Octavio Paz and modernity: An avant-gardist criticism from the suburbs of civilization

• Autor(a) principal: Ledesma, Xavier Rodríguez
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Civitas - Revista de Ciências Sociais (Porto Alegre. Online)
• Texto Completo: https://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/index.php/civitas/article/view/11153
• topic: Octavio Paz; modernity; Latin America; Octavio Paz; modernidad; Latinoamérica

Since the fifties of the last century, a Latin American voice began to call attention to the need to think about the meaning of modernity in general and, specifically, how we could give it a new meaning in remote regions, far from the metropolis – and, by doing so and recovering our specificity, find our own ways to reach our own, specific destination. It was the voice of a poet, not of a social scientist or a philosopher. Since few decades, reflection on modernity has become a topic within the academic and cultural world; it is surprising that those deep and avant-gardist digressions are unknown or just denied by the hegemonic centers and discourses of knowledge. The author of this rich, deep, inspiring, avant-gardist and well-written reflection on modernity was the Mexican poet Octavio Paz.