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By the 1920s, new ideas regarding film as the seventh art disseminated in Europe had a profound effect on Brazilian literature, specifically the emergence of an avant-garde literary movement known as modernismo, or “modernism.” Charting the new theories regarding cinema as an art form, this chapter examines how they were appropriated and elaborated by modernist writers in Brazil in the 1920s, most notably in the novels of Oswald de Andrade, the poetry of Mário de Andrade, and an urban chronicle by Antônio de Alcântara Machado called Pathé Baby. In examining this experimental literature, the chapter shows how new international ideas regarding film form and aesthetics provided the modernist writers with a tool for critiquing the official trajectory of national modernity in Brazil.

In the late nineteenth century, sociological studies often functioned as a channel between the psychological and criminological sciences and the traditional field of literature. I argue that Nordau’s work, which drew as much upon Italian criminology as it did upon Jean-Marie Guyau’s sociological theory of aesthetics, constituted a major path by which ideas of degeneration taken from the medical and criminological sciences came to be a fundamental tool of interpretation of modern Latin American culture. One of the main lines of argument in this chapter is that social theories on the degeneration of modern art were useful to vast sectors of the late-nineteenth-century intellectual elites to identify with the values of modern civilisation. By linking the development of literary modernismo to the wider engagement with questions about the features of modern civilisation, this discussion offers a new reading of modernismo as a movement that in its boom phase helped foster ideas of modernity as an essentially urban − and therefore transnational − phenomenon through notions of refinement, disease and degeneration. The second part of the chapter shows how Rodó’s seminal essay Ariel marked a turning point from decadent civilisation to the idea of Latin American culture by building on a moral conception of aesthetics.

This chapter focuses on the modernist cultures of North America that have relatively little to do with modernismo. Latin Americanists have been critical of the way that modernism has become synonymous with European cultural developments, effectively eclipsing modernist production in other parts of the world. It would subsequently be much more difficult for foreigners to view Mexico as a place devoid of culture. The Mexican culture would continue to exert a formative, if often unacknowledged, influence on the arts across North America. Until now, the Mexicanist presence in American modernism has been recognized primarily through the towering reputations of the muralists. Focusing on how modernism traveled, particularly along less well-illuminated routes, inevitably points the way to women like Porter, Brenner, and Modotti, who were conduits and producers of an American modernism anchored in Mexico.

Modernismo is a literary and cultural movement that emerged in the 1920s, which brought together artists who were devoted to the aesthetic development of Brazilian arts and letters in order to advance cultural nationalism. This chapter focus on two major modernist writers, Oswald de Andrade and Mário de Andrade, who both advanced projects for the renovation of Brazilian arts and letters. Oswald authored the most radical gestures of modernismo, which includes two celebrated manifestos: “Brazilwood Manifesto” (1924) and “Cannibalist Manifesto” (1928). On the other hand, Mário's pioneering work in musicology established a modern foundational discourse on Brazilian musical nationalism.

This chapter examines the debates among political and literary figures over the issue of Americanization in Puerto Rico during the early years of U.S. colonial rule, along with their implications for Puerto Rican culture and sense of identity. It begins by providing an overview of official U.S. Americanization policy, followed by a discussion of the wide array of responses it elicited among prominent political and literary figures such as Rosendo Matienzo Cintrón, José De Diego, Nemesio Canales, Luis Lloréns Torres, and Miguel Guerra Mondragón. The rise of a new literary sensibility in Puerto Rico, known as modernismo, is given consideration. The chapter then looks at the labor movement's autonomous cultural sphere, the work of popular cultural creation among the dispossessed, the emergence of Puerto Rican cultural expressions in New York, and debates regarding race and nationalism. It also discusses the life and work of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg before concluding with an analysis of literary manifestos and avant-garde calls to arms as well as their impact on Puerto Rican literature throughout the 1920s.

This article studies the region’s sanitary conditions as portrayed in scientist Carlos Chagas’ account as a way to better understand writer Mário de Andrade’s 1927 chronicles, published posthumously as O turista aprendiz (The Apprentice Tourist), in which -quite originally- he understands malaria as a vehicle for creativity. The authors read Chagas’ medical perspective as a way of better approaching the kind of operations that Mário de Andrade performs, and which undermine the discourse of science that sees malaria as an endemic problem to be solved. The authors distinguish the way in which Mário and Brazilian modernismo approached the Amazon from previous canonical descriptions, mainly the highly influential one of Euclides da Cunha. In his playful descriptions of the region and its inhabitants, Mário de Andrade sees malaria as a different form of relating to space and knowledge, as a state of mind prone to contemplation and productive immobility.

A picture of literary life in New York in 1914 is sketched, just as Salomón de la Selva began his career as a poet. The group of 1914 was the third generation of Hispanic writers resident in the city, many of them exiles from the political revolutions elsewhere in the American Tropics. The second generation had been dominated by José Martí. After Spain’s removal from Cuba in 1898, many Cuban exiles returned home and there was a hiatus in the early years of the new century before a third generation began to take shape, which de la Selva joined straight from his schooling on Staten Island, fully bi-lingual. Institutional support was important for young writers, so there are accounts here too of the origins of the Poetry Society of America, the Hispanic Society of America, and of the new journals which had begun to proliferate. New York was fast becoming the city of modernity, prompting here a discussion of the relationship between the literary terms modernismo and modernism, for which an American current is traced.

This chapter traces Borges fils’s (Jorge Luis’s) relationship with Borges père (Jorge Guillermo) and the impact this relationship had on Borges fils’s development as a writer. Included among Borges père’s influences on his son were his extensive library and his interest in metaphysics—particularly Berkeley’s idealist philosophy and Zeno’s paradoxes. Although psychoanalytic critics tend to suggest otherwise, father and son had a positive relationship. Borges père encouraged his son’s vocation and supported him financially, while Borges fils helped his father with his own writing. This chapter includes an analysis of Borges père’s published writing, including his modernista poems ‘Momentos’ and ‘El cantar de los cantares’, his translations of the Rubiáyát, and his novel El caudillo.