Argentine literature
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Argentine literature is placed among the most important in Spanish language, with world-famous writers such as José Hernández, Jorge Luis Borges, Manuel Puig, Julio Cortázar and Ernesto Sábato. As well as other aspects of the Argentine culture, literature in Argentina has always been subject to heavy European influence, especially from Spain and France.
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[edit] History
[edit] Beginning
Argentine literature began around the year 1550, with Matías Rojas de Oquendo and Pedro González de Prado (from Santiago del Estero, the first important urban settlement in Argentina), who wrote both prose and poetry. They were partly inspired, undoubtedly, in the unwritten aboriginal poetry, according to Carlos Abregú Vyrreira by the lules, juríes, diaguitas and tonocotés. A symbiosis emerged slowly between the aboriginal and Spanish traditions, creating a distinct literature, which was geographically limited (well into the 18th century) to the Argentine north and the central region, with the province of Córdoba as its center. Two names stand out from this period: Gaspar Juárez Baviano and Antonia de la Paz y Figueroa, also known as "Beata Antula". Within poetry, Luis de Tejeda, disciple of Góngora and Saint John of the Cross, is considered to be the first Argentine poet.
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.
[edit] Cultural independence from Spain
The rupture with Spanish tradition, in favor of the French romanticism that postulated the return to popular sources and to the medieval past, allowed Esteban Echeverría to be the creator of the first local and realistic story, El Matadero ("The slaughterhouse"), and of the poem La Cautiva ("The Captive"), with the Pampas as its stage.
In the middle of the 19th century José Mármol published the first Argentine novel, Amalia. Meanwhile poetry decreased its combative spirit and turned towards the anecdotal and sentimental: Carlos Guido y Spano and Ricardo Gutiérrez, the chronicle writers of folk literature; Vicente Fidel López, Lucio V. Mansilla and Juana Manuela Gorriti; and the historical ones: Bartolomé Mitre and Domingo F. Sarmiento.
[edit] Generation of 1880
The generation of 1880 emphasized the European color and the 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. Essay is a recent genre: José Manuel Estrada, Pedro Goyena and Joaquín V. González. The narrative works oscillated between social issues and folk literature: Miguel Cané, Eugenio Cambaceres, Julián Martel y Carlos María Ocantos.
[edit] Literatura Gauchesca
While European-oriented, indeed Eurocentric, themes and styles were and would remain the norm in Argentine letters, especially from Buenos Aires, a picturesque, imitation-gaucho literature, purporting to use the language of the gauchos and reflect their mentality, arose in the 1880s as a part of that Generation's understanding of national identity. The three great figures in this trend, José Hernández, Estanislao del Campo and Hilario Ascasubi immediately became, and have remained, among the most popular figures of a whole unique genre in Argentine and Uruguayan literature, the gauchesco or "gauchoesque" style. (Cf: Borges: Aspectos de la poesía gauchesca, 1950).
[edit] Modern
Towards the end of the Nineteenth Century, led by the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, modernism appears. Preciosity of manner and the influence of Symbolism sum up the new esthetic, which inspires the clearest voice in poetry, Leopoldo Lugones, author among many other things, of the first Argentine science fiction story.
The first truly modern generation in Argentine literature is that of the Martinfierristas (c. 1922). The movement contributes an intellectual doctrine in which current representative paths come together: that of Florida group, adscript to ultraísmo, with Oliverio Girondo, Jorge Luis Borges, Leopoldo Marechal and Macedonio Fernández; and that of Boedo, impressed by Russian realism, with Raúl González Tuñón, César Tiempo y Elías Catelnuovo. Of all of them, Ricardo Güiraldes remains classic in style, giving a whole new freshness to gauchesca poetry and writing perhaps the great Argentine novel, Don Segundo Sombra.
