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The First Published Review of Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

José Vasconcelos  and
Ruben Gallo
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Extract

UNTIL RECENTLY, LITERARY HISTORIANS BELIEVED THAT OCTAVIO PAZ'S THE LABYRINTH OF SOLITUDE (EL LABERINTO DE LA S0LEDAD)—NOW considered one of the most influential analyses of Mexican culture written in the twentieth century—was ignored by Mexico's intellectuals for several years after its publication in February 1950. The country's most influential thinkers, from Samuel Ramos to Alfonso Reyes, remained silent after the book's release, even though Paz touched on many subjects, from political history to the origins of national identity, that they had explored in their work. The Labyrinth received only a handful of reviews, mostly by minor writers who merely summarized its arguments. The critic Enrico Mario Santf has interpreted this silence as a veiled form of ninguneo, the passive-aggressive tendency to turn one's adversaries into “nobodies” by ignoring their work—one of the vicissitudes of Mexican cultural life analyzed in The Labyrinth (49).

Type
Little-Known Documents
Information
PMLA , Volume 121 , Issue 5 , October 2006 , pp. 1509 - 1511
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2006

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References

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