Throughout this study, I theorize and explore the consequences of the self-reflexive text in the literary writings of João Cabral de Melo Neto, Osman Lins, and David Viñas. I argue that what unites these writers is not solely the context of neocolonialism and underdevelopment in the 1950s and 60s in Brazil and Argentina but the properly vanguard problem and gesture of mediating the present and politics, as I trace in their theoretical writings, letters and literary texts their shared concern with making literature relevant, functional and dynamic in a public sphere in crisis. If I contextualize these writers in their historical moments and provide close readings of their works, I also localize and extract from their projects concrete problems and formulations that I deem productive for the study of literature today, and in order to place these historically engaged and dynamic literary projects in dialogue with some of the more pressing debates in the field of contemporary Latin American Studies such as the crisis of literature, the politics of aesthetics, the rise of the neoliberal city, the legacy of the Boom and literary vanguardism, the Neo-Baroque, and the ongoing problems of subalternity, Eurocentrism, and representation.

In dialogue with the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group and thinkers such as José Rabasa, Alberto Moreiras, Severo Sarduy, Jacques Rancière, Gilles Deleuze, and Alain Badiou, my study links the Subaltern Studies Group to a different line of theoretical questioning and examines how the writings of Cabral, Lins, and Viñas ultimately articulate self-reflexive and challenging proposals concerning the vanguard functions of literature and literature's difficult relationship to subalternity and the political field in a neocolonial context.