Essay and Territory: The Geography of National Identity

doi:10.1017/9781009283069.016

Chapter 15 - Essay and Territory: The Geography of National Identity

from Part II - Critical Inroads

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 May 2024

Adrián Gorelik and

Amanda E. Powell

Edited by

Alejandra Laera and

Mónica Szurmuk

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Alejandra Laera: Affiliation:
University of Buenos Aires
Mónica Szurmuk: Affiliation:
Universidad Nacional de San Martín /National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Argentina

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Summary

“The evil of the Argentine Republic is its extension”: Domingo Faustino Sarmiento´s famous admonition in Facundo (1845) was not only a program for the modernization of Argentina but a figurative horizon for the literary genre that was going to critically analyze that very modernization until the mid-twentieth century: the “national character essay.” This genre had analogous developments in many parts of Latin America, but did not establish the link between territory and national identity as strongly as it did in Argentina. In the century that leads from Sarmiento to Ezequiel Martínez Estrada the genre displays a series of literary resources that seek to take the geographical configuration of the country as a measure of its people’s soul. This can be seen both in the invention of a physical sphere of the nation to set the stage for his political drama (Sarmiento) and in the metaphorization of the map as the nation’s body (Martínez Estrada). This corpus is analyzed here in relation to real and imaginary geographies that produced it and were produced by it.

Keywords

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento Ezequiel Martínez Estrada national-character essay territory national identity

Type: Chapter
Information: A History of Argentine Literature , pp. 232 - 244

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009283069.016 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2024

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