It has been traditional for New World literary scholars to follow the direction of European theorists. If Aristotle has been the bedrock referent, in recent years the theorists writing from France have become objects of incantation. Reading articles submitted to journals for publication, one gets the impression that many young scholars in this hemisphere believe that to legitimize anything they write they must make it clear at the outset that their approach has been sanctified by Genette, Greimas, Todorov, Kristeva, Barthes, and so on. That the Europeans tend to view with hostility the pretensions of Latin American and Caribbean writers to recognition as models is exemplified in an editorial in the January 1986 number of the French journal Esprit. And a North American critic was heard echoing this attitude in April 1987 in Barbados: while genuflecting to Michel Foucault he spoke with negative distortion of the Caribbean theorists José Antonio Portuondo and Roberto Fernández Retamar.