From the nineteenth to the twentieth century: Tracing (the) silenced origins of the Latin American essay
Description
At the end of the XIX Century, contradictions caused by an unequal modernity in Latin America provoked a crisis of social and professional identity on writers. This crisis is accompanied by an erudite verification of a greater economic and political interference of United States on the area My thesis involves four Latin American essayists who challenged the traditional paradigm of opposing Latin America vs. United States through attributes such as spirituality, humanism, and aesthetic taste vs. materialism, egoism and vulgarity. Such paradigms served in securing the writer's social status---artificer of that redeemed Latin America---at the cost of stopping social democratization processes. The illiterate mass was then, the other menace of that canonic Latin Americanism The essayist referred in my thesis are Chilean Francisco Bilbao (1823-1865), Peruvian Manuel Gonzalez Prada (1844-1918), Argentinian Manuel Ugarte (1875-1951) and Brazilian Manoel Bomfin (1988-1932). From different historic moments, theses essayists attempted to visualize cultural heterogeneity of the continent, as well as economic asymmetries that fractured social tissues. That is, they put into evidence political divisions of social classes and educational importance that national projects established as result of independence movements were not able to resolve. Through professional practice relating them to social urban sectors originating from the poor and middle classes, these essayist managed to overcome the literate terror facing the growing processes of social democratization as well as to secure a professional identity that audaciously negotiate places of literary enunciation with the market. Through such strategies, these essayists moulded an anti-imperialist posture no longer depending on dichotomies derived from essentialism