Structuring the Multiple: The Evolution of the Urban Imaginary from Scholasticism through National State Formation in Latin America: 1492--1854

This dissertation explores the historical evolution of the urban imaginary from the outset of the Spanish Colonial enterprise to the consolidation of national states in Latin America. My theoretical approach models the urban imaginary on Alain Badiou's philosophy of being as presented in Being and Event. In the first chapter, I elaborate a genealogy of theoretical approaches to social space along with a general framework for the presentation of the urban imaginary in Latin American literature.;In Chapter 2, I explore the ideological framework of the Spanish Imperial project and its relationship to the city through the dual notions urbs and civitas as a projection of Thomist Scholasticism. Within this foundational encounter with Latin America's first urban modernity, I then investigate the articulation of that urban modernity as an ideology of state in the imposition of the colonial urban imaginary from its original inception in Cortes' Segunda carta de relacion (1520), through the emergence of an independent creole optic under the aesthetics of Mannerism in Bernardo de Balbuena's Grandeza mexicana (1604), and finally in its maximal deployment as the Baroque count-as-one in Carlos Siguenza y Gongora's Alboroto y motin (1692).;Chapter 3 is an exploration of the urban imaginary in the writings of Argentina's Generation of 1837. From the outset as a political `metaphysics of state', I explore the evolution of the urban imaginary as a programmatic resemantization of the urban sphere under the aegis of a transcendental count-as-one in which the colonial values are recoded as those of the state. The emergence of this program parallels the birth of Argentine narrative fiction with Esteban Echeverria's El matadero (1838) in which I propose that the elaboration of the urban imaginary is a projection of a minor literature. From there, I turn to Domingo F. Sarmiento's famous antinomy of civilization or barbarism as it is presented in his Facundo (1845) as an index of Badiou's concept of forcing. This chapter concludes with the Alberdi's Sistema economico y rentistico (1854) as an example of the state's transformation.;In Chapter 4, I articulate the emergence of monumental space within Chile's Generation of 1842 with a principle focus on Alberto Blest Gana's nineteenth century best seller, Martin Rivas (1862) in which I postulate the foreclosure of the revolutionary evental economy latent to liberalism under the aegis of the state through the production of the monument.