l992 NOVEL OF THE ANERICAS Symposium
Introductory Notes for Participants and Colleagues
The Novel of the Americas Project was conceived as an
ongoing North-South cultural dialogue in l9s9. Informal
discussions on the University of Colorado camps between North
American and Latin American writers that took place in l9s7 and
l9ss (discussions around visits by Mario Vargas Llosa, Manuel
Puig, Luis Rafael Sanchez, Ariel Dorfman, and others) led to the
idea of a Novel of the Americas Project, as conceived by Ronald
Sukenick and Raymond L. Williams, with the full support of the
critical Studies of the Americas Committee, Vice Chancellor Bruce
Ekstrand to Whom the CSA Committee reported, and then President
Gordon Gee.
Background
Opened by Carlos Fuentes in September of l9s9, the Novel of
the Americas Project began as a preliminary dialogue on the state
of the novel. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "then at Duke University,
closed this first symposium. The relationship between the
cultures of Europe and the cultures of the Americas was debated
in a panel discussion, "Is There A Post-European Novel?"
The second and third Novel of the Americas Symposia took
place in April of l99O and October of l99O, respectively. The
second Novel of the Americas Symposium, "Innovation, Gender, and
the Novel", focused largely on women's writing, with a lecture
by Elena Poniatowska. Three prominent men also participated:
Ishmael Reed, Fredric Jameson, and Rolando Hinojosa. David
Carrasco, who provided a synthesis in the final panel /discussion
of this symposium (and now on the Steering committee), managed to
find common threads in this three-day dialogue. The third
symposium used geography as its organizing principle, centering
on Caribbean and North American writing' The Cuban writer Severo
Sarduy joined William H. Gass and the scholar of Latin American
literature Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria in this u.s.-caribbean
dialogue, which also brought novelist Daniel Maximin from
Guadeloupe.
The Novel of the Americas Symposia have been conceived with
a multiple agenda, but have consistently promoted the original
idea of a substantive North-South dialogue and have attempted to
assess the state of contemporary culture of the Americas from a
comparative perspective. The common language has been English,
but one hears Spanish and French spoken when the Novel of the
Americas groups meet. These symposia have accepted as a working
supposition the multicultural state of the cultures of the
Americas, and have consciously attempted to bring into our
dialogue cultural or etAnic groups freqUently ignored or
marginalized, such as the writers from Francophone Quebec, Native
American writers, and the young and innovative writers from Latin
America and North America Whose fiction might not necessarily fit
the needs or demands of multinational Publishing houses.