ABSTRACT
The lack of attention to concrete conditions in the Spanish-speaking societies, Paul Julian Smith significant contribution to the field was to "theorize" anglophone Hispanism and therefore shake up a discipline that for the most part had been a hegemonic scene controlled by rival yet compatible empiricist and formalist methods. Smith's message was triumphalist, however, and seemed relatively unconcerned with local situations: "Now that the hegemonic modern tradition has come to an end"; "after the epoch of white supremacy". The claim that postmodernism signaled the end of various epochs and styles was ironic since it was the modernist tradition itself that had developed the contemporary "sense of an ending" which Frank Kermode once called "the mood of end-dominated crisis" endemic to the modernist project. As we bid farewell to Cervantes and the "master narratives" that informed his writing, it strikes that we must bid farewell to the narrative of postmodernism as well.
