SCENES OF CHILEAN LITERARY CRITICISM IN THE 1950S (PRESS, ESSAY, ANTHOLOGY, SHORT STORY)

Abstract

This paper presents three scenes of Chilean literary criticism linked to the so-called “generación del 50”: the reception of Claudio Giaconi's essay, Un hombre en la trampa (Gogol) (1960) and its understanding as an intervention to think about the state of Chilean literature; the characteristics of the Antología del nuevo cuento chileno (1954), compiled and prefaced by Enrique Lafourcade, and its critical procedures to establish itself as a bastion of new literature; and the recurrence of the term technique as a critical tool used to evaluate the books of short stories of the young narrative. To this end, it proposes that in the 1950s there was an exponential growth of critical discourses, whose characteristics show a multiplicity of critical forms that allow us to analyze some decisive episodes of Chilean literary criticism.