Off-campus UMass Amherst users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your UMass Amherst user name and password.

Non-UMass Amherst users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.

Dissertations that have an embargo placed on them will not be available to anyone until the embargo expires.

Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6543-6396

AccessType

Campus-Only Access for Five (5) Years

Document Type

dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Degree Program

Comparative Literature

Year Degree Awarded

2020

Month Degree Awarded

September

First Advisor

Maria S. Barbon

Second Advisor

Jim Hicks

Third Advisor

Luis Marentes

Fourth Advisor

Miguel Fernandez

Subject Categories

Latin American Languages and Societies

Abstract

Time Bound. Gauchesca and its Print Culture, 1872-2011, attends to the critical role of popular print culture in shaping public opinion on everyday social, political, economic, and cultural issues regarding the Argentine nation, its peoples, and its borders. The project focuses on the Argentine gauchesca, the literary genre about frontier life which used the voice of the marginalized gaucho ‘cowboy’ to comment on topical events through the circulation of broadsheets, pamphlets, and other ephemeral print media. I argue that following the country’s centennial celebrations in the 1910s, the genre was institutionalized as Argentina’s “national” literature, severing its ties to popular print and thus ignoring the mundane, everyday ways in which the voice and image of the gaucho continued to sway readers across varied ideological camps. By expanding and extending the definition of the gauchesca genre, Time Bound exhumes and reclaims the vital relationship between popular print culture and gauchesca throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Informed by post-western studies and their critique of the representation of the U.S. West, Time Bound contends that the gauchesca genre was bound to the nineteenth century by a narrow understanding of national identity and by canon formation reliant on book publishing as a legitimizing medium. Through a print studies approach that dislocates the cultural centrality of the book, my work places canonical figures (José Hernández, Jorge Luis Borges, Arturo Jauretche) alongside a multiplicity of lesser-known authors and illustrators (Dante Quinterno, Walter Ciocca, Florencio Molina Campos, and Oscar Fariña) who voiced their concerns independently of state-sanctioned ideologies (and sometimes plainly against them) in magazines, calendars, and other ephemeral print media. The result is a curated archive of gauchesca popular visual and print culture that reveals the genre’s continuity and continued engagement with current events pertaining to the nation and national identity, and its role shaping public opinion.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.7275/18907487

Share

COinS