Una visión desde la poscolonialidad en el ensayo “La era crítica (XVIII-XIX)” de Alfonso Reyes

This paper follows from a broader investigation of the work Letras de la Nueva España (1948) by Alfonso Reyes, which is a series of seven essays, whose seventh place corresponds to “La Era Crítica (XVIII y XIX)”. We propose here an analysis of this last essay, which will support, at first instance, in Reyes’s own conceptual assumptions abouts his notions of “culture” and “cultural synthesis” that are presents in his essays-lectures “Notas sobre la inteligencia americana” (1936) and “Posición de América” (1942); subsequently, we will analyze the essay from the postcolonial concept proposed by Ángel Rama, consistent of the intellectual of the “lettered city” in his book La ciudad Letrada (1998). This conceptual and historic-cultural context will be the foundation for a discourse analysis of some fragments of the essay, from the theorical perspectives of Teun Van Dijk (2000), Helena Calsamiglia and Amparo Tusón (1999), as well as from the enunciation theory of Émile Benveniste (1971). All of this will allow us to understand the place that both Letras de la Nueva España and the essay in question have in the work of Reyes, and the way the author integrates himself into Mexican and Latin-American cultural work based on, in this case, his assessment of the Mexican literature made in the Colonial period.