intrinsic value of the object itself. The criteria taken into account by these

decision-making groups rely more on the possibilities of legitimatization of that object

or author in a particular market than in the self-contained aesthetic value of the work of

art.

There have been tensions between high and low literature and art since the 1920’s

Modernism, as commented on by Virginia Woolf (1942) in a letter which she titled

“Middlebrow,” when she referred to “lowbrows,” “middlebrows” and “highbrows.”

However, the strengthening of Capitalism in the world, and the consequent increase of

the importance of financial factors has deprived art objects of any consideration of their

merit from a mere aesthetic point of view. The criteria have therefore become more

political and ideological, and more dependent on the press than on the intrinsic qualities

of art and literature. Criticism has even been more practiced by journalists than by

specialists.

We still do not know exactly what kind of influence Cultural Studies will effectively

exert upon the future of art and literature, whether it will allow them to broaden and

salvage their range of effectiveness or whether it will add to their fragmentation and

eventual disappearance. Thousands of bookstores are going bankrupt around the World

because of this shift of interest from the book to sheer consumerism. A book only

counts today when it brings a great amount of information that can be useful in some

practical field of activity or discipline. Fictional books have increasingly been subsided

and authors have turned to writing books of history, sociology, politics, law, science,

information science, science fiction and the like. Mass production and best-sellers are

aimed at reinforcing what the public already knows, or what is profitable. The days of

acquisition of cultural background through reading in order to be able to talk in the

living-room are gone. Specialized critics in art and literature alone, such as Gombrich,

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Hugo Friedrich, Wolfgang Keyser, Karl Vossler, or Edmund Russell, have vanished.

Literature has turned into self-aid, as in the phenomenon of the Brazilian best-seller

Paulo Coelho, or, more recently, in the publication of a self-help book by the prestigious

literary author and translator of Woolf in Brazil, Lya Luft, whose latest novel Losses

and Gains (Perdas e ganhos, 2003) provides the reader with edifying examples from

her own biography. The new outstanding fact in this kind of literature that lacks style or

imagery is how much it approaches the didactic or the pedagogical. This only shows the

lack of prestige that art today holds among people, a phenomenon that Richard Rorty is

ready to acknowledge through the use of pragmatics. In Brazil today it is usual to make

an edition of only 1,000 copies of a novel or book of essays, and a book of poetry does

not even interest a publisher, unless its publication is supported by some institution or

paid for by the authors themselves. Many authors, among them the successful author of

detective novels Rubem Fonseca, now employ quotation marks to indicate dialogue

instead of the dash used in Portuguese, for the sake of simplifying translation according

to English rules. Such is the gold rush for dollars existing in the local world of

publications.

What should the solution be, then?

It seems to me that the only way to escape this vicious circle of domination on the

part of the rich, due to the devaluation of the sublime in art, is to negotiate with these

forces rather than to reject them, and to establish a new media culture with a view to

reducing costs. The Internet allows “minor” works of art by “minor” authors from less

prestigious countries of the world, such as Brazil and the Spanish-American nations, as

well as elsewhere, to profit from this opportunity to expose their points of view without

the restraints of established criticism. Art exposed by these new forms of media would

make it viable for artists devoid of patrons to communicate their production with other

parts of the globe at a small cost and with few restraints to freedom and creativity.

The idea that Latin America, in order to be authentic, must remain national,

regional, natural, local, exotic, results in stagnation and only complies with a kind of

metaphysical thought that divides the world into two halves, the rich and the poor. It is a

compromise with the past that will lead nowhere. It is an agenda that predetermines a

static thought related to identity rather than to diversity. It attempts to stop progress. It is

as restrictive and limited as socialist art, as directed by the dictators of the Soviet Union

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in the 1930s, who opposed Mayakowsky´s, Boris Pasternak´s and so many other artists´

ideas.

