It is my aim to focus on a number of notions and categories, which emerge from the critical-theoretical journey of Elena Altuna whose fields of research were the Peruvian colonial culture and the contemporary Spanish-American literature. I will start from the underlying readings in her production which are evidence of the intellectual field and the paradigm shifts of her time. Then, I will advance toward some notions, starting from the notion of foreignness, which copes with the colonial figure, by linking it with the Cornejo-Polarian proposal. Another one is remoteness which, in response to the connections between peninsular and creole people, exposes macerated presentations in colonial writing. Rhetoric of reparation is a notion used to refer to those writing strategies which, far from the mimesis with the metropolis, expose the re-signification of both, the foreign and own traditions ...