Obvious

I was rather timidly suggesting in my MLA talk that just maybe the metanarrative of Hispanism in its peninsular variety was the distinctiveness of Spain herself. Then of course I was reminded on the Cold Hearted Scientist blog that the concept of a national literature arises with nationalism itself. There could be no Hispanism in the first place without the idea of a Spanish national literature. Of course, you could have a Hispanism whose narrative was the Spain is no different from any other country. But what would be the fun of that? I suggest that such narratives would be motivated by the attempt to overcome exceptionalism, and thus be still in the same family. In fact, that is the Ortega y Gasset family narrative in El País in the 1980s. Look how European we are!

A little googling took me to the Peruvian writer Mariátegui:

El florecimiento de las literaturas nacionales coincide, en la historia de Occidente, con la afirmación política de la idea nacional. Forma parte del movimiento que, a través de la Reforma y el Renacimiento, creó los factores ideológicos y espirituales de la revolución liberal y del orden capitalista. La unidad de la cultura europea, mantenida durante el Medioevo por el latín y el Papado, se rompió a causa de la corriente nacionalista, que tuvo una de sus expresiones en la individualización nacional de las literaturas. El “nacionalismo” en la historiografía literaria, es por tanto un fenómeno de la más pura raigambre política, extraño a la concepción estética del arte. Tiene su más vigorosa definición en Alemania, desde la obra de los Schlegel, que renueva profundamente la crítica y la historiografía literarias.

I felt really kind of slow because of course I knew this. The claim I was making rather tentatively was a super-obvious one.