The conflict of national, authentic, underdeveloped versus international,

autonomous and rich nations reveals a threatening situation in which the defense of the

authentic, the “natural,” the “exotic,” the “regional” or even the “national” can mean a

strong dichotomy that can undermine Latin America’s development in the arts. The

defense of nationalism has been appealed to since the 19th Century, as has been pointed

out by two leading 19th Century Brazilian authors, José de Alencar (1873) and Machado

de Assis (1874). Both were worried about “national themes,” such as the presence of the

Indian in Brazilian novels and poetry. Machado even stated that he did not need to be an

Indian to be Brazilian, which did not hinder him from following in the trap of the Indian

School and writing a book of poetry based upon the India as late as in 1870. Such a

demand for nationalism has persisted in Brazil until now through the teachings and

writings of the São Paulo University Professor Antonio Cândido. It implies that the

world has not significantly changed from the national to the international.

Conclusion

The Romantic idea of “local color,” when employed in the sense of preserving

“originality” in Latin America will only divert the discussion from achieving new trends

in art and literature in the post-modern era. It only contributes to immobilizing Latin

America in an immutable “identity” attached to its past. Meanwhile, the developed

nations are more autonomous in their pragmatic thought to create freely. Notions such

as local color or identity, national or the authentic would only make Third World

nations stagnate into an immutable essentialism. It is clear that today, in the era of

globalization, these aims are reminiscent of old, metaphysical forms of thought and that

they only contribute to exclude Latin American artists from a free, down-to-earth

intimacy with everyday and emotional life, as often demanded by their subject matter.

Our reading of Richard Rorty’s pragmatic philosophy aims to demonstrate that there

is only one way to preserve tradition: through its destruction and renewal through

creativity in the here and now. Only thus can Latin American art and literature find a

freer and more flexible way of thinking. To achieve this, extensive observation of

reality and negotiation with the existing artistic canons around the world are needed. It

is through informal means, parallel to the canons established by the dominating nations

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that Latin America will be able to enter the realm of international art, by employing a

means that is anti-canonical in itself.

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Perrone-Moisés, Leyla. Altas literaturas. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998.

Prins, Gwin. “Oral History.” In: Burke, Peter, ed. New Perspectives on Historical Writing. University Park: the Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. p. 114-39.

Reis, Roberto. “Cânon”. In: Jobim, José Luís, org. Palavras da crítica. Tendências e conceitos no estudo da literature. Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1992. (Biblioteca Pierre menard). p. 65-92.

Rorty, Richard. “De Man and the American Cultural Left”. In: (1996), p. 129.

-----. Essays on Heidegger and others. Philosophical Papers. Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. [1st ed. 1995 b].

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-----. “Feminismo, ideologia e desconstrução: uma visão pragmática”. In: Um mapa da ideologia. Org. Slavoj Zizek. Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto, 1996.

-----. “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres”. In: -----. Philosophy: its End and its New Hope. (Japanese trans.). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1988.

-----. Objetivismo, relativismo e verdade. Escritos filosóficos I. Rio de Janeiro: Relume-Dumará, 1997. [Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers. I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 a].

-----. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. [1st ed. 1979].

-----. “Truth, Politics and ‘Post-modernism’”. In: Spinoza Lectures. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1997. p. 1-52. See also “Is ‘post-modernism’ relevant to politics?” p. 23-52.

Woolf, Virginia. “Middlebrown.” In: ---. The Detah of the Moth and Other Essays. Orlando, Fla., Harcourt Brace & Co., 1942. (A Harvest Book). p. 176-86.

Other Works by Richard Rorty:

Rorty, Richard. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1982.

-----. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. [Also translated into German and Italian].

-----. Debating the State of Philosophy. Habermas, Rorty, and Kolakowski. Westport: Connecticut; London: Praeger, 1996. Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Based on a debate held in Warsaw on May 8-9, 1995.

-----. “De Man and the American Cultural Left”. In: 1996. p. 129.

-----. Essays on Heidegger and others. Philosophical Papers. Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 a. [1st. Ed. 1995].

-----. The Linguistic Turn. Recent Essays in Philosophy and Method. Chicago: Chicago Press, 1970. [1st ed. 1967].

-----. Philosophy: its End and its New Hope. “Science as Solidarity;” “Texts and Lumps;” “Pragmatism without Method;” “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres;” “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy;” “Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth.”

----- et alii. Philosophy in History. Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy. Ed. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, Quentin Skinner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

-----. “The Pragmatist’s Progress”. In: Eco, Umberto. Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Ed. Stefan Collini. Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler, Christine Brooke-Rose. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Chapter 4. p. 89-108.

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