Naturaleza y cultura en la poesí­a del modernismo latinoamericano

Abstract

By focusing on a constellation of key poems –Rubén Darí­o’s “Caupolicán” (1888), José Martí­’s “Amor de ciudad grande” (1882) and Julián del Casal’s “En el campo” (1893)-, the analysis draws differences between romantic and modernist articulations of a founding category in XIXth century Latin America. If the concept of “civilization” is the basis of an emerging order which defines social and national roles in the new XIXth century global distribution, its intrinsically antinomic character produces a series of binary oppositions –equally hierarchical and axiological– such as culture-nature and city-country. Under such conditions, Latin American Romanticism found in the new relationship between subjectivity and the environment a way to practice its aesthetics, by re-culturing natural space in order to integrate it to the process of national identity building. As a rupture with this tradition, modernist poems reconfigure the antinomy nature-culture in a new inflection which ends up affecting the legitimation resources of an aesthetic project. In particular, our hypothesis approaches poetic rhythm as a fissure in the “lettered city” and as a driving force of a new literary institution which –while transforming the oppositional paradigm civilization-barbarism, original-copy, local-universal– contributes to demarcate the authority of the modernist poet from that of the traditional lettered subject.