Argentine literature
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Argentine literature, i.e. the set of literary works produced by writers who originated from Argentina, is one of the most prolific, relevant and influential in the whole Spanish speaking world, with renowned writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Leopoldo Lugones and Ernesto Sábato.
History
Origins
As a matter of fact, the name of the country itself comes from a Latinism which first appeared in a literary source:
Argentine literature began around 1550 with the work of Matías Rojas de Oquendo and Pedro González de Prado (from
Gradually, with the economic prosperity of the port, the cultural axis moved eastward. The letters of the colonial age (Viceroyalty-neoclassicism, baroque and epic) grew under the protection of the independentist fervor: Vicente López y Planes, Pantaleón Rivarola and Esteban de Luca.
During the 17th century, Argentine baroque literature was poor in comparison with that from Europe and some other parts of the New World. The only remarkable poet of this period was fray José Luis de Tejeda who wrote Coronas líricas and El peregrino de Babilonia
Cultural independence from Spain
As in the rest of the continent, strong feelings of emancipation from Spain were present in Argentina. Before independence, some neoclassical authors such as Juan Cruz Varela produced numerous works related with this revolutionary spirit but still under the paradoxical Spanish domain.
Argentina's true break with Spanish tradition was manifested in literature through the adoption of French romanticism as a model, postulating the return to popular sources and to the medieval. This aesthetic and intellectual was brought by Esteban Echeverría who wrote the first local and realistic story, El Matadero ("The slaughterhouse"), as well as the nativist poem La Cautiva ("The Captive"), with the Pampas as its background. His barbed wit and opposition to powerful Buenos Aires governor Juan Manuel de Rosas forced him into exile.
In the middle of the 19th century
As Rosas' power increased, more literary works from the opposition were produced, such as
Echeverría, Mármol and Sarmiento are among the group of writers known as
Poetry lessened in combative spirit and turned towards the anecdotal and sentimental: Carlos Guido y Spano and
Literatura Gauchesca
European-oriented, indeed Euro-centric, themes and styles would remain the norm in Argentine letters, especially from Buenos Aires, during this century. The (romantic) poetry as La cautiva or the latter Santos Vega by Rafael Obligado gave a lot of importance to the nature of the pampa,[2] sharing some elements with a picturesque, imitation-gaucho literature, purporting to use the language of the gauchos and to reflect their mentality. The first current is known as poesía nativista (nativist poetry) and became a literary tradition. The second (known as poesía gauchesca) developed in parallel as a part of that generation's understanding of national identity. Although it also is a product of literary authors, this writing takes the voice of the gaucho as protagonist from the beginning. Gauchesca is related to payador's singing, a payador being a modern equivalent of the illiterate medieval singers. A payador's work, in opposition to gauchesca, is sung spontaneously.[3]
The first gauchesco author was Bartolomé Hidalgo who wrote during the war of independence and therefore his works had a strong political ideology. His compositions were mainly cielitos (payadoresque songs but with provocative political messages) and diálogos patrióticos (conversations between two characters about current affairs).
In a second period, gauchesca was influenced by political-faction fights. Estanislao del Campo, and Hilario Ascasubi are the most representative writers of this period. Del Campo wrote Fausto, a poem which has been read both as a parody of gauchesca and an intelligent joke towards city people.[4] In the poem, Anastasio El Pollo meets a friend and tells him his impressions on particular event: he has seen the Devil. What El Pollo doesn't know (or pretends he doesn't) is that all he saw was actually an opera performance at Teatro Colón.[5]
The last author of gauchesca is José Hernández, the author of Martín Fierro. Gauchesca leaves its political influences and becomes social in the sense that gauchos are disappearing, mainly due to Sarmiento and the new economic model. Hernández is considered the responsible for consolidating the gauchesco style.
Generation of 1880
The generation of 1880 emphasized the European color and cultural supremacy of Buenos Aires. The migratory current of mixed ethnicity accentuated the change of the big village for the cosmopolitan metropolis. The poetry of this period is lyric: Leopoldo Díaz y Almafuerte. The latter usually depicts the worker's life in passionate attacks against the contradictions of contemporary society. Almafuerte (pseudonym of Pedro Bonifacio Palacios) was also a teacher and a journalist whose opinions and articles gave him a lot of problems.
Essay is a recent genre that developed in the late 19th century: José Manuel Estrada, Pedro Goyena and Joaquín V. González.
Narrative works oscillated between social issues and folk literature. The predominant tendency was Realism, best represented by Miguel Cané in his autobiographical novel Juvenilia. Other writers influenced by realism were Lucio V. Mansilla, Francisco Sicardi, Benito Lynch and Carlos María Ocantos. Naturalism was also an important tendency towards the end of the century. Argentine Naturalism was commanded by Eugenio Cambaceres in his novels Sin rumbo and Música sentimental, almost forgotten today. Cambaceres was inspired by Émile Zola's theory about the naturalistic approach to literary work, but its ideology suffered considerable alterations. Julián Martel and Antonio Argerich with ¿Inocentes o culpables? added a highly loaded moral touch to Argentine naturalism.
