The research question that governs our book asks whether the emergence of cultural studies is a consequence of what we will call "literary indiscipline." To understand what "literary indiscipline" is all about, our book goes back to the modern organization of knowledge established during the Kantian or Prussian Enlightenment, an organization in which both literature and philosophy, especially the latter, unleashed a "conflict of the faculties." Although in the Latin American nineteenth century there is a certain cultivation of linguistics and ecdotics, the hermeneutical techniques of German philology are conspicuous by their absence, that is, there is an indiscipline in interpretation, a disdain for poetic education and critical editing, a disdain that seems to be very vaguely redeemed when the faculties of law expel from themselves and give birth to them in a separate way. at the beginning of the twentieth century, the faculties of letters.