INTRODUCTION
PROLOGUE
Perhaps this is a literary adventure.

A grey day, in the month of April, the journey began: we and other dreamers put our strengths together, people from the humanities, all of us teachers, dared discuss about the literary text, pick up Literature from its abandoned territory, move it, shake off its dust from so many years of abandonment. It was time to ask Literature to dialogue with other Knowledge, with different disciplines. It was convenient to speak about poets, their bohemian worlds, their failures, their imprint on the cultural life of our country, insist on this trivial matter: “ Chile , land of Poets ”.
We all knew something about this and exaggerated the delicious gossip of oral tradition: things like: “Molina, the kid, never wrote anything, he was only an invention of a writer”, or, “once I was in a lecture and nobody came, except a few poets with their self published books”, or, “I recognize that I have only read Heidegger and other philosophical writings”, or, “we all could do something about Literature”.

All of this in a teachers' room, over a round table full of books, notebooks, a couple of pencils, and the inescapable, half empty, coffee mugs. All this happened in Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano, three years ago. This way a group came into being, of teachers, bachelors in Philosophy, Journalists, Sociologists, Psychologists who took on the responsibility of organizing lectures, extension programs, researches about our national literary production. Students from different careers in the University joined in. We also took advantage of time in classes.

We built, then, a meeting place between literature, its creative process, the Social Studies theoretical frameworks and the interests of the people who joined in this adventure. In accomplishing our task, we received institutional backing. During this journey we ended up with the Aesthetics and Literary Studies Degree Program which today ends its first stage with a group of students who graduate from this learning program.

Starting from this curricular program and its requests, each of these students wrote essays on literary criticism and others related to narrative and poetic literary forms.

Today, we collect these texts and give shape to a sort of First Anthology. This text called Cuadernos de Literatura /Observatorio de la Palabra N º 1, Literary Notebook/Critic of the Written Word is the concretion of an expansive wish: creative literary production requires to be materialized, put down on paper, linked with an editorial viewpoint, supported by a publishing house, joined in to the natural process of all writing, which means reading, interpreting, criticicism, perceptive recreation. This is the only way to do what we understand by literature. We are delighted by this.
The contents in this journal are wide ranging: they venture into Classical English Literature, a critical view of Juan Luis Martinez' poetry, a study about the journalistic approach in Enrique Lihn's poetry, Pedro Lemebel's symbolic writings, the problematic around America and the writings on identity, the poetic waves in the work “El Niño Dios de Sotaqui” and the literary organization of “Vaca Sagrada” by Diamela Eltit. Each of the articles constructs a literary argument, proposing intelligent notions about the particular topics that they treat, in a way so that the critical proposals are legitimized by their pertinence in a literary discussion. We are glad about this.

We thank the trust put on us. We thank our students, the group of committed teachers who are taking part in this project, Ventana Abierta Publishing House, who provided this text with its professional support, and, of course, Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano. We believe that this editorial adventure materializes the wisdom we had when this project was just starting which led us to put together different efforts from different people to dignify literary production, to expand its frontiers, to re-establish the dialogue between Literature and other knowledges. We dearly hold that passion is fruitful and necessary in the case of a literary adventure, when you put down words like a long outstretched arm.

Pavella Coppola Palacios
Director
Programa Diplomado en Estudios Literarios y Estética
Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano