Heterogeneic Time: An Anachronistic and Transcultural Rethinking of Eurochronology

Abstract

The focus of this article is the relation between time and transcultural space in literary history. The argument is that the concept of anachronism can help us understand the complexity of temporality and that the analysis of transcultural exchanges between European and Latin American art and literature may change literary history and further an understanding of the anachronism of Eurochronology. Two examples of a transcultural and anachronistic relation between Europe and America will be analyzed, both of them novels and writers of magical realism. Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) is analyzed as a challenge to European historicity, while the transcultural aesthetics of Miguel Ángel Asturias is analyzed as a challenge to the understanding of avant-gardistic modernity. The analyses are carried out in critical dialogue with historicism and theories about world literature.