Memory and other issues, further chronicle of an experience

Abstract

Within the framework of a reflection on Latin American literary theory taught in Argentine universities, this work recovers the very brief experience carried out in 1973 in what were then called «national chairs». That year I joined as a teaching assistant the chair directed by Noé Jitrik, Ibero-American Literature, which did not integrate that spectrum, although it is undoubted that it took part in the desire for renewal and even the fervor that characterized the moment. Some of the guests to be part of the chair came from private courses of literary theory taught by Jitrik in which, to the major texts of structuralism and the controversies that surrounded it ― quite busy then ―, some authors of what would be called post structuralism were added. The Chair of Ibero-American Literature was organized around three fields (critical, theoretical and contextual) that, more or less coordinated, professors Jitrik, Ludmer, and Ruffinelli gave in the respective theoretical classes: an entrance to the texts from varying and eventually complementary approaches that were put into discussion in the practical ones. An intense experience broken by the arrogance of a story that must be recovered not only from the memories, but from the materiality of the words in the syllabi, the bibliography and the methodologies taught.