Descripción:
This book investigates three examples of the turn-of-the-century essay in Spain and Latin America: Angel Ganivet’s Idearium español (1897), José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel (1900), and Alcides Arguedas’s Pueblo enfermo (1909). Michael Aronna traces the reactions of these historically and rhetorically related colonial and postcolonial thinkers to the new economic, cultural, social, and political challenges of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He shows how concepts of sexual degeneration, racial inferiority, immaturity, and gender prominent in contemporary philosophy and science were central to these writers’ shared understanding of the nation as an organism vulnerable to ‘social pathogens.’


TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Introduccion......11

1. Angel Ganivet’s Idearium español and The Model of National Illness......34

Repression and Denial......34

Spain as Virgin......42

Seneca(s Fig Leaf and the Medicalization of Sexuality......9

Ganivet as Doctor: Natural History as National History......55

Colonialism and Degeneration: The Story of Agation Tinoco......64

Aboulia: The National Autobiographical Diagnosis......70

Sickness as Virture and the Critique of Capitalism......75

2. Jose Enrique Rodó’s Ariel: The Therapeutic Program for Panamerican Revocery......87

Ariel and the Organicist Model of National Health......87

Ariel and Latin American Hellenism......99

Healthy Introspection vs Sickly Self-Absorption......106

The Historical Roots of Ariel and Caliban as Symbols of Health and Disease......115

The Therapeutic Qualities of the Androgynous Adolescent Male......122

Masculine Regeneration and the Evolutionary Fantasy of Ariel......128

3. Alcides Arguedas’s Pueblo Enfermo: The Terminally Ill Nation......135

The National, Pan-American and Spanish Roots of Pueblo enfermo......135

Racial Psychology and Illness......141

America the ‘Young’ or America the ‘Sick’?......153

The Pathology of Simulation in Public and Private Life......166

The Discourse of ‘Public Health’ in Pueblo enfermo: its Racial, Moral and Class Underpinnings......180

Conclusion......186

Bibliography......190