an untimely enterprise, dice Avelar

This untimeliness is, today, in times of defeat, the very essence, the very constitutive quality of the literary. Indeed, literature seems today, to us as well as to many outside literary circles, an untimely enterprise. This may be the sole justification to tarry with it, without making any concessions to the aestheticist-reactive defenses of the literary institution against challenges coming from culturalism. For if literature can no longer be the surrogate redemption that the optimistic, positive ontology of the boom wished to make of it, it may also be, on the other hand, a little too early to give in to the apocalyptic, pronounce death sentences over the literary, and start searching for surrogate objects upon which to apply the same positive optimism.

de The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning por Idelber Avelar.