Ángel Rama, Emir Rodríguez Monegal y el Brasil: dos caras de un proyecto latinoamericano

Abstract

Formed in a small country more open to the western world than to its own territory, Angel Rama (1926-1983) and Emir Rodriguez Monegal (1921-1985), participated in their country’s cultural journals until the end of the 60s. This experience allowed them to come into contact with a multiplicity of problems, debates, and textualities, which they would capitalize upon in their Latin American studies, to which they devoted themselves almost exclusively once they had left Montevideo. In spite of the great homogenization that took place in Latin America in the decade of the 60s, Brazil was for the Hispanic area a somewhat ungraspable cultural terrain. At first Monegal and then Rama, and finally on the same temporal place, they both understood the value of reading Brazil. Without decreasing the importance of context, Monegal privileged the aesthetic and the literary; Rama preferred seeing the Brazilian as that which confronted the social and cultural experience of Spanish America. Very much in opposition to each other and in some ways complementary, they both sought alliances with Brazilian intellectuals (Rama with Candido; Monegal with Haroldo de Campos, among others). Therefore, by examining these antecedents and tensions this thesis is entitled Angel Rama, Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Brazil: The Two Faces of a Latin American Project. Because Brazil was not only a battle ground for the integration into the project, which each one of them developed in similar degrees as precursors nor was it a factor which differentiated them from other scholars. Moreover, it became the place of proof, from where to watch the course taken by Latin American literature and culture’s variants.