How travels are written: narrative strategies in Sergio Chejfec and Martín Caparrós

Abstract

In the present article we intend to revisit exclusively the posthumous compilation Para una revisión de las letras Argentinas by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada and to reconstruct the articulation of the triad literature - national life - people, starting from his reading of the works of the Argentine Romantic Generation of 1837, better known as "Generación del '37". Such generation contributed, in a context of censorship and exile, to the world of philosophical-political ideas that were foundational at the time of the formation of the Nation- State, citizenship and other modern institutions in the Argentine territory. However, for Ezequiel Martínez Estrada this is not the true merit of that generation. The author of Para una revisión… -published in 1946- writes that the republican and democratic ideas of the writers have little to do with literary production or with just the letters. Martínez Estrada pretends to praise less the political intervention, than the foundation of a necessary prose parallel to govern and that it constructs the conditions so that the culture is possible. For this purpose, he proposes a difficult enterprise to (re) do: a literature (together with the sciences and other arts) that trains the people within the fight to global ignorance, the true despotic power of every colonial act.