Accessible intellectuals: Three cronistas of the 1920's and 1930's (Roberto Arlt, Argentina, Mario de Andrade, Brazil, Salvador Novo, Mexico)

In the 1920's and 1930's, three Latin American literary figures associated with their city's avant-garde movements were also being recognized as cronistas (chroniclers): Roberto Arlt in Buenos Aires, Mario de Andrade in Sao Paulo and Salvador Novo in Mexico City. Writing chronicles enabled them to earn an income, gain public recognition, and access a much broader audience than would have been possible through mediums such as books or literary magazines. They shared their city's public spaces (streets, buses, street-cars and taxis) and its popular culture (magazines, newspapers, cinema, and radio) with their readers, and strove to document these experiences. Their articles formed part of an urban dynamic characterized by the constant movement of texts, citizens, and commodities that overflowed into a conceptual movement between literature and journalism, art and commerce, frivolity and intellect.; I argue that Roberto Arlt, Mario de Andrade and Salvador Novo's practice of the chronicle responds to the changing place of literature in Latin American urban cultures of the early XXth century. Because of their link to commercial culture, they authorize themselves through the recognition of their readers, more than simply through their links to high culture. Their practice of the chronicle thus imagines, or rather generates, a communal practice of reading. The mocking tone through which they fashion their public image recalls the confrontational strategies of the avant-gardes and indicates their resistance to institutionalized definitions of art and literature. These chroniclers entice their audience through a rhetoric of accessibility that promises intimacy with their readers, yet still leaves them room to elude it.; The first chapter looks at Roberto Arlt's Aguafuertes Portenas to explore his relationship to the space of Buenos Aires, and his self-fashioning as a both a spokesperson and a member of an urban community. The second chapter explores Mario de Andrade's column Taxi , focusing on the links established between commercial texts, nation building, and the city of Sao Paulo. The third chapter studies Salvador Novo's chronicles through the prism of Mexico's debates on the feminization of literature in the 1920's, and his elaboration of the chronicle as a genre that performs both the "masculinity" of literature and the "femininity" of mass culture.