“Mostrar, no decir”: The Influence of and Resistance Against Workshop Poetics on the Hispanic Literary Field

Franco Harnache, Andres [UCL]

Until recently, due to the romantic imaginary of the artist-as-genius, the Hispanic literary tradition has been wary of a literary advice industry or academic programs of creative writing. This wariness hindered the professionalization of Hispanic authors, but at the same time it kept Hispanic literature out of anglicized uniformity which permitted, by the mid twentieth century, a reinterpretation of western literature by writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Nonetheless since the early 2000s a series of MFA programs in creative writing, first in the United States, but more recently in Latin America and Spain, have been changing Hispanic literature. These programs, with syllabi imported from the Anglophone canons, have influenced a new generation of writers who mirror the English savoir-faire and reject their own literary traditions, which were more experimental, less rooted in realism, and even somewhat baroque. There is, however, also resistance in the field, where workshop-inspired developments coincide with a return to a more Hispanic tradition of innovation.