Modern
Towards the end of the 19th century, led by the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, modernism appears in Latin American literature. Preciosity of manner and a strong influence from Symbolism sum up the new genre, which inspires the clearest voice in poetry, Leopoldo Lugones, who was the author of the first Argentine science fiction story. The first truly modern generation in Argentine literature is the Martinfierristas (c. 1922). The movement contributes an intellectual doctrine in which a number of current trends come together: the trend represented by the Florida group, adscript to ultraísmo, with Oliverio Girondo, Jorge Luis Borges, Leopoldo Marechal and Macedonio Fernández; and the trend of Boedo, impressed by Russian realism, with Raúl González Tuñón, César Tiempo y Elías Catelnuovo. Ricardo Güiraldes, however, remains classical in style, giving a whole new freshness to gauchesca poetry and writing what is perhaps the novel, Don Segundo Sombra.
Benito Lynch (1885–1951), an eccentric short-story writer who, like Güiraldes, does not easily fit into any "generation", wrote his quirky tales in an enchanted neo-gauchoesque manner about this time. Between the end of this decade and the beginning of the following one emerged the Novísimos ("Newest"), a generation of poets (Arturo Cambours Ocampo, Carlos Carlino and José Portogalo), fiction writers (Arturo Cerretani, Roberto Arlt, Luis Maria Albamonte and Luis Horacio Velázquez) and playwrights (Roberto Valenti, Juan Oscar Ponferrada and Javier Villafañe). The group promoted philosophical reflection and a new essence for Argentinidad. Leopoldo Marechal's novel Adán Buenosayres, published in 1948 and praised by Julio Cortázar in 1949.
Also worthy of note is the literary work of
Generation of '37
The Generation of 1937 centers on poetry, where it developed the descriptive, nostalgic and meditative in the work of
Essayists do not abound. Antonio Pagés Larraya, Emilio Carilla, Luis Soler Cañas are some of the few who stand out, although the greatest Argentine essayist after Sarmiento – Ezequiel Martínez Estrada – also belonged to the Generation of '37. Many of these writers and a number of European ones contributed extensively to Sur, a literary journal published by Victoria Ocampo, a noted commentator on the day's culture.
Neohumanism, Existentialism and other influences
In 1950, another milestone arose: the New Humanism, a response to World War II and its aftermath. On one level are
A new trend started in 1960, continuing until about 1990. Its influences are heterogeneous: Sartre, Camus, Eluard; some Spanish writers, like Camilo José Cela; and previous Argentine writers like Borges, Arlt, Cortázar and Marechal. Two trends were in evidence: the tracing of metaphysical time and historicity (Horacio Salas, Alejandra Pizarnik, Ramón Plaza) and the examination of urban and social disarray: (Abelardo Castillo, Marta Lynch, Manuel Puig, Alicia Steinberg).
Dirty War
The 1970s were a dark period for intellectual creation in Argentina. The epoch is characterised by the
Current
The 1990s are marked by reunion among survivors of different generations, in an intellectual coalition for the review of values and texts as Argentina faced the end of the century. Some examples are Alan Pauls, Mario Areca, Aníbal Cristobo, Ernesto de Sanctis, Marco Denevi, Edgar Brau and some more.
See also
Notes
- ^ María Minellono. "Entre el folletín y la novela histórica; el problema del género en Amalia de José Mármol"
- ^ Eduardo Romano. El nativismo como ideología en "Santos Vega" de Rafael Obligado: Editorial Biblos
- ^ Wikipedia article (in Spanish)
- ^ Enrique Anderson Imbert. Prólogo a Fausto. Buenos Aires: Editorial de Belgrano
- ^ Enrique Anderson Imbert. Análisis de Fausto. Buenos Aires: CEAL, 1968
References
- Prieto, Martín (2006). Breve historia de la literatura argentina (in Spanish). Taurus. ISBN 978-9870403371.
Further reading
- (in Spanish) Arce, Emilia Isabel. "La institucionalización del rol materno durante gobiernos autoritarios: respuestas de escritoras argentinas y brasileñas a la construcción patriarcal de género y nación." (Archive) (PhD thesis). University of Texas at Austin, May 2009. (English abstract included)
External links
- Historia de la Literatura Argentina (in Spanish)
- Literatura Argentina (in Spanish)
- Generaciön del 37 (in Spanish)
- Biblioteca básica de literatura argentina
- Scanner cultural
- La inmigración en la Literatura Argentina (in Spanish)
- Orígenes de la Literatura Argentina (in Spanish)
- Dossier Juan L. Ortiz
- Argentine Literature in Argentina.ar (in English)