In Russia and Argentina modernism arrived well before the advent of
socioeconomic modernization, and found societies with restricted civil liberties, only
nascent middle classes, and virtually non-existent public spheres. Despite these factors,
within a span of some fifty years, Petersburg and Buenos Aires turned into vibrant
literary capitals rivaling London, New York, and Paris as centers of literary modernism.
This dissertation offers a new understanding of the period by exposing the critical role of
publishers and cultural patrons in this extraordinary cultural advancement. I argue that
they were able to reformulate their countries’ historically ambivalent positions vis-à-vis
Western European civilization by working closely with avant-garde literary groups and
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promoting their literary works that combined sometimes contending, sometimes
complementary cosmopolitanism and nationalism.
My analysis of the interrelated processes of the development of print culture,
national identity, and the literary public sphere in Russia and Argentina is informed by
Benedict Anderson’s thinking about nationalism and print culture, Pierre Bourdieu’s
treatment of publishers as key participants in cultural production, and the concept of the
public sphere as seen by Jürgen Habermas. Close reading of select literary works of the
1920s shows that Russian and Argentine “peripheral” experiences, once transformed into
artistic creation, became consonant with cultural practices of international modernism
precisely because they combined both cosmopolitan and nationalist tendencies. Each of
the writers considered—Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Arlt, Veniamin Kaverin, and
Konstantin Fedin—was able to formulate highly original and yet unmistakably national
response to modernity. Following the writers’ trajectories from early literary experiments
to the works of the late 1920s, when they renounced their youthful deviations and joined
the literary (and sometimes even political) establishment, I show how these literary texts
renegotiated the issues of national identity by reworking diverse and often “foreign”
literary traditions into authentically Russian and Argentine prose. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/ETD-UT-2010-05-772 |
| Date | 16 September 2010 |
| Creators | Potoplyak, Marina |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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