{"title":"From Civilization to Barbarism in\n El ciudadano ilustre\n : The Return of a Latin American Paradigm?","authors":"Kristian VAN HAESENDONCK","doi":"10.3828/bhs.2024.49","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n The aim of this article is to have an in-depth look at how the nineteenth-century paradigm of\n civilización y barbarie\n , predominant in Latin America, is represented in the film\n El ciudadano ilustre/ The Distinguished Citizen\n (2016), an Argentine film directed by Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat. A fictional account of an Argentine writer’s life after winning the Nobel Prize, it has a highly ambiguous ending. I argue that the film establishes a dialogic link with classics of Latin American literature such as Esteban Echeverría’s ‘El Matadero’ (1871) and Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘El Sur’ (1953), and\n Facundo\n by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, laying bare the unresolved tension between\n civilización\n and\n barbarie\n in contemporary Argentina and broader Latin American society. A close analysis of\n El ciudadano ilustre\n shows that, at least in Latin America, oppositional concepts have all but died, thus challenging the postmodern trend of dissolving them along with other supposedly outdated binarisms (such as urban v. rural, centre v. periphery.). Simultaneously, the film uses metafiction as a postmodern strategy to deal critically with the dichotomy.\n","PeriodicalId":44702,"journal":{"name":"BULLETIN OF HISPANIC STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2024-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"BULLETIN OF HISPANIC STUDIES","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.3828/bhs.2024.49","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE, ROMANCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The aim of this article is to have an in-depth look at how the nineteenth-century paradigm of
civilización y barbarie
, predominant in Latin America, is represented in the film
El ciudadano ilustre/ The Distinguished Citizen
(2016), an Argentine film directed by Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat. A fictional account of an Argentine writer’s life after winning the Nobel Prize, it has a highly ambiguous ending. I argue that the film establishes a dialogic link with classics of Latin American literature such as Esteban Echeverría’s ‘El Matadero’ (1871) and Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘El Sur’ (1953), and
Facundo
by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, laying bare the unresolved tension between
civilización
and
barbarie
in contemporary Argentina and broader Latin American society. A close analysis of
El ciudadano ilustre
shows that, at least in Latin America, oppositional concepts have all but died, thus challenging the postmodern trend of dissolving them along with other supposedly outdated binarisms (such as urban v. rural, centre v. periphery.). Simultaneously, the film uses metafiction as a postmodern strategy to deal critically with the dichotomy.
期刊介绍:
Edited in one of the leading British University Departments of Hispanic Studies by an editorial team specializing in a wide range of Hispanic scholarship, and supported by a distinguished international Editorial Committee, the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies is the foremost journal published in Britain devoted to the languages, literatures and civilizations of Spain, Portugal and Latin America. It is recognized across the world as one of the front-ranking journals in the field of Hispanic scholarship.