As a result of a process of colonization which lasted over three centuries and which can still be felt, though not from the same matrixes, in economical and cultural terms, Latin American intellectuals have always taken Western European ideas and institutions as paradigms and have always sought to internalize their world view. As such, the teaching and research of language, literature and culture at the Latin American universities have usually taken place within the framework of national philology.

However, with the advent of Deconstruction and of Cultural and Post-Colonial Studies in the second half of the twentieth century, this model has been deeply queried in Latin America, but it has never been completely abandoned. Rather, this questioning has given way to a tension between those who try to maintain the hegemonic concept of nation and the study of literature as a high expression of the national spirit on the one side, and those who approach literature as one among other expressions of the political affirmation of each group that compose the continent’s ethnic, social, cultural and linguistic mosaic on the other side.

Considering the criticisms raised nowadays both to the hegemonic construction of the nation-states and to the aggressive responses that they have generated, particularly on the part of minority groups, our purpose in this paper is to raise a few questions regarding the teaching of literature and the writing of literary histories at the present time in Latin America.