| This dissertation examines how writing altered the perception of literary, social, and geographic space in Argentina during the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1829–1852). Though the nation-state would achieve its definitive form with the federalization of the city of Buenos Aires in 1880, I argue that during the Rosas era the concept of a unified Argentina was conceived on the terrain of discourse, through antagonistic debates regarding the question of national organization.;This project considers how letrados, particularly Juan Bautista Alberdi, Esteban Echeverría, José Mármol, and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, endeavored to inscribe themselves in a tightly circumscribed public sphere by calling attention to the sociopolitical conditions that prevented the immediate realization of their plans to modernize Argentina. Lacking a historical legacy or the popular will necessary to legitimate their model of a centralized state, they looked to inscribe a teleology of progress in a variety of regions. Employing a technological imagination, these letrados engage in a radical cartography to regulate both economic growth and biological reproduction.;Though this process has typically been characterized as the labor of a handful of intellectuals, known collectively as the Generation of 1837, an examination of a broad corpus that includes private correspondence, popular poetry, and journalism of the era indicates that, in fact, the production of national space involved an array of social actors, both supporters and opponents of the Rosas regime. Indeed, writing itself was an essential instrument to the construction and maintenance of Rosas's populist rule. As a consequence, the national public sphere emerged from the conflict regarding two competing notions of power: one rooted in rural traditions and the charisma of the caudillo, a primus inter pares; and another based on the rule of written laws and strong, centralized institutions. The deep antagonism between these models was not resolved, but, rather, set the limits for the consolidation of a national society. Through a series of debates, pro-Rosas scribes and dissident letrados made for unwitting accomplices in articulating of the space of the nation. |
