Second nature an essay on the nature of landscape in Latin America

Second Nature examines the problem of insufficient "expressiveness" of language in Latin American literature--the critical distance that separates discourse from reality, words from objects and that motivates much of the productive anxiety in Latin American culture by focusing on the pervasive challenge of landscape from Colonization to the present day. By reading several canonical texts that wrestle with landscape, the dissertation focuses on the creativity generated by the epistemological anxiety caused by ungovernable landscapes. At the basis of the problem of expressiveness lays, I suggest, the problem of landscape. And at the basis of the problem of landscape I find a general assumption about "nature" (i.e. natural settings, outside the city limits) that Latin Americans have made since Colonial times. The stark contrast between urban and rural spaces (always understood as wilderness) reaches a masterful point of inflexion, I venture, with the publication of La vorágine by Colombian novelist José Eustasio Rivera in 1924, and Los ríos profundos by the Peruvian José Maria Arguedas in 1956. Crystallizing decades of a continuous search to find the best way of conveying the new American reality, the two novels turned the alleged expressive failure into an aesthetic principle, embracing it until it became what "natural" might actually mean for Latin American culture.

Organized in four chapters, the dissertation follows the historical trajectory that the dichotomy between city/countryside (traditionally understood as civilization/barbarism) has had in the region since its beginnings until the dichotomy's exhaustion and possible dissolution, as it hopes to contribute to the fruitful debate about the city/countryside dialectics, which has shaped Latin American Studies. By showing that some novels central to the tradition are not only the result of a confrontation with the wilderness, but that their artistic achievement is a direct response to the anxiety produced by the encounter with an overwhelming landscape, I suggest that, if we pay attention to contradictions, the Latin American canon can be characterized by the continuous struggle to expand and accommodate language to the challenges of a sublime landscape and reality.