The production of dissimilar and contradictory literary discourses which originates in Latin America during the Conquest and Colonial periods has traced grave problems for literary criticism. Until the 1950's and 1960's, positivist historians and literary scholars tried to affix and evaluate this period of transatlantic transfer and acculturation without satisfactory results. The fundamental fact that had been slantedly presented by positivist historians and literary critics was the cultural shock produced by the invasion and colonization process. This cultural shock did not result in an ideal synthesis since the cultural foundations of indigenous societies were destroyed. The colonial regime incorporated advantageous aspects of the indigenous societies for its own growth and reorganized them in a disconcerting fashion for the colonized. One of the major changes to which the indigenous population was subjected was the implant of a new language. As one can clearly expect, the linguistic transference in itself produced a severe scission at the cultural level, not only from a literary perspective but from a political one as well. Semeiotically, one can propose that the sign of the new society is linguistic disjunction and that a consequence of this phenomenon is, in turn, social disjunction. The study, from an interdisciplinary perspective, analyzes the acculturation process through a close look at traditionally considered "social" oral poetic tradition and texts brought by the Spanish to America. The study of the "social" poetry in Spanish from the area today known as Peru demonstrates how these poetic discourses contribute to the acculturation process instead of fulfilling the denunciatory function of the socially oriented discourse. Ultimately, this study intends to divulge how through the use of oral and erudite European poetic tradition, the Spanish founded and established a dependent culture in the area we know as Peru and how this dependency permeates the poetry written in this area from the Sixteenth until the Twentieth century. In the Twentieth century, however, the study demonstrates through a close look at Antonio Cisneros' poetry how the contemporary Peruvian poet has taken conscience of dependency and "rewrites" Peruvian culture through truly social poetic discourse.

While González Prada was mainly a prose writer and ideologist, he did write poetry throughout his life, beginning perhaps even before he began to write prose. Although his poetry itself had little influence on other poets, the ideas which lie behind it did. The purpose of this paper is to show that there are two incipient trends of Peruvian poetry in Prada's poems: Modernism and indigenism. Prada’s tendency towards Modernism is found to be mainly theoretical and ideological, as his adoption of modernist style occurs when Modernism has already been established by Rubún Darío, and disappears after the publication of Exóticas in 1911. Chocano serves as a counterpoint to Prada in showing the extent to which the latter had any real influence on the development of a particular modernist poet, and to which the full development of Modernism differed from the innovations which Prada had envisioned. The incipient indigenism in Prada's poetry is represented in Baladas peruanas, although the point in which Prada anticipates twentieth century writers is that of the use of poetry as a vehicle for ideas, and as such is also evident in Libertarias and Presbiterianas. The nature of Prada’s indigenism is compared to that of Chocano in order to show the extent of the modernists' failure to develop the trends which Prada had foreshadowed. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate