Julio Camba's foreign chronicle, or the disguises of the personal column. A rhetorical analysis of Mis páginas mejores

Abstract

During the first third of the 20th century, Julio Camba was one of the most popular and influential columnists in the Spanish press. His foreign reports, sent from Istanbul, Paris, Berlin, London, and New York, appeared in the main national newspapers between 1907 and 1936 and were later collected in numerous anthologies that continue to be republished to this day. Due to their tone and content, Camba's reports have always been difficult to classify in generic terms. In this research, the authors propose classifying them as examples of modern personal columnism. To identify the persuasive resources on which they rely, the authors select a sample of chronicles (n=70) included in Mis páginas mejores (2015) and analyse them according to the variables and categories established by rhetorical analysis for the study of argumentative genres. The results allow us to conclude that, in the section on inventio, ethos and the fallacy of generalization are the most common rhetorical devices; that Camba's preferred structure is deductive, in which the article begins with the thesis to be demonstrated and then develops the particular cases that illustrate it; and that, in the elocutionary dimension, syntactic licenses or metataxes (parallelism, reiteration), tropes or metasememes (metaphor, simile), and figures of thought or metalogisms (irony, hyperbole) abound. All these features underpin the argumentative nature of Julio Camba's chronicles and highlight their expressive richness.