El romance patologio: Naturalismo, medicina y nacionalismo en Argentina (1880-1910).

This thesis examines the interaction of nationalism and the naturalist novel, taking into account not only the institutional debates over national literature but also the genre's internal configuration. It concludes that these two aspects are not necessarily congruent, since through a biological redefinition of the politics of gender and race naturalist texts insist in de-constructing the foundational romances on which the first national Latin American novels were based. Thus, while attempting to comply with the formal requirements of Argentinism, their allegorical, ill-fated love-stories question, and even refute, any possibility of national utopia. Although writers like Cambaceres, Podesta, Sicardi and Argerich are known to have adopted the narrative structures of French Naturalism, less recognized is their use of that literary model to prove the horrifying consequences of a sexuality unsupervised by the State. It also affirms that the omnipresence of biological explanations did not derive only from European fiction. A thorough reading of medical treatises of that period suggests that medicine provided the novel with narrative strategies, epistemological assumptions, as well as models of professional authority. Argentine Naturalists, many themselves physicians, reflected upon the conditions necessary to obtain, through eugenical experimentation, the healthy 'race' that would build a perfect society. Through allegory, their texts promote or discourage the sexual union of different social groups. By applying the traits of Lombroso's innate criminal or Maudsley's intermediate states of insanity, they helped to identify the pathological characters--the bad fathers and mothers--that populated fin-de-siecle Argentine society. But often the ambiguous etiology and prognosis of degeneration appeared to preclude utopia. Whether because of the atavistic immigrant, the degenerate upper class creole, or the regressive gaucho, the Nation was under the threat of an ominous disease for which the novel could offer diagnosis, but no cure. The topic of this dissertation not only has implications for a large array of issues being discussed in the humanities and social sciences (such as cultural hegemony and social control, science and ethnic identities, as well as gender and national aesthetics), but also reaches beyond Argentine literature and contributes to a description of the uses of Naturalism by other Latin American writers.PhDLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsLatin American literatureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129482/2/9513448.pd