Writing the earth, writing the nation: Latin American narrative and the language of geography.

摘要

This dissertation examines the relationship between literary writing and geographical discourse in Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo: Civilizacion y barbarie (Argentina, 1845), Euclides da Cunha's Os Sertoes (Brazil, 1902), and Romulo Gallegos's Dona Barbara (Venezuela, 1929). These narratives are often read as locating their authority in the discourse of science or within the didactic lessons of the national allegory. I contend that both readings simplify the legacies of these works and elide the significance behind the form coupled with their content. To fully understand the politics of these mixed forms, we must move from the general (empiricist science) to the particular (geographical discourse). I defend this move by demonstrating that Sarmiento, Cunha, and Gallegos emerge as literary figures alongside, and even participate in, the formation of politically oriented geographical institutions; between 1833 and 1910 over fifty geographical societies appear across the Americas, first in Mexico and later in Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela. This simultaneity---between literary writing and institutional formation---points to an understudied alignment between literature, geography, and politics in Latin America. I illustrate that, through a host of literary devices (e.g. metaphor, anaphora, alliteration, etc.), these writers give form to a consolidated nation-state by constructing a unified---or potentially unify-able---geographic space. By tracing how their narratives are informed by and in dialogue with previous non-Latin American land treatises (by, for example, Alexander von Humboldt, Henry Thomas Buckle, and Agustin Codazzi), I argue for the centrality of geographical discourse in literary, cultural, and social analysis. This project contributes to several conversations in the field, including the discourse of Eurocentrism, the issue of Amerindian versus Occidental epistemology, and the interconnectedness of race, inequality, and land distribution.