Saber trágico y sensibilidad melodramática

Consideraciones preliminares y enfoques latinoamericanos

Abstract

The present text suggests a twofold comparative perspective. First, it discusses genealogical features that allow for a contrastive as well as a connecting take on the categories of “tragedy” and “melodrama.” Second, it introduces a problematization that owes to the conceptual differences that are at work between center and periphery. That is to say, the categories in question not only reveal different meanings according to their respective use and legitimacy in Western Europe and in Latin America; but the categorization itself responds to epistemological inequalities and particularities of differing cultural histories. Thus melodrama, or the melodramatic imagination, has been conceived by Latin American writers and cultural theorists as an agency that allows to question, or relativate, the “tragic” tradition that characterizes an influential part of eurocentrist philosophical aesthetics.