SOURCE: "The Boom Novel and the Cold War in Latin America," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 38, No. 3, Autumn, 1992, pp. 771-84.

In the following essay, Larson questions whether or not there is a correlation between global cultural, intellectual, and political anti-communism and the "canonization of Latin American modernism."

I

One of the collateral if perhaps somewhat fortuitous benefits of the current preoccupation with postmodernism in the humanities is that it has now become much more difficult to sustain what for decades was the dominant mode of apology for modernism itself, and the underlying ideology of its "canonicity": the idea that modernism and modernity were consubstantial categories, that modernism was somehow already precontained in the raw and immediate experience of contemporary life. To defend, say, the Joycean interior monologue or the surrealist principles of montage, it was once necessary only to declare the fidelity of the aesthetic device...