Benito Lynch (1885-1951), a wonderfully excentric short-story writer who, like Güiraldes, does not easily fit into any tiresome "generation", proposed his marvelously quirky tales in an enchanted new-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), as well as narrators (Arturo Cerretani, Roberto Arlt, Luis Maria Albamonte and Luis Horacio Velázquez) and playwrights (Roberto Valenti, Juan Oscar Ponferrada and Javier Villafañe). This group postulates philosophical reflection and a new essence for Argentinidad.
[edit] Generation of '37
The Generation of 1937 centres perhaps on poetry, where it develops the descriptive, the nostalgic and the meditative with Ricardo E. Molinari, Vicente Barbieri, Olga Orozco, León Benarós and Alfonso Sola Gonzáles. Narrators line up after idealism and magic realism, (María Granata, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Julio Cortázar) or a subtler form of realism Manuel Mujica Laínez, Ernesto L. Castro, Ernesto Sábato and Abelardo Arias), with some urban touches as well as folk literature (Joaquín Gómez Bas and Roger Plá).
Essayists do not abound: Antonio Pagés Larraya, Emilio Carilla, Luis Soler Cañas; but, of course, the greatest Argentine essayist after Sarmiento, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, belongs to the Generation of '37.
[edit] Neohumanism, Existentialism and other influences
About 1950 another milestone arises: the New Humanism, a response to World War II and its aftermath. On one level are avant-gardists like Raúl Gustavo Aguirre, Edgar Bayley and Julio Llinás; on another, existentialists: José Isaacson, Julio Arístides and Miguel Ángel Viola. Further away, those who reconcile both tendencies with a regionalist basis: Alfredo Veiravé, Jaime Dávalos and Alejandro Nicotra. Among narrators we find charged testimonies of the times: Beatriz Guido, David Viñas and Marco Denevi. In a majority of these writers, a strong influence of Anglo-Saxon and Italian poetry can be perceived.
A new trend starts in 1960, going till about to 1990. Influences are heterogeneous: Sartre, Camus, Eluard; some Spanish writers, like Camilo José Cela; and Argentines like Borges, Arlt, Cortázar and Maréchal. Two tendencies can be seen: the tracing of metaphysical time and historicity (Horacio Salas, Alejandra Pizarnik, Ramón Plaza) and urban and social disarray: (Abelardo Castillo, Marta Lynch, Manuel Puig).
From the provinces important poets and storytellers appear: Luis Franco, Juan L. Ortiz and Jorge Wáshington Ábalos.
[edit] Dark military days
The 1970s are dark for the intellectual creation. The sign of the epoch is exile (Juan Gelman, Antonio Di Benedetto) or death (Roberto Santoro, Haroldo Conti). Remaining literary journalists like Liliana Heker veiled their opinions in their work. Some poets (Rodolfo Walsh, Agustín Tavitián, Antonio Aliberti), narrators (Osvaldo Soriano, Fernando Sorrentino), and essayists (Ricardo Herrera, María Rosa Lojo) stand out between the vicissitudes and renew the field of the ethical and aesthetic ideas. Again the referents are Eluard, Eliot, Montale and Neruda.
From the politically active ambiences appears a big writer: journalist Julio Carreras (h), many of whose principal works begin newly to be valued. He was seven years prisoner of the military dictatorship.
[edit] Current
The 1990s are marked by the reunion of the survivors of different generations, in an intellectual coalition for the review of values and texts facing the end of the century.
[edit] Miscellanea
Ernesto Che Guevara was an Argentine, born in Rosario. Besides his armed fight and his political involvement with Fidel Castro's government in Cuba, he wrote The Motorcycle Diaries, about his travels around Argentina and South America, which was turned recently into a movie.
[edit] See also
- Latin America novel boom
- Cultural movement
- Spanish literature
- Mexican literature
- Spanish poetry
- Spanish American poetry
[edit] External links
- Historia de la Literatura Argentina (Spanish)
- Literatura Argentina (Spanish)
- Generaciön del 37 (Spanish)
- Biblioteca básica de literatura argentina
- Scanner cultural
- La inmigración en la Literatura Argentina (Spanish)
- Orígenes de la Literatura Argentina (Spanish)
- Dossier Juan L. Ortiz
