Del escamoteo del presente a la incorporación de lo urbano en la literatura puertorriqueña actua

Abstract

This essay considers how recent Puerto Rican Literature, especially young poetry, appropiates itself of things related to urban realities, both in their contents and their structure, transforming them in esthetic categories. In ways different from those adopted by generations before the seventies, which already exhibited other concerns equally present today, these texts we are referring to do not leave aside reference to the present time and actual spaces, an attitude that was inherent to authors trying to blurr from their utopian representation of national reality the fact of cultural diversity or multiplicity, modernization, and foreign cultural breach. Today's literature does not dwell in organizing external space, in creating another "learned city" or "ciudad letrada", as Uruguayan writer Angel Rama called the virtual city that Latin American writers imagined, but strives to bring these spaces to the text by some sort of incorporation, of life-experiences-hoarding of things escaping the logic of well-ranged discourse. Young writers today succeed in opening their text to multiplicity, to otherness, and in so doing they claim their own identity and difference.