Spanish, American and Brazilian Literature

Perhaps the best way to begin is with one of those anecdotes whose bare facts speak volumes of sociocultural history. Buenos Aires has traditionally seen itself, and been seen by other Latin Americans, as the cultural capital of the Spanish-speaking New World. Mexicans or even Colombians and Peruvians may not be particularly happy about this circumstance, but the simple fact remains that the Argentines after independence (and particularly after ousting Rosas in the midnineteenth century and after the capitalist bourgeoisie took over) overcame their status as a colonial backwater by pursuing aggressively European cultural models that set the tone for the dominant cultural elite in most corners of the continent. This leadership role has never seemed to wane much, no matter how dictatorial regimes may strive to undermine the nation's creativity-and foreign assimilationism-in the name of a closed Catholic morality. Thus, one may find as a synecdoche of Argentine cosmopolitanism books in most of the major foreign languages: wags might even note than one can even find books in Spanish, although non-Argentine authors are often hard to come by. There are bookstores specializing, of course, in books in English and French, and the Italian and Jewish immigrant heritage is honored by books in Italian and Yiddish. The German ancestry of many immigrants before the war makes books available in that language, and, here and there, books may be seen in the many languages of other stocks. Oriental immigration is the new wave in Argentina, and surely that publications in Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and so on are now available in the grocery stores these new arrivals seem to have acquired along Corrientes in the previously almost exclusively Jewish Once district of Buenos Aires

Linguistics · Spanish Literature · Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism · History · Latin American Literature Analysis · Latin American Literature Studies · Philosophy

• Argentine Afterlives

  Open Access•Thomas Genova•TRANSMODERNITY Journal of…•2022

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• The Latin American Short Story

  Myron I Lichtblau, Margaret Sayers Peden•Hispania•1984

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