Campos magneticos de la modernidad latinoamericana: Una historia intelectual de Argentina, Brasil y Uruguay (1900--1935)

My dissertation is a comparative study of different intellectual practices in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay at the turn of the 20th century. I examine the work of canonical as well as non canonical authors in order to provide a renewed critical interpretation of the output and function of intellectuals in Latin America as modernity developed in these countries. In my dissertation I refer to a common set of political as well as cultural challenges that those intellectuals, as a group and individually, underwent during their growing conflict with institutionalized powers. My reading highlights literary texts in which the idea of being intellectual is anchored in factors such as aesthetic issues, socioeconomic forces, State policies, literary rivalries, and the difficulties encountered in the constitution of an intellectual field in a highly unstable political context. Borrowing from theoretical and conceptual paradigms from history, philosophy, literary theory, political science, and the sociology of intellectuals, the chapters of my dissertation go from a genealogical perspective of the term 'intellectual' itself to the significant influence of both leftist and rightist intellectuals in populist governments well into 1930s and 1940s. My dissertation proves that an examination of intellectual work in that period may open new critical paths to understand the relationships between Brazilian and Spanish American literature.