Abstract
The main purpose of this article is to evaluate the roles played by literary critics in the formation of Mexican intellectual field, in comparison to Brazil and Argentina, as well as the degree and modalities of institutionalization (university, press, magazines, etc.) of this activity in the 1950s. Thus, we start by analyzing the trajectory and the intellectual production of the recognized critic and historian of Mexican literature, José Luis Martínez (1918-2007), in order to compare them with those of the Brazilian critic, Antonio Candido (1918-2017), and the Argentinian, Adolfo Prieto (1928-2016). Literary criticism, whose practice until the middle of the twentieth century was mundane and understood as a minor genre of literature, came to be leveraged by its institutionalization in the universities, more precisely by the creation of graduate courses, which occurred in the three countries in the first half of that century, which progressively, gave the critics specific means of legitimation and, increasingly, independent of the stamp of writers. Obviously this process occurred slowly and in a conflictive way, but the rise and authority gained by these new cultural producers altered the morphology and relations of force in the literary and academic fields.
Keywords:
Literary criticism; Trajectories; Literary field; University; Latin America