| From Romanticism to our days, the journey to Paris as a necessary rite of passage has been a recurrent topic in Latin American literature. The city of Paris is not only an important topic but also constitutes one of the basic myths, together with that of nature, that pave the way to the search for a Latin American identity. The main purpose of this work is to unveil this mythical discourse of Paris through Latin American "Modernista" prose.;This work begins by exploring the image of Paris before the "Modernista" movement based on Sarmiento, one of the founders of the modern Latin American narrative. In Viajes por Europa, Africa y America: 1845-1847, he devotes a chapter to Paris where he sets about exploring the city, looking for his origins and finding instead the first signs of modernity. A collection of journalistic accounts is analyzed next: Sensaciones de Paris y de Madrid (Gomez Carrillo, 1900). Carrillo's text shows the foundation of a mythical discourse of Paris that will be vastly disseminated throughout Latin America by the press. The other texts examined are the novels De sobremesa (Silva, 1896), Idolos Rotos (Diaz Rodriguez, 1901) and Raucho (Guiraldes, 1917). All three novels illustrate, through their main characters, the development of the image of Paris in relation with the search of personal and national identity in Latin America.;The myth of Paris unfolds through "Modernista" literature, beginning with the image of the Cosmopolis that allows the writers to distance themselves from the reality of their countries, looking for their origin in European culture, to the image of a city that becomes the paradigm of the "artificial" and "unnatural". The deception following the confrontation of the imagined and dreamed Paris with the real Paris will coincide with the beginning of another rising myth: the myth of nature, from which will grow the "regional novel", the literary and cultural movement that will replace the "Modernista" movement. If once writers tried to find the answers to their origins in Paris, their own land will be now the place where they will try to find their identity. |
