‘“Thought in American and for the Americans”: Victoria Ocampo, Sur and European Modernism’

Abstract

This essay examines the seminal role of Argentinean writer Victoria Ocampo (1890–1979) in the reception of the so-called High Modernism in Spanish-speaking countries through her professional activity as a literary critic and as a publisher under the auspices of the intellectual circle “Sur” [“South”]. In her project of running a literary journal, Ocampo partly emulated the spirit of Sylvia Beach’s monthly publication Navire D’Argent, but was most positively encouraged by Waldo Frank and Jose Ortega y Gasset—editors of Seven Arts (1916–1917) and Revista de Occidente [Journal of the Western World], respectively. Both Frank and Ortega were extremely influential in Ocampo’s ambition to establish an inspiring cultural network connecting Europe and the American continent. Ocampo, Frank and Ortega joined in an effort to counterbalance what they saw as a decadent European aesthetics via Hispanic routes of inspiring connections among cultural capitals in the interwar period. A careful analysis of the sociological impact, in South-America, of these avant-garde publications, allows us to conclude that they served the cause of empowering women intellectuals in the geographical periphery much more than did contemporary European maganizes.