La prudencia de Cortés: teoría política y práctica retórica en la Historia de la conquista de México de Antonio de Solís
The Historia de la conquista de México, published by Antonio de Solís in 1684, and later extensively reissued and translated, has been praised for the ‘elegance’ and ‘sweetness’ of its style. From very early on these qualities made the Historia to be read as a prose model worthy of imitation. Different scholars have studied Solís's sources and the way he manipulated them on the one hand, and, on the other, the extent of the reliability of his account. However, very little has been said about the actual writing practices of the Historia in the context of contemporary historiographical theories, or the author's own ideas about history or politics. This paper analyzes how some of these rhetorical techniques (I particularly focus on the use of oratio figurata, sententia, and epiphoneme) gave shape to Solís's political ideas, in particular the concept of prudence.
El Metatexto Historiografico y la Historiografia Indiana
De la cita de Reyes, nos interesa solo la Cronica; su determinacion generica y su inclusion en la literatura. La estructura conceptual de la afirmacion de Reyes presupone que la cronica es un genero y, ademas, que es un genero literario. eRealmente es asi? Si nos preguntamos "que es literatura" o "que es un genero" nos enfrentamos con un problema complejo pero que, no obstante, puede resolverse derechamente diciendo que la literatura es lo que todos sabemos, por tradicion, que es literatura y que los generos son clases de textos, tales como la cronica o el teatro misionario. Esto es, que se trata, simplemente, del ge'nero y de la especies. Pero, en la frase de Reyes, el concepto de especie ha desaparecido; el de
Historicity and Literariness: Problems in the Literary Criticism of Spanish American Colonial Texts
One need only skim the table of contents of any anthology of Spanish American literature of the colonial period to realize that the majority of the selections appear to belong to the field of historiography rather than to literature. And if we read beyond the titles, to the texts themselves, it might be surprising to find that the number of works of historical intent actually grows. If we were to limit ourselves to those texts which were produced with the intention of writing "literature" (as the term is commonly understood today, that is, as imaginative or creative writing with a primarily aesthetic purpose), we would need to reduce the list by more than half, retaining little other than lyric poetry and a few theatrical pieces. This scenario underscores a problem within the field of colonial literary studies that as critics we have a tendency to avoid or ignore. It also raises important questions regarding our critical and pedagogical mission, since the classification of these texts as literary colors all of our thoughts on their interpretation. In fact, a fundamental contradiction arises from the classification of these texts as "literature." Because so many of the texts we consider literary today were not so at the time they were written in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, our critical and pedagogical work often is performed from an essentially anachronistic perspective.