Chapter 4: To Change Society
Comps peeps
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José Martí – pg. 95, 103-112
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Clorinda Matto de Turner – pg. 101-103
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Eugenio Cambaceres – pg. 117-118
General Notes
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“In 1880, the social structure of Latin Amer was
still remarkably similar to that of the colonial period” (92)
-
Little interest in improving lot of the masses
(92)
-
Call for social change came largely from
individuals (92)
-
L.A. became an international “supplier of raw
materials and food products such as coffee, sugar, and meat to the expanding
populations of the old world”
o
Argentina – booming meat-packing industry (hmm
think el matadero)
-
The people who were already on top stayed on top
(economically) (93)
-
Intellectuals “sought
ideologies which could account for the backwardness of Latin America and yet
provide hope for the future” (93)
o
European ideologies –
liberalism, positivism, and later socialism and anarchism
-
Liberalism (93)
o
Europe
= free trade, laissez-faire, individualism
o
L.A. = economic liberalism impossible; attack
against church (anti-clericalism)
-
Positivism (93-95)
o
Europe = focus on progress in society; Auguste
Comte (France) & Herbert Spencer (England)
o
L.A. = importance of practical knowledge and technical
skills, focus on industrial progress, justification
of power of elite (survival of the fittest); intellectuals/believers: Domingo Sarmiento,
Porfirio Díaz, & others not on list
o
Positivism failed to change social structure in
L.A. and put too much faith in foreign powers (almost colonial status de nuevo)
o
Influence of positivism on L.A. literature:
§
humanist literature that attacks dictatorship
and fanaticism
§
radical literature that saw salvation in a total
change in social structure (Martí)
§
literature which reflected rather than advocated
social change
-
Clorinda Matto de
Turner (101-103)
o
Vida: 1854-1909
o
Unusually successful for a woman
o
Author of the first social protest novel on
behalf of the Indian – Aves sin nido
(1889)
§
Summary – pg. 102
§
In the text, the writer can offer little apart
from personal solutions
§
Book’s tone is strongly paternalistic
-
Cuba and José Martí
(103-112)
o
Longer fight for independence in Cuba than in
other countries of Latin America (103)
o
José Martí was Cuba’s greatest political and
literary figure of the nineteenth century
o
I DIDN’T
READ THIS SECTION SINCE I’M NOT PLANNING ON READING MARTI YET. WILL COME BACK
TO IT WHEN I GET TO HIM. (PROB DURING THE SEMESTER RATHER THAN SUMMER)
-
Social change and the novels of Blest Gana (113-115)
o
Blest Gana (from Chile), was one of the first
writers to attempt to describe social change in Latin America
o
In set of three novels (including Martín Rivas) he showed the Chilean
upper and middle classes trying to improve their situation by marriage
§
Class divisions are
extremely important and marriage is the accepted way of bettering one’s social
status
o
In Martín
Rivas, fortune-hunting is made to seem respectable
o
Very brief summary of Martín – pg. 113
o
Blest Gana seeks a society in which worth rather
than birth or money will prevail.
o
The novel (M.R.) also carefully documents the society
of the period and brings in contemporary political/social events
o
Blest Gana brings out the heartlessness of the
rigid social system in which women are the chief victims (Franco’s talking
about a different one of his novels here but it’s still an important thought)
o
“his novels, even though there characterization is
schematic and the writing clumsy on occasions, do represent a questioning of the values of the brash new societies that
were emerging”
-
Argentina and the Naturalist Novel (115-118)
o
“Nowhere in Latin America had society changed
more drastically than in Argentina where the influx of immigrants, the rapid
growth of Buenos Aires, and the success of the meat-exporting industry had
created a type of urban prosperity unparalleled in the southern hemisphere. Compared
with Buenos Aires, Lima and Bogotá were, at this period, still colonial cities”
(115)
o
Interest in naturalism (from France)
§
Idea of the instability of Argentina’s economic
prosperity
o
Polemic against “foreigners” due to the strong
influx of immigrants
o
Eugenio Cambaceres, Sin Rumbo
§
“the best of the Argentinean novelists”
§
“rails at the avariciousness of the trading
classes”
§
We as humans are “slaves of our instincts”
§
Brief summary of Sin Rumbo – pg. 117
§
Cambaceres belief that “lack of moral or
spiritual purpose in man’s life reduces him to a biological machine which
propagates and evacuates without the intervention of human will. His only
freedom is that of sef-destruction”
-
Conclusion – 19th century Latin
American writers were frequently influenced by contemporary foreign literature
trends (particularly from Spain and France)
o
“they appropriated whatever foreign traditions
they found suitable to their immediate purpose”
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