Expressions of Latin American singularities in the essays of Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980), Octavio Paz (1914-1998), Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) and Mario Vargas Llosa (1936)

Abstract

In his essays El pachuco y otros extremos (1950) and La inteligencia mexicana (1950) Octavio Paz (1914-1998) as well as Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) in De lo real maravilloso americano (1967) and Conciencia e identidad de América (1975), gave themselves the task of conjuring up a series of responses to Latin American singularities embedded in a universal tradition; this task was also undertaken by Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2017) in La soledad de América Latina (1982) and Por un país al alcance de los niños (1994); finally, Mario Vargas Llosa (1936) expressed about it in ¿Libertad para los libres? (1983) and Dentro y fuera de América Latina (2005). The narrative works of these writers were vital in the consolidation of the Latin American literature, but it is valid to point out that the same happened with their extensive intellectual production, specifically in the essays already mentioned. The essay, without a doubt, is a genre that allowed the transmission of ideas, what makes it a “potentiator” of the discursive enunciation, and from there we allow ourselves to establish the “ideologemas”, or translinguistic instruments that provide information about the historical and social coordinates of the text, and that for the specific case of this work are present in the different discourses on this territory denominated Latin America. In this way, the goal of this study is to analyze the expressions of the Latin American singularities in these authors through the ideologemas: “loneliness”, “miscegenation”, “wonder”, “myth” and “travel”.