In this dissertation, 'Modernity and Marginality: The Destruction and Renovation of the Latin American City and Writer in the Chronicles of Joao do Rio, Lima Barreto, and Roberto Arlt,' I will examine modernity and the changing role of the writer in the early twentieth century. I will argue that the Latin American chronicle, as a hybrid literary form, best represented the efforts and conditions of the socially engaged professionalized writer of the period in question Joao do Rio, Lima Barreto, and Roberto Arlt experienced different degrees of marginality due to racial and class-based origins. They were salaried journalists who depended on newspapers for their livelihood. Aware of their status as wage-earning specialists, they were nonetheless driven by a determination to use their artistic abilities to fight against the economic system and against bourgeois society. Refusing to accept the complete separation of writing from political radicalism, they fought to insert themselves in society as subjects rather than as mere objects, encouraging a cultural transformation through everyday experiences. The comparison of their works also lends itself to a comparison of the two largest South American cities of that time, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires Given the striking parallels between these three authors, I will argue that the chronicle was a particularly useful vehicle through which they could express themselves artistically and communicate with the common man in the universal context of a new, modern culture that cut across national, linguistic, and class-based